The Canning Season by Polly Horvath
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Well, the book has been out for eleven years already. But I am a late-comer to Polly Horvath so here I am. This is hands down one of the best YA novels I've ever read.
Polly Horvath pulls no punches when she decides to let her characters go down difficult paths. There is a lot of Dickens and fairy-tales in the background with themes of abandonment, rescue, and self-reliance. But it's the way Horvath does it all that makes the book shine. Her prose and dialog are inviting and rhythmic. Tilly and Pen Pen made me laugh out loud many times, and even the lines of the minor characters are human and funny. One of the magical things is that the characters who don't do what we think they should do don't end up painted as villains. Somehow she writes it so I see them as just people, who probably don't know any better, or can't be what we want them to be. This is a tall order for youth fiction!
It has the same charms as [b:The Trolls|100477|The Trolls|Polly Horvath|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312001124s/100477.jpg|1859684], but with a much more intricate novel narrative (where Trolls was episodic). I'll have to amend my review of Trolls, now!
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