One of my childhood books that I revisited. For a kid's book this is actually very dark. It deals with themes of abandonment and bullying albeit in a very brief way. However, the ending seems somewhat rushed, if bittersweet. I certainly would have now liked more pages on the Plantaganets dealing with the aftermath of the final act.

Also, Marchpane is totally a B-rhymes-with-witch.

i vaguely remembered this as one of the strangest and saddest books ever given to me as a child, so i dug it out on archive.org and reexperienced it and couldn't put it down. i'm thinking of klara and the sun and cuckoo song and nontraditional personhood and powerlessness

I was lucky enough to find the 1962 edition illustrated by Tasha Tudor at a second-hand bookshop, and it is gorgeous. Godden's story is a perfect match for Tudor's style.

Okay, so I love Rumer Godden's writing. I like simple prose comprised of the most apposite words and she always delivers. Whether she's writing for children or adults, she just gets it right. I especially enjoyed the books set in India but a special accolade goes to The Greengage Summer where, even in her fifties, she was able to capture that particular angst of being a teenager trying to come to terms with the adult world. When writing for children, as she does here, there is no sentimentality, not all the dolls have a happy-ever-after story and nothing is sugar-coated. She writes of a different world (it was written in 1947 but could describe an earlier era) but there will still be children out there who warm to the story of the diverse dolls who get to inhabit this particular dolls' house. The human qualities, both good and bad, that the dolls display may even enlighten today's young readers.