The Unwritten: Volume 01 (2010)

Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (2010)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrator: Peter Gross | Page Count: 144

"But the unpalatable fact is that you auditioned to play yourself and didn't get the part."

The Tommy Taylor™ books are a cultural phenomenon. Tommy is a boy wizard with a small group of friends, whose adventures have spanned thirteen books. The collective routinely save their world from the kind of villains that typically populate children's literature.

The author of the books is Wilson Taylor. It's a well-known fact that Wilson based the lead character on his own son, Tom Taylor. Consequently, Tom has grown up in the public eye. He's not a writer and had no direct input in the books, but people love him, regardless.

He attends conventions and answers questions from fans, some of whom can't separate reality from fiction.
If you're thinking along the lines of Harry Potter crossed with Christopher Robin, then you're on the right track.

But that's merely a stepping stone into a much larger ocean of unpredictability. (FTR, I've not read the Potter books; my only experience of the character is the first film and half of the second one, so I'm basing my comparison on that.)

Author Mike Carey used that simple premise to craft something that brings together all the tools of storytelling available to the modern writer, from the earliest times when tales were told at the fireside to travellers, to the modern era of public signings, film adaptations, and the distribution of information via internet communities. He uses his writing and plotting skills to build a world that is itself fictional but tied invariably to reality at every turn.

If you're interested in the machinations of storytelling as much as in a story's ability to entertain a reader, you'll find much to adore in the work. I was hooked from Chapter Two.

(Chapter Five is different to what came before, but is most likely important backstory for something that will become more relevant in future books. I found the 'handwritten' font used therein difficult to read, and having to figure out the words before I could apply them to the sentence as a whole interrupted the flow on the narrative, which is rarely a good thing.)

If words have power and belief has power, then shouldn't belief in the power of words be an even more potent force? In The Unwritten, such things are sometimes coiled with truth.

The book collects together The Unwritten, issues 1-5.

Individual covers. Click for FULL size: