Emma and the Banderwigh - Matthew S. Cox

Ten-year-old Emma doesn’t believe in faerie tales or monsters that secret children away in the night—until she meets one.

 

She lives in a quiet village at the edge of Widowswood with her parents, her Nan, and her little brother, Tam. Ready to abandon the whimsy of childhood, she finds the boredom of chores comforting and Nan’s fanciful bedtime stories silly.

 

One morning, a wan and weary older girl staggers out of the woods and sets the entire town aflutter with whispers of a child-stealing monster lurking in the forest. Nan tells her of the Banderwigh: a dark soul who feeds on sorrow and drains the life from children’s tears.

 

Darkness comes calling on Emma’s happy home, threatening the reality to which she desperately clings. The impossible becomes more and more real, forcing Emma to reach inside herself for the ability to believe. Her family depends on it.

 

 

I've read some book by Matthew S. Cox before but they were completely different from this one. While that's not necessary a bad thing, it did make this read entirely different from what I'd come to expect.

 

Emma and the Banderwigh is a dark fairy tale that I think is probably aimed at children around the age of ten, since the main character is 10 years old (although to me she felt like an older teen). I think for kids this could really be a scary fairy tale since the Banderwigh, feeding from sadness, is quite the scary villain.

 

I however had some trouble to get into the book, but I think that probably had more to do with me than with the story as I could see it had some real potential. It's an extended version of an original plan for a short story and I think it did show. It felt like somewhere between a real book and a short story, I couldn't really decide. I do think that the size of the story might make it better for children to read.

 

 

About The Author:

 

Born in a little town known as South Amboy NJ in 1973, Matthew has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Somewhere between fifteen to eighteen of them spent developing the world in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, and The Awakened Series take place. He has several other projects in the works as well as a collaborative science fiction endeavor with author Tony Healey.

 

Hobbies and Interests:

 

Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour (<- deliberate), and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it.

 

He is also fond of cats.