Behind the Canvas by Alexander Vance

Rating: 3/5

Behind the Canvas has a pretty interesting premise: a world where everything and everybody ever created by art lives, with a dash of magic and witches on the side. Claudia, Friendless and Alone, forges a connection with Pim, a boy she finds in a painting, and is dragged into the world “behind the canvas” where the witch Nee Gezicht rules.

After typing that, it sounds a bit like Narnia, but it’s really not. Vance does a good job of building the world and has some pretty clever ideas regarding the magic and how it works. Claudia is pretty one-note, but Pim has some complexity to him (and his resolution perfectly fits with the magic and the rules of the world; I appreciated that Vance didn’t break his own rules there), and I liked that Vance didn’t have Claudia become a One-Friend Wonder, but instead learn from her experience, get a bit bolder, and be able to connect with people that she never would have before.

The writing is pretty simplistic, and like I said, Claudia is pretty one-note—every other character has more life in them than she does. You could tell Vance had a lot of fun coming up with personalities for all these Picture People, but when it comes to Claudia, she’s incredibly boring. There’s also a rather jarring and annoying part at the end when Claudia attributes Pim’s ignorance of nail polish remover to “Boys” rather than “This boy lived three hundred years ago when nail polish remover didn’t exist, so of course he doesn’t know what it is.” Apparently, Vance forgot the origins of his own character.

Behind the Canvas is decent and relatively fun. Its simplicity, occasionally awkward and stilted writing, and boring main character means that it doesn’t really stand out to me as particularly good, but it also wasn’t particularly or jarringly bad, either. Children who love art would probably really enjoy this book.

Info: Alexander Vance; published 2016 by Feiwel and Friends

Genre: Middle Grade, Realistic, Fantasy

Warnings: None.

Recommended Age Range: 8+