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Gardner, Sally

Entry updated 20 March 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(?   -    ) UK theatre designer, illustrator and author, her books either being written for younger children or for the Young Adult market, beginning with the first of her twelve picture books [none listed below], The Little Nut Tree (graph 1993). The Magical Children sequence beginning with The Strongest Girl in the World (1999 chap), for slightly older children, tells the stories of various children who gain Magic powers. The Red Necklace sequence beginning with The Red Necklace: A Story of the French Revolution (2007) features a young boy trained to perform magic tricks who finds out suddenly that he has the power to make his tricks real; he falls in thrall to a cadre of aspirational Secret Masters but escapes.

Gardner's singletons tend to address somewhat older readers. The young protagonist of I, Coriander (2005) suffers from a cruel stepmother in seventeenth century London, but her life – mostly on London Bridge before it was denuded by early urban planners, and in a land of faerie – is engagingly narrated. The nightmare of World War Two infuses her two young adult tales of greatest sf interest. The father of the young protagonist of The Double Shadow (2011) creates a Theatre of Memory, a Machine capable of re-enacting events out of the safe past, or perhaps creating them out of whole cloth: a miniature Utopian Keep that, he hopes, will keep them safe, after a soothing Memory Edit, as war looms. The much darker Maggot Moon (2012) is set in what has all the earmarks of an Alternate History Hitler Wins 1950s Britain, a "Motherland" whose increasingly totalitarian surveillance-obsessed government deepens the Dystopian pallor in which its citizens live, while their masters attempt to organize a ruinously expensive but "triumphal" landing on the Moon. The simplicity of Gardner's narrative style may seem at times inadequate to its task; but the acuity of her take on twentieth century worlds makes a virtue out of her sometimes undue clarity.

The Weather Woman (2022), set in an eighteenth century London between two great frosts that turn the Thames to ice, follows the intricate growth to adulthood of a young women who, born with the capacity to predict weather (see Precognition; Weather Control), conceals and profits from her gift by speaking from within a clockwork Automaton constructed by her father. [JC]

Sally Gardner

born Birmingham, England

works (selected)

series

Magical Children

Red Necklace

individual titles (selected)

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