My rating: 
(3 / 5)
I grabbed up this novella in audiobook form from the library website, because I so adored the last book I read by Neil Gaiman.
This one I thought was… okay.
It’s a fanciful tale of a girl who is a part of a family circus. Her mother falls ill, and is in the hospital awaiting surgery, when the young girl falls into a world of her own creation, drawn with charcoal on paper (and other places).
“We often confuse what we wish for with what is.”
I found this story a little hard to follow, and had to skip backwards several times because I thought surely I must have missed something, some explanation of what the heck was going on. (I hadn’t). While the prose is beautiful, as is the case in all of Gaiman’s writing, the story felt like a piece of something larger that suffered from the removal of the rest of the work. I still am a little ambivalent about both the characters and the plot; I think my lack of strong feelings is more about not really understanding what was going on more than anything else. I’m not a stupid reader, but the meaning of this book was just beyond me.