The Land of Decoration

From reading previous reviews of The Land of Decoration, I was expecting an uplifting and magical read, but unfortunately this book was not at all like how I expected it to be.

10 year old Judith lives with her very religious father and is an outsider at school and in ordinary, everyday life. She is bullied and spends her time making her own Land of Decoration out of rubbish in her bedroom. One day, she makes it snow over her imaginery world and the next day, she wakes up to thick snow outside her house. She believes she is capable of miracles and her future actions impact heavily on the real world.

I enjoyed the descriptions and innocence of Judith's narration, but we never get to know when or where this book is set, which at times I found hard to engage with. There are parts of the book which are very frustrating to read as Judith and her father are not honest with each other. Ultimately I found this an incredibly sad book and also a little bit odd and slightly disturbing at the end.