Honesty and Lies

Eloise Williams' Honesty and Lies is a historical adventure for 9 year olds about a Welsh runaway storyteller who talks her way into Queen Elizabeth's palace.

What happens

Honesty arrives in London in the middle of winter, squashed in among the cabbages in a farmer's cart. She's run away from her father in Wales. She's starving, she's frozen, and all she has is a quick tongue and a head full of tales.

On her very first day she bumps into Alice, a maid at Greenwich Palace. Alice is proud and prickly and would very much like to be rid of her. (She doesn't believe a word about the wolves Honesty once outskated on the ice.)

Honesty follows her anyway. By nightfall she's done something very brave and very reckless in front of the Queen herself, and she's been given a job at the palace.

Honesty and Alice take turns telling the story, and that's where the fun is. Honesty makes up tall tales about everything. Alice is quiet and careful and plainly hiding something. You'll soon be wondering which of them to trust.

The palace is gorgeous to read about, with jewels, tapestries and a clock that tells the tides. Then you go downstairs to the laundry, where the dirty washing is piled waist-high. It gives a very real feel for what life was like for the servants.

This is Elizabethan London with the grim bits left in, so be ready. There are severed heads on spikes over London Bridge, and Honesty sees them up close. People are chained on the riverbank as the tide comes in, a crowd rushes off to watch a hanging, and a man goes for the Queen with a dagger. Both girls are thirteen, and the story reads with that.

A child who's upset by that sort of thing might find it too much. A reader who loves the gory side of history will probably be fascinated, and very glad they don't live there.

What to read next

Eloise Williams has another young storyteller in The Curio Collectors. Lily is learning the trade on the road, travelling the countryside in a caravan full of curiosities.