The Glass Town Game
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner
“Dazzling.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Charlotte and Emily Brontë enter a fantasy world that they invented in order to rescue their siblings in this “lovely, fanciful” (Booklist, starred review) novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.
Inside a small Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë have invented a game called Glass Town, where their toy soldiers fight Napoleon and no one dies. This make-believe land helps the four escape from a harsh reality: Charlotte and Emily are being sent away to a dangerous boarding school. But then something incredible happens: a train whisks them all away to a real Glass Town, and the children trade the moors for a wonderland all their own.
This is their Glass Town…almost. Their Napoleon never rode into battle on a fire-breathing porcelain rooster. And the soldiers can die; wars are fought over a potion that raises the dead, a potion Anne would very much like to bring back to England. But returning is out of the question—Charlotte will never go back to that horrible school.
Together the Brontë siblings must battle their own imaginations in this magical celebration of authorship, creativity, and classic literature from award-winning author Catherynne M. Valente.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Valente (Radiance) delivers a linguistically dazzling novel that draws on the Bront siblings' real-life childhood writings about Glass Town, an invented land where they escaped the difficulties of their lives. Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell are grieving the deaths of two older sisters and dreading the "Beastliest Day" when Charlotte and Emily are forced to go off to school. As Branwell and Anne accompany them to the carriage, a detour to the local train station leads them to escape to Glass Town, which turns out to be even wilder and more bizarre than they ever imagined. "Don't worry, Em," Charlotte reassures her sister. "We're only in an insane, upside-down world populated by our toys, our stories, and Napoleon riding a giant chicken on fire. Nothing so bad as School." The plot picks up after Anne and Branwell get kidnapped, but the story's real delights come from the wit and cleverness woven into every description and conversation, as well as the sharp insights Valente brings to the children's insecurities, longings, and hidden desires, which burst to the surface in this magical and perilous world. Ages 10 up.
