book rec: Well Witched

[psocoptera]

Well Witched by Frances Hardinge turned out to have some surprising parallels to Bright's Passage but putting them in the same post sounded like a recipe for cross-spoilerization, and in fact I'm not even sure I should say what I would have used for the subject line of the paired-rec post. And except for, uh, the thing they have in common, and the other thing, they are very different - Well Witched is middle-grade, for one thing. I believe it was recommended to me in a conversation about Edward Eager, and I suspect it's particularly awesome if you grew up Edward Eager like I did, but I think there's a lot to like even if you didn't. Some vivid imagery, and Hardinge is a sharp emotional observer, there's some really good character detail here. And clever plotting. Recommended (although in keeping with the previous post, I'm going to put one thing that might bother some people under a spoiler cut).

One of the antagonists is a woman whose baby was killed many years ago, eventually leading her by the end of the novel to go mad with grief. I actually thought it was handled fairly well (for a middle-grade novel especially), in that, when we find this out, it moved her from being just sort of randomly evil to having a good reason for all her hate, and it was totally on-theme, but some readers might still not want a dead!baby-mama stereotype in their middle-grade fantasy.