Elf Dog and Owl Head
Age 8+
General Fiction
From the singular imagination of National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson comes a magical adventure about a boy and his dog—or a dog and her boy—and a forest of wonders hidden in plain sight.
Clay has had his fill of home life. A global plague has brought the world to a screeching halt, and with little to look forward to but a summer of video-calling friends, vying with annoying sisters for the family computer, and tuning out his parents’ financial worries, he’s only too happy to retreat to the woods. From the moment the elegant little dog with the ornate collar appears like an apparition among the trees, Clay sees something uncanny in her. With this mysterious Elphinore as guide, he’ll glimpse ancient secrets folded all but invisibly into the forest. Each day the dog leads Clay down paths he never knew existed, deeper into the unknown. But they aren’t alone in their surreal adventures. There are traps and terrors in the woods, too, and if Clay isn’t careful, he might stray off the path and lose his way forever. Graced with evocative black-and-white illustrations by Junyi Wu, Elf Dog and Owl Head is heartfelt and exhilarating, wry and poignant, seamlessly merging the fantastic and the familiar in a tale both timely and timeless.
Creators
M. T. Anderson is the author of Feed, a National Book Award Finalist; the National Book Award winner The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party and Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, which were both Michael L. Printz Honor Books; Symphony for the City of the Dead; Yvain: The Night of the Lion; Landscape with Invisible Hand; and many other books for children and young adults, including The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, cocreated with Eugene Yelchin, which was a National Book Award Finalist. M. T. Anderson lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
Junyi Wu is the illustrator of several books, including Two Bicycles in Beijing by Teresa Robeson; Beatrix Potter, Scientist by Lindsay H. Metcalf; and the Newbery Honor Book Scary Stories for Young Foxes by Christian McKay Heidicker. Junyi Wu is a graduate of ArtCenter College of Design and is based in Orange County, California.
Reviews
Anderson’s work is invariably funny and piercingly intelligent and never quite what you expect. . . His new novel, “Elf Dog & Owl Head,” is a kind of inverted Narnia story: Instead of children stumbling on a portal to a magical world, a dog scampers out of a magical world and into our own. . . . One of the quietly subversive facets of this gem of a novel is the way it moves past the easy dyad that frames our world as a mundane wasteland and the other one as a magical paradise. Anderson writes as eloquently about the joys of reality as he does about the Otherworld, and he makes the case, without straining, that mundanity has its own magic.
The New York Times Book Review
It is not hyperbole to say that M. T. Anderson is one of the greatest living writers, in any genre and for every age group. It might even be an understatement.
Adam Gidwitz, author of The Inquisitor’s Tale, a Newbery Honor Book
Delightful, amusing, and imaginative! Elf Dog and Owl Head proves that great stories are good medicine.
Cynthia Leitich Smith, best-selling author of Sisters of the Neversea
Writing with his characteristic precision, Anderson melds the fantastic with the everyday to often riotous effect while also gently schooling Clay and readers in cross-cultural communication. It all comes to a thrilling climax on Midsummer’s Eve before a bittersweet, perfectly pitched denouement. Wu’s lovely, textured pencil drawings add eldritch warmth. . . . A hilarious, heartfelt triumph.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Revisiting the setting of his Norumbegan Quartet and layering the everyday with intriguing lands and creatures, Anderson expertly balances the anguish of pandemic-era isolation with the transporting joys of new friendships. Stylized b&w pencil art from Wu punctuate this wryly told fantasy.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
