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The Shadow Garden
An entirely new edition of The Vampire Castle. The story begins with Elspeth placed at the dreaded Rutherford's school, hoping that her mother will soon fetch her home. Elspeth is about to turn eleven. This should not prove particularly momentous in anyone's life, but for Elspeth it does, because she is about to discover she is not the ordinary girl she thought she was. Elspeth, it seems, has mysterious origins, and an even more mysterious destiny. Turning eleven means she is about to meet a grandfather she never knew she had, and commence an adventure in his peculiar garden that will take her to extraordinary and creepy places as far from home as she can imagine. Meeting dark characters from myths and legends, and traveling through space and time, Elspeth will have to use her wits at every turn to find her way home. Scary, quirky, funny and fast-paced, The Shadow Garden is a juvenile scifi fantasy that will take your imagination to the end of the universe and back. Are you ready for the journey?
ebook
Published August 31, 2017
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 23, 2022
I got this book on the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale, and started to read it just to see what I had got, but found it was uncannily similar to Dragon's Green, which I had just borrowed from the library, and found myself getting thoroughly confused because of the similarities in characters and plot, so I decided to finish the library book first and come back to this one when I had returned it.
In both books the protagonist is an 11-year-old girl whose name begins with E -- Elspeth in this case, and Effie in the other. In both the girl's closest friends are two boys, in both the children are given detention by nasty tyrannical teachers, and in both the girl gets transported to a magical dream world in which she discovers relatives she never knew she had.
[book :The Shadow Garden] has a dream-like quality, similar to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As in dreams, there are abrupt transitions from one scene to the next, with no reason or logic behind them. In a dream one can get into a car, and find that one is riding a bicycle or a horse, or some other mode of transport, without noticing the transition. In this book there are similar abrupt transitions, barely noticed by the characters, and the characters seem to ignore things that the readers wonder about.
At one point they are in the library of an ancient castle that belongs to a vampire count. The library catches fire, but none of the characters, least of all its owner, seems to think of putting the flames out, and just note them spreading and taking hold in passing. Instead they use papers to make tapers to travel to another part of the castle, which has been damaged by an earthquake.
And this is related to a trope that seems to be common to many fantasy books -- I also found it in The Sword of Shannara -- the deserted passages and halls of the castle are lighted by candles or lamps or flaming torches, whose flames seem to remain inexplicably alight with no one to tend them or light them, until they, equally inexplicably, all go out, and so the characters need to make paper tapers to guide them through the dark passages. In my experience such tapers burn for less than a minute, but here they last for a couple of hours at least, through several scenes, including some abrupt transitions.
That's OK, because one knows that it is dream-like fantasy, in which anything can happen and probably will, and there doesn't need to be any logic or reason behind it. But in the Alice books there is a kind of dreamland logic to it, and it occurs to Alice to question some of the illogicalities, but in this one the characters just seem to accept most of them. And in some cases the gaps and transitions seemed to be a bit too much. At some points in the story it felt as though there were several pages, or even a whole chapter or two missing.
Nevertheless, I found it an enjoyable read, and if you like books set in fantasy dream worlds, this one is worth reading.
In both books the protagonist is an 11-year-old girl whose name begins with E -- Elspeth in this case, and Effie in the other. In both the girl's closest friends are two boys, in both the children are given detention by nasty tyrannical teachers, and in both the girl gets transported to a magical dream world in which she discovers relatives she never knew she had.
[book :The Shadow Garden] has a dream-like quality, similar to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As in dreams, there are abrupt transitions from one scene to the next, with no reason or logic behind them. In a dream one can get into a car, and find that one is riding a bicycle or a horse, or some other mode of transport, without noticing the transition. In this book there are similar abrupt transitions, barely noticed by the characters, and the characters seem to ignore things that the readers wonder about.
At one point they are in the library of an ancient castle that belongs to a vampire count. The library catches fire, but none of the characters, least of all its owner, seems to think of putting the flames out, and just note them spreading and taking hold in passing. Instead they use papers to make tapers to travel to another part of the castle, which has been damaged by an earthquake.
And this is related to a trope that seems to be common to many fantasy books -- I also found it in The Sword of Shannara -- the deserted passages and halls of the castle are lighted by candles or lamps or flaming torches, whose flames seem to remain inexplicably alight with no one to tend them or light them, until they, equally inexplicably, all go out, and so the characters need to make paper tapers to guide them through the dark passages. In my experience such tapers burn for less than a minute, but here they last for a couple of hours at least, through several scenes, including some abrupt transitions.
That's OK, because one knows that it is dream-like fantasy, in which anything can happen and probably will, and there doesn't need to be any logic or reason behind it. But in the Alice books there is a kind of dreamland logic to it, and it occurs to Alice to question some of the illogicalities, but in this one the characters just seem to accept most of them. And in some cases the gaps and transitions seemed to be a bit too much. At some points in the story it felt as though there were several pages, or even a whole chapter or two missing.
Nevertheless, I found it an enjoyable read, and if you like books set in fantasy dream worlds, this one is worth reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review