"Ye toads and vipers!" Karen Cushman has a talent for developing characters I really care about. Meggy is no exception. A real crank, talented insult-giver, and whiney when she arrives in London. But nonetheless, Meggy holds to her principles even when those principles create a moral dilemma for her. And even the dilemma has moral obstacles. Will she act based on the good of others, or only because she's afraid for herself?Here is a character study I enjoyed! I wanted to know how Meggy would survive in London, how she would grow and make her way in the world. Relatively short, well-researched historical fiction I'd recommend to anyone. This was a nice little historical novel for the middle grade set, so it's pretty short, but with a surprising amount going on. First, it's set in the middle of Elizabethan England and focuses on Meggy who struggles to walk with her hip dysplasia, relying on crude crutches to get around. She's tormented for her disability, which makes doing basic things difficult. But worse than being bullied by the general public, she has been unwanted and unloved by all her family except her grandmother. She ends up getting sent to London because her father sent for her, assuming she was a boy (he knew nothing except that he'd left barmaid pregnant) and apparently thinking she (he) could be his assistant. We never meet her mother or grandmother, but her father is pretty much a scoundrel. Meggy is lucky because she stumbles across one group of people who is nice to her and this makes the novel not horrifically depressing. We see Meggy go from being an angry girl to one with a handful of friends and the possibility of bettering her situation through a possible career.Note that the author goes to great lengths to make the setting and characters very realistic. This means that the language is not standard, modern English. For this reason, the book is really appropriate for confident readers (kids or adults)--they have to be comfortable coming across words they don't know and either figure them out from context or look them up, because there are a lot of archaic words.
What do You think about Alchemy And Meggy Swann (2010)?
Really good in audiobook form. Wonderful use of the language. Lively characters.Middle reader.
—clg2012
