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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of The Lie Tree , Frances Hardinge offers "a delicious combination of historical adventure, coming-of-age tale, and supernatural intrigue" ( Publishers Weekly , starred review).
Sometimes, when a person dies, their spirit goes looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space within them, perfect for hiding.
Young Makepeace has learned to defend herself from the ghosts that try to possess her in the night, desperate for refuge, but one day a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard. And now there's a spirit inside her. The spirit is wild, brutish, and strong, and it may be her only defense when she is sent to live with her father's rich and powerful family. There is talk of civil war, and they need people like her to protect their dark and terrible family secret. But as she plans to escape and heads out into a country torn apart by war, Makepeace must decide which is worse: possession--or death.
"Darkly splendid . . . a wonderful, resonant narrative whose subtlety and insight will challenge, entertain and enchant." -- The Guardian
" A Skinful of Shadows is outlandishly creative and thoroughly blood-chilling. Her storytelling is visceral and unfurls at an exciting pace, making this novel a wonderful, weird and terrifying addition to her body of work." -- Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"A book that only Hardinge could write . . . [a] masterful and spooky historical fantasy." -- School Library Journal (starred review)
"Hardinge's writing is stunning, and readers will be taken hostage by its intensity, fascinating developments, and the fierce, compassionate girl leading the charge." -- Booklist (starred review)
"Deliberate, impeccable, and extraordinary." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Author Notes
Frances Hardinge was born in 1973 in the United Kingdom. Her first novel, Fly By Night, won the Bradford Boase Award in 2006. Her other books include Verdigris Deep / Well Witched, Twilight Robbery, and A Face Like Glass. Cuckoo Song won the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Novel at the British Fantasy Awards in 2015 and The Lie Tree won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As the English Civil War gains momentum, a girl named Makepeace Lightfoot attempts to uncover the shadowy secrets of her family history after her mother is killed. To do so, she travels to Grizehayes, the ancestral home of the father she never knew, where she learns that the aristocratic Fellmottes are able to possess ghosts within them, bringing them preternatural knowledge and strength. Thanks to her Fellmotte lineage, Makepeace comes to harbor several spirits within her, and she takes on as many external personas-servant, spy, medic, prophet-as she attempts to escape (and eventually bring down) the Fellmottes, who see her little more than a vessel. Hardinge, whose The Lie Tree was the 2015 Costa Book of the Year, crafts a delicious combination of historical adventure, coming-of-age tale, and supernatural intrigue, set amid power struggles that reshaped 17th-century England. Makepeace's evolving relationships with the ghosts embodied within her are fascinating and moving (differentiated fonts make these internal conversations easy to follow), highlighting her growing compassion despite being given few reasons to trust anyone in her young life. Ages 13-up. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The 2015 Costa prize winner is back with a worthy follow-up to The Lie Tree, set just before the English civil war Frances Hardinge's last novel, The Lie Tree, won the overall Costa book award in 2015; the only other children's book to have done so is Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, in 2001. Hardinge is at the forefront of children's fiction, with a rich, unusual taste for language, an eye for the striking and apt image and stories that reveal a staunch defence of the weak and the oppressed. What is more, she combines a subtle, intellectual approach with plots that swoop and soar. Her darkly splendid new book is a worthy follow-up to The Lie Tree, set just before the start of the English civil war. Hardinge has always been interested in splits and doubles; in how a character, apparently good, can be only a sliver away from being bad; in how perceptions and opinions shift according to perspective and situation. Her heroine in Cuckoo Song was a fairy changeling, unaware that she had been created and placed into the family that she thought hers; Faith in The Lie Tree must fight against the strictures placed on women in the 19th century, while unpicking a web of falsehoods around her scientist father. Makepeace, the protagonist of this new book, also faces a mystery around her birth, and is surrounded by a similar web of lies. All these girls are born into power structures that appear to constrict; all learn that things can be made more malleable. The central themes of A Skinful of Shadows are inheritance and power, and how these link to governance both literal and psychological. An aristocratic family, the Fellmottes, possess an unusual ability. They can catch ghosts and absorb them into their own minds. Makepeace, being a bastard daughter, is tracked down by the family, who wish to protect their property and bloodline at all costs. And yet, as Makepeace discovers, her mother fled from them, and, as her last wish, begs her to flee too. Hardinge is adept and vivid in creating a sense of terrifying, apparently permanent grandeur: the Fellmotte house, Grizehayes, is ancient, implacable and vast; Lady April, one of the family, treads over the outstretched palms of an underling rather than get her dress wet. It is not hard to see a critique of aristocracy: should some families, here quite literally in thrall to their ancestors through their ghosts, be any more suited to power than others? The damage done as a result is incalculable. Hardinge gives the opposing Puritans a similar kind of treatment, with their inconsistencies and excesses laid bare, and it is to her great credit that she delineates the attractions and horrors of both sides, symbolised in the characters of James, a bastard tempted by nobility, and Symond, the noble heir who seems to shift allegiance. Makepeace, travelling from one camp to the other, reads news sheets of the same battles from both sides, each proclaiming loudly that they, and only they, are right. The problem of echo chambers and fake news is an old one. The most appealing characters here are the in-between ones: the spies, roustabouts and uncoverers of nuggets of information, those who risk their lives not in the service of ideology, but in the service of life itself. Thanks to large amounts of gold, the Fellmotte family have managed to persuade Charles I not to expose their supernatural dealings. Makepeace must navigate these tricky territories, while staying true to her brother James and managing the increasing number of ghosts that pop into her head (including a wonderfully sniffy doctor, a reformed Puritan and another, more mysterious being). What gives the book its strength is the essential fairytale backbone of a girl going out into the world to achieve, and to reach a higher level of existence. Perhaps in response to the Puritan elements in the story, Hardinge's language in this novel is less elaborate than it has been, resulting in a cleaner, sharper diction. There are many wonderful moments that have the unmistakable Hardinge tang. Makepeace accidentally absorbs the ghost of a bear, symbolising both the uncontrollable id that she must subdue and the violence threatening to tear apart the country in "surprising zigzags". She develops a deep rapport with her beastly fellow traveller, but often it's "like reasoning with a thundercloud". The pull of the story is towards subversion, and Makepeace ends by reappropriating her inherited gifts, and using them not to provide a vessel for antiquated mores, but to succour the weak and the dispossessed. This is a wonderful, resonant narrative whose subtlety and insight will challenge, entertain and enchant. Philip Womack's latest book is The Double Axe (Alma). - Philip Womack.
Kirkus Review
In 17th-century England, a girl faces civil unrest, conflicting Christianities, and a family inheritance more horrific than she could have dreamed.Makepeace has nightmares, so Mother banishes her to an abandoned chapel to practice fighting off the dead people who are trying to enter her mind. Upon Mother's death, Makepeace is sent to the Fellmottes, family of the father she never knew. Grizehayes is a "graceless and vast" house, the wealthy family's "arrogance made stone.proof of their centuries." The Fellmottes treat her as a servant and prevent her escape: they need her as a spare receptacle for generations of family ghosts. But if Makepeace's body inherits the ghosts, her own consciousness may not survive. Doggedly ingenious and stolid, Makepeace grabs every scrap of agency she can findeven when ghosts do share her mind, invited or not, human or beast. She escapes Grizehayes, but the Fellmottes hunt her through city and countryside, through both sides of the unfolding English civil war, through the disguises she keeps changing. Powerlessness, poverty, and integrity are major themes, built on a subtle yet stubborn underlying warmth. Hardinge's plot is both unpredictable and rock-solid, her settings full of smells, her imagery vivid: "A shocked silence pooled like blood." All characters are white and English.Deliberate, impeccable, and extraordinary. (Historical fantasy. 12-15) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her first novel since The Lie Tree (2016), Hardinge again summons history and fantasy, intermingling them in a most unusual way. Set against a backdrop of the English Civil War, the story opens in a small Puritan village, where a girl named Makepeace wrestles with vivid nightmares. When her mother is accidentally killed, the girl is sent to her father's family, of whom she knows nothing. The Fellmottes, it turns out, are an old aristocratic clan with an insidious secret they are able to house the spirits of the dead, a gift they have twisted, and the inherited cause of Makepeace's clawing nightmares. The narrative opens slowly as Hardinge lays deliberate groundwork and conjures a palpably eerie atmosphere, which mounts in horror as the story progresses. It picks up after Makepeace, now 15, has spent two years as a kitchen girl at the Fellmotte estate, gathering information about the family. The plot becomes populated by spymistresses whose ranks Makepeace fleetingly joins and vengeful spirits, and is punctuated by her escape attempts and wartime battles. Yet much of the action unfolds in Makepeace's head, as she acquires her own coterie of ghosts, most memorably that of an ill-treated bear. Hardinge's writing is stunning, and readers will be taken hostage by its intensity, fascinating developments, and the fierce, compassionate girl leading the charge.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2017 Booklist
