Write your abstract here.Century is a house where the inmates wake as the sun
sets and go to bed with the sunrise. They are not
themselves ghosts, but there is a magical and wholly
convincing explanation.
The
time is 1890. The house is in England. Every night is
the same, and it is always winter, icy and cold. Twelve-
year-old Mercy Galliena Verga has lessons with her younger
sister Charity. Their austere governess Galaetea watches
them all the time. There is also Aurelia the nurse and
housekeeper who is much more likeable, but the whole
household is ruled by the children’s strange and distant
father Trajan who almost lives in a conservatory full of
the long dead and dusty remains of plants which must at
some time have been alive and thriving and have filled the
conservatory with life and aroma.
But the
children do not know or even think about the past.
Nor do they meet any other people – except that Mercy often
sees ghosts – like the running laughing child outside her
bedroom door. Then Mercy sees a new
ghost – a dead body of
a ghost in the ice under the pond.
The adults in the household do not want her to see this new
ghost, but Charity is curious as always and when Mercy
finds a snowdrop on her pillow – a sign of spring that
never comes – the girls want to investigate.
Mercy next sees a young man who is not a ghost. He is
called Claudius, and he is trapped in some mysterious way.
Mercy, he says, can release him but he cannot explain how
or why before he disappears.
Back at home, Mercy starts to ask questions. Why can’t she
remember her mother, even attending her mother’s funeral?
Her questioning infects Charity, but upsets the household.
Galaetea becomes even stricter and locks her in her room.
Her father is angry in a despairing way, but the magic has
started to unravel. Escaping her room Mercy enters a
world where her mother, elegant and beautiful, is alive. A sunny
outdoor birthday party is taking place. Mercy is ten. She
is playing with her friend, the ghost outside her door.
This world leads to three others that Mercy enters with
difficulty all the time trying to defeat a magic, which is
sucking her back into her winter world.
The mystery is played out. Mercy discovers that her
family is so long-lived family that they have to keep moving place
to avoid curiosity as to why they never age. Some are
magicians: Claudius is and it is his love for his fiancé
whose ghost was in the pond, that has caused events so
terrible that Trajan has forced the family to be frozen for
100 years. In this time they have to repeat over and over
just 5 days in their family history. Mercy finds that she
too is a magician, and she has grown in her powers. She
releases them from the spell and makes her father see that
the family can lead a better, more normal life.
This is the first book from an innovative and gifted
children’s writer and is a “cross-over” fiction work. It
bodes well for future sophisticated story lines from this
author.
More reviews about the Century