So pleasingly fast-paced and funny. Hildi Kelmar lives in a village in the Swiss Alps, and works as a maid at Castle Karlstein. Her employer, Count Karlstein, is the guardian of his two orphaned English nieces and a thoroughly nasty individual, the sort who goes in for pacts with demons. It’s nearly All Souls’ Eve, which means the demon huntsman will soon be on the prowl: and this year, he’ll have human prey. There’s not much surprise in the plot of this book, but that’s part of what’s pleasing: the familiar logic of it. The story is narrated in bits and pieces, some of it by Hildi and some by others: the orphaned English nieces (who read Gothic romances like The Mysteries of Udolpho<\/i> and fancy themselves heroines), their no-nonsense former schoolteacher, a bumbling coachman, a clever mountebank, an inept police sergeant. Pullman, as always, writes wonderfully: I stayed up past my bedtime to finish reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So pleasingly fast-paced and funny. Hildi Kelmar lives in a village in the Swiss Alps, and works as a maid at Castle Karlstein. Her employer, Count Karlstein, is the guardian of his two orphaned English nieces and a thoroughly nasty individual, the sort who goes in for pacts with demons. It’s nearly All Souls’ Eve, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}