The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray

E Latimer's The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray is a creepy gaslit story for 10 year olds about a girl whose paintings don't stay inside their frames.

What happens

Bryony is thirteen and she's very good at painting. That's the whole problem.

Her aunt and uncle shut her in the attic when she was seven, the moment she started showing talent. No playing outside. No other children. Just rich clients coming up the stairs to sit for her, and Aunt Gertrude with the attic key on a chain round her neck.

Now Bryony's clients have started disappearing. Three of them so far. The newspapers have noticed, and Aunt Gertrude is beside herself about the scandal.

What Bryony has noticed is something else. Her own reflection turned away from her in the mirror. A finished portrait of two sulky twins that shimmers when she isn't looking straight at it. And when she needs to calm herself down she recites art facts (Baroque, Realism, the Society of Orientalist Painters, 1893), which tells you a great deal about her.

She has a temper, too, and she uses it. There's a wonderful scene where two sneering ladies in far too much lace order her to paint faster and to leave out the crow's feet. She gives them exactly what they've asked for. You'll cheer.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The book opens with a woman alone in her house as a painted hand comes out of a canvas and takes her, and it doesn't hurry. The cruelty at home is on the page too. Aunt Gertrude pinches Bryony's ear until her eyes water, sends her to bed with no dinner, and Bryony expects worse than bruises for answering back.

So if your reader finds grown-ups being deliberately horrible to a child hard going, this one will sit with them. If they love a shivery story where the child is cleverer than every adult in the house, it's spot on.

What carries it is the atmosphere. A dim attic, gas lamps, a funeral parlour next door with a girl on its roof, and Bryony pressing her ear to a window she has prised open with a rusty spade.

What to read next

For another thirteen-year-old who sees things nobody believes, try The Thirteen Treasures. Tanya gets packed off to her grandmother's old manor because of the trouble her strange sight keeps causing, and there are tunnels running under the house.