A Fairytale for Everyone

The Puppets of Spelhorst is the first installment in the Norendy Tales, a projected trio of novellas written by the masterful Kate DiCamillo, author of Because of Winn Dixie and Flora and Ulysses. At only 149 pages, this middle-grade fairytale is a beautifully crafted, easy-to-read story ideal for students, children, and bright-eyed adults.

            But how does the story start? And what adventures await beneath the vibrant blue cover?

            Let me set the scene: A collection of puppets hangs in a toy shop window, staring out at a crooked row of wind-battered houses. An old sea captain is shuffling past, head bowed, back stooped. There’s a violet-eyed girl grappling for gallery space on the walls of his mind. And the puppet in the window, the dark-haired girl hanging companionably beside the wolf, the boy, the king, and the owl—she has violet eyes too. So, in a bout of sentimentality, the captain (appropriately named Spelhorst given the novella’s title) purchases the puppets, and takes the lot back to his upstairs flat in a shabby coastal town. This, the puppets think, is the start of something great. But when the elderly captain perishes during the night— from illness, heartache, age…take your pick; this is a fairytale after all, some speculation is required— the puppets are forced to grapple with the fact that dreaming of an adventure is not the same as surviving one.

            Like every fairytale, the lessons in this wonderfully simplistic novella lie not in DiCamillo’s mastery of words, but her restraint in using so few to illustrate the puppets’ unique dreams. What is a song and how does it grow? Is a wolf more than her teeth? What is a king without his crown; a ruler without his subjects? Can a puppet fly? Every question is an electric current buoying a narrative that is, at its surface, dazzling, if not necessarily shocking.

            If you, like me, are a literary aficionado who struggles to find cute, family-friendly, palette cleansers between gut-wrenching historic dramas, then this is the novella for you. But if you prefer your books dripping with melodrama steeped in teenage angst (Booktok, I’m looking at you), then I recommend handing The Puppets of Spelhorst to a younger sibling and trading this darling slip of a story for a novel with more meat on its bones.