You Think Your Dog Is Special? Meet Elphinore.

ELF DOG & OWL HEAD, by M.T. Anderson. Illustrated by Junyi Wu.

M.T. Anderson received the Nationwide Ebook Award in 2006 for the primary quantity of “The Astonishing Lifetime of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation.” He additionally received, in my head, the award for Finest First Line of 2002, along with his novel “Feed,” which begins: “We went to the moon to have enjoyable, however the moon turned out to fully suck.” (“Feed,” too, owns the excellence of getting been proper about social media two years earlier than Fb even launched.) Anderson’s work is invariably humorous and piercingly clever and by no means fairly what you anticipate — any author whose oeuvre extends from “Symphony for the Metropolis of the Lifeless” to “Burger Wuss” is working all potential sides of a avenue that has greater than the same old variety of sides.

His new novel, “Elf Canine & Owl Head,” is a type of inverted Narnia story: As a substitute of youngsters stumbling on a portal to a magical world, a canine scampers out of a magical world and into our personal. The canine is Elphinore, one of many royal searching hounds of the Individuals Underneath the Mountain, a reasonably chilly, unfeeling band of subterranean elves.

Properly captured in Junyi Wu’s moody, d’Aulaires-esque illustrations, Elphinore is possessed of extra canine joie de vivre than your widespread elf hound. (A shameless Celtophilic pedant would level out that her white pelt and blood-red ears mark her as one of many Cŵn Annwn, the phantom searching pack of Welsh mythology.)

When the Royal Hunt of the Queen Underneath the Mountain chases a wyrm above floor, into the floor world, Elphinore is fascinated: “She needed to analyze this glowing woodland that lay on the highest facet of the mountain, the place she noticed colours she had by no means seen earlier than.” Elphinore dawdles and is left behind by the pack.

Fortuitously, she is discovered and befriended by a boy named Clay. He takes her house to his household: Clay is a center little one, between Juniper, his order-obsessed little sister, and DiRossi, his moody teenage older sister. A lot as “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was set towards the true darkness of World Battle II, “Elf Canine & Owl Head” is about through the pandemic, which signifies that Clay and his siblings are stalked by the 4 Horsemen of boredom, monetary spoil, distant schooling and being sick of each other. At her wits’ finish, DiRossi tearfully flips over a Monopoly board, shouting, “It’s simply all of us going round in circles perpetually in a sports activities automobile and a shoe!” In that second, we’re all DiRossi.

Elphinore could also be the most effective factor that’s ever occurred to any of them. With the elf canine as information, the forest round Clay’s home unfolds right into a wooden between worlds, and it incorporates wonders. In a village the place all people has owl heads, Clay bonds with a boy named Amos. DiRossi finds a fellow traveler in an historic and apparently clinically depressed blue big. However everytime you journey between worlds you elevate the dangling questions of how, and whether or not, to go house. The merciless Individuals Underneath the Mountain will come in search of their runaway elf hound, and Elphinore and Clay should work out the place she really belongs.

I received’t give away the elegant, delicately balanced conclusion, besides to say that one of many quietly subversive aspects of this gem of a novel is the best way it strikes previous the simple dyad that frames our world as a secular wasteland and the opposite one as a magical paradise. Anderson writes as eloquently concerning the joys of actuality as he does concerning the Otherworld, and he makes the case, with out straining, that mundanity has its personal magic. Typically it’s sufficient simply to be the place you might be. For anybody who disagrees, properly … I’ve some dangerous information for you concerning the moon.

Lev Grossman’s newest center grade novel is “The Golden Swift.”

ELF DOG & OWL HEAD | By M.T. Anderson | Illustrated by Junyi Wu | 240 pp. | Candlewick | $18.99 | Ages 8 to 12