I, Coriander

I could hear voices calling me from far away. Maybe I dreamt it, maybe I did not I have often wondered what would have happened if I had done as I was told and left the silver shoes alone. Would everything then have been all right?

Set in London of the 1650s, this is a glorious novel of evil and magic, fairies and a wonderful heroine named Coriander . . .

Coriander is the daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies mysteriously and her father is forced to leave due to the rising control of the Puritans. Coriander is left to fend for herself against her stepmother and the fundamentalist Puritan preacher she consorts with. 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.