Some hills are just hills. This one isn’t.

Ellie Larkspur is ten, practical, and always has a plan. Her little brother David is eight, and he has never once met an idea too wild to try. So when the two of them find a tunnel hidden in the hillside behind their house — a tunnel that breathes cold air on the hottest afternoon of the summer — there’s really only one thing to do.

They go in.

What they find Under the Hill is a world Ellie and David couldn’t have dreamed up between them, even trying their hardest: a feast that never quite ends, games whose rules change their minds mid-play, and an entire delighted kingdom of small, strange, wonderful creatures who seem to have been waiting a very long time for children to visit. Their Queen is the kindest, saddest, loveliest creature either of them has ever met — and all she asks, in return for so much wonder, is one small favor.

Find her crown. Bring it home.

It should be simple.

It is not simple. And by the time Ellie and David understand why the Queen’s people have stayed hidden underground for so long, it may already be too late to put things right.

Perfect for readers who loved the sideways logic of Alice in Wonderland, the gentle strangeness of David and the Phoenix, the puzzle-box wit of The Phantom Tollbooth, and the sibling teamwork of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Under the Hill is a big-hearted, richly imagined adventure for readers ready for a story with real magic — and real courage — in it.

Whether any of it really happened is something the book will never tell you.

You’ll have to go under the hill yourself to decide.