I, Coriander
Sally Gardner
Subjects
- History Time - blasts from the past
- Fantasy Worlds - awesome adventures of magic and mystery
Average rating
The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen. This is a book filled with enchantments — a pair of silver shoes, a fairy shadow, a prince transformed into a fox – that contrast with the heartbreaking loss and cruelty of Coriander’s life in the real world. With its brilliantly realized setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters. Coriander is a heroine to love. Her story will establish Sally Gardner as a children’s writer of boundless imagination and originality.
Reviews
It was really creepy and intrasting.
Madam Daffodil Paperclip 16.09.2023
good book, historical fiction.
Viscountess Petronella Foxtail 31.08.2021
This is a great book to read it really grips you and makes you want to read on. My favourite character is Hester, she seems like she has been threw a lot and is ashamed of her past but she gets threw it and gets a great life. This book was great, it had many twist and turns in like death, finding new worlds and magic. I would definitely recommend it to someone my age and older but not any younger
Anonymous 31.08.2020
This book is really good and it's about a girl called Coriander who's mother dies and then her father marries an evil woman called Maud. Then Maud brings in this man called Arise Fell (what an oxymoron!) who tortures Coriander. But Coriander has a passageway into a secret world...through the chest in her father's study!
Anonymous 06.08.2020
At first I thought it was a bit boring and struggled to get into it but then it started to get really good towards the middle in the story.There is a girl called coriander and on her doorstep when she is six there are some beautiful silver shoes with a C on each one they are made for her but her mum won’t let her have them because she thinks there is a spell on them . When her mum dies her dad marries a ugly woman named maud legs who invites a mean preacher called arise fell with the hand of wrath and the hand of salvation who brings much sorrow to coriander’s life
General Panther Skateboard 06.10.2019
It was a gripping tale
Anonymous 28.08.2014
