A Melodrama

Unrelated to my studies, life or family for a change; this one is a book. A Drowned Maiden's Hair, by Laura Amy Schlitz. There was quite a lot of buzz about this one on the blogs, and I was rather afraid that my expectations would be too high - and God knows, I do have the out-of-step responses sometimes. But this was a no-worries-needed read. I have just now discovered (when checking publishing company - don't know what it is about my noticing things when going to LJ that I'd missed when reading the book) this in the acknowledgments: 'and for Eva Ibbotson, who said this sounded like a bloody good story and I ought to write it down'.

I'm with Eva!

The prologue is a suitably eerie and melancholy poem called 'The Sands of Dee' by Charles Kingsley (and here I am just having babbled about The Water Babies). Part One 'The Secret Child' (Spring 1909) opens, in wonderful style: 'On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"'. Maud, aged eleven, 'plain, clever, and bad' (don't you love this already?) is an orphan and the best day of her life is that on which she's taken home from the Barbery Asylum for Female Orphans by the Hawthorne sisters - the decision being made by the most charming of them, Hyacinth. Three elderly sisters, needing a young girl for 'the family business', keeping her secret in the house in which they live with their deaf servant Muffet... Maud is a great character, as the desperate vulnerability caused by her desire to be loved is beautifully shown, and kept from being just angsty by her intelligence, occasional bolshieness and the delight with which she encounters new experiences. (Had she managed to remain obediently hidden in the house, just minutes from the sea, she would have been a far less interesting character!)

Other characters are great as well, the atmosphere wonderfully Gothic without being at all excessive, but the aspect I liked perhaps even more than those was the tension over exactly what the 'family business' is, and whether it's supernatural or not - though it's no less threatening either way. And I love the shading given to the eventual discovery of its nature. The ending ending seems to me very Eva Ibbotson, though I won't say another word for fear of spoiling for anyone who hasn't yet read it. I'd recommend doing so.