Isabel Abedi Verbotene Welt (Forbidden World) Loewe Verlag, October 2006, 460 pp ISBN: 978-3-7855-5699-3 For readers of 10+ Here is an enormously entertaining fairy tale in which the strangest things happen, even by the standards of the genre. The Statue of Liberty is mysteriously stolen, with Otis, a twelve-year-old American boy, locked in the loo inside. So is the Berlin department store in which Olivia, a German girl also aged twelve, is hiding. Thereafter, one by one, other famous buildings and bridges around the world disappear. Could all this have anything to do with Reginald, who runs the hotel at grand but bankrupt Forthwick Castle but seems to spend most of his time in the basement building a miniature world on tables? Yes indeed, because this Reginald has at his command a genie called Minima who miniaturises all these buildings at his bidding but seems to be running out of steam. Other unusual and entertaining characters cluster round, not least Cheryl, a whacky beautician and Otis's mother, and Jally, a Persian, who is in search of a missing lamp. A delightfully improbable tale by a skilled and assured author, who has her own secret recipe for mixing mundanity (mobile phones, etcetera) and magic.