Minireviews: Eva Ibbotson

Back when I was a young, wide-eyed Eli, one who ventured regularly into the middle-grade section of my local library, ¹ I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Eva Ibbotson. Her children's books are perfection incarnate, with characters that fit within the bounds of good and evil without being two-dimensional, and they always, always have a happy ending—a perfect ending, in fact, not saccharine or unbelievable. An ending in which the Bad Guys are suitable punished (but never more or less than they should be) and the Good Guys live Happily Ever After. Actual Happily Ever After, too, not a ride into the sunset with a prince who didn't exist until five minutes before the end.
So imagine my immeasurable² joy when I discovered that Speak was rereleasing some adult books Eva Ibbotson wrote in the 80s as YA titles. These are romance novels, but don't be alarmed—they aren't bodice-rippers, but nor are they silly and insipid. They're... you know when, in movies with bad special effects, sometimes a character will open some sort of Magic Book and suddenly light will burst forth from its pages? These books are like that. Only, you know, metaphorically, because I don't know how one would go about reading a book that blinds one every time one looks at it.
Moving on.
There are four books out right now, and a fifth on the way. Here are some minireviews, because we love you, and also because we love sticking words together like kabobs, or possibly legos.³


A Countess Below Stairs tells the story of Anna Grazinsky, a Russian Countess displaced by the first World War. Penniless, her family flees to England, and Anna takes up work as a maid in the house of the young Earl of Westerholme, recently returned from the war with his beautiful fiancée Muriel. Complications, as always, ensue.
A Countess Below Stairs is beautifully written—Muriel is exactly the right amount of evil, in a deliciously scheming, sweet/nasty way. Every character is perfect and wonderful. This book will make you dance. Or at least jump about like an idiot.
Probably my favorite of the four.



20-year-old Ruth Berger is living in Vienna with her parents and her fiancé when the Nazis invade and they are forced to flee. All manage to leave the country—except Ruth, who is left stranded in occupied Vienna with nowhere to turn.
Enter Quinton Somerville, a professor and friend of the family. Quinn is an English citizen, and he marries Ruth to get her out of the country.
They plan to keep their marriage a secret and annul it as soon as possible, but when Ruth enrolls in college and becomes Quinn's student—well, needless to say, things go rather awry.
The Morning Gift is superb. Eva Ibbotson's writing is as lyrical and eccentrically amazing as always, and she manages to perfectly blend Viennese passion and creativity with British practicality.



Set in the Austrian countryside, A Song for Summer tells the story of Ellen, a girl raised by three aging suffragette aunts ("In a way they were born to be aunts," Ibbotson tells the reader in the first line). Though brought up to be a pillar of feminism and the emancipated woman, set to take her place as the first woman to do some important thing or another, Ellen's interests—and talents—lie elsewhere. And so, after a brief and rather miserable stint in University, Ellen enrolls in the Lucy Hatton School of Cookery and Household Management, graduates summa cum laude, and embarks to Austria to take up the post of house mother at an eccentric boarding school.
There she meets Marek, the groundskeeper with a secret past, as well as quite a few children who are very much in need of love and cleanliness.
I like A Song for Summer slightly less than A Countess Below Stairs or The Morning Gift. The characters are still wonderful—Eva Ibbotson has a talent for characters that other authors might kill for—but the plot was not quite as well-paced as the others, progressing slowly with short, sometimes jarring bursts of speed.
I did, however, learn the word defenestrate⁴ from this book, something for which I shall be eternally grateful.




A Company of Swans is probably my least favorite of the four books, but that does not in any way mean that it isn't good.
Harriet Morton is a young English ballerina in 1912 Cambridge when she flees her oppressive father's house and joins a ballet company which is going to Manaus, the beautiful Amazonian city with its ludicrously wealthy rubber barons and a newly built opera house. In Manaus she meets Rom, one of the aforementioned ludicrously wealthy rubber barons.
The reason, I think, that I like this book the least is that Harriet, the protagonist, is not as fleshed out as the other three protagonists. However, there is a point in the novel where someone remarks that Harriet has Natasha's ears, which is the kind of brilliant characterization that only Eva Ibbotson can do. ("But Tolstoy doesn't describe her ears," replies a character, to which the answer is, "I don't need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like.")
In addition, it seemed to me that not much happened. Ibbotson often incorporates into her novels a sense that everything is hurtling together, and will collide at exactly the wrong moment and cause everything to go terribly wrong before it goes right. But the collision in A Company of Swans came too late, and did not last long enough—things were put right with far too much ease.

All in all, though, these books go at the top of the pile, each and every one of them.



Yours,
Eli

1. Now I only go there because it has the best seats. MY CHILDHOOD IS LOST.
2. Actually, if I had to guess, I'd say it was about 5.96 kilograms.
3. The lego simile is probably more apt, considering that a kabob is on a stick, whereas the word minireview is not on a stick.
4. A verb meaning "to throw someone out of a window."