A Skinful of Shadows

Product Information

Winning the Costa Book of the Year for The Lie Tree was one of the most incredible moments of my life, and to be perfectly honest I'm still staggered by it. It did also up the stakes and increase the pressure! This was a bit daunting, and made it harder to write A Skinful of Shadows. What was your inspiration for writing A Skinful of Shadows? It starts as a horror story, a haunted story, and transforms into historical fantastical mystery/intrigue, with ghosts and spies and war and cruelty and conspiracies. It’s not the supernatural that’s the most terrifying and bleak, but the realistic aspects - war, poverty, subjugation, classism. The world is grey and full of shadows and nuances, and scaffolded on power structures that sometimes need to be shifted a bit.

A Skinful of Shadows / Young Quills Awards 2018 – Winners and A Skinful of Shadows / Young Quills Awards 2018 – Winners and

The spirit is wild, brutish and strong, and it may be her only defence when she is sent to live with her father’s rich and powerful ancestors. There is talk of civil war, and they need people like her to protect their dark and terrible family secret. Non-Fiction Tasks related to content of the novel (Puritans, King Charles, Lambeth Palace, Traitor's Gate, witchcraft). Now Eve must stop Nix who has been able to drive all her previous hunters insane and is also capable of doing a lot of damage herself. The book gives us castles, hungry soldiers, plagues, and suspicious townsfolk. Did I mention it also gives us ghosts? Oh yes, a number of ghosts. One of the great aspects of the story is that we the reader learn, grow, and gain knowledgeable life lessons along with our POV character, the young Makepeace, who learns early in the narrative she is being groomed to be the receptacle of centuries old ghosts aka souls. Like all primary characters in YA narratives, Makepeace is rebellious and strong willed, so wants a say in the proceedings. Frances Hardinge was born in Kent. She enjoyed a bookish childhood in an isolated old house on a hilltop in the country. She read English at Oxford then worked as a technical author for a computer software company.urn:oclc:record:1003866068 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier skinfulofshadows0000hard_f1e1 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t09x25c71 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781509869305 A Skinful of Shadows is the story of a girl. The story of a country in the throes of Civil War. The way these two stories intersect and diverge from one another. It’s a story about a brother and a sister, a mother and a daughter, a girl who needs to grow up. It has a unique found family, one bear, female spies, ghosts and terrible villains. It is above all, a story about trust and having faith in people. Frances Hardinge weaves a dark, otherworldly tale in A Skinful of Shadows, her first book since the Costa Award-winning The Lie Tree.

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge - Pan Macmillan

This time we are in the mid-17th century England, in the middle of the English Civil War between the King and the Parliament, the Puritans and the Royalists. ( “Give a man a sword and pistol,’ said Helen, ‘and leave him hungry for a few weeks, and everybody will start to look like the enemy.”) Young Makepeace Lightfoot, a daughter of a single mother in a Puritan village, learns early on to guard herself against ghosts who, as everyone knows, are aiming to invade you and set shop in your head. After losing her mother in London riots, she is taken in by her father’s rich family as a servant — and perhaps as something else, something more and infinitely terrifying. A Skinful of Shadows is a 2017 children's or young adults' paranormal historical fiction novel by Frances Hardinge. Her seventh novel, it revolves around Makepeace Felmotte, a girl with the inherited ability to see and absorb ghosts. It is set during the First English Civil War, and in particular the Siege of Oxford. The book was received positively by critics and was short-listed for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2017. [1] Synopsis [ edit ] In Remember Me by author Christopher Pike, the central character of the book Shari Cooper is herself a ghost. Although initially she has to come to terms with her new condition considering she just woke up one day and realized things were not quite right.

The first things to shift were the doll's eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss's face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak. Things are going quite well for Eve since her death. There is nothing to complain and all she now wants is to be able to communicate with her daughter once again. Quite a lot of history is mentioned in the book. The King (Charles I) is at war with parliament and all citizens much choose their side, dividing the country into two. All of the counties mention are historically correct, for example Oxfordshire and Staffordshire. Only the plot with Makepeace, necromancy/witchery and Makepeace's ancestors (including Grizehayes, her ancestors home) don't exist as they're just part of the storyline and have been made up by Frances Hardinge to make the story more interesting.

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge review - The Guardian A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge review - The Guardian

I loved Makepeace. Especially since she lost it every time someone was cruel to an animal. I don’t care which century we’re talking about, it’s wrong. It was interesting to see her navigating life alone with her mother, then life completely alone, the life with Bear, followed by life amongst her ancestors, life amongst ghosts, eventually life as a spy ... all while trying to figure out where to go, what to do and who to be … I didn’t know what to expect with Skinful, which perhaps made my creeping realization of being in the wrong story all the more uncomfortable. It begins with a young girl, Makepeace, feeling her way through her outsider status in a small village. It turns out that the village is populated with Puritans who looks askance at a single mother. One day Mother starts leaving her in the local cemetery so she can learn to use her skills. Makepeace grew up with a dutiful but demanding mother in the house of her aunt’s family. Of her father she never knew anything, except for a heritage she never asked for and which her mother fled away from. The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.ABOUT THE NOVEL: A Skinful of Shadows is a dark YA historical fantasy set in the early part of the English Civil War. Makepeace is an illegitimate daughter of the aristocratic Fellmotte family, and as such, she shares their unique hereditary gift: the capacity to be possessed by ghosts. Reluctant to accept her appointed destiny as vessel for a coterie of her ancestors, she escapes. As she flees the pursuing Fellmottes across war-torn England, she accumulates a motley crew of her own allies, including outcasts, misfits, criminals, and one extremely angry dead bear.

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge | Goodreads A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge | Goodreads

Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest to find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family – before it's too late . . . Makepeace, the protagonist of this new book, also faces a mystery around her birth, and is surrounded by a similar web of lies. All these girls are born into power structures that appear to constrict; all learn that things can be made more malleable. However, fate intervenes when Eve is called upon to capture an evil spirit named Nix who has just escaped from hell. After that, however? The book went from being possessed by the ghost of a bear to a story of fantasy intrigue in the days of England's Civil War in the 17th century.This was my first Hardinge book. I have more a couple more of hers on my shelf for the future and I'm definitely excited to read them. While I give this a 3.5 stars it's a solid 3.5. Assuming you can push through the dragging war bound middle of the novel then I believe most will enjoy Hardinge's creepy and (mostly) compelling ghost story.