Title: A House Without Mirrors
Author: Marten Sanden
Genre: Childrens
Length: 176
Rating: 5 Star
Description/Synopsis:
Thomasine has spent months living in her great-great-aunt’s dusty, dark house with her father, and her aunt, uncle and cousins. While her father’s siblings bicker about how much the house must be worth, her distant, elderly aunt is upstairs, dying, and her father has disappeared inside himself, still mourning the death of Thomasine’s little brother.
But one day, her youngest cousin makes a discovery: a wardrobe, filled with all the mirrors missing from the big house. And through the mirrors, a different world – one in which you can find not what you most wish for, but perhaps what you most need …
A beautiful tale of love, grief and growing up, “A House Without Mirrors” is an unforgettable adventure into families and the power of love.
Review – MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
I sped through this story. It was awesome.
I got a very Narnia feel to this story because of how people travel through the wardrobe but it was its own story in every other aspect.
We go into a house with no mirrors and seems devoid of life, where a family who is all torn up and each having their own issues have moved in because their great-aunt is dying. The adults fight about the price of the house and the kids fight with each other and the parents. Until one day the youngest child goes into the wardrobe containing all the missing mirrors and goes into another world which is a mirror image to the house they live in, has a girl living there, and the house has life once again. When she comes out she has gained something about herself that she needed and is happier.
Gradually every member of the household goes to this other place and gains something they need, with the girl in the other world growing older each visit, and they leave the house behind with just Thomasine and her father and great-aunt. Thomasine later works out thanks to a photo album that she helped the other girl create that she is actually her great-aunt.
This rises questions. Does the wardrobe take you back to the past? Or did it take them to a world they think the house would have been like back then?
This is a children’s story, but I find myself questioning if it would be a good book to read to children. Kids these days are so over protected that everything they are exposed to is cute fluffy garbage and isn’t remotely creepy like when I was younger. This book was a bit creepy, I don’t know if every child could handle it. On a completely different level too, I don’t know if every child will understand the message that is being spoken.
So my advice would be to read it yourself before you read it to your kids just so make sure it might not creep them out, but I think anyone older would enjoy it if you liked the way this review sounded.
Till Next Time…