Title The Ogress and the Orphans Series --- Author Kelly Barnhill Cover Art --- Publisher HarperCollins - 2022 First Printing Algonquin Young Readers - 2022 Category Middle Grade Warnings None Main Characters Ogress, Mayor, Anthea, Bartleby, Cass Main Elements Ogres, dragons

A fantasy about the power of generosity and love, and how a community suffers when they disappear.

Stone-in-the-Glen, once a lovely town, has fallen on hard times. Fires, floods, and other calamities have caused the people to lose their library, their school, their park, and even their neighborliness. The people put their faith in the Mayor, a dazzling fellow who promises he alone can help. After all, he is a famous dragon slayer. (At least, no one has seen a dragon in his presence.) Only the clever children of the Orphan House and the kindly Ogress at the edge of town can see how dire the town’s problems are.

Then one day a child goes missing from the Orphan House. At the Mayor’s suggestion, all eyes turn to the Ogress. The Orphans know this can’t be: the Ogress, along with a flock of excellent crows, secretly delivers gifts to the people of Stone-in-the-Glen.

But how can the Orphans tell the story of the Ogress’s goodness to people who refuse to listen? And how can they make their deluded neighbors see the real villain in their midst?

The novel starts with lovely fairy tale language, perfect atmosphere for this kind of story. A tale of the importance of libraries, trees, and most importantly, kindness. I worried it would be another of those tales where orphans are living under terrible conditions, but just the contrary, they were the only kind, happy people in the entire town. A town were after all the things that mattered to them burned down (the library, the school), the park turned into a sinkhole and the trees all died away, something died inside of them too and they became cruel. But while the orphanage had to struggle for food, they didn't have to struggle for love, and I thought that was lovely.

And of course I would had loved to have lived in that town when the library was its heart and people wandered the tree lined streets, and sat down to discuss the latest book they had read.

It is also a tale where the cats are the good guys, as are the crows, and I loved it for that as well.

But while there was so much I loved, I found myself not quite actually loving the whole. Its a bit like how this book was a nominee for several awards but didn't win any of them. In the end I found it to be a little long, and a little repetitive. While the language serves a shorter fairy tale very well, there's something in that writing style that doesn't work as well in a 400-page novel. While I don't require non-stop action, that many pages of an ogress baking, and a mayor gloating, and the townspeople grumping, it kind of dragged a little. And I'd be remiss that the moral of the story isn't woven seamlessly throughout, it's jumps out of the pages with a hammer every few chapters to remind you to be nice to the people around you.

I still highly recommend it because it was lovely, and it was uplifting, and the writing style rarely found these days.