Starred review from August 28, 2023
Carey (Little) draws on fairy tales and Shakespeare for a dazzling bildungsroman. In 1901 Norwich, 12-year-old Edith Holler lives in her family’s dilapidated theater, where she fills her days reading books on the city’s past. From them she learns that hundreds of children have inexplicably died or vanished from Norwich over the centuries. She can’t say for sure, but she thinks they’ve been murdered, their bodies used to flavor Beetle Spread, a popular local delicacy invented by a 14th-century woman named Meg Uttig. Even the eccentric theatrical troupe that serves as Edith’s surrogate family would find her claim hard to swallow, so she decides to share her knowledge by writing a play, inspired by Hamlet, to reveal the crime through drama. In the run-up to its production, her father, Edgar, marries Margaret Uttig Unthank, the heir to the Beetle Spread fortune. Margaret promptly turns Edgar against Edith and burns all copies of her play. Edith, realizing Margaret will do anything to hide Beetle Spread’s secret, flees from the theater’s basement into subterranean Norwich, where she rewrites her play among the ghosts of the murdered children who roam the city’s bowels. Edith says her theatrical friends “strive to make the impossible possible” to “convince our public of fantastical personages and happenings.” On these grounds, Carey unquestionably succeeds. This affirms the author’s standing as a major literary talent.
September 1, 2023
Artistic vision, wit, and the creatively grotesque intermingle in Carey's (The Swallowed Man, 2020) literary historical fantasy. In 1901, Edith Holler is a physically fragile, curious, motherless 12-year-old who's lived her entire life within her large family's historic theater in Norwich, England, because of a supposed curse. A sprightly narrator, Edith is unsurprisingly possessed of an active imagination--too much so, the adults around her believe. After she deduces an unsavory association between Norwich's lost children and the local delicacy of Beetle Spread (which is exactly what it sounds like), Edith writes a play about this secret history that her stern yet indulgent father agrees to stage. But when widowed Beetle Spread heiress Margaret Unthank becomes her father's new fianc�e, our heroine feels uneasy, and for good reason. Edith's entertaining tour of the theater's many nooks and their inhabitants feels somewhat protracted, though the pacing quickens after Margaret appears on the scene. This quirky homage to Carey's childhood home, which bursts with personality and his expressive pencil drawings (and multiple ghosts), underscores the importance of listening to children.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from September 1, 2023
A comic novel (tinged with gothic elements) about a girl trapped in her family's theater in Norwich, England in 1901. When Edith Holler--the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this twisty tale--was christened, an old actress put a curse on her: If the girl ever stepped outside, she would die and the "entire theatre would come tumbling down." Afterward, the story goes, the actress exploded, spattering blood everywhere. But is the story real? "We who live in the theatre here have some belief in magical things," Edith tells us. Both imprisoned and perfectly content, Edith roams the nooks and crannies of the theater, and when she tires of this, she reads about the town's history and makes a disturbing discovery: The children of Norwich have been disappearing in astonishing numbers. Moreover, she has a pretty good hunch who's responsible: folk legend Mawther Meg, the woman who allegedly invented Utting's Beetle Spread, a local delicacy. Since no one takes her seriously, Edith pursues the only avenue open to a child forbidden by her father from speaking to outsiders: She writes a play. This, in turn, sets into motion an uncanny sequence of events that seems to come straight from her script and gives credence to her father's warning that once a play is out in the world, its characters come to life. Though Carey's book runs a wee bit long, it is a raucous romp through the world of early 20th-century theater, with its barrels of fake blood and donkeys living in the bowels of the understage to provide the muscle for scene changes. In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal. A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.