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Summary
Summary
Parallel stories set in different times, one told in prose and one in pictures, converge as a girl unravels the mystery of the abandoned Thornhill Institute next door.
1982: Mary is a lonely orphan at the Thornhill Institute For Children at the very moment that it's shutting its doors. When her few friends are all adopted or re-homed and she's left to face a volatile bully alone, her revenge will have a lasting effect on the bully, on Mary, and on Thornhill itself.
2017: Ella has just moved to a new town where she knows no one. From her room on the top floor of her new home, she has a perfect view of the dilapidated, abandoned Thornhill Institute across the way, where she glimpses a girl in the window. Determined to befriend the girl and solidify the link between them, Ella resolves to unravel Thornhill's shadowy past.
Told in alternating, interwoven plotlines--Mary's through intimate diary entries and Ella's in bold, striking art--Pam Smy's Thornhill is a haunting exploration of human connection, filled with suspense.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017
A New York City Public Library Notable Best Book for Kids
A 2018 ALSC Notable Children's Book
A VOYA Top of the Shelf Pick
Author Notes
Pam Smy studied Illustration at Cambridge School of Art, part of Anglia Ruskin University, where she now lectures part-time. Pam has illustrated books by Conan Doyle ( The Hound of the Baskervilles ), Julia Donaldson ( Follow the Swallow ) and Kathy Henderson ( Hush, Baby, Hush! ), among others. She lives in Cambridge.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Near the start of British illustrator Smy's harrowing debut novel, Ella Clarke and her father move to a house that overlooks a dilapidated former orphanage, the Thornhill Institute. Ella's father is never home, so when the lonely teen spies a girl wandering Thornhill's grounds, she decides to crawl through the gate and introduce herself. Thirty-five years earlier, in 1982, 13-year-old Thornhill resident Mary Baines is being tormented day and night by a fellow orphan. When the facility begins "rehoming" children and laying off staff as part of a planned closure, her bully's persecution intensifies, and an increasingly miserable Mary contemplates revenge. Her actions will have ramifications for decades to come. The girls' stories intertwine as they unfold in tandem; heartbreaking entries from Mary's diary alternate with eerie b&w illustrated sequences, which silently follow Ella's exploration of Thornhill and her interactions with Mary's ghost (newspaper clippings and other bits of text provide context for these otherwise wordless sections). Smy uses this hybrid format to weave a chilling tale that highlights the importance of kindness and child advocacy while emphasizing the lasting damage wrought by abuse and neglect. Ages 10-14. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Dual stories set decades apart unfold together in this hybrid novel told in diary entries and eerie grayscale illustrations. More than 30 years ago, Mary Baines kept a diary about her life at Thornhill, an orphanage, and the cruel torment she experienced at the hands of another girl there. Meanwhile, in the present, Smy's cinematic artwork shows lonesome Ella curious about the dilapidated former orphanage outside her window and the newspaper clippings she finds about a girl who went missing there, named Mary Baines. As Mary becomes more and more tormented for her love of books and the strange puppets she makes in her room, Ella sneaks onto Thornhill's grounds and finds remnants of Mary's dolls, which she takes home and lovingly repairs before returning them. The interplay between Mary's diary entries and the images of Ella's investigation builds depth in both girls' narratives, though Ella's can be a bit harder to decipher. Still, the enigmatic narrative, believable horrors, and haunting conclusion will be riveting for fans of ghost stories.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what makes A good ghost story? Roald Dahl once wrote that it "should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts." I'd add that the perfect ghostly tale should contain a generous helping of ambiguity. And it doesn't hurt if it has some creepy dolls. "Thornhill," a debut novel by the British illustrator Pam Smy, has all of the above ingredients, in spades. Especially the disturbing bits. If you like your thoughts disturbed, this could be the book for you. Gentler and younger readers may want to keep a safe distance. The book alternates between written journal entries and pages of wordless art. The text is in the form of a diary from the "far-off" year of 1982. Mary, its author, is lonely, fearful, orphaned and selectively mute. She lives at Thornhill, a decrepit orphanage slated for closure. She is tormented every night by a fellow orphan, part mean girl, part creepy fiend, who stands just outside her attic room and wordlessly "thumps" on her door. By day, the girl manipulates the other residents to embrace and then bully Mary, who, in response, hides in her attic room and builds dolls. The illustrated spreads tell the story of a present-day girl named Ella, who has moved into the house across from the now abandoned orphanage. Out her bedroom window, she gazes at Thornhill, boarded up and graffitied, and sees... something. The rest of the story alternates between Mary's descriptions of social agonies in the face of her nemesis and Ella's lonely attempts to confront what she soon determines to be a ghost. The tale is mostly ghost- and bully-driven, but has lighter moments as Mary reads and identifies with the far gentler "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. "The girl in it is called Mary too and her parents die right at the beginning of the story, so she is on her own, like me." Indeed, 1982 Mary has her own secret garden where she hides from her harasser. It's bedraggled even then, and, in 2017, still more overgrown and littered with the severed bodies of dolls, which Ella finds, repairs and returns to the ghost in an offer of friendship. "Thornhill" also has ghostly echoes of Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," beginning with the similarity of its name to Thornfield, home of the glowering Mr. Rochester and his madwoman in the attic, where the orphaned Jane is governess. Is Mary a gentle Jane Eyre or the mad Bertha? I won't tell you, and neither does Smy. Smy's illustrations are moody comicsstyle spreads of gray paint and black ink, just creepy enough. A canny observer can read them like text; these visuals tell a wordless story of a girl, her workaholic father and absent mother. Drawings of newspaper articles reveal pieces of the orphanage's history. The images' silence is as mute as Mary and as evocative as her diary. On occasion, though, the spreads feel more atmospheric than plot-driven and the repeated black pages separating sections feel like unnecessary padding. "Thornhill" owes a great deal to Brian Selznick's groundbreaking novels, like "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." Smy has created a gothic take on Selznick's hybrid format, and as with many gothic novels, the ending of this spectral tale is rather gruesome and more than a bit confusing. But the book will certainly pull lovers of ghost stories, narrative illustration and creepy dolls into its dark pages, to revel in its scares and ambiguities. LISA BROWN is the illustrator, most recently, of "Goldfish Ghost," written by Lemony Snicket. She has written and illustrated many other books for children.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-9-This illustrated debut novel brings the dead back to life. Mary's story, told through diary entries, takes place in 1982 over a seven-month period at the Thornhill Institute for Children, an orphanage on the cusp of closing its doors forever. Mary has selective mutism and has turned to the art of doll-making. Her odd hobby and quiet persona make her a target for bullying. After many of the other orphan girls have been "re-homed," Mary is left alone with her main tormentor and decides she has had enough and will get revenge, no matter what the cost. Flash forward 35 years to Ella, who has moved to a home near the now abandoned Thornhill Institute and whose experiences are depicted through eerie, detailed drawings. After seeing a girl in the neglected lot and hoping to make a friend, Ella sneaks in and discovers that there is much more there than meets the eye. In Mary's old room, Ella reads the poor orphan girl's diary. Ella writes a letter to Mary asking if they can become friends. The striking juxtaposition of Mary's prose and the illustrations portraying Ella's life will draw readers into this intriguing ghost story with an ending that chills to the bone. VERDICT The combination of diary entries and artwork makes this an excellent selection for middle schoolers and reluctant readers.-Stephanie Wilkes, Good Hope Middle School, West Monroe, LA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
From a swamp monster who speaks in verse to a guinea pig in search of world renown, plus a chilling graphic novel and an adventure in the Amazon This month, lucky eight-plus readers can plunge into the green wilds of Katherine Rundell 's marvellous new novel, The Explorer (Bloomsbury). Stranded in the Amazon rainforest, Fred, Lila, Max and Con overcome their initial terror to adapt to the uncompromising fierceness and beauty of their surroundings, gradually shedding the constraints of home -- and discovering much more than they expected. Hannah Horn's delicate line drawings encroach, vine-like, on Rundell's dangerous, intoxicating pages in this love-song to the natural world and those who find release in it. This is essential reading for lovers of Eva Ibbotson. Also for eight plus comes a Newbery medal-winner by Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank The Moon (Piccadilly) -- a poignant, humorous fantasy with glints of Margaret Mahy, Neil Gaiman and Robin McKinley. It features a village that sacrifices its children and a witch who saves them, a swamp monster who speaks in mellifluous poetry and a girl growing up perilously powerful, without knowing why. This is a gorgeously stratified and satisfying novel, full of archetypal, bone-deep fairytale resonances. Bestselling Murder Most Unladylike author Robin Stevens turns to homage, meanwhile, in The Guggenheim Mystery (Puffin), both a tremendous art-theft whodunnit and a loving tribute to the much-missed author Siobhan Dowd. This sequel to Dowd's The London Eye Mystery scoops up Ted, a rigid thinker with a gift for analysis, his tempestuous sister Kat and Salim, his cousin, with an assured and gentle hand, setting them down in New York City, where Ted and Kat's Aunt Gloria is a curator at the Guggenheim art museum. When a Kandinsky is stolen and Gloria is arrested, though, it's up to the young detectives to clear her name... Stevens's deft, philosophical writing lends itself perfectly to her continuation of Dowd's work. For readers who like a frisson of fear, Pam Smy's ominous, hefty hardback, Thornhill (David Fickling), is a rule-breaker in the vein of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret -- a skin-crawling story of a derelict house haunted by past cruelties, told almost entirely via illustration, with some help from found texts and tattered ancient diaries. Smy's intense chiaroscuro, delicately drawn handmade dolls and spare, evocative detail, with pure black pages marking the division of days, combine to create an unsettling, deeply memorable read. Elsewhere, in picture-books for much younger children, Press Here creator Herve Tullet returns with Say Zoop! (Chronicle), an anarchically interactive mixture of white space, coloured dots and reader-supplied sound, with a Fantasia feel to its imaginative sparseness. Press the blue dot and say OH -- get louder or softer, wavery or still -- add a yellow dot, AH -- and the delightful mayhem can only end in a rainbow universe of sound. In a departure from previous, playfully epistolary picture-books, Tom Percival takes to the skies with Perfectly Norman (Bloomsbury), starring a boy hero who is unremarkable until he grows a pair of wings. Worried that people will think his soaring antics weird, he conceals them beneath a coat -- but what are others hiding in their turn? This joyous, original paean to individuality is sophisticated but deftly judged; quirky children just starting to sense the invisible burden of peer-group disapproval should find it especially heartening. Meanwhile, Izzy Gizmo, by Pip Jones and Sara Ogilvie (Simon & Schuster), features an inventor girl, a disabled crow, an encouraging granddad and a thumbs-up to resilience. Izzy's strange devices don't always work as they should -- but when she designs prosthetic wings for a wounded bird, her grandfather pushes her to persist, despite failure and fury. Jones's loping, engaging rhymes and Ogilvie's vivacious images evoke both inspiration and frustration. There's more from Pip Jones for five-to-eight-year-olds in Piggy Handsome (Faber), the turbulent tale of a grandiloquent guinea pig. Disconsolate to have reached the age of three (that's 30 in guinea pig years) with nothing to show for it, Handsome sets off to the seaside to achieve world renown, with a gruff budgie named Jeffry for company. Engagingly silly wordplay, bumbling burglars and Adam Stower's diverting drawings make for a winningly frivolous formula. Young readers with a yen for Egyptology have a treat in store with The Story of Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury), a richly involving non-fiction title from Patricia Cleveland-Peck, interlaid with Isabel Greenberg's charismatic illustrations. Moving smoothly from the boy king's daily life to the discovery and excavation of his tomb, it's packed with accessible, intriguing information. From 360 Degrees is the fascinating In Focus -- Cities, created by Libby Walden, and featuring illustrations from 10 artists, each bringing a unique and appropriate style to their allocated city. From the secrets of London's Royal Mail post train to the smoke-signals of the Vatican, the detail hiding beneath the oversized flaps creates a real sense of insider knowledge. For teenagers, MA Bennett reinvigorates the boarding-school thriller with her debut S.T.A.G.S (Hot Key), set in the eponymous St Aidan the Great School, where tension runs high between the Medievals -- the aristocratic student elite, who shun modern tech as inimical to their traditions -- and those less sophisticated pupils dubbed Savages. When scholarship girl Greer receives a cryptic invitation to the head Medieval's country house offering "huntin', shootin', fishin'", she is flattered enough to accept -- only to discover the quarry isn't what she expected. This is a darkly compelling examination of the allure of privilege, and the unscrupulous means by which it preserves itself. More light-heartedly, seasoned collaborators Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison (Lobsters, Never Evers) return with Freshers (Chicken House), a hilarious, truthful-feeling immersion in the mandatory "fun", self-reinvention and stranger-crowded loneliness of freshers' week. Narrated by Luke, who is navigating a long-distance break-up, and Phoebe, nursing a long-held crush on Luke, it's a messy, cringey, comically evocative no-mance. Finally, from Stripes, A Change Is Gonna Come is a wide-ranging and dynamic anthology by 12 black and minority ethnic authors. From Phoebe Roy's feather-growing teenage girl to Inua Ellams's poetic summary of experience left behind, it deals compellingly with its Ovidian theme of change. With work from familiar names (Nikesh Shukla, Catherine Johnson) and newcomers (Aisha Busby, Mary Florence Bello), there is considerable variety -- but never a dud note. - Imogen Russell Williams.
Kirkus Review
Decades after the tragedy at and closure of gothic Thornhill Institute, a new girl in town is drawn into its story.The past storyline is told through white, orphaned Mary's diary entries (dated in the early 1980s); white preteen Ella's modern, voiceless story unfolds, Wonderstruck-like, in intercut, illustrated, wordless sequences (frames of which occasionally have text, such as newspaper clippings). Selectively mute Mary is a puppet-making, literature-loving outcast at Thornhill, her situation complicated by the return of her chief tormenter and the ringleader of the other girls, back from a failed foster placement. These are Thornhill's last days, the girls being sent to new placements so the property can be developed. Stoic Mary thinks she just wants to be left alone, until a taste of irresistible friendship turns to cruelty. In the present, lonely Ella is intrigued by Thornhill, especially the girl she sometimes sees beyond the locked walls. She sneaks onto the grounds, finds puppets, and repairs them before returning them, striking up an odd, at-a-distance friendship with the mysterious girlwho, she realizes, is likely the dead girl from the orphanage's past. The puppets and doll figures take a familiar creepy motif and make it a source of joy and comfort. The striking monochromatic art is atmospheric and emotional in an understated way that gives it more power rather than less. It's capped by an ambiguous climax and chilling denouement. Beautiful, moody, sad, and spookyall at once. (Horror/graphic hybrid. 10-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.