The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe

The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe by Karen Foxlee. Allen and Unwin 2025. Middle-Grade hardback RRP $24.99. ISBN 9781761182020

Reviewed by Debra Williams

The year is 1719. Lavender Wolfe is a “clapperdudgeon” and “pickpurse”, trained by her mother. She is alone on a wharf when she is snatched by a woman known as Big Agatha and thrown into the galley of a pirate ship, The Good Marchioness.

Lavender is disguised as a boy because only boys can live and work in the galley. She is renamed Hans Whitby and has to make her home among the “kitchen rats.” The problem is that The Good Marchioness is no ordinary ship. It is captained by the strange and fierce Odyessia Pleasant, who sports a wing instead of an arm. The crew are on a desperate voyage: to find and return stolen treasure before all who sail on the cursed pirate ship are to sand, including Lavender.

She is quick-witted and sharp. Captain Pleasant soon realises that Lavender can read the winds, thereby assisting the ship to find the ghost ship they seek to break the curse on the Captain and the Good Marchioness.

This novel involves much adventure; however, it also contains some heavy themes for the target readership. Lavender appears to have been abandoned by her mother, who is spending her time in a local pub, whilst Lavender awaits her return, something that never happens.  *Sensitivity warning*: this story is a pirate’s tale, and, as such, involves scenes of severe drunkenness, looting and murder. Some of Lavender’s kitchen rat friends die, and this is a harsh blow to an 11-year-old. Certain terms, such as describing the captain as “three sheets to the wind” (a description of severe drunkenness), would not be known or understood by the MG age group (some adults have recently mentioned they have never heard of the expression either). It also features supernatural themes, including an attempt to reverse a curse with unexpected results. Lavender desperately hopes that the reversal will bring back her deceased mates, which is also something that doesn’t happen.

It is intended for readers 9-12 years of age.

Lenny’s Book of Everything

Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee (A&U) PB RRP $19.99 ISBN 9781760528706

Reviewed by Kathleen Condon

It is rare to find a book, especially one for children, which employs a writing style which is distinctively different from others. Karen Foxlee is one of the very few YA authors I’ve come across in decades of reviewing books who writes ‘differently’, her language quirky and poetic. For instance, here is how she starts the book: ‘Our mother had a dark heart feeling. It was as big as the sky kept inside a thimble. That’s how dark heart feelings are. They have great volume but can hide in small places. You can swallow them with a blink and carry them inside you so no one will know.’ It takes a special reader to come on board a book with language like this but anyone doing so will surely benefit and come to love the characters in Foxlee’s books.

Lenny’s Book of Everything is a book with a stellar cast. There is Cynthia Spink, the proud, hard-working, single mother of two; Mrs Gaspar, the eccentric Hungarian crone who lives in their apartment block and cares for Cynthia’s two children while she works; Lenny Spink who narrates the story, and Davey, her good-natured younger brother who happens to have gigantism.

From the day Davey is born, his mother has ‘a feeling’ which she’s unable to articulate but which she repeats often. The Spinks live an ordinary life punctuated by the excitement of the arrival of the latest issue of an encyclopaedia set that Cynthia’s sharp letter-writing skills won. Each book as it arrives, allows the children to see the world outside of their small town. They experience the wonders of the world - beetles, birds, quasars, quartz - and dream about a life of freedom and adventure, visiting places like Saskatchewan and Yellowknife, and the gleaming lakes of the Northwest Territories.

However, as her brother's health deteriorates, Lenny comes to accept the inevitable truth; Davey will never make it to Great Bear Lake. 

This outstanding novel about heartbreak and healing by an award-winning author is a wonderful read for discriminating kids over the age of ten, but which will also be read and enjoyed by many adults.

A Most Magical Girl

A Most Magical Girl by Karen Foxlee (Allen & Unwin) HB RRP $19.99

ISBN 9781848125742

Reviewed by Daniela Andrews

Imagine a perfectly proper girl, Annabel Grey, living in London in the Victorian era. She attends ‘Miss Finch’s Academy for Young Ladies’ where she learns how to walk demurely, how to feign a smile when discontent and how to display a ‘graceful countenance’ at a dinner party.

Remove her from that world.

Send her to live with some long-lost aunts, who inform her she’s a witch. Explain that she needs to go on a quest to retrieve a powerful wand in London’s underworld. And that she needs to do it quickly, before the evil Mr Angel turns the city (and its inhabitants) to dust. Tell her she’s a most magical girl – a Valiant Defender of Good Magic.

Imagine her disbelief, her reluctance to assume the role, the personal journey she must undertake before she can succeed … and you will have the premise of this book. 

Karen Foxlee, author of Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, has written another terrific middle grade story about an unlikely hero. Another magical girl, Kitty, and an unusual troll named Hafwen join Annabel in her journey. Together, they must defeat Mr Angel, a villainous, power-hungry wizard who has created a machine to build an army of evil ‘Shadowlings’. The machine has been fed with items of sadness for almost 13 years – booties and bonnets of dead babies and feathers from extinct birds. He created the machine with the grieving tears of Annabel’s mother … and now he wants Annabel herself. 

The story is divided into three parts. Each new section features a stunning double-page, three-dimensional, black and white illustration by Elly MacKay. We also note the level of the dark-magic gauge in Mr Angel’s machine – a creative way to build suspense!

The writing is beautiful, evoking all the senses – especially in its descriptions of Under London. The chapters open with a lesson from Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855), creating a wonderful juxtaposition between Annabel’s former life and her new one. Annabel’s self-acceptance is cleverly illustrated in the final chapter, which opens with a lesson from a different role model. It also begins with the same line that opened the novel, along with another one of Annabel’s puddle visions … but it’s a much stronger, likeable Annabel who closes the story.