Description
The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson
Kristina Sigunsdotter and Ester Eriksson, translated by Julia Marshall
(Gecko Press)
The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson
£8.99
Cricket Karlsson enjoys the science lesson whereby the class dissects cows’ eyes. The retina looks like ‘a mini universe‘. Then again, Cricket’s someone who pictures in the world about her. That’s why she makes chewing gum sculptures. She is inspired by her Aunt Frannie who once created an installation with Cricket called ‘a thousand years of black’. it involved ‘painting all the pots and the magnolia tree black‘. Cricket’s mother didn’t see the art.
Now Cricket’s keeping a diary, for Aunt Frannie is unwell and has checked herself into a psychiatric ward. Cricket’s visiting secretly, though she thinks her father knows this. She shares her own Wolf Hour- that time in the night where you cannot sleep- with Aunt Frannie. It seems Aunt Frannie can’t lose the Wolf Hour.
Cricket’s Wolf Hour is full of worries about Noa who was once her blood best friend. Now she and Noa have fallen out and Noa’s part of the horse girls, who call Cricket ‘Crapula’ and ostracise her. Once Cricket would have shared the letters she found upstairs from Matt in Madras to her mother. Now she has to reason it all out on her own…
The Secrets of Cricket Karlsson is an honest middle grade novel, so raw that we feel Cricket’s pain and long for her reunion with Noa, and the recovery of Aunt Frannie. Then again, we hope that the horse girls might be tethered firmly so they stop terrorising our heroine.
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