The Castle of Tangled Magic

The Castle of Tangled Magic by Sophie Anderson is a folklore-soaked fantasy for 9 year olds about a girl who has spent her whole life hunting for magic in her own house.

What happens

Olia lives in Castle Mila, a wooden castle on a lake, five hundred years old and going a bit crooked with age. Thirty-three roof domes. Hidden doors, staircases behind bookcases, rooms nobody has opened in years.

She has found her way into fourteen of the domes so far. Most held nothing but dust. A couple held maps, inks, glass beads and a broken telescope.

Her family used to be royal. Now her mum and dad are carpenters who use one of the old ballrooms as a workshop, and the village borrows the Great Hall for weddings and birthdays.

Her grandmother Babusya says the castle was built from magic and that spirits live in and around it, including a fox-shaped house spirit behind the kitchen stove. Olia has been looking for thirteen years and has never once been certain.

Then Rosa arrives, three weeks old, and everything Olia wants gets bigger. She has stitched a patch for the family blanket, one for every year of the castle's life, and she is going to sew it on at the harvest feast.

The first part of the book is home. Apple picking with a grandmother who knocks fruit down with her walking stick. Cottage cheese pancakes and cloudberry jam. Sliding down bannisters in woolly socks past ancestors who frown at you. It's lovely, and it's slow on purpose, so that you mind about the castle before anything threatens it.

Which it does. Babusya predicts a storm and a journey. Olia's papa points out there isn't a cloud in the sky.

The night the wind comes is the best writing in the book. It cracks the kitchen window, screams around the domes, and brings part of the roof crashing into the Great Hall. Olia sits gripping a chair, frightened for her father who has gone to look, and for the village, and for her home.

That's the part to weigh up beforehand. It isn't gory or grim, but a child who takes worry to bed may feel every minute of that storm. A reader who likes being frightened in a safe way will love it, and there's a small orange paw behind the stove to hold on to.

Afterwards the feast is cancelled, the repairs look impossible, and the one dome nobody has ever got into is suddenly open to the sky.

What to read next

Babusya keeps telling her that belief is everything and that you have to look at things from different angles. Anderson does something similar in The Thief Who Sang Storms, where Linnet lives in a swamp with her father and a rat called Whiskers, waiting for a singing magic that hasn't come.