Potentially confusing and unsettling storyline for under 11’s in a debut gothic adventure.
Lucy Hope’s debut novel is an atmospheric gothic adventure set in Bavaria in 1900 where Cassie Engel’s lives in a rather idiosyncratic house originally built by her great-great-grandfather on top of a rock that overlooks the small town of Edenburg and the forest. Cassie doesn’t have the easiest home life with a distant and self-obsessed mother who is an opera singer and an alcoholic taxidermist father who has never recovered from the war. Her grandma is seriously ill and reliant on a morphine pump to ease her pain and even the family maid is elderly, meaning most of the running of the house falls to sensible Cassie, including caring for a collection of stuffed owls.
Life gets ever more complicated for Cassie when during a treacherous thunderstorm a cherub is blown through her bedroom window. The story is written from the first-person perspective of Cassie which works well as it gives the reader a real understanding of Cassie’s frustration at her mother, bemusement at her father and worries about what the cherub’s arrival might mean. Her gentle best-friend, Raphael, joins her to scour the library for more information about the cherub but even he is acting oddly. When Cassie is attacked in the forest by a menacing vulture-like creature with foul breath called a Sturmfalken, she believes it is the growling cherub that she has to thank for protecting her. When Cassie and Raphael meet an old woman in the forest with a bizarre story about Raphael’s birth and he reveals to Cassie what has been worrying him, it leads to an emotional second half.
To be honest I felt like the story took a few too many detours without offering much in the way of clarification or pointers in the right direction and leaving it right until the denouement to tie everything together in a rather disquieting manner. I certainly wouldn’t give this book to my middle grade age niece and I am in two minds about whether to give it to my sensitive 13 year-old niece. Either way, the storyline has the potential to confuse and I didn’t feel there was much in the way of logical progression from one scene to the next. Admittedly the story does come together but in has the feel of a dark and unsettling fairy tale that may well leave middle grade readers with some serious questions. Both my nieces like fantasy novels but Fledgling definitely has a heavier feel than I can imagine either of them being comfortable with as well as several characters who are belatedly revealed as not all they first appear.
Far and away the best thing for me about this novel was the vividly imagined house on top of a tall rock with a helter-skelter road blasted into the rock face and complete with owlery and a zip wire to move between floors. The descriptions of the features added by different generations of the family were well-drawn and engagingly told and I think I could have read a book about Cassie’s unique home alone!
Life gets ever more complicated for Cassie when during a treacherous thunderstorm a cherub is blown through her bedroom window. The story is written from the first-person perspective of Cassie which works well as it gives the reader a real understanding of Cassie’s frustration at her mother, bemusement at her father and worries about what the cherub’s arrival might mean. Her gentle best-friend, Raphael, joins her to scour the library for more information about the cherub but even he is acting oddly. When Cassie is attacked in the forest by a menacing vulture-like creature with foul breath called a Sturmfalken, she believes it is the growling cherub that she has to thank for protecting her. When Cassie and Raphael meet an old woman in the forest with a bizarre story about Raphael’s birth and he reveals to Cassie what has been worrying him, it leads to an emotional second half.
To be honest I felt like the story took a few too many detours without offering much in the way of clarification or pointers in the right direction and leaving it right until the denouement to tie everything together in a rather disquieting manner. I certainly wouldn’t give this book to my middle grade age niece and I am in two minds about whether to give it to my sensitive 13 year-old niece. Either way, the storyline has the potential to confuse and I didn’t feel there was much in the way of logical progression from one scene to the next. Admittedly the story does come together but in has the feel of a dark and unsettling fairy tale that may well leave middle grade readers with some serious questions. Both my nieces like fantasy novels but Fledgling definitely has a heavier feel than I can imagine either of them being comfortable with as well as several characters who are belatedly revealed as not all they first appear.
Far and away the best thing for me about this novel was the vividly imagined house on top of a tall rock with a helter-skelter road blasted into the rock face and complete with owlery and a zip wire to move between floors. The descriptions of the features added by different generations of the family were well-drawn and engagingly told and I think I could have read a book about Cassie’s unique home alone!