Castle of Shadows

Ellen Renner's Castle of Shadows is an adventure for 9 year olds about a princess nobody has bothered to look after.

What happens

Charlie is the daughter of a king. You would never guess it. She steals cheese from the kitchen because she is hungry, gets shaken like a rat in a terrier's jaws for it, and goes to bed with her stomach aching.

Her mother walked out of Quale Castle five years ago and never came back. Her father has not really come back either. He spends his days hanging upside down from scaffold poles building towers out of playing cards, and when he talks to Charlie he addresses a spot a few inches above her head.

That leaves the housekeeper in charge. Mrs O'Dair is a mountain of black silk who smells of mothballs and cold mutton. She forgets to feed Charlie. She never forgets to punish her.

So Charlie fights back in the only ways available. Manure in the new footman's boots. Books smuggled out of the library for Tobias, the gardener's boy, who blackmails her for them and never once loses his temper, which she finds absolutely infuriating.

Then a folded scrap falls out of one of those books. It is a letter in her mother's handwriting, written the night she vanished, and it breaks off halfway through a sentence.

The pleasure of reading this is Charlie herself. She is furious and funny and hopeless at doing as she is told. When something upsets her she does not cry, she thinks up twelve unpleasant things to do to Tobias Petch, and she keeps a running total.

Renner also gives you a whole country going wrong around a child who only half understands it. Crops have failed twice. There are people in the city who think a king who plays with cards should lose his head, and Charlie has to stand there and listen to a footman say so.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The neglect is not softened at all. Charlie is properly hungry, shaken and shouted at by the staff, and locked in her room with stale bread and cabbage water when she steps out of line. A child who has only ever known kind adults may find that harder going than any of the danger in the plot.

The flip side is that Charlie is never pitiable. She is too busy plotting. If your reader enjoys a heroine with a filthy temper and a plan, the neglect reads as something she is beating rather than something happening to her.

What to read next

If the bit that grips them is a girl left to fend for herself in a big cold house, A Little Princess is in the library. Sara Crewe turns up at Miss Minchin's school rich, adored and slightly too clever for everyone, and she does not stay rich.