A festive and charming treat for those who love cozy, quirky Christmas stories.
Lowles offers a sugar-spun, peppermint-scented Christmas adventure steeped in tradition, imagination, and holiday heart.
This children’s tale, set in the whimsically grand Fiddlesticks Christmas Candy Cane Castle, follows generations of hardworking elves—and Elf Rubert, a lost young elf—as they uphold a secret family tradition of crafting the most perfect peppermint candy canes in the land. The book employs richly stitched prose that combines humor and folklore, revealing the origins of candy canes, the mischievous tricks of goblins, and the deeply magical roles that beets, Silkie hen eggs, and Peppermint Falcons (who bring the flavoring to the castle from the wilds of Mercia) play in this fictional world. Occasional grayscale images by Coelho show elves in action. Readers will be happy to learn about what goes into making the most perfect candy canes, which involves candy cane crooking machines, enchanted recipe books, and festive avian messengers; each elf has a precise role, whether they’re sugarsmiths, crookers, or ribbon-tiers—which is quite different from the toymaking elves of other holiday stories. It all leads to a gentle Christmas morning with candy canes delighting children near and far. Lowles’ detailed, old-fashioned Christmas story combines elements of fairy tales and legends, foregrounding the enduring magic of storytelling. Younger readers may need some help with the longer passages, but older children and nostalgic grown-ups will find themselves thoroughly charmed. Each page comes to life with its vivid descriptions of such things as the sparkle of frost on turret windows, the fragrant wafts of peppermint rising from cauldrons, and the rhythmic bustle of Goblin Gatekeepers protecting the factory entrance: “Equipped with smart dark blue uniforms and caps, whistles and nets, they guarded the whole Fiddlesticks castle 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” Reading this captivating tale will make anyone reach for a candy cane—and maybe some will wonder about the origins of real-life confections.
A festive and charming treat for those who love cozy, quirky Christmas stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Nightingale Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.
In Florence’s middle-grade fantasy novel, a young girl’s heart is tested in the face of an evil, spreading Darkness.
Eleven-year-old Lydia, “freckle-cheeked and round-eyed, with hair the color of pine bark and fair skin,” is struggling with the knowledge that she has reached the age to apprentice as an herbalist. Lydia is reluctant to leave her beloved, magical Mulberry Glen and her cozy Housetree in the woods—she’ll miss Garder, the Glen’s respected philosopher; her fairy guardian Pit; her human friend Livy; and even the mischievous part-elf, part-imp, part-human twins Zale and Zamilla. But the twins go missing after hearing of a soul-sapping Darkness that has swallowed a forest and is creeping into minds and engulfing entire towns. They have secretly left to find a rare fruit that, it is said, will stop the Darkness if thrown into the heart of the mountain that rises out of the lethal forest. Lydia follows, determined to find the twins before they, too, fall victim to the Darkness. During her journey, accompanied by new friends, she gradually realizes that she herself has a dangerous role to play in the quest to stop the Darkness. In this well-crafted fantasy, Florence skillfully equates the physical manifestation of Darkness with the feelings of insecurity and powerlessness that Lydia first struggles with when thinking of leaving the Glen. Such negative thoughts grow more intrusive the closer she and her friends come to the Darkness—and to Lydia’s ultimate, powerfully rendered test of character, which leads to a satisfyingly realistic, not quite happily-ever-after ending. Highlights include a delightfully haunting, reality-shifting library and a deft sprinkling of Latin throughout the text; Pit’s pet name for Lydia is mea flosculus (“my little flower”). Fine-lined ink drawings introducing each chapter add a pleasing visual element to this well-grounded fairy tale.
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781956393095
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Waxwing Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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