The Ghost's Child

Starred review from September 1, 2008
Hartnett (Surrender
) introduces an unlikely protagonist for a one-of-a-kind love story. When 75-year-old Matilda Victoria Adelaide, or Maddy, comes home to find a mysterious boy awaiting her, she thinks it “odd, but also somehow flattering, as when a stray cat chooses your house to call home.” She tells him about her youth and about falling in love. Thus begins a tale that revels in profound questions (“How... does one craft sturdy happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as a life?”; “What is the world's most beautiful thing?”; is life “settling for what you can get, if you can't have what you really want?”) and Maddy's tireless pursuit of their answers as they unfold through her relationship with Feather, a youth who captures her heart so totally that she is forever changed. Those who enjoy fables or magical realism will be spellbound by this redemptive story of a search for love, love lost and love (of a sort) found again. If the emotional distance created by the narrative frame proves a barrier for other readers, the exquisite prose may yet hold them. Ages 14–up.

January 1, 2009
Gr 7 Up-Reality quickly gives way to fantastical fable in this story of an old woman who returns home from walking her dog to find a strange boy in her lounge room, where she gives him tea and tells him the story of her life. A lonely child of wealthy parents, Matilda/Maddy encounters a ragged, wild young man on the beach near her home. She names him Feather and they fall in love and conceive a child, but she miscarries. In trying to tame Feather, Maddy loses him, too, and, despairing, she attempts to drown herself in a pond, to be rescued by Feather, who then leaves for good. But Maddy learns to sail and embarks alone on a dangerous sea journey to find him, only to finally acknowledge that their fragile love cannot sustain a life together. Sailing back to her old life, she later becomes a doctor and humanitarian. As her story ends, it is apparent that the boy is her never-born child who has come to accompany her passing to the next world. Lyrical writing, heavy with visual imagery and touched with euphemism, creates an ethereal mood, but the story is not served well by the fantastical elements. Maddy's journey brings her face to face with talking sea creatures, a floating mosque, a battle between a kraken and a leviathan, and Zephyrus, who guides her to the savage island where she confronts Feather and the loss of love. Neither fish nor fowl, this romance may nevertheless find a readership with older fantasy lovers."Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2008
Grades 8-12 With lyrical simplicity, award-winning author Hartnett turns around the archetypal story of the passive maiden who needs a prince to break her free. Matilda is a solitary old lady who shares her story with a grumpy young kid who arrives at her house. Isnt it horrible being old? he asks her. She tells him about her youth, when she was called Maddy and always felt like a misfit in her privileged home. At 18, she finds Feather, a homeless boy on the beach, tousled and tameless as a flash of lightning, and they marry, despite Mamas objections to the savage. After a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, Maddy is devastated. Then, Feather, who cannot adjust to a conventional lifestyle, leaves her. Maddy takes off on a magical quest through ocean and wilderness, helped by whales and wind, to find him, but their reunion doesnt make for a slick, predictable ending. Rooted in realism, Hartnetts powerful fantasy is filled with exquisite details of the natural world, and with the hurt, anger, and melancholy of human secrets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)