The Uninvited

LoveReading4Kids Says

August 2025 Book of the Month

Powerfully allegorical, Ross MacKenzie’s The Uninvited melds magic with exploring important issues around immigration and freedom. As such, alongside being a peril-packed adventure, steeped in danger and dark secrets, it also raises pertinent questions regarding a present-day climate that’s hostile to those seeking refuge.  

Boasting an inventive structure, and a tension-heightening present-tense narrative, the story begins with a “spark in the sky” and a “flicker of magic”, as observed by a family on the Isle of Lewes. And then comes the first moment of the Arrival, when hundreds of “ragged, pointed-eared men and women with packs and bags slung over shoulders [and] children clutching stuffed animals” slip into the human world seeking a place of safety, away from the war that’s ravaging their land.  

Four years on, and thirteen-year-old Samm lives in a refugee camp that’s provoking strong reactions in the UK. While some human rights groups say “keeping the people of Faerae in a camp like this is against their rights”, others are “vehemently opposed to allowing Faerae folk to stay in the country at all”. So far, so powerfully familiar.  

Then, into this conflicted environment and the brutal conditions of the camp, eight years after the Arrival Samm discovers he has a powerful gift that might hold the key to ending the war in his homeland, and to reopening the portal between two worlds. At the same time, while Samm’s quest compels him to enter an array of terrifying places, including a nightmarish circus, a human boy might too have a role to play in the fate of the Faeraes… Bravo to MacKenzie for conjuring such a vivid, conversation-starting magical adventure.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen is a writer, reviewer and workshop presenter whose lifelong love of books began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About The Uninvited

When the Faerie folk flee their world and come to ours, running from the nightmare of war, nobody in the everyday knows what to do. So they are locked away.

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