Published to acclaim in the United Kingdom, this stunning historical fiction novel delves into a hidden side of eighteenth-century England: the world of infanticide and child slavery. Otis Gardiner, the Coram man, makes a vicious living disposing of the unwanted children and illegitimate offspring of distraught young women, rich and poor.
Meshak is Otis's oppressed, simple minded son, who finally discovers an infant he considers special enough to risk saving out of the hundreds who have succumbed to his father's brutality. The infant's father is Alexander Ashbrook, a brilliant young aristocrat disinherited by his family for his devotion to a forbidden career, who is astonishingly unaware that he even has a son, much less that he has abandoned him.
Around this trio and a host of other characters swirls Jamila Gavin's carefully orchestrated plot, in this disturbing, ultimately uplifting novel about sons and fathers, abuse and abandonment, treachery and devotion.
Book Reviews:
School Library Journal: "Mystery, romance, horror, and adventure overlap in this story set in England in 1741." Grades 7-9.
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review): "In the great tradition of Dickens, British author Gavin mines English history, contrasting 18th-century city life with that of country estates, the wealthy classes with the poverty stricken...Gavin paints low-life characters every bit as seductively as the high-society variety, and never shows her hand as the disparate threads of her narrative join together into a seamless whole."
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books: "Gavin has put together a raging cauldron of scandal, secrets, and sin, along with a healthy dose of redemption, justice, and fairy-tale endings...(An) immensely involving piece of historical fiction."
The New York Times Book Review: "Gavin, who was born in India but has lived in England most of her life, has pored over the historical documents with minute concentration and absorbed them so thoroughly that at no point does one weary of the details. The result is a novel of 18th-centure Britain that not only seems utterly plausible, but whose well-known landscape, in her lyrical and luminous style, feels freshly rinsed."
Book Awards:
- UK: Whitbread Children's Book Award 2000 (now called the Costa Book Award)
- USA: New York Public Library, Books for the Teen Age
- USA: Publishers Weekly, Best Children's Books of the Year
About the Author:
Jamila Gavin (Born August 9, 1941) is a British writer born in Mussoorie, India in the foothills of the Himalayas near the border with Pakistan.
Her father was Indian and her mother English. She learned to describe herself as "half and half." On her website she says that from her mixed background "I inherited two rich cultures which ran side by side throughout my life, and which always made me feel I belonged to both countries".
She first visited England when she was five, and settled there when she was 11. She worked in the music department of the BBC before becoming a writer.
She wrote her first book after her first child was born because she became aware that there were few children's books reflecting their experience as multi-racial children. She has also written books reflecting her childhood in India, particularly her Surya Trilogy.
She now lives in Gloucestershire.
