“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet, epigraph to My Diary From the Edge of the World by Jodi Lynn Anderson,

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” ~Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, quoted in My Diary from the Edge of the World by Jodi Lynn Anderson.

Twelve year old Gracie didn’t know that when her mother gave her a diary for her birthday, the coming year would be the most exciting and momentous of her life. Garcie lives in the prosaic town of Cliffden, Maine where “nothing terrible or exciting ever happens.” Baseball games, science lectures, school, watching Extreme Witches on TV, playing in puddles after a rain, collecting fallen dragon scales—these are the rather mundane things that make up Gracie’s life with her mother, a professional violinist turned homemaker, her father, an abstracted and absent-minded meteorologist, her older sister Millie, the beautiful, graceful one, and her little brother Sam, nicknamed the Mouse.

Gracie lives in an alternate universe version of Planet Earth. Gracie’s Earth is flat, and it is home to lots of creatures that are only mythological on our Planet Earth. Witches, dragons, (destructive) mermaids, pegasi, sasquatches, ghosts, and other myths are all real in Gracie’s world. And Dark Clouds come for people when they die.

When it looks as if a Dark Cloud has come for Sam the Mouse, Gracie’s family decides to outrun fate (or death) and try to escape to the Extraordinary World where dragons and ghosts and Dark Clouds don’t exist. Gracie’s dad is the only one she knows of who actually believes that the Extraordinary World really exists and that it might be possible to to get there from the edge of their world, but anything is worth trying to save Sam.

Okay. So “quirky” and “weird” are appropriate descriptors for this middle grade fantasy that is more of a family in crisis story than an adventure story. Gracie’s family crosses the continent in an old Winnebago, and they encounter monsters and wonders beyond imagination. They also learn to trust one another and to forgive each other. I thought the book was poignant and emotional at times, and the story was intriguing. However, the use of (fallen) angels as just another mythological-but-real-in-this-world set of characters marred the book to some extent. I wish the author had chosen some creatures other than angels to be her guardian protectors in this otherworld, since “one of these things is not like the others.” Angels may be mysterious, but they’re not mythological in the same way that witches and ghosts are.

Gracie’s world is also beholden to or ruled over by “the gods”, like Zeus(?), but they are barely mentioned in the story. At one point in the diary when Gracie and her family have been saved from certain doom by the quick thinking and action of a good friend and by fortuitous circumstance, Gracie writes, “‘Thank you,’ I whispered to no one in particular. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.'”

It reminds me of this song by Andrew Peterson:

Anyway, Gracie and her family are looking for a savior, a place of refuge, and maybe even for Someone to thank. You’ll be intrigued, if you read the book, to see whether or not they find what they’re looking for.