Twelve-year-old Kat Bateson is her father's "logical child": she loves working math problems and repairing clocks. So when her great aunt gives her a family heirloom--a silver chatelaine, dangling with charms--and tells her it's magical, Kat dismisses it as nonsense. She has more important things to worry about. It's 1940, the Germans are bombing her neighborhood in London, and her father has disappeared on a mysterious mission. For safety, Kat and her siblings are sent to a boarding school in a remote Scottish castle run by the beautiful but icy Lady Eleanor.
Is Lady Eleanor who she claims to be? Is she even human? In The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, Janet Fox (Sirens) conjures a slow-burning, memorably bewildering world, skipping back and forth through the centuries--a world in which people aren't quite what they seem. Even the rational Kat is forced to admit the thing she fears most: "Magic is a real and solid thing, and lives inside her, as real as blood and bone." Kat and her schoolmates investigate the castle's secrets, but they are plagued by nightmares of a mechanical monster and possible German spies, and haunted by visions of strange waifs who might need their help. It'll take more than Kat's reasoning skills to solve the mysteries of Rookskill Castle.
Readers will enjoy making connections between the illustration of the chatelaine's 13 silver charms and the complicated storyline. Fox works a spell of her own, pulling her audience deep into the increasingly nightmarish tale, while creating a stout-hearted heroine who isn't afraid to trust her own mind. --Ann Shaffer, freelance writer and editor