The Barren Grounds by David Robertson

Morgan has been shuffled from one foster home to another in Manitoba, Canada since she was three years old.  Even though the adults in her most recent home are trying to be nice, she still feels mistrustful and angry all the time.  When another foster kid, Eli, joins the home, they don't really get along well at first. Then one day they find a secret door in their attic that leads to a mythical land, Misewa.  To Eli, who was raised in an indigenous community, the land feels like home, but they are not in the land long before they discover that the talking beasts of the land have been stuck in perpetual winter for many years. Morgan and Eli have to decide if they will risk everything to try to help the creatures of Misewa.

Robertson has borrowed a bunch of tropes from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There is the magic door, the perpetual winter, talking beasts, and a different timeline when you are in the mystical land. In both books there is the epic struggle of the good vs evil.  In  the Narnia Books, the White Witch represents evil or Satan, but in this book the bad guy represents Europeans. It is also interesting to compare Ochek, who is the hero/mentor of this book to Aslan in the Narnia book. (spoiler alert) When Ochek first meets Arik, a talking squirrel,  he wants to kill and eat her, even though she is a sentient being. The children have to stop him. In other words, the big hero, the savior character,  is, in a way, a confessed cannibal. I could see some people having problems with that and the anti- "white man" message. If, however, you just take it as a middle-grade fantasy, it is actually pretty good. The writing is artful and the characters as are well drawn and complex. It is a book that would make a good young reader stretch and contemplate some really hard questions. It would also be an interesting book for a parent/child book club. (2021, 256 p)