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Summary
Summary
In this whimsical, original folktale, written and illustrated throughout in vibrant full color by two celebrated masters of modern fantasy, a young girl's journey becomes an enchanting coming-of-age story about magic, friendship, and the courage to shape one's own destiny.
Lillian Kindred spends her days exploring the Tanglewood Forest, a magical, rolling wilderness that she imagines to be full of fairies. The trouble is, Lillian has never seen a wisp of magic in her hills--until the day the cats of the forest save her life by transforming her into a kitten. Now she must set out on a perilous adventure that will lead her through untamed lands of fabled creates--from Old Mother Possum to the fearsome Bear People--to find a way to make things right.
Author Notes
Charles de Lint, an extraordinarily prolific writer of fantasy works, was born in the Netherlands in 1951. Due to his father's work as a surveyor, the family lived in many different places, including Canada, Turkey, and Lebanon. De Lint was influenced by many writers in the areas of mythology, folklore, and science fiction.
De Lint originally wanted to play Celtic music. He only began to write seriously to provide an artist friend with stories to illustrate. The combination of the success of his work, The Fane of the Grey Rose (which he later developed into the novel The Harp of the Grey Rose), the loss of his job in a record store, and the support of his wife, Mary Ann, helped encourage de Lint to pursue writing fulltime. After selling three novels in one year, his career soared and he has become a most successful fantasy writer.
De Lint's works include novels, novellas, short stories, chapbooks, and verse. He also publishes under the pseudonyms Wendelessen, Henri Cuiscard, and Jan Penalurick. He has received many awards, including the 2000 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for Moonlight and Vines, the Ontario Library Association's White Pine Award, as well as the Great Lakes Great Books Award for his young adult novel The Blue Girl. His novel Widdershins won first place, Amazon.com Editors' Picks: Top 10 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2006. In 1988 he won Canadian SF/Fantasy Award, the Casper, now known as the Aurora for his novel Jack, the Giant Killer. Also, de Lint has been a judge for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Bram Stoker Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-After 12-year-old Lillian Kindred is bitten by a venomous snake while playing in the woods around the remote farm where she lives with her aunt, the wild cats of the forest put her spirit into the body of a cat rather than let her die. However, when Lillian asks Old Mother Possum to change her back to a girl, her aunt dies from a snake bite instead. A sense of wrongness with this event sets in motion a journey first to the ancient and mystical Aunt Nancy of the Creek tribe and then to the Bear People, for whom Lillian works as a servant in return for an answer to her dilemma. This is a pleasant tale that meanders and takes its time, with many leisurely chats between Lillian and various animals, magical and otherwise, but not much action. There are no big epiphanies or momentous events; readers will feel satisfied when things work out for Lillian in the end, but it's not clear what point her adventures have or how everything hangs together. While well suited as a charming read-aloud for a younger child, this quiet, nature-rich fantasy might require some patience from older readers. The pencil and colored ink illustrations are lush and evocative, though the renderings of human characters are somewhat stiff.-Eva Mitnick, Los Angeles Public Library (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this enchanting expansion of De Lint and Vess's 2003 picture book, A Circle of Cats, the duo tells the story of Lillian Kindred, a spirited orphan living on a farm at the edge of a forest with her beloved aunt. While exploring, Lillian is bitten by a snake but saved from death by the magic of the feral cats she has befriended, who turn her into a kitten. Seeking a return to human form, Lillian makes a deal with Old Mother Possum, only to discover that her aunt has died of snakebite. A complex series of adventures, transformations, and tradeoffs occurs, involving a number of De Lint's typically syncretistic magical characters, including Aunt Nancy the spider woman and T.H. Reynolds the fox, who unapologetically informs Lillian that he's eaten Mother Possum's husband, saying, "I'm a fox. It's what we do." De Lint zestfully combines the traditional and the original, the light and the dark, while Vess's luminous full-color illustrations, simultaneously fluid and precise, capture Lillian's effervescent blend of determination and curiosity. Ages 8-12. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
When friendly cats turn orphan Lillian into a kitten to save her from a deadly snakebite, a perilous journey through a magical land ensues. The story is enchantingly dreamlike, and Lillian is a likable heroine. Atmospheric green-tinged illustrations make the setting feel ultimately benign. This is an expansion on the author-illustrator team's story for younger readers, A Circle of Cats. (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Rather than let Lillian Kindred die of a snakebite, the titular cats turn her into a kitten, and thereby hangs this sweetly magical tale. Tanglewood Forest is inhabited by cats and cat spirits, talking animals and the Apple Tree Man. Kitten Lillian meets Jack Crow, Old Mother Possum and the fox T.H. Reynolds (whose initials stand for "Truthful and Handsome") in her quest to regain her girl form--but that precipitates yet another snakebite and a different twist to an already twisty story. The tale is infused with Native American and European folk motifs as it meanders along. While it sometimes seems to be held together by little more than verbal gossamer, it is clearly written on a level even a young middle grader can easily follow. Vess' many and varied illustrations will be in color in the final version (only black-and-white sketches and some full drawings were seen). While Lillian grows in both grace and stubbornness, she also learns to listen and even to see the fairies she longs for. A satisfyingly folkloric, old-fashionedfeeling fable. (Fantasy. 8-12)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this expanded version of A Circle of Cats (2003), 12-year-old orphan Lillian is bitten by a snake, but she is spared death when the cats of Tanglewood Forest turn her into a kitten. Old Mother Possum takes her back in time to return her to human shape, but this time Lillian's aunt succumbs to the snake. Realizing that her choices bring unintended consequences, Lillian begins a quest to revisit her decisions, with the goal of saving her aunt, and her kindness toward others (as well as her cleverness) eventually does just that. Set in a magical forest populated by Bear People, an Apple Tree Man, and the Father of Cats, the story's lyrical, folkloric style is well suited to a tale of magic and mystery. Vess' line-and-watercolor illustrations (not seen in final form) appear throughout; they help to break up the text for younger readers and give form to de Lint's unusual characters. Give this to fans of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World around You (2005).--Weisman, Kay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN my oldest son was 3 and something didn't go quite the way he had envisioned, he would lament: "I want to go back! I want to go back!" Surely, one of the hardest jobs of childhood is accepting that life moves forward and when something terrible happens, it cannot be undone with either words or wishes. Two new middle-grade fantasy novels feature children on the verge of adolescence who want very much to change the course of life events, and who learn it's never as simple as it may seem. "The Water Castle," by the Maine author and librarian Megan Frazer Blakemore, is set in a Maine hamlet where, just as in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, all the children are decidedly above average. They're smarter, faster and stronger. Healthier, too. To what do the inhabitants of Crystal Springs owe their longevity? There just may be a real Fountain of Youth in their town. Ephraim Appledore-Smith is thrust into the strangeness of Crystal Springs - which isn't even on any maps - when his father suffers a devastating stroke. Ephraim's mother, a doctor, takes him, along with his brother and sister, to live in the ancestral family home so their father can receive treatment from one of her medical school mentors. Soon after they arrive, Ephraim gets the feeling there's something odd about his new house, once a resort and health spa that boasted of healing waters and is known locally as the Water Castle. For one thing, the labyrinthine house hums, and flashes of blue light that appear inside don't have an obvious cause. Things get even stranger when Ephraim starts sixth grade at the local middle school. There he meets Mallory Green, a classmate and a descendant of the African-American family that long served the Appledores, and Will Wylie, a descendant of the scientifically minded family that has feuded with the Appledores for a century. Together, the three embark on a quest to explore the tunnels under the Water Castle and discover whether Ephraim's family really did find the Fountain of Youth, or whether they were just hopeful hucksters. Of course, Ephraim is driven by more than just curiosity. If he can find the Fountain of Youth, he can reverse his father's stroke. Would a Fountain of Youth be a blessing or a curse? This question occupies the parallel 1908 story of Ephraim's and Mallory's ancestors, obsessed with expeditions to the North Pole. The central narrative involving Ephraim and his friends ultimately shies away from the darker side of immortality, with an ending that at once feels a bit too neat and leaves questions hanging. What shines through, however, is Blakemore's tender understanding of how these children - and all children - feel about their lives and the adults who control them. Just as Ephraim wishes the Fountain of Youth would turn back time and heal his father, Mallory wishes she could return to a time before her family fractured, and Will, most heartbreakingly of all, wishes his father could be . . . someone else: "He'd been wishing his whole life for the same thing, he realized, for his dad to be someone he was not. In that moment he realized that wish was never going to come true, no matter how many times he made it." The irrevocability of death also concerns the young girl of Charles de Lint's thoroughly delightful fantasy novel "The Cats of Tanglewood Forest," an expansion of a 2003 picture book with Charles Vess, "A Circle of Cats." The orphan Lillian Kindred is a first-rate heroine, brave and bright and kind, and her absinthe-green dress and fire-red hair are powerful visual touchstones in the gorgeous illustrations, which appear generously throughout the beautifully designed book. Bitten by a venomous snake while napping one day, Lillian is changed into a kitten by magical cats - "Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too" - inhabiting the wood. They've returned her own kindnesses by saving her life, but she doesn't want to be a kitten, and she journeys to see Old Mother Possum, a possum witch who, with a snap of her fingers, returns Lillian to her human form, granting her wish that "none of this had ever happened." But monkeying with time and fate has consequences, as Lillian learns when she returns home to discover the snake has claimed another victim, someone very close to her. She must set out on a mission to reverse this turn of events, shadowed by a fox named T. H. Reynolds (The T is for truthful, the H for handsome - or so he says), one of the most charming literary characters I've run into in quite some time. De Lint's world is both familiar and fantastic. Magic lurks at the edges but only occasionally draws in the humans who live there. This story is rich with allusions to Native American folklore and reminds us, across its bewitching and wonderful pages, that humans young and old have always wished to turn back the clock. Lillian, with the help of the possum witch's magic, restores some of the balance lost through her tinkering. But the lovely final illustration, of her elderly and beloved aunt, emphasizes that even where there's wizardry, time marches on, and no one lives forever. S.S. Taylor's novel for middle-grade readers is "The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon."