This item has been added to your basket.When Annika is taken away to a forbidding estate in Germany, the reader pines for Vienna alongside her. What’s more, we see Vienna through the eyes of Annika, a foundling girl who works in a house in one of the oldest squares in the city – so we see the rosy peaks of the alps through her attic bedroom window, exploring overgrown gardens and sampling patisseries.
Her Vienna is a city of palaces and waltzes and cinnamon-scented air. It is set in early twentieth-century Vienna – the city Ibbotson was forced to leave as a child – and the scene setting is sumptuous. The Star of Kazan by Eva IbbotsonĮva Ibbotson wrote brilliant portal fantasies and her most famous adventure story is the wonderful Journey to the River Sea, but for me her most transporting book is The Star of Kazan. In all the books below – whether they’re set in the past or in an entirely invented world – the writers have mastered that particular alchemy that allows a world to leap off the page and into the imaginations of readers.
For the setting of a book to be truly compelling, I think it has to belong at least in part to the imagination – to the place the author has recreated from memories or built up from dreams. But I was careful not to ground anything I was creating too closely in reality. I read fairy tales and medieval encyclopaedias and history books, and then filled half a notebook writing the history of Zehaira and how the city was constructed. A lot went into creating the world of The Kingdom Over the Sea.
In The Kingdom Over the Sea we travel first to the city of Zehaira, then to a settlement of sorcerers in a mountain valley, and later to the frozen north of the Russlands. Most readers I’ve met agree that a map at the beginning of a book is the first sign of a good story – there is nothing better than to know, right at the start, that you’re about to be taken on an adventure. There’s something magical in that moment when the world falls away around you, until you’re walking unfamiliar paths and seeing unfamiliar sights. I’ve always loved books that transport their reader to another world.
0 kommentar(er)
