I wanted to like this book so much more than I actually did like his book. The Brontë siblings (Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell) are making an unwelcome trip on their own by train to boarding school when a fantastical person made of books and newspapers shows up at the station. They can see him but no one else can. Then a train made of leaves and branches shows up, again no one else can see it but they get on. They are greeted by life-size, living versions of Branwell's famous toy soldiers that, in reality (and in the book) inspired the children to create their own fantasy world--the fantasy world that they now enter in The Glass Town Game, including their imaginary creations Gondol, Angria and Glass Town. They then get in the middle of a battle between a child version of Napoleon riding a giant rooster and Wellington. Eventually they go through all sorts of adventures, end up teaming up with writers like Byron and Shelly, meet some of their characters and scenes from their novels, and ultimately meet an alternative Queen Victoria who resides in the imaginary world they created where she imagines a fantasy land called "England," and eventually have to figure out how to get back. When they do a certain amount of the cold, hard reality of their lives returns--but with the lingering fantasies and leaps of imagination that they enjoyed in the interim.

It feels like a cross between the Brontë's juvenilia and [b:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass|24213|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass|Lewis Carroll|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630487234l/24213._SX50_.jpg|2375385] with lots of sly literary references to their own and other books.

All of the above is why I really wanted to like it and in some ways it really did. But I also felt like it was a bit of an orphan book. It was pitched to middle grade readers and had a middle grade sensibility of foregrounding the plot and keeping the characters relatively simple and static. But it also was very long, sometimes it felt like one new invention after the next without exploring them. It had its wonderful moments but also long stretches with a "oh, yet more of this" feeling. And, if you lack context I think it would be even harder for readers to engage with it--and I have some context but suspect I missed an awful lot (like did characters from [a:Anne Brontë|8249|Anne Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1219762839p2/8249.jpg]'s [b:Agnes Grey|298230|Agnes Grey|Anne Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504690878l/298230._SY75_.jpg|2222441] show up at some point? I think so but that book is still on my TBR.

If you have particularly niche tastes in the Brontë's and a certain type of metafictional fantasy this may be the book for you, but hopefully you'll start with lower expectations than I did.