The Spiderwick Chronicles

About The Spiderwick Chronicles

When the Grace children move into their late great-great-uncle Arthur Spiderwick's crumbling, secret-filled estate, the youngest, Jared, discovers a hidden library holding Arthur's life's work: a field guide to the real, dangerous faeries living in the woods around the house. Reading it awakens the attention of the creatures it describes -- brownies, goblins, ogres, a treacherous shapeshifting hobgoblin -- and the Grace siblings are pulled into a war to protect the guide, and themselves, from a faerie world that very much does not want to be catalogued.

Holly Black and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi built this as a true collaboration: DiTerlizzi's detailed, gothic-storybook illustrations are as central to the reading experience as Black's text, and the five original slim volumes (originally released almost as a set) work as an accessible entry point into dangerous-faerie fiction for younger readers than Black's other work. A sequel trilogy, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles, continues the story with the next generation of the family confronting new, larger threats to the faerie world's balance.

For readers (or their parents) looking for the illustrated, slightly younger on-ramp to Holly Black's faerie fiction before graduating to her YA books, this is where to start.

How to read this series

Read the original five books -- The Field Guide through The Wrath of Mulgarath -- in publication order; they were written as one continuous story told across short volumes and should be read together, back to back. The sequel trilogy, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles (The Nixie's Song, A Giant Problem, The Wyrm King), follows a new generation of the family and continues the story afterward.

Both series are illustrated collaborations between Holly Black (text) and Tony DiTerlizzi (art), aimed at a slightly younger readership than Black's other faerie fiction -- a good starting point before her more YA-pitched Modern Faerie Tales or Folk of the Air books.