Tuesdays at the Castle

Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George is a fantasy for 10 year olds about a girl whose home rearranges itself, and who is the only one bothering to map it.

What happens

Castle Glower grows new rooms when it gets bored. Usually on a Tuesday. It has doubled the length of the corridor outside Celie's bedroom, added a room with a bouncy floor that you reach through a fireplace, and once removed an ambassador's door and shut him in (he turned out to be a spy, so nobody complained).

Celie is eleven and she loves all of it. She is three hundred pages into making the first atlas the castle has ever had, sketching staircases and hidden passages as she finds them.

Nobody else can be bothered. Rolf is fourteen and being trained as the heir. Lilah is busy being grand. Their parents have gone off to watch the eldest brother graduate from the College of Wizardry, and Celie has been left behind, sulking about it.

Then the carriage comes back without them.

What follows is not a rescue mission. It is a castle filling up with foreign ambassadors, princes arriving with twenty-five men apiece, and a great deal of very polite circling while everyone works out whether a fourteen-year-old boy can hold a kingdom. And nobody is watching the little sister who knows every passage in the building.

The Castle itself is the best thing in the book. It doesn't talk. It nudges. It keeps steering Celie back to the same tower room until she stops and asks why, and it produces exactly enough guest rooms overnight, so worn and ordinary that she half believes they were always there.

Your reader gets to notice what the Castle is up to slightly before the adults do, which is a lovely place to sit.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The parents are ambushed on the road. The search party comes back with a torn gown, their mother's wedding ring and the report of bloodstains, and there is a state funeral for the king, the queen and the eldest son about a third of the way in. The children are told their parents and their brother are dead. It is handled quietly rather than gruesomely, but the grief is real and it sits under everything after it.

For a child who has lost somebody recently, that may be too much just now. For one who reads for the moment when the youngest and least important person turns out to be the one who matters, it is perfect.

What to read next

If they finish it wanting another enormous building with something alive in the walls, The Castle of Tangled Magic is in the library too. Olia has lived in Castle Mila all her life and is still finding rooms nobody has opened in years.