Book Descriptions
for I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
From The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY)
In a tale of both historical fiction and fairy fantasy, Coriander Hobie discovers she is caught between two worlds. The daughter of a London merchant in seventeenth-century Great Britain and a princess from the fairy world, Coriander never knew about her mother’s fairy world until she receives a pair of silver shoes. When she puts them on, however, she gains the ability to travel between the two worlds. Unfortunately, both worlds hold trials for Coriander. Her London home has become a miserable prison, with a captive father and a wicked stepmother ever since the death of her mother. The fairy tale world, on the other hand, is ruled by an evil witch who turned a handsome prince into a fox and is determined to be in control. Although only a teenager, Coriander must find a way to save the people in both of her worlds and ultimately decide where she belongs. 2006 USBBY-CBC Outstanding International Books List, Nestlé Children’s Book Prize Gold Award, shortlisted for the British Children’s Book of the Year and the Stockton Children’s Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. smv
From the Publisher
The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen.
This is a book filled with enchantments -- a pair of silver shoes, a fairy shadow, a prince transformed into a fox - that contrast with the heartbreaking loss and cruelty of Coriander's life in the real world. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters.
Coriander is a heroine to love. Her story will establish Sally Gardner as a children's writer of boundless imagination and originality.