It’s been a while since I’ve written, but I have extra time on my hands with the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and what not. If you have extra time on your hands and you want to get lost in a story, you can’t go wrong with The Unwritten. There are 11 volumes of this epic, and it will pull you in and transport you to oh so many places. The Unwritten has everything you can think of—adventure, fantasy, post-modern social commentary, metafiction, comedy, on and on.

Tommy Taylor & the Bogus Identity

This is the story of Tommy Taylor. His father is perhaps the most successful author on the planet. His father’s books, however, are about a boy wizard named after and based on his son, Tommy. We recognize the boy wizard troupe as a nod to Harry Potter. So, Tommy Taylor is world famous, but only as a character in his father’s books. The real Tommy Taylor would like a life and identity of his own.

The story kicks off with this identity crisis, and jumps back and forth between the real Tommy Taylor and the Tommy Taylor of his father’s books. His father’s fans are rabid about a long awaited final book. Tommy resents the books and his father. It doesn’t take long for reality and story to start intertwining, which isn’t that original of a concept, but that’s not all there is to it. It’s much deeper than that.

And The Twists Keep On Coming

A sketchy cultish cabal shows up, and Tommy goes on the run trying to figure out why they’re after him. A girl who is eerily similar to his fictional counterpart’s friend befriends Tommy himself and gives him advice, and the conspiracy continues to grow. What exactly did his father do? What was he up to? Speaking of his father, where is he?

Every volume of The Unwritten will keep you on your toes. The plot never gets predictable, partly because this isn’t just a story. It’s a meditation on the power of stories in our lives. The meta, postmodern beauty of it all will have you thinking and rethinking what it all means. It’s a smart, mysterious book.

On top of that, you have characters and subplots twisting and turning. The book pulls in classic stories and fables going back through all of literature—Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Everything is given a twist. Where do all these stories come from? How do they exist in our collective psyche, and what does it have to do with Tommy Taylor?

Tommy Taylor and the War of Words

The Unwritten is not just all words. The art is beautiful and compelling, and gives us different looks for different narrative elements. There’s written book pages, dialogues, TV broadcasts, and websites. There’s fairy tales and super heroes. It will immerse you in the story and many worlds of the stories.

Once I started The Unwritten, I didn’t want to put it down. It really captures the magic of stories. Each volume adds to the mystery, and you’re never sure where it will go. I read it over a year ago, and the journey is still fresh in mind. Get lost in the story while you’re riding out this quarantine thing. You can start here.