Book Review: Lanny by Max Porter
The Details
Media Type: Audiobook
Title: Lanny
Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC.
Pages/Length: 4 hrs 34 min
Release Date: May 24, 2019
Source: Library Borrow
Add it on: Goodreads | LibroFM
There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.
Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
The Narrator(s)
This is the type of story that absolutely needed multiple narrators, and all of them do a wonderful job of bringing it to life. Since a good majority of this book is experienced through the day to day musings of the townspeople, having multiple narrators means a more immersive experience. The narrator who did Dead Papa Toothwort and Lanny’s voices though? Spot on. Wonderful. Stunning. I was so impressed! I think this is a story that very much needs to be told orally to be appreciated.
The Review
I can’t be the only one who occasionally picks books up on a whim, right? Especially lately, since I’ve been less and less up to date with new releases, I tend to just pick whatever catches my eye. So when the library had this book on their book picks for “getting lost”, I was very much into it. A story about a Green Man character, a being as old as the forest itself, who is so aptly named Dead Papa Toothwort? Oh, you’d better believe that I was invested.
As it turns out, I was right to feel that way. This story feels like going back in time, to the days when stories were told around a fire. From the very opening, Max Porter builds this atmosphere that is hard to ignore. A tiny town, full of people going about their daily lives. A being in the woods, watching. Waiting. Dissatisfied in the lack of attention to nature and whimsy that people have developed. That is, except for one little boy. One spot of bright in the dark.
Lanny’s character is hard to describe. He of course has the quintessential “little boy” personality, but he is so much more than that. He is the child that all of us were at one point, before the world tried to convince us that magic wasn’t real. Porter weaves a story, with Lanny at the center, that is full of intrigue and enchantment. Here is a boy who still sees the beauty in things. A boy who doesn’t care about fitting in, because that’s not what is important at all. I loved that his two parents were on such different spectrums about how to act towards him, because it felt like the way all of us are looked at by the world. It was gorgeously done.
Alas, I have to stop here or otherwise I run the risk of spoiling things on accident. I will say that this story definitely took a turn that I wasn’t quite expecting, but I loved it all the more for that. This is my favorite kind of folk tale. A little dark, a lot magical, and brimming with atmosphere. I truly recommend the audio book! Take some time, and get lost in this wonderful story.
