The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe by Karen Foxlee (Miss Mary-Kate Martin's Guide to Monsters series) is a triumphant middle-grade adventure on the high seas featuring danger, sorrow, courage, magic, and found family.
It is 1719. Lavender Wolfe is hungry and has waited hours for her mother to return to the wharf to fetch her. Big Agatha, a "yellow-haired," olive-eyed, "perfectly wild looking" ship's cook, spots the fair-haired young Lavender. She takes Lavender aboard the Good Marchioness, "the most magical and cursed pirate ship that ever sailed the seven seas," despite the girl's protestations that she hasn't been abandoned. The captain, Odyessia Pleasant, a frightening, violet-eyed woman with a jagged scar and a wing in place of one arm, suspects Lavender can hear winds speak. Lavender insists she isn't magical, even though the wind did talk to her. However, desperately hungry, she takes the kitchen rat's oath and learns to peel potatoes, stir porridge, and scrub floors, along with five other magical children. They serve the crew, who seek the ghost ship Lady Eloise, which has a "spectral map" that will lead them to a stolen treasure. They must return the prize "before the dawn of the last day of the seventh year" or all aboard the Good Marchioness are doomed to be turned to sand. Meanwhile, the tetchy Captain Pleasant is suspiciously eager for Lavender to help her bottle storms.
Lavender's journey, narrated in her own plucky voice, is heartwarming and heartbreaking. There is much grief on the months-long voyage as children full of "goldenness" die and those who want to "make [their] own destiny" run toward other dangers. Lavender, who feels "meant for the sea," grows brave on waters calm and treacherous as the Good Marchioness faces mutiny, a Spanish armada carrying "only ammunition and vengeance," and the dreadful, blue-tongued ghosts of the drowned. Her relationship with the enigmatic captain, whom everyone else fears, is especially captivating. Big Agatha's bedtime stories conjure a fairy tale atmosphere, and magic seeps from interstitial recipes with ingredients such as "a wish for safe seas with the first bite." The textured black-and-white mixed-media illustrations by Martina Heiduczek (Wild and Free) give a sense of time and place to the novel. Her spot drawings, such as a tiger painted on a glass spice bottle, add whimsy, as do Foxlee's larger-than-life side characters (including a peculiar hen). Here lies excitement as vast as the sea. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer
Shelf Talker: A girl who can speak to the winds goes from kitchen rat to brave pirate on a cursed ship in this exhilarating, endearingly eccentric, and singularly spirited middle-grade high-seas fantasy.