Just in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last fifty years, though, I’ll summarize. It’s about a brother and sister, Jack and Sarah, who go out to play one day and find this old train track in the woods. It leads to a tunnel, and they wind up going through it into another world, the Goldengrove. The Goldengrove is a giant forest where gnomes carve entire villages from the trunk of a single elm tree, fairies host grand balls in moonlit clearings, and wizards disguised as snowy owls keep watch from high branches. The afternoons in the Goldengrove are always perfectly warm and sunny and have been known to last for days at a time.

Except it’s not the Goldengrove anymore, because the hobgoblin king and queen have captured the fairy princess whose laughter makes the sun rise. Now that she’s their captive, the hobgoblin king has taken over the Goldengrove and turned it into the Dimwood. In the blackness of the eternal night, all the wickedest creatures—the trolls and banshees and ogres—have driven the good creatures into hiding.

Anyway, Jack and Sarah journey across the forest, defeat a troll army, rescue the fairy princess, battle the evil hobgoblin king and queen, and return the world to the sunshine.

Sorry for ruining the ending, but if you didn’t see it coming, you really should read more stories.

The World at the End of the Tunnel happens to be my favorite book in the entire world.

The first time Gram read it to me, I was eight, and it was snowing. Like, hard. The roads were so bad that school was canceled for a week, and Dad couldn’t come get me from Lanternwood.

There was too much snow to go to the Spinney, and anyway, it was too cold for walking around outside, which meant Gram and I spent most of our time bundled up in Morning Glory Cottage.

I didn’t mind it, but Gram, who hated being cooped up inside, went a little stir-crazy. She finished about twenty paintings in her studio, cleaned the whole house, and cooked enough soup to last all winter.

One morning, I opened the door to her room and found her lying in her bed, looking out the window, crying. There was an old green shoebox on her lap.

“Gram?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She turned to me and frowned, leaning down to shove the shoebox under the bed.

“Emma,” she said. But it was like someone else was saying my name. There was a coldness in her voice I wasn’t used to, like the icy weather had climbed inside her. “You should have knocked.”

My eyes started to well. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Boomer had lunged over and bitten me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”