Thornhill

Product Information

Over the past year I have been busy assisting many schools with their book and teaching resources and I wanted to share some feedback that I have received. Thornhill is a perceptive piece of storytelling, and an intelligent addition to ghost and gothic literature; but it also an extremely important book, and calmly presents several serious challenges to the British book industry. As she unpacks boxes in the bedroom of her new house, Ella catches a glimpse of a crumbling, forsaken house beyond the overgrown garden she sees from her window. Maybe not the most unique storyline ever for someone who's been on this planet for thirty years, but it deals with bullying, and loss, and loneliness, and the writing is simple and raw. Mary lives a very secluded and isolated life at Thornhill whereby she spends most of her time confined to her room at the top of the house surrounded by her dolls which she makes from clay and considers them her friends.

Never expected I'd get much out of this book, to begin with, since I hardly find enough substance for my liking in non-adult materials anymore. and as a general rule couched in a very specific example - if you’re going to show a picture of a door that is meant to have a word scratched on it, even if that detail hasn’t yet come up in the story, you have to either show the word or make different decisions about your composition, because its absence will be noted during a second-read. From Smy's illustrations which are absolutely BREATHTAKING and EERIE (they remind me quite a bit of Emily Carroll's Through the Woods which is another graphic novel I loved! Woe to Mary and Ella, victim and perpetrator of a situation that could have been so easily resolved had it been recognised by responsible eyes.Most early mornings you’ll see her walking her dog, Barney, along All Souls’ Lane into thegraveyard, past Frances Cornford’s poem, the hidden pillbox and around the field beyond all ofwhich inspired the setting and story for The Hideaway.

Mary is selectively mute and we read her story through her diary entries as well as in the wordless, full page monochrome illustrations. I know that publishers do love to persuade us all that books fit nicely into little boxes, but I’ve never met an author who tells me that their books are for 8-12 year olds; you are more likely to hear from an author simply that ’It’s a book’. Thornhill was not scary to me as an adult but it probably would be to the kids in age demographic it was written for. The papers of the book are edged in black so when you open the book you peer into its rooms and try to work out what the shadows hide.Not one or two to punctuate and illuminate the text, but half the narrative is told in pen and ink drawings set against tones of faded greenish-grey. Combining the past (1982) with the present, THORNHILL revolves around Mary, a quiet girl living at the orphanage waiting to be adopted. The prose is the story of Mary in 1982, while the haunting, interlaced, black and white illustrations are Ella’s story in the present. If Wendy, John and Michael’s parents had not left them only in the care of a dog, Peter Pan would never have got in and led them away.