100 Cupboards N D Wilson by N. D. Wilson 9780375838811, 0375838813 instant download after payment.

One magical cupboard would be enough for a fantasy story, but Wilson
offers his twelve-year-old protagonist an even hundred. When Henry York
comes to stay with his aunt, uncle, and three female cousins in Henry,
Kansas, after his parents have been kidnapped while bicycling across
South America, he has hitherto "led a life that had taught him not to
look forward to anything." But the same dreary landscape that launched
Dorothy to Oz here introduces Henry to his uncle's schemes of selling
tumbleweeds on E-bay, to the summer joys of sandlot baseball, and to the
existence of a wall in his attic bedroom full of mysterious cupboard
doors which turn out to be portals across time and space into the
fantastic unknown. Wilson is a marvel at crafting delightful sentences,
such as "The paint was scum brown, the sort that normally hides at the
bottom of a pond, attractive only to leeches and easily pleased frogs."
Henry is the perfect unlikely fantasy hero, a boy whose parents made him
ride in a car seat until he was nine and gave him a protective helmet
to wear in P.E. But it is hard to connect with a boy who asks about his
absent parents, "Are they really my parents?" is told, "Nope," and then
never asks anything about them again. Henry's journeys through cupboard
after cupboard become tedious after a while, with too many magical
vistas and villains, and the completely unresolved ending feels more
like a cheat than a beckoning to read on through the proposed series.