Gradually-too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic-it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively.
Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. Terrifying, life-affirming and memorable.Ĭhainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.Įvery four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school.
She presents Ivan’s story as a first-person narrative in beautifully composed writing enhanced by Ivan’s visual acuity and depth of emotion. Pyron has based her story on magazine articles about a Russian feral child, one of hundreds of thousands whose lives were disrupted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Two years later he is captured, and after months of care, he regains his humanness. Threats are ever present in the form of police, gangs of teens and wild animals in the forest.
Increasingly, his time with the dogs provides nourishment for both his hungry belly and his soul. Ivan keeps a button belonging to his (probably dead) mother as a talisman and remembers the fairy tales she read to him. They survive on the trains in the winter and in the forest during the summer.
He soon befriends and is adopted by a small group of dogs and becomes one of them. They live in the subway stations, begging and stealing food. At first, he is taken in by a scruffy group of children under one adult’s control. Ivan is only 4 years old when he runs away to the streets of Moscow. An orphaned boy in Russia survives as a member of a pack of dogs.
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