Our Featured Debut this month is the enchanting fantasy adventure The Sky Beneath the Stone from exciting new talent - Alex Mullarky.

This is a captivating story for readers 8+ about family, friendship, overcoming fear and travelling into the unknown.

Adventurer Ivy North is afraid to go outside. But when a sorcerer turns her brother into a bird, Ivy must go to an enchanted realm to rescue him. Can Ivy face her fear and save her brother? 

Author Alex Mullarky tells us more about the inspiration for her book and the magic and power of portals into another world in her guest blog. Check it out below!

Through the Wardrobe, Through the Wall

Guest blog by alex mullarky

There’s something about portals that never stops being exciting. Who could ever forget the moment when Lucy first opens the doors of the wardrobe, shuffles through fur coats in darkness and emerges into the glow of a lamppost in a snowy forest? To this day, whenever I see a new adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I still get chills when those doors creak open. 

What’s not to love about the idea that there’s another world right under your nose? Whether you need to figure out how to fly first (second star to the right and straight on till morning), follow a rabbit down a hole in the ground, or find a knife sharp enough to split the seams of the universe, books are full of ordinary children finding their way to extraordinary places.

Even when you’re all grown up, you can never quite silence the little voice in the back of your head that says what’s through there? It might be a tree hollow shaped like an archway, one of those creepy little doors in an attic room, or a mirror as tall as you are that doesn’t quite reflect what you’re expecting.

Of course, sometimes a portal may not look like a door at all. It might be a forest so deep and dark that you accidentally stray from one realm into another. You might sail out into a lake and come to an island that wasn’t there when you left the shore. A mountaineer might tumble into a crevasse, never to be seen again, only to discover a whole new world in the ice. What’s most captivating of all is the idea that these doorways could be anywhere; it’s the possibility that you could fall from a world of the mundane into the magical at any moment.

For Ivy, the main character in The Sky Beneath the Stone, the discovery is at the bottom of her garden. One morning she wakes up and finds a hole in the drystone wall that has never been there before – and her brother Callum is missing too. When she finally finds him, it is through the wall – and she is just in time to watch as he is transformed into a kestrel and trapped in that other place.

Through the hole in the garden wall, Ivy sees a world that is an eerie mirror of the land she knows. This is Underfell: the fairy realm that lies beneath the mountains and lakes of Cumbria, home to the Lake District National Park. Ivy doesn’t know why her brother sought out this passage to Underfell, or how to turn him back into a boy again; all she can do is pack up her rucksack, grab her map and follow him through.

In some of the best fantasy stories the characters don’t physically travel through a portal at all. Instead, they come to realise that the world they know is not what it seems. That’s the case for the Drew siblings and Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising, and for Colin and Susan in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: they stumble upon ancient magic in the landscape, and are drawn into its enchanting (but often dangerous) orbit.

Underfell is a bit of both. Geographically it looks just like Cumbria, and the mountains and lakes are (for the most part) where you’d expect them to be. But the sky is not really a sky at all, the trees and plants don’t abide by the seasons, and the landmarks are weird echoes of their equivalents in the world above.

I wanted to reflect that there is magic in the world we know, in nature and in other people. That the land we live in is full of stories, their roots as deep as our most ancient trees. That a portal to a far-off place may really have been leading you home all along. It’s a bit like John Muir’s famous words: “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

(The best portals of all, of course – and the easiest to find – are made of ink and paper, stored on shelves or piled up beside the bed. I don’t know of a better way to make a quick escape to another world, where anything is possible.)

So the next time you stumble upon an ancient doorway to a long since crumbled building, or a spiralling hedge with a circular hollow at its heart, take note. You’re never too old to be transported to another realm, and that’s the wonderful thing about portals: it’s always possible that you just haven’t found yours yet.

The Sky Beneath the Stone is out now. Watch author Alex Mullarky read an extract of the book here.