'A rediscovered gem of a fairytale' -- Susan Price
In January 2024, I'm quite chuffed to say, my book The Ghost Drum was reviewed in The Times by Lucy Bannerman, as 'Children's Book of the Week.'
Ghost Drum by Susan Price review — a rediscovered gem of a fairytale
Narrated by a cat on a golden chain, this Carnegie winning story of a young shaman fighting back against a brutal ‘Czardom’ is breathtaking
Saturday January 27 2024, 12.01am, The Times
We begin on a midwinter night “in a far-away Czardom” when a stranger knocks on the door and persuades a slave woman to hand over her newborn baby. “The snow is so deep that the houses are half-buried in it, and the frost so hard that it grips the houses and squeezes them till they crack.”
The stranger is a (good) witch who raises the girl to become a shaman, but her powers are envied by other shamans like the jealous Kuzma. Meanwhile, in the “jewel-coloured gloom” of the Imperial Palace, the Czar rules like a tyrant. He may own everything from the birds in the sky to the “air in the lungs of his people,” but when his son is born, he becomes so fearful of being usurped, he imprisons the baby in a windowless tower. Princess Margaretta, the Czar’s cunning sister, “who never says what she means, but lies all the time,” plots to get rid of them both.
And so it is left to Chingis, the young shaman-witch, to save the boy and protect people from tyranny. But can evil ever be defeated when “no matter how many lies Czars and Czaritsas tell, they always seem to find enough fools to believe the next lie”?
Spoiler alert: the good guys win, but you’ll never guess how they win, suffice to say that there’s a ghostly feminist fightback to make your beaded reindeer slippers quiver. Oh, and the whole thing is narrated by a cat on a golden chain — which is not as annoying as it sounds.
Susan Price, an author from Dudley with 60 books to her name, stacked supermarket shelves and washed up in hotel kitchens to supplement her writing career before going on to win the Carnegie Medal for this masterpiece in 1987. She writes with diamond-cutter precision, conjuring up unforgettable images and drawing on the same “Baba Yaga” Russian folklore as The House with the Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson. There are so many dark twists and surprises, at one point I gasped out loud on the Tube. It is all told with timeless fairytale clarity — or what the American poet James Merrill called “a tone licked clean … over the centuries by mild old tongues.”
As the cat tells us at the end, “If you thought this story was tasty, then serve it to others. If you thought it sour, then sweeten it with your own telling.” Breathtaking.
Thank you, Ms Bannerman!
In even more cheerful news, my Faber editors tell me the book almost immediately sold out its first run and had to be reprinted.
by Susan Price
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