Fantasy |
Juvenile Literature |
Juvenile Fiction |
Summary
Summary
In this extraordinary debut novel with its deft nod to Dickensian heroes and rogues, Mira Bartók tells the story of Arthur, a shy, fox-like foundling with only one ear and a desperate desire to belong, as he seeks his destiny.
Have you been unexpectedly burdened by a recently orphaned or unclaimed creature? Worry not! We have just the solution for you!
Welcome to the Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, an institution run by evil Miss Carbunkle, a cunning villainess who believes her terrified young charges exist only to serve and suffer. Part animal and part human, the groundlings toil in classroom and factory, forbidden to enjoy anything regular children have, most particularly singing and music. For the Wonderling, an innocent-hearted, one-eared, fox-like eleven-year-old with only a number rather than a proper name - a 13 etched on a medallion around his neck - it is the only home he has ever known. But unexpected courage leads him to acquire the loyalty of a young bird groundling named Trinket, who gives the Home's loneliest inhabitant two incredible gifts: a real name - Arthur, like the good king in the old stories - and a best friend. Using Trinket's ingenious invention, the pair escape over the wall and embark on an adventure that will take them out into the wider world and ultimately down the path of sweet Arthur's true destiny. Richly imagined, with shimmering language, steampunk motifs, and gripping, magical plot twists, this high adventure fantasy is the debut novel of award-winning memoirist Mira Bartók and has already been put into development for a major motion picture.
Author Notes
Mira Bartok is a Chicago-born artist and the author of twenty-eight books for children.
Mira's writing has appeared in several anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series.
Bartok lives in Western Massachusetts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first book for children, Bartók (The Memory Palace) takes readers to a world in which part-human, part-animal groundlings are largely treated with disdain. The story follows a one-eared fox groundling known simply as Number Thirteen, who has spent all of his remembered life at Miss Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, where days are spent toiling silently in a classroom and factory. After Thirteen saves Trinket, a daring bird groundling, from bullies, the two hatch a plan to escape the home. Renamed Arthur by Trinket, the fox groundling seeks to uncover his hazy past but finds his trust and innocence tested in dark and unfriendly places. Bartók doesn't delve into the origins of groundlings but uses them successfully as a stand-in for other disenfranchised groups, with the groundlings subjected to derision and menial tasks by most of the upper classes. Music plays an important role in the story, both as a means of connection and a force for good. Though somewhat dense and slow moving at times, Bartók gives readers a richly imagined fantasy landscape to lose themselves in. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 10-14. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
In Arthurs world there are humans, wild animals, domestic animals, pets, and, on the bottom of the heap, groundlings, creatures who combine human and animal. Arthur is eleven years old, half boy, half fox, imprisoned in an orphanage of melodramatic misery, cruelty, and deprivation. When he makes friends with Trinket, a small, perky, birdish creature, his fortunes change, and the two plan and execute an escape. Frying pan to fire, he ends up first as an apprentice to a Fagin-esque figure and then trapped in Gloomintown, an underground hellhole. Innocent and pure, Arthur proceeds through a gallimaufry of fairy-tale tropes, nods to Dickens and T. H. White, and a generous helping of steampunk in pursuit of his goal of self-knowledge. But Bartk demonstrates her own inventiveness: one type of device for instance is a combination of passenger pigeon, player piano, and the internet. She also creates memorable scenes. A particularly sly one involves Miss Carbunkle, the sadistic headmistress of the orphanage, looking for venture capital to support her goal of removing music from the world. This big-canvas fantasy is not shy about lengthy description, a bouncing point of view, or a joyful kitchen-sink approach to secondary characters, incidents, and plot lines. sarah ellis (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Miss Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures isn't much of a home for the orphaned groundlings who reside there. These youngsters part human, part animal are treated like slaves and forbidden from any activity approximating fun. Among them is the nameless Number 13, a gentle, one-eared fox with music in his heart, incredible hearing, and a gift for understanding animal languages. When his peppy, inventor friend Trinket devises an escape plan, they flee into the world outside, which proves more dangerous than the one they left behind. This beguiling fiction debut from Bartók (The Memory Palace, 2011) is just the ticket for readers who revel in quest stories, or those with a soft spot for animal fantasies. Bartók carefully constructs her world, gracing it with a classed society, music, and a touch of steampunk. Number 13, later called Arthur after the legendary king, traverses perilous environs and encounters hostile attitudes toward groundlings in his determined search for his destiny. With a movie already underway, this book seems preordained for popularity. Final illustrations unseen.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ONE OF THE CHIEF PLEASURES of children's books is the central role friendship so often plays - a lonely character moves from isolation and misunderstanding toward the warmth and security of true kinship with others. It's immensely satisfying to watch young people take control of their own fates, navigating outer peril and inner struggle in order to find connection, as do the protagonists of two enchanting new middle grade books. The hero of "The Wonderling," Mira Bartók's debut children's novel, is a groundling, a human and animal hybrid, known only by the number stamped on the tag that hangs around his neck. This sensitive soul, part boy, part fox, has only known the grim confines of Miss Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, a joyless place where music is forbidden and the only greenery is the moss growing on the stone wall that surrounds it. He doesn't know who he is or where he comes from, and - most poignantly - wonders why he has been born at all. After he is befriended and rechristened Arthur by a plucky fellow groundling, Trinket, the friends manage to break out of their miserably cosseted world and plunge into the great unknown, the world that's so vast he "had to close his eyes from time to time in order to adjust to its size." He arrives in the shining city of Lumentown and then, in the most opulently strange and inventive passages of the book, descends to the underworld beneath the city, where the clanging from mines and factories echoes through fog "thick as soup and brown as umber," slugs leave glowing silver trails in the darkness, and hundreds of crows' eyes glitter like stars at the top of a chamber. Too often the bullies in the story speak in stale clichés rehashed from the movies, and chance or magic can sweep in too conveniently to save the day. But these weaknesses don't diminish the power of the grand set pieces and exhilarating twists, or the pleasure of humble, exquisite moments. A home inside a tree smells like "pine wreaths, cedar chests, rosemary and mushrooms from deep within the woods." Soon after their escape, Arthur and Trinket settle in a mossy spot between tree roots and gaze up at the night sky: "A cool wind blew, and the two friends pulled the blanket tight around them." Momentum builds toward a thrilling crescendo and, rarest of all, a wholly satisfying ending that still whets the appetite for a sequel. THE DELICIOUS villain of "Himble & Blue" is a mystical golden alligator who lurks in the swamp outside town and delivers asides to the reader in a velvety, malign purr. His dark menace is foil to the pure hearts of Blue Montgomery and Ttimble Wilson, the winning duo of Cassie Beasley's charming, warm-hearted and richly imagined tale. Blue and Ttimble have each been brought by their parents against their will to the poky town of Murky Branch, Ga., a town so small that Ttimble thinks it could "bore the heroism right out of her." But Ttimble is an eternal optimist: "Her parents had taken her life and given it a good hard shake, but that didn't mean Ttimble was going to fall to pieces." Dead set on being a hero and inspired by the incantatory slogans of the infomercial celebrity Maximal Star, Ttimble is undeterred even when every rescue she attempts ends in disaster. "I prefer," she says upon meeting Blue, "to think of myself as potentially extraordinary." Blue, on the other hand, is usually blue. The victim of a generations-old family curse, he just can't win at anything - speliing bees, video games, sports, fights - and is gloomy after being recently dumped at his grandmother's house by his constitutionally impatient racecar-driver father. Then Ttimble catapults in, a breath of fresh air, zealously intent on saving Blue. As droves of eccentric, meddlesome relatives turn up to wait for a red moon to rise, when all wili be called into the swamp to fulfill or contest fates handed down long ago, only the courage to face truths about themselves - truths as dark as the swamp itself - will save Blue and Ttimble. In places the story staggers under the weight of unwieldy plot mechanics and gratuitous emotional explication. But these are flaws of exuberance, and it's hard to dwell on them while you're rooting for characters as disarming as these two. NADIA aguiar is the author of the Lost Island of Tamarind trilogy.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-6-Thirteen, a fox groundling (creatures that are half animal, half human), has spent most of his life in "the Home," a horrid orphanage/workhouse run by the evil Mrs. Carbunkle. When he saves a bird groundling named Trinket, the two hatch an escape plan, and Trinket renames him Arthur, in honor of the brave medieval king. Once Arthur and Trinket are free from Mrs. Carbunkle, they set off on an adventure that will test Arthur's destiny as a Wonderling, including his very unusual abilities to understand and speak to animals and to unknowingly sing a haunting song each night as he sleeps. He will have to head ear-first into danger and return to The Home to find out what that destiny holds. Written with clear and detailed descriptions, this novel drops readers into a strange, magical, mythical, and mechanical world. Fantasy fans will be swept along by the mystery and adventure, guessing until the end how the plot and characters connect. Bearing some similarities to Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" with shades of Erin Hunter's "Warriors" series, Bartók's title will appeal to readers who appreciate anthropomorphized animal characters, high-stakes adventure, and Dickensian settings. -VERDICT A stellar new contribution to fantasy that should find a place in every middle grade collection.-Clare A. Dombrowski, Amesbury Public Library, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Goth Girl goes out with a bang, Michael Morpurgo visits the land of Oz, Sally Jones the gorilla and a trio of suffragettes Big names abound this September for five- to eight-year-olds -- including Chris Riddell 's final Goth Girl book, Goth Girl and the Sinister Symphony (Macmillan), in which Ada, daughter of the brooding poet Lord Goth, must steer clear of unwanted stepmothers while helping ensure the smooth running of the Gothstock festival. Like its predecessors, it's seeded with elegantly illustrated, punning allusions to everything from canonical literature (Jane Ear) to pop heroines (Tailor Extremely Swift). Handsomely turned out as ever, this silver-foiled hardback feels instantly welcoming and accessible -- the jokes here are always for Riddell's young readers, never on them. Meanwhile, Michael Morpurgo revisits The Wizard of Oz from an intriguing new perspective; charmingly illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark, Toto (HarperCollins) features Dorothy's canine pal telling his pups the story of his post-cyclone adventures. With an appealing folksy swagger and a diverting catchphrase ("You're too doggone right"), Toto's jaunty, down-to-earth rendition, full of understated emotion and humour, conjures an Oz ideal for bedtime reading. Elsewhere, Orlando Weeks, former lead singer of the Maccabees, turns his hand to author-illustration in The Gritterman (Penguin). As he faces forced retirement, the last gritterman, salter of icy roads in winter darkness, muses on his work and its meaning in a laconic, reflective manner reminiscent of Raymond Briggs. Weeks's delicate, assured drawings evoke chill-reddened skin, old, trusted machinery, deep shadows, blazing cold and solitude in this superbly atmospheric story. For eight and above, there's a fascinating Swedish fantasy from Pushkin: The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius, translated by Peter Graves. Sally Jones -- always given her full name -- is a silent but multitalented gorilla; engineer, chess-player and cargo-boat companion of the Chief, a Finnish seaman and her greatest friend. But when the Chief is framed for murder, she falls in with fado singer Ana Molini and Luigi Fidardo, a repairer of musical instruments, and begins the arduous, far-flung process of clearing his name. Sally Jones's dispassionate, delightfully old-fashioned diction is a perfect match for Wegelius's nostalgic monochrome illustrations. There are more fantastical animals to be found in Mira Bartok's The Wonderling (Walker), a dreamy Dickensian tale of a fox-like, one-eared "groundling", or despised human-animal hybrid. We follow his flight from Miss Carbuncle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, and his narrow escape from a life of crime, saved by music and a groundling bird called Trinket. Though prone to occasional overlong descriptions, the book's imagined worlds, from hovels to mansions, are imbued with the wonder of the title; and its innocent hero, no match for the Faginesque creatures he encounters, should resonate especially with gentle, guileless readers. For lovers of stark, intense landscapes, Gill Lewis's Sky Dancer (Oxford) is essential. Joe and his elder brother Ryan are mourning their gamekeeper father, who died after serving time for shooting an endangered bird of prey: a hen harrier, scourge of the young birds he reared on the grouse moor. Now the community is bitterly divided between tradition and conservation. What with Ryan's fury, Joe's own friendship with the land-owner's daughter, an unexpected new acquaintance and the mingled shame and pride of his father's memory, Joe's certainties have been annihilated. What will he do when he finds an orphaned hen harrier chick? Vivid, difficult and satisfying, this is magnificent storytelling. From Bloomsbury, there's complex emotional fare for teenagers in Carnegie-winner Sarah Crossan 's latest verse novel Moonrise, told from the perspective of another Joe: a 17-year-old who has not seen his older brother Ed for 10 years, becasue he is on death row. Joe now has only a few visiting hours to spend with him as the calendar moves inexorably towards Ed's execution date. Mistrust, forgiveness and the premeditated stripping away of a future, distorting many other lives in unfathomable ways, are communicated through Crossan's spare, expressive free verse, with understated, heart-breaking clarity. Sally Nicholls's Things a Bright Girl Can Do (Andersen) is a captivating suffragette novel told from three perspectives: that of Evelyn, a well-bred young woman with an untapped gift for scholarship; May, the "Sapphist" daughter of a broad-minded Quaker; and cross-dressing Nell, a working-class Poplar girl enraged by the realisation that her talents will never be appreciated like her brothers'. Each voice is distinct, resonant and authentic; and the ideas that run through the book -- the thrill of first love, the effect of real conflict on idealistic doctrine, the impossibility of the happy ever after -- add up to something uniquely special. From suffragettes to feminist fairytales: Deirdre Sullivan's Tangleweed and Brine (Little Island) is a tapestry of retellings and reimaginings, some told in a beguiling second person, that foreground women -- their desires, powers, fearsomeness and vulnerability. Sullivan's prose is laced with flowing lines in pentameter; and her remade Grimm and Perrault stories are enriched by Karen Vaughan's sharp, intricate, Beardsleyesque illustrations. Finally, for the smallest readers, there's less sinister illustrated magic -- a new picture book, The Ugly Five (Alison Green), from Gruffalo giants Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Africa's Big Five, including the lion and the leopard, are much sought after on safari. But what about the Ugly Five -- the warthog, wildebeest, hyena, vulture and marabou stork? Donaldson's exuberant verse and Scheffler's strong, inimitable style are splendidly suited to these underrated, cheerful grotesques, and evoke the love between parents and children of every species. There's a lyrical collaboration from Faber in the enticing Come All You Little Persons, a John Agard poem well served by Jessica Courtney-Tickle's numinous illustrations. Little bird person, little wave person, little tree person; all spring forth from dappled, blazing or sparkling environments to join hands in a joyful, tender dance, celebrating people, places and the glory of existence. Rather more down-to-earth is Oi Cat! by Kes Gray and Jim Field (Hodder), the third in the series that began with Oi Frog! The previous instalment's diktat that cats must sit on gnats resulted in an irate feline with a bite-pimpled posterior. Now the well-meaning dog suggests that "kitty" or "moggy" might achieve a more comfortable seat ... Boasting a final fold-out surprise, and the immortal line "My bottom is none of your business!", this animal-rhyming silliness goes from strength to strength. - Imogen Russell Williams.
Kirkus Review
A young groundling, or animal hybrid, escapes a horrible orphanage to discover his past. The shy, foxlike groundling known as No. 13 has only the faintest memory of a song and the far-off sounds he can hear with his single furry ear to keep him wondering why he exists. He's imprisoned along with dozens of other unwanted groundlings in a former monastery-turned-grim workhouse where food and comfort are scarce. The seemingly human headmistress has dark secrets, and her assistants are cruel to the orphans. When a clever and resourceful new friend springs Arthur, as she calls No. 13, and herself from the institution, the two embark on an epic journey that will eventually bring them back to free the other orphans. Bartk's language is full of rich description and effulgent inventories of food and places. Her world includes Christmas and Beethoven, along with homes in hollow trees, clockwork beetles, police patrols on flying bicycles, and allusions to ancient magic, both good and evil. Arthur, sweetly innocent throughout his journey, must make his way in Lumentown, where groundlings are at best second-class citizens and High Hats control everything. Arthur's harrowing encounters with cruelty, hunger, and filth are interspersed with gentle humor and kindness. Though the origins of the groundlings are never explored (perhaps saved for the planned sequel), the worldbuilding otherwise has an impressive level of conviction and credibility. Bartk's lovely, detailed illustrations and drawings throughout support the sense of enchantment in this imaginative adventure. Captivating and with great potential as a read-aloud. (Fiction. 9-13) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.