Book Review: Splendors and Glooms

By Amanda Wiggins

In Splendors and Glooms, Laura Amy Schlitz creates an atmospheric Victorian London filled with puppetry and orphans, magic and cruelty and an evil witch with a cursed stone. Two orphans, Parsefall and Lizzie Rose, are forced to work for the wicked puppet master, Gaspare Grisini, who can make puppets move like they are alive, but he often fails to feed the children or buy them necessities. Lizzie Rose muses, That, too, was Grisini: a bad guardian, a bad man perhaps, but a matchless artist.

One day, the rich and lonely Clara Wintermute sees The Phenomenal Professor Grisini and His Venetian Fantoccini perform in the park and begs her parents to allow the puppeteers to entertain at her twelfth birthday party. She vanishes that evening, and Grisini, the main suspect, disappears soon after. Suspicion falls on the children, who flee right into the hands of an evil witch.

With every sight, smell and sound, Schlitz uses small details to create a gothic, Dickensian world. Her characters are fully realized, three-dimensional beings with their own thoughts and habits, and you feel real fear for them. Within the grim reality of Clara Wintermutes life, we see that even those in high stations are not exempt from pain and grief.

I highly recommend this young adult book for pre-teens, teenagers, parents and anyone who enjoys reading along with their children. A Newberry Honor book, Splendors and Glooms is available on Amazon and in brick-and-mortar bookstores.