When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively.

Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. Rugged cross-country adventure with a diverse cast of two- and four-legged fellow travelers and a sturdy main character who is more than a little “wilded” herself.Ĭhainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.Įvery four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Through bitter storms and ambushes, terror and tragedy, an unrelenting sense of purpose lightened with flashes of humor-“Black had eaten three toes, which, technically, had belonged to an English lord”-carries Feo and her allies to a decisive confrontation with Rakov. Though historical events up to and including the February Revolution take place in the background, Feo’s harrowing journey is the story’s focus. Off she sets on a seemingly quixotic rescue, with beloved semiferal charges Black, White, and Gray (“a bunch of the most beautiful criminals”), a newly born wolf pup, 13-year-old army deserter Ilya, and growing bands of children and disaffected villagers in her wake. Mikail Rakov, declaring that wolves are all vermin, descends to burn the cabin and hustle her mother off to Kresty Prison in the city. Feo’s idyll comes to a sudden end when brutal, sadistic Gen. Petersburg, 12-year-old Feodora, “a dark and stormy girl,” and her strong mother, Marina Petrovich, take wolves that have grown too dangerous for the aristocratic households in which they have been raised from captured cubs and train them to live on their own in the wild. A young Russian who has known more wolves in her life than people sets out to rescue her mother from a czarist prison.

The wolf wilder