Verdigris Deep (Plug)
A friend who is referred to as "The Hatted One" (not to be confused with bellinghman or Terry Prattchet has just had her second book published.
I acquired my copy through work, and collected it yesterday (I would have had it earlier in the week had I not been languishing in a bunker near heathrow) and will post my own thoughts as soon as I've finished reading it.
In the meantime, a Review from the Sunday Times.
VERDIGRIS DEEP by Frances Hardinge
Hardinge is one of the most interesting children’s authors writing today. Her first book, Fly by Night, a constantly surprising imaginative feat set in an alternative 18th century, deservedly won the Branford Boase Award for a first children’s novel. This, her second, demonstrates the range of her ability. Three schoolchildren, two of them outsiders at school, the third wilder and cooler, take coins from a wishing well, which give them disturbing powers and obligations. This adventurous tale of hidden secrets, unhappy families and deep desires is often creepy and tense, although it also has humour, and the characterisation is subtle.
What makes this book really remarkable, however, is the word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, writerly care in finding the mot juste, the perfect metaphor, striking image, or resonant nuance. A woman looks at a child “absently as if to see whether she had been delivered the right package”; the feeling of being watched is like “dead leaves down the back of your jumper”; supermarket trolleys have “far too much body language for objects with no heads or limbs”. Genius.
I acquired my copy through work, and collected it yesterday (I would have had it earlier in the week had I not been languishing in a bunker near heathrow) and will post my own thoughts as soon as I've finished reading it.
In the meantime, a Review from the Sunday Times.
VERDIGRIS DEEP by Frances Hardinge
Hardinge is one of the most interesting children’s authors writing today. Her first book, Fly by Night, a constantly surprising imaginative feat set in an alternative 18th century, deservedly won the Branford Boase Award for a first children’s novel. This, her second, demonstrates the range of her ability. Three schoolchildren, two of them outsiders at school, the third wilder and cooler, take coins from a wishing well, which give them disturbing powers and obligations. This adventurous tale of hidden secrets, unhappy families and deep desires is often creepy and tense, although it also has humour, and the characterisation is subtle.
What makes this book really remarkable, however, is the word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, writerly care in finding the mot juste, the perfect metaphor, striking image, or resonant nuance. A woman looks at a child “absently as if to see whether she had been delivered the right package”; the feeling of being watched is like “dead leaves down the back of your jumper”; supermarket trolleys have “far too much body language for objects with no heads or limbs”. Genius.