The Ogress and the Orphans
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4.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A NYT Bestseller, National Book Award finalist, and instant fantasy classic about the power of community, generosity, books, and baked goods, from the author of the beloved Newbery Medal winner The Girl Who Drank the Moon.
Stone-in-the-Glen, once a lovely town, has fallen on hard times. Fires, floods, and other calamities have caused the people to lose their library, their school, their park, and even their neighborliness. The people put their faith in the Mayor, a dazzling fellow who promises he alone can help. After all, he is a famous dragon slayer. (At least, no one has seen a dragon in his presence.) Only the clever children of the Orphan House and the kindly Ogress at the edge of town can see how dire the town’s problems are.
Then one day a child goes missing from the Orphan House. At the Mayor’s suggestion, all eyes turn to the Ogress. The Orphans know this can’t be: the Ogress, along with a flock of excellent crows, secretly delivers gifts to the people of Stone-in-the-Glen.
But how can the Orphans tell the story of the Ogress’s goodness to people who refuse to listen? And how can they make their deluded neighbors see the real villain in their midst?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before fires claimed its spaces of books and learning, Stone-in-the-Glen was a "lovely town... famous for its trees," its abundance, its close-knit community, and its ample library (where even the librarians' "shushes were lovely"). Following the fires, however, searing light, damaging floods, and anger and rumor become commonplace, and the cued-white human residents retreat behind locked doors and fences, goaded on by a self-interested, isolationist mayor who sows a campaign of suspicion and fear. At the impoverished but love-filled Orphan House, 15 children reside alongside two elderly sweethearts and a fantastical reading room, doing their best to stretch their meager resources. When a "careful and considerate" ogress takes up residence at the town's far edge, cultivating a garden and observing the town's need, she begins delivering nourishing baked goods and boxes of vegetables to the residents overnight. Employing a benevolent, omniscient narrator ("Listen," the voice urges) and a slowly unfurling, deliberately paced telling, Newbery Medalist Barnhill incorporates ancient stories, crow linguistics, and a history of dragonkind into an ambitious, fantastical sociopolitical allegory that asks keen questions about the nature of time, the import of community care, and what makes a neighbor. Ages 10–up.
