The Long-Lost Home

Maryrose Wood's The Long-Lost Home is a comic Victorian adventure for 8 year olds about a young governess stranded in Russia and desperate to get back to her pupils.

Penelope Lumley is sixteen, capable and extremely far from home. Through a piece of legal trickery, her contract has been sold without her knowledge to the Babushkinov family, on a failing beet plantation in the gloomy town of Plinkst.

Her new pupils are horrible. Veronika is vain and tells lies about her brothers. The eight-year-old twins wrestle until somebody's lip splits and then start again. Penelope has made a globe out of a potato and a whittled stick, because there isn't one, and she spins it and thinks about England.

What she really thinks about is the three children she left at Ashton Place. She writes to them every week. Nothing comes back.

Meanwhile, back in England, a man calling himself Judge Quinzy is sitting in Lord Fredrick Ashton's study, being agreeable. He is not Judge Quinzy. There is a curse on the family, it involves wolves, and he has a deadline.

The narrator is the joy of these books. He, or she, stops to tell you the difference between flotsam and jetsam (Penelope turns out to be a bit of both), apologises for mentioning Plinkst at all, and explains what an atlas is before wondering aloud whether every nursery ought to have a globe instead of a potato. It's warm and knowing and entirely on the child's side.

But here's the problem, and it's a real one. This is the sixth and final book in the series, and none of the other five are in the library. It opens mid-story, with a curse you haven't met and three much-loved children you've never been introduced to. The narrator explains a good deal to anyone who doesn't already know, but your reader is still walking in at the last act.

There's a wolf curse in the background too, along with a faked death and a family who wiped a daughter out of their own records. Nothing frightening happens on the page in the opening, but the mood is Gothic under the jokes.

If they'd rather start something whole, The Orphans of St Halibut's is here. Three children run an orphanage entirely by themselves, keeping quiet about the fact that they have no matron, and an inspection is coming.