Edith Holler
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The witty and entrancing story of a young woman trapped in a ramshackle English playhouse—and the mysterious figure who threatens the theater's very survival
The year is 1901. England’s beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In the eastern city of Norwich, bright and inquisitive young Edith Holler spends her days among the boisterous denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, she decides to write a play of her own: a stage adaptation of the legend of Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy known as Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar, imposing woman named Margaret Unthank, heir to the actual Beetle Spread fortune, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play—the one thing that’s truly hers—from the newcomer’s sinister designs.
Teeming with unforgettable characters and illuminated by the author’s trademark fantastical illustrations, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman’s struggle to escape her family’s control—and to reveal inconvenient truths about the way children are used.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carey (Little) draws on fairy tales and Shakespeare for a dazzling bildungsroman. In 1901 Norwich, 12-year-old Edith Holler lives in her family's dilapidated theater, where she fills her days reading books on the city's past. From them she learns that hundreds of children have inexplicably died or vanished from Norwich over the centuries. She can't say for sure, but she thinks they've been murdered, their bodies used to flavor Beetle Spread, a popular local delicacy invented by a 14th-century woman named Meg Uttig. Even the eccentric theatrical troupe that serves as Edith's surrogate family would find her claim hard to swallow, so she decides to share her knowledge by writing a play, inspired by Hamlet, to reveal the crime through drama. In the run-up to its production, her father, Edgar, marries Margaret Uttig Unthank, the heir to the Beetle Spread fortune. Margaret promptly turns Edgar against Edith and burns all copies of her play. Edith, realizing Margaret will do anything to hide Beetle Spread's secret, flees from the theater's basement into subterranean Norwich, where she rewrites her play among the ghosts of the murdered children who roam the city's bowels. Edith says her theatrical friends "strive to make the impossible possible" to "convince our public of fantastical personages and happenings." On these grounds, Carey unquestionably succeeds. This affirms the author's standing as a major literary talent.
