Barkbelly (by Cat Weatherill)

One day at school Barkbelly accidentally kills one of his schoolmates. Sure that the townspeople will kill him, he flees and has a series of adventures, including working in a jam factory and joining a traveling circus. Along the way he learns that there is an island where other wooden people live, and he becomes determined to make his way there and find his family.

Like Barkbelly himself, this book is not quite like anything else you've read. Reading the flap copy you might be tempted to think it's a Pinocchio variation, but aside from being about a wooden boy on a journey, they're not much alike.

Storyteller and first-time author Cat Weatherill has a unique imagination, and she puts it to work with a light touch on the fantasy elements, some lyrical language, and a picaresque journey through a fascinating world. It's an unfortunate surprise, then, that after displaying such deft handling of her unusual story, the author resorts to a deus ex machina to magically resolve the story into a too-pat ending. But this doesn't dampen the pleasure of the rest of the book, and Weatherill partially makes up for it by including a delightful little fable as an epilogue.