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Sally Gardner
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Book
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Publisher | Orion | ||
ISBN | 1842555049 | ||
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Reviewer
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Janice
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Synopsis
The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen.
This is a book filled with enchantments -- a pair of silver shoes, a fairy shadow, a prince transformed into a fox - that contrast with the heartbreaking loss and cruelty of Coriander's life in the real world. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters.
Coriander is a heroine to love. Her story will establish Sally Gardner as a children's writer of boundless imagination and originality.
Review
I Coriander is written in seven sections with each section having five parts and each part linking to the next.
I Coriander is set in 1643 about a young person called Eleanor Hobie who was born and live on the River Thames. She does not remember much of her early years except the things that happened immediately around her.
I Coriander is a tale which I and others have found to hard to put down.
A fast flowing book, enthrallingly set out like a classic old style novel. There are pen and ink drawings which show how the author has sketched the landscape in the times of the book.
The story goes full circle from the start to the great, great granddaughter of the original person in the book.
I did find this book hard to put down but also found my self cross referencing people to see where and when they lived within the story and at which year they had been born. This was a great book to get the feel of London over a period of 200 + years which I thoroughly enjoyed.
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