Product Description

The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. 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. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters. Coriander is a heroine to love. Her story will establish Sally Gardner as a children's writer of boundless imagination and originality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349637 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 6-8–Known for her picture and chapter books, I, Coriander (Dial, 2005) is Sally Gardner's first venture into YA fiction. Written in the first person, Coriander Hobie describes both the ordinary and extraordinary events that occur in her life in 17th-century London. The unexplained appearance of a beautiful pair of silver shoes that fit Coriander perfectly set into motion an inexorable chain of events. Traveling via her silver shoes between the puritanical time of Oliver Cromwell and her mother's mystical fairy kingdom, Coriander's voice is strong and true. The juxtaposition of Puritan and fairy, fear and fantasy, make this detailed tale come to life. A strong sense of setting pervades the novel; London Bridge and the Thames River are lovingly described, as is the Summer Palace of the fairy king. Truly a book meant to be read aloud, British stage actress Juliet Stevenson does the story justice with her wonderful sense of timing and cadence, easily differentiating between the characters with different inflections and tones. An interview with the author rounds out this audiobook that's sure to be a hit with fantasy as well as historical fiction lovers.–Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI
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From AudioFile
Sally Gardner's novel (winner of the 2005 British Nestlé Children's Book Prize) is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Cromwellian England and a mirror-world of fairies, magic, and evil queens. Young Coriander must cope with her splintered family, the revelation that her mother was a fairy, and the sinister machinations of her Puritan stepmother and the preacher Arise Fell. With a dreamy narration that befits the fantastical nature of the story, Juliet Stevenson skillfully adjusts her British accent to depict different characters and classes--and even the scratchy, menacing voice of a talking raven. Listeners will also be interested in an interview at the end of the book in which the author discusses her writing process and her struggle with dyslexia. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. This first novel's cover, picturing a sumptuously dressed girl who holds viewers in a steady gaze, resembles that of Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy (1994) and Gail Carson Levine's lla Enchanted (1997). But Coriander's story is more intricate than either of these, challenging readers with casual interpolations of fantasy into Commonwealth-era English history. When Coriander's Royalist father flees political enemies, she is left with an odious stepmother and a wrathful Puritan minister. After a particularly harsh punishment, Coriander awakens in another world, where she discovers that her real mother was a fairy princess and that her human guardians serve a destructive fairy queen. Coriander must be the first to locate a hidden object of power and use it to restore fairyland to health (and, as implied, prompt the Restoration back home). Not every reader will have patience for the story's stately unfolding, but those who persist will reap rewards from Gardner's conjuring of both turbulent seventeenth-century London and the shimmering mysteries of fairyland. American readers may find it useful to start with the historical endnote. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved