Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Oh sweet Beloved Spare us Sores, thought Mosca. Look at us, we're thieves, and mill burners, and spies, and one of us is a cutthroat as well. We're Criminals of the Murkiest Hue, and we're not even very good at it."

After twelve year-old orphaned Mosca has been kind enough (and clever enough) to steal the magistrate's keys and free the storyteller and confidence man Eponymous Clent from the stocks in order that he might be convinced to help her escape her now-miserable life in Chough, Eponymous tries to dupe her the first chance he gets. But the girl, who had been taught by her unusual father to read and cherish language, is far more tenacious and resourceful than the swindler initally judges her to be. And then there is that goose under her arm.

"Mosca took a couple of rapid steps towards the door, and then halted. Something was missing.
" 'Where's my goose?'
" 'The goose?' Mistress Bessel whistled through her teeth regretfully. 'Eponymous said it was his. I give him the names of some contacts in Mandelion and told him a place where he could stay, and he give me the goose in exchange. You better take the matter up with him when you find him.' "Mosca clenched her fists, and bristled like a cat. 'Saracen!' she screamed at the top of her lungs. 'Foxes!'
"Around the doorway a muscular white neck curled questioningly. Into the shop proper came Saracen with his sailor's strut, making a sound as if he were swallowing pebbles and enjoying it. Mosca knelt and reached for him.
" 'Farthingale!' In answer to Mistress Bessel's sharp cry, a young man with an armful of stone nettles put his head around the door. 'Take that goose away and keep it under control, will you?' Farthingale wiped his free hand on his apron, and went to obey. "Rather a lot of things happened in quick succession. Since most of them happened after Mosca had ducked under the nearest table and pulled her new bonnet down over her face, she could only guess at their nature. However, they were loud, and violent, and sounded as if they might be expensive.
" 'Throw a rug over it, boy, and grab it!' she could hear Mistress Bessel shouting.
"Farthingale must have followed her instructions, since a moment later there was a hoarse cry of pain and a sound like the counter breaking. To judge by his yelling, though, Farthingale was still alive, which relieved Mosca. He bellowed a great many words that were new to Mosca and sounded quite interesting. She memorized them for future use.
"At last she raised the broad bonnet brim and gazed cautiously out into the shop. The floor was awash with the chalky shrapnel of shattered leaves and shivered ribbons. Through the debris swaggered Saracen, trailing a hessian rug like a cloak, a sprinkling of stone dust across his orange beak. Farthingale had taken refuge behind the wreckage of the counter, and was cupping one hand over his bloodied nose. Mistress Bessel had scrambled onto a rickety chair, her skirts hitched. The wood beneath her portly weight creaked nervously as the goose strutted barely a yard from her feet.
"Mosca emerged, carefully grabbed an armful of goose, and bobbed a hurried, inelegant curtsy to her hostess.
" 'I am very sorry, Mistress Bessel,' she explained hurriedly. 'Saracen has an antipathy to strangers.' She had long treasured the word 'antipathy,' and was glad of a chance to use it.
"She left the shop at a weak-legged walk. It surely could not be long before Mistress Bessel sent a constable after her anyway, but if she ran the woman might think to shout, 'Stop, thief!' and then she would have the whole street at her heels."

Having inadvertently burned down the mill in which she has essentially being imprisoned by her aunt and uncle, there is clearly no turning back for Mosca. And so she escapes from Chough with Eponymous and embarks on a journey that will find the girl up to her neck in intrigue, insanity, politics, religion, censorship, double-crosses, and murder in a fictionalized eighteenth-century English setting.

From the beginning of the first chapter (A is for Arson) first-time author Frances Hardinge--who clearly loves language as much as her young heroine Mosca--provides such colorful descriptions that I was often compelled to stop and re-read passages.

"Chough could be found by straying as far as possible from anywhere comfortable or significant, and following the smell of damp. The village had long since surrendered to a seeping, creeping rot. The buildings rotted from the bottom upward. The trees rotted from the inside out. The carrots and turnips from the outside in, and were pale and pulpy when they were dug out.
"Around and through the village, water seethed down the breakneck hillside in a thousand winding streamlets. They hissed and gleamed through dark miles of pine forest above the village, chafing the white rocks and learning a strange milkiness. Chough itself was more a tumble than a town, the houses scattered down the incline as if stranded there after a violent flood."

Already released in Britain, the adventure, intrigue, language, and the goose are guaranteed to make FLY BY NIGHT--a tale about a young woman and the power of the printed word--one of the most talked-about kid's books of 2006.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com