
Just finished this today, and going to postpone writing about
Shug and
Dairy Queen yet again, as I want to get some thoughts jotted down before they all jumble too much. (Thinking about this one in light of Charlie's next project, on the historical in children's lit. )
I'd seen this in bookshops and been attracted by the cover (while also regularly confusing it with the equally attractive
Celandine), and had thought it was a purely historical, rather than a historical-cum-fantasy or vice versa. It won the gold award in the Nestlé Children's Book Prize - though why the fact that Sally Gardner overcame dyslexia should seem
the most important thing about the book I find hard to understand - and came full of glowing reviews, which I won't bother to quote. And this seemed as if it was a book I should love: set in London during the 1640s to 50s, with a trip to Faerie (and back again), a heroine determined to save her love, evil stepmothers - oh wait. That's part of what I don't love, but how to organise this, I'm not so sure. I kept thinking about the comment (quoted by Charlie in a recent talk) of Alan Garner's about the 'what if corral', as he (C.) put it - 'the idea that in fantasy, as in all fiction, there must be coherence to whatever rules you have set in place'. And I thought this 'corral' had gaps in the fantastic, in the relation of the supernatural to the realist (or historical) and in the realist strand. And possibly even more worryingly - there's a three-fold parallel in the story, which seems to me to lead to a rather unpleasant ideological end-place. I'm putting this behind a cut, as it's really not a review of any kind, but more a look at a book that was of interest for very particular reasons, through a very particular lens. And it's 100% spoiler, too, so this may be for an audience of - well, one.
( Read (a lot) more, if you wish )