Just a Little Scary

I hate horror.  I really do.  I don't like to be scared it's not a thrill for me, it's just scary.  So I was not excited when I saw the cover of Jonathan Auxier's The Night Gardener.  It looked scary.  I know, I know, don't judge a book by it's cover-but we all do it.  And often the cover can give you a lot of great information.   A better saying would be, 'don't rule out a book by its cover.'

Luckily The Night Gardener is just a little bit scary.  Better words would be suspenseful, gripping, and magical.  Kip and Molly are Irish immigrants who got separated from their parents on the journey to England.  Desperate to escape the orphanage they take a job working for the Windsor family.

But something isn't right.  The gaunt, sickly family looks nothing like the rosy portrait of themselves hung on the wall.  They are clearly poor yet the mother seems to have a never ending supply of jewels and the boy has all the candy he can eat.  How is this possible?

And why are there muddy footprints on the stairs every morning?  How is this sickly looking tree in the front yard still surviving?  And why won't anything else grow around it?

Molly is known for being a superb storyteller but now she finds real life is stranger than the wildest tale she can imagine.  Will she be able to figure it out?  Will the story of her life, and of Kip's, have a happy ending?

Of course I'm not going to tell you.  But I do highly recommend this book.  At a time when lengthy series are so popular it's nice to have all of the magic and drama of a long fantasy series packed into a single book.  I had forgotten how nice it is to get the whole story from one book.

Being brave...that's kids stuff.