Eleven-year-old orphan Stella Montgomery and her three aunts live a circumscribed Victorian life at the Hotel Majestic: the aunts take the mineral waters in the bathhouse or are "wrapped up and propped in cane chairs in the long sunroom," while Stella studies deportment, pianoforte and "French phrases to say to the wife of a bishop whilst drinking tea." She also--secretly, because, as her aunts tell her, "Curiosity is a sign of a vulgar mind"--loses herself in illustrations of jungles and serpent-infested seas in a pilfered atlas. The adventure that unfolds after Stella witnesses a hotel guest burying something in a Chinese urn provides her with more danger and thrills than her beloved atlas could ever offer.
Middle-grade fans of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events will eat up Withering-by-Sea. Australian author-illustrator Judith Rossell packs every page with details such as Aunt Condolence's "Particular Patent Corset of springs and whalebone, which creaked and twanged as she moved," and pencil, ink and watercolor illustrations of curiosities like an evil professor's creepy "hand o' glory." Stella's ill-used but intrepid new friends burble over with a kind of low-brow Aussie-Victorian slang--such as "Nobble me granny" or "Stinking gumbleguts"--that would do Roald Dahl proud.
Stella harbors her own mysteries: Is she fey? Does she have a lost, unknown sibling? But her steadfast commitment to keeping a terrible enchanted object safe, and to saving Ben, a boy who's held in the professor's faded magical thrall, is what drives her, be it to a performance hall or to castle ruins on a desolate island. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor