North Child (Usborne Modern Classics)

Product Information

She is the author of two highly acclaimed fantasy novels in the US, "Hero's Song" in the Songs of Eirren series, and "Fire Arrow", a Booklist Top Ten Fantasy Novel of the Year. Her happy and loving childhood is failing: not only are they impoverished and her sick sister lying close to death, but her parents have concealed the truth of her birth-direction from her—the superstition that has hung over her entire life. Superstition says that children born facing north will travel far from home and Rose's mother is terrified that Rose, a north child, will face a lonely, icy death if she follows her destiny. and "Handsomely evoking a landscape filled with castles, trolls, shamans and spellbound princes, the story will exercise its audience's imagination. Rose was born facing north, and the old stories say she will ventue far from home and embark on a dangerous journey.

The bear takes Rose to a distant castle hidden within a mountain, where each night she is confronted with a mystery. Inis magazine was critical writing that "Pattou has replaced the conciseness of the folktale form (her novel makes use of 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon') with a detail-oriented kind of epic exoticism, and more has been lost than gained in the exchange.Now reborn for a new generation of readers, this beautiful new edition is a spellbinding adventure to curl up with on long winter nights. Mothers often get a bad rap in my books’, says Pattou, ‘and I still wonder about the way that Rose’s mother is the one main character in the book not to have her own voice’ ( North Child is told by multiple narrators, including Rose, her brother, father and the White Bear.

while Publishers Weekly saw that "Readers with a taste for fantasy and folklore will embrace Pattou's (Hero's Song) lushly rendered retelling of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon. This novel bludgeons the folktale into an overly rationalistic, epic narrative form that relies on exoticism for its appeal and has no meaningful historical or geographical accuracy. It also allows for a full view of the relationship between Rose and the White Bear, which is drawn with the grace and beauty befitting the inherent tragedy at the heart of the plot. When later Rose betrays of the bear, it is her quest to make good the harm she has caused that drives the plot.

Reading it was like sinking into a dream and I spent my days waiting for the chance to pick the book up again. The heroine of the tale is sacrificed to a White Bear by her superstitious mother, in exchange for the family’s prosperity and to heal her sister Sara. The quietly spoken Pattou, who must have been asked about this so many times, still enthuses about the effect it had on her as a child growing up in Chicago.