The story is told by Coriander daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies & 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 & left to die but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came & 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 & cruelty of Coriander's life in the real world. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge & underpinned by the conflict between Royalists & Puritans it is a terrific page turner involving kidnapping murder & romance & 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 & originality.