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Loading... Edith Holler: A Novelby Edward Carey
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  reader1009 | Nov 16, 2023 | 
Artistic vision, wit, and the creatively grotesque intermingle in Carey's literary historical fantasy.... This quirky homage to Carey's childhood home, which bursts with personality and his expressive pencil drawings (and multiple ghosts), underscores the importance of listening to children. 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....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. comic novel (tinged with gothic elements) about a girl trapped in her family’s theater in Norwich, England in 1901. When Edith Holler—the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this twisty tale—was christened, an old actress put a curse on her: If the girl ever stepped outside, she would die and the “entire theatre would come tumbling down.” Afterward, the story goes, the actress exploded, spattering blood everywhere. But is the story real?.... In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal. A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.
"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 itsconfines. 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 vicious 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 theater, 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'scontrol- and to reveal inconvenient truths about the way children are used"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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November2023 bingo challenge; recommended on youtube, character is a writer
Carey's peculiar brand of old-timey horror (sometimes gory but not in a realistic way) wins again, set in a fabulously ramshackle old theater. (