Mystery meets fantasy for the middle-grade reader in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL

HALLIE EPHRON: Up to now, my favorite children’s story set in a hotel has been ELOISE - all about a cheeky 7-year-old who lives in New York City’s Plaza Hotel. Now there’s another wonderful children’s book set in a hotel - the posh Sanborn House Hotel in London. In it there’s a mysterious fourteen-year old boy who lives on a floor that may or may not exist, and a sister and brother try to figure out what’s going on. 

Sounds intriguing, right? The book is called THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL, and it’s my sister Amy Ephron’s middle-grade fantasy novel (with brilliant covers by Jennifer Bricking and magical interior maps and scary creatures bu Vartan Ter-Avanesyan). It's the third in a fabulous series, but the books can be read in any order. This time Amy’s poaching on my territory: it’s also a mystery.

Looking for a holiday present for a budding mystery reader, a middle-grade boy or girl in your family? This one's a winner. 

Welcome Amy! The hotel. The mysterious fourteen-year old boy. London. A curious glass marble. Shadows that pass outside windows and vectors of the marble that seem to pass through walls. Please, tell us about how you came up with some of the wonderfully original ideas that are in this book, and how it turned into a mystery.

AMY EPHRON:  This is the third in The Other Side series, where Tess, whom I think of as a remarkable heroine (although she does jump in sometimes without thinking about what might happen next) and her brother Max, who’s younger and much more methodical and logical (although even he admits it’s sometimes hard to be logical especially when they go to England...) go to visit their Aunt Evie at a posh hotel in London.  

It’s Christmas and after a freak snow storm in London (which global warming gave me after I wrote it) and a visit to watch the snow fall in Hyde Park, Tess is charmed by a 14-year old boy having tea in the dining...except that no one else can see him....

By itself, almost, the book turned into a puzzle, a mystery.  As Tess unlocks the secrets of The Sanborn House and the story of the mysterious boy named Colin, whose last name is also Sanborn (just like the hotel) and who also, if he exists at all, seems to live there all year round...

The hash tag is #unlockthesecrets and Tess has a funny history of getting herself and Max into situations that are almost impossible to get out of, but if and when they do, they heal the hearts of the people they’ve interacted with, as well as their own.

I call them a modern-day mash-up of an old-fashioned children’s book. They’ve been reviewed as standalones and kindly compared The Secret Garden or an Edgar Eager book.  

Tess is a modern (and old-fashioned) super-hero, from feats of aerial ballet to a real (or imagined) dance with the stars, or a crazy flight down an orange path of vectors on the other side of the wall, not to mention excellent horsemanship!  She comes to the fore to rescue them from seen and unseen dangers in all three of The Other Side novels...but they are mysteries because she has to in all cases figure out how and why!

The Other Side of the Wall is the one that really unfolded as a mystery -- as Tess has to figure out what happened in the Sanborn House so many years ago to understand what’s happening now and what she has to do to fix it or at least to try...  It was lovely to be able to also write in period as well as in contemporary times, in the same novel, as what appears at first to be a 20’s costume party on the 8th floor (the floor Max insists didn’t even exist the day before) may turn out be in fact a step back in time.....but time travel, it turns out, may be a precarious thing.  

These books also have an intentional subset of rules: no guns, no explosions.  The dangers are real but also existential and there will never be any version of a hand-to- hand battle or combat in that way.  Just a curious amount of magic, a back story that has to be revealed and changed, whether it’s in the past or in a different space of time, and a real danger if they don’t get back in time, or even get back at all.    

Real mysteries, which my sister Hallie taught me, are often best as an emotional roller coaster (read her the new book: Careful What You Wish For and you’ll see what 

I mean.)  And the emotional undercurrent in The Other Side of the Wall -- the perceived and unperceived loyalties and flat-out deceptions, were an amazingly rich field to write, imagine, and explore.  

Thanks to all of you at Jungle Reds for welcoming me into your extraordinary mystery corner. 

HALLIE: The book is flat-out terrific, and it's definitely an emotional roller coaster. One thing I especially love about The Other Side Series is that they're adventures with siblings. I've always love books about siblings... Starting with Hansel and Gretel. Anyone remember the Twins books? Or Meg Murry and her little brother Charles Wallace, or Lucy and Edmund Pevensie in the Narnia books. 

Why do siblings make especially good characters for fantasy/adventure books with a touch of mystery?

The Other Side of the Wall
It's Christmas break and Tess and Max are in London, staying at the posh Sanborn House with their Aunt Evie. As they wait for their parents to arrive, there is an unusual snowstorm that makes the city seem as if it's caught in a snow globe. Perfect weather for an adventure in Hyde Park. But when Max, Tess, and Aunt Evie leave to search for a cab, they find a horse and carriage and driver curiously waiting for them at the curb. And that's just the beginning...

Soon Tess is charmed by a mysterious boy named Colin who lives at the hotel all year round--on the 8th floor. But Max is sure the elevator only had 7 floors the day before. And how come everyone at the hotel seems to ignore Colin? Things seem to get stranger and stranger. There's a 1920s costume party in Colin's parents' apartment. A marble that seems to be more than it appears. And a shadow that passes mysteriously by Tess and Max's hotel window.

Tess wants to figure out what's going on, but finds only more questions: Is it just a coincidence that Colin's last name is Sanborn, the same as the hotel? Why does the cat's-eye marble look eerily similar to the crystal at the top of their hotel room key? And, most importantly, what happened in that hotel one Christmas long, long ago?

In this mysterious story sprinkled with holiday enchantment, Amy Ephron transports readers into the magic of London at wintertime, where it's just possible that what seems imaginary is real, and your wishes might come true.

Amy Ephron lives in Los Angeles. Her new book "Carnival Magic" the continued, startling, sometimes magical adventures of Tess and Max is a bestseller and was featured in "Teen Vogue," tagged as a standalone, "Parade," "Story Monsters, inc," "The Jewish Journal," etc. It has been nominated for an American Library Association award, The Grand Canyon Award to be announced in 2020. A companion to "The Castle in the Mist," (the intro to Tess & Max and their Aunt Evie,) was an Amazon Best pick, a B&N pick, and claimed a nom for a SCIBA award.