“But it’s best you know this now, at the beginning of this book. Every story has a villain, after all. And every villain has a story.”
Kelly Barnhill is an absolute gift to literature, and not just children’s lit. She’s another one of my “heart hug” authors, but her hugs come in the form of fairytales and smell like freshly baked cookies. I adored The Girl Who Drank the Moon and became even more smitten with her first adult offering, When Women were Dragons. The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin Young Readers 2022) is geared toward 9–11-year-olds, but one is never too old for fairytales. There are some folks who hate this book and call it “preachy” – those folks tend to be the ones who support book banning and want higher fences instead of longer tables, and this book’s message just hit a little too close to home; heaven forbid someone become a better person from reading.
The novel has an ogress, fifteen orphans, a dragon, and a town that used to be oh-so-lovely until the library burned. Stories are whispered from the oak beams used to build the homes, but people have forgotten how to listen. Stories hum from the stone from which the town derived its name, Stone-in-the-Glen, but people forgot about the stone and covered it with trash. When the library burned, Myron, who runs the orphanage with his beloved wife, saved as many books as he could, and his body is forever marked from that night, but the orphans have books and stories and the best of hearts making each scar worth it. The mayor is a sparkly man the whole town fell in love with. He arrived not long after the fires and saved them from the dragon. They didn’t know he was the dragon wearing a sparkly man suit, and under his control, the town became a miserable place with miserable people who didn’t trust each or take care of each other. And this is story of how an ogress who just wanted to find a community, a murder of crows, a blind dog, and fifteen orphans saved the town with the magic of books and baked goods.
As beautiful as this novel is and as much as I love Barnhill’s writing style, the novel is not as tight as it could be, and it starts to drag without much action after the first half before spiraling quickly to an action-packed conclusion – I’d have loved a huge chunk removed and more flesh on that last quarter. That said, it’s still a fantastic read about the power of stories and the hearts of those who listen to them.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 