The Star of Kazan

This is a great big fat engrossing read. It draws you in and won’t let you go until the last page is turned and the last sigh is sighed. It opens in 1896 in a village in the Austrian mountains when two ladies find an abandoned baby girl. Annika, the baby girl, is brought up by the cook and housemaid, for this is what the ladies are, in the household of three eccentric professors at the university in Vienna.

When Annika’s mother turns up it seems the girl’s dream has come true, but instead it is the beginning of a nightmare. Taken to a cold and uninviting house on a large estate in north Germany, Annika at first makes the best of things, overjoyed to be with her missing mother. But gradually it emerges that things are not as they should be; readers may pick up on hints that her ‘mother’ is not all that she seems to be and when Annika is sent to board in a school run by a tyrannical headmistress we know that it is time she lost her trusting attitude and confronted reality.

Plenty of local colour and exciting incidents build up atmosphere and a sense of place that is not overloaded with historical detail. The professors take Annika to see the famous Lipizzaners at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and the history of the Riding School is explained to her. But here, as elsewhere, Ibbotson has resisted the temptation to overload with facts a story set at the edge of a major upheaval in Europe. Instead fact blends with imagination in a novel which requires readers to leave disbelief outside its jacket; we are invited to step in and enjoy a captivating narrative which engages the reader right to the very last page.