the house with chicken legs by sophie anderson

Gradually-too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic-it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively.

Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. The Russian/European setting suggests that the human characters are white.Ĭhainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.Įvery four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Anderson’s tale draws themes and inspiration from Russian fairy tales, deftly weaving the threads of these magical stories into Yanka’s adventure and evoking the folklore, music, art, and customs of the Eastern European north. Yanka and her companions in adventure retell the stories told by a woodsman who frequently visited Yanka and her mother, revealing truths about Yanka’s enchanted past. She rescues a young elk from the icy river and encounters a Yaga and a house on chicken legs just when she needs help. The forest draws her, and she can suddenly understand what some of the forest creatures are saying to her. Yanka impulsively leaves her home the morning after the festival celebrating Winter’s end when she awakes to find her legs transformed into those of a bear.

The villagers call her “Yanka the Bear,” she explains, because of her foundling past but also because she towers over the other 12-year-olds “like a cuckoo chick in a nest of wrens.” Though her foster mother is loving, and though Sasha, her best friend, is clearly devoted to her, Yanka feels that something is missing from her life and that she doesn’t truly belong. A young girl who was found as a toddler outside a bear’s den finds that her connection with bears runs deep.

The house with chicken legs by sophie anderson