Lada Between Two Worlds - Julia Panfylova

Published by Nana Fox Publishing: New Zealand, 2022.

This is a really odd book, like many of the fiction books I have read this year!! 

Lada is a young girl growing up in the Ukraine. She has odd-coloured eyes and is picked on by the girls in her village. Her grandmother looks after her while her father is away fighting in an unspecified war. This could be the set-up for an emotional drama.

But no.

Lada quickly meets a magical fox with mind-control powers who, nevertheless, is unable to control Lada. This upsets the fox no end. The fox can also talk, explained by the fact that 'of course foxes can talk. They just don't usually have anything they want to say!'

A nearby house has a ghost in it that used to be friends with both of Lada's parents. The ghost writes letters to Lada, that Lada never reads. In fact, throughout the book the ghost never once actually interacts with Lada.

There is a seven-legged spider in the cellar that can collect tears and 'spin' them into magical pearls. These pearls can then be placed as the eyes in a hand-carved owl figurine in order to make a magical portal to Aotearoa.

Aotearoa is a magical land covered with, at times, a long white cloud (funnily enough, considering what Aotearoa means). Within Aotearoa, Lada meets a witch who has captured the sun, an owl who is also the guardian of the forest, a talking goat that is quickly killed, and a hunter who becomes more and more cartoonishly evil before abruptly becoming a hero when the fox tells him to via mind-control.

All of these plot-points are layered atop one another in quick succession, and it just seems a bit too much. Also, Aotearoa is never once called New Zealand, not even in the author's biography. That feels intentional and also makes it seem far less like a 'real' place; it is more of a Narnia-type setting. By the end Lada has learned to look after animals and also may have some idea about what happened to her mother... but really, by then I'd guessed the end and lost focus a bit. It's very odd.

Did I already say that?

Interesting for a one-time read though. 

Completed 20 August 2023.

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