Midnight

16-year-old Will and 13-year-old Violet have, for most of their lives, believed that they are brother and sister. It has never been a particularly easy relationship, a state of affairs certainly not improved when it turns out that Will is an adopted child. In his own terminology, he is ‘the changeling… the child who saddens the mother and infuriates the father and terrorises his little sister’. While part of the fascination of Wilson’s novel undoubtedly lies in the psychological complexity with which Will – living up to this self-definition – is depicted, her supreme achievement is her creation of Violet, her narrator. Here is a totally convincing portrait of a child whose only release from insecurity and unhappiness lies in her absorption in the fairy dolls she painstakingly designs as a tribute to Caspar Dream, her favourite of all fairy-book illustrators. The arrival at her school of the exotic Jasmine would seem to offer a further release but their friendship, far from diminishing complexities of feeling, painfully postpones Violet’s attainment of some measure of emotional growth. This is Wilson on top form, moving with ease between reality and fantasy, darkness and light. Sharratt rises admirably to the challenge of providing the Dream illustrations.