A unique debut that layers Slavic folk tales onto very 21st century dilemmas, The House with Chicken Legs reboots the legendary witch and spirit guide Baba Yaga in a dizzyingly imaginative and utterly compelling modern folktale.
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2019
Waterstones Children's Book of the Month for May 2018
A spellbinding adventure, bound-up with traditional folk and fairy tales, The House with Chicken Legs transports readers to a world of spells and spirits bound by ancient rules and one girl who longs to break free.
My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same.
Marinka dreams of a normal life, she dreams of standing still, but her house has chicken legs and a will of its own and moves on without warning.
For governing Marinka’s world is the powerful and feared Baba Yaga. To some she is a witch, to others the Goddess of Death who guides spirits between this world and the next and she is also Marinka's grandmother.
Marinka longs to change her destiny and sets out to break free from her grandmother's footsteps, but her house has other ideas...
Based on the Slavic fairy tales she was told by her own Prussian grandmother, Sophie Anderson’s debut is both a powerful reimagining of ancient storytelling and an entrancing new story of one girl’s search for freedom and her own calling. Accompanied by beautiful internal illustrations by Elisa Paganelli, it is a celebration of the power of storytelling to weave new spells and keep magic alive for every new generation.
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 9781474940665
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 300 g
Dimensions: 195 x 129 x 23 mm
This vividly imagined blend of fairy tale and coming-of-age novel reflects perceptively on death and loss - The Sunday Times
This original debut takes a poignant, philosophical look at predestination and free choice, and features delectable food descriptions, cheeky jackdaws and a frolicking lamb. - The Guardian
A magical tale. a captivating and original retelling of a traditional story straight out of folklore. Beautiful escapism. - Sunday Express S Magazine
Enticing, a little bit dangerous, and thrumming with possibilities. - Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars
While it plays, elegantly and surprisingly warmly, with the idea of death, Anderson's book is rich with the tastes, smells and sensations of life, from the flavour of borscht to the sounds of violins - Times Literary Supplement
The House with Chicken Legs is steeped in Russian folklore in the form of a Baba Yaga mythical retelling. You may think ‘Oh, just another retelling…’ but let me assure you, that this reimagining take on this tale is... More
Huge thanks to Usborne for sending me both and proof and a finished copy of this book. It was a true beauty to read, but made even more special with the illustrations woven through the pages. I raced through this... More
Death, the film Coco built a whole film around the idea that death should be treated as a celebration of a life well lived. This does that for the book world. The idea that the dead tell their stories at parties so... More
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