I, Coriander

I, Coriander

First edition
Author	Sally Gardner
Illustrator	Lydia Corry
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Children's
Publisher	Orion Children's Books
Publication date	August 4, 2005
Pages	320 pp
ISBN	978-1-84255-290-2
OCLC	59878419
Dewey Decimal	823.914 22
LC Class	MLCS 2006/45011

I, Coriander is a children's novel by Sally Gardner, published in 2005, a historical fantasy set in London at the time of the Puritan Commonwealth. It won the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award.^[1] It was also shortlisted for the British Children's Book of the Year and the Stockton Children's Book of the Year,^[2][3] as well as longlisted for the Carnegie Medal.^[4]

Plot summary

The novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century girl named Coriander.

Coriander starts an adventure she cannot stop when she slips on a pair of silver shoes from an anonymous person. Her mother insists that she must not have them, whilst she herself insists she will. On Coriander's ninth birthday her mother gives in and let's Coriander have the shoes. Shortly after, Coriander's mother dies. Coriander's father remarries, to a Puritan woman with a daughter and a set of strong beliefs. She soon changes the house and brings an old friend of hers to meet Coriander, a preacher with horrible methods. Coriander's father is arrested and she is left with her stepmother and stepsister. The stepmother dismisses Coriander's favourite servant as well as friend. After Coriander hides a doll in the cupboard, her stepmother is furious with her. Coriander longs for her father's return. The preacher and her stepmother Maud unleash their fury and lock Coriander in a chest for three years.

It all starts to slowly change, a thread that never ends, and one that Coriander cannot control.

She soon finds out all her mother's deepest secrets and must fight the evil Queen Rosemore, her grandfather's second wife, who has put him into a trance. To save her mother's beautiful yet deadly power and her father's faith, she falls in love with Tycho, a fairy prince from the other world, a dangerous thing for her to do. As all things she once knew vanish, she must fight the horrors of the angry Puritan world in which she lives and those of the world of magic, which holds the secret of time and all things possible.

In the end she (Coriander) ends up with the prince, Tycho, who was disguised in the Kings fair

References