The Magic Toyshop Mini-Review

Title:  The Magic Toyshop
Author:  Angela Carter
Published:  First Published W. Heinemann Ltd. 1967, First Published in Great Britain by Virago Press 1981
Recognized:  John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1969
Pages:  200
Source:  The Book Depository
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction

I was prompted to read this after noticing Angela Carter being mentioned by several book bloggers, all claiming to love her books.  "Ooh!," I thought, "I've never heard of her...must try!"  The story was unique and the writing incredibly descriptive.  The characters were well-defined by their traits and an element of mystery or suspense always loomed in the background.  I just may read another one of Angela Carter's titles (there are many to choose from by the way).

Description from Goodreads:

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure garden. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshops. The classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative works.

"Beneath its contemporary surface, this novel shimmers with blurred echoes—from Lewis Carroll, from 'Giselle' and 'Coppelia,' Harlequin and Punch… It leave behind it a flavor, pungent and unsettling" -- The New York Times Book Review

Favorite Quotes:

"Her skin prickled with wakefulness and her nerves were as raw as if a hundred knives were squeaking across a hundred plates in concert.  At last, she could bear it no longer and got up."

"Beside the portrait was a carved cuckoo clock with green ivy and purple grapes growing around a green front door...the front door flew open with a whirring sound that startled her very much.  The bird emerged, bowed and cuckooed seven times.  It was a real cuckoo, stuffed, with the sounding mechanism trapped, somehow, in its feathered breast.  There was a grotesque inventiveness, a deliberate eccentricity in the idea of the cuckoo clock that Melanie had never encountered."

"The taxi climbed through gaunt, grey streets with, here and there, ragged October trees dropping sad leaves into a deepening, sheep-white and shaggy mist.  Melancholy, down-on-its-luck South London."

"She parcelled up the dress and stuck it in the fork of the tree.  she could carry it up with her and put it away again in the trunk and no one would know it had been worn if they did not see the blood on the hem, and there was only a little blood.  The cat put its head on one side and turned it sequin regard on the parcel; it stretched out its paddy paw and stroked the dress.  Its paw was tipped with curved, cunning meat hooks.  It had a cruel stroke.  There was a ripping sound."

"Symbolic and virtuous white.  White satin shows evey mark, white tulle crumples at the touch of a finger, white roses shower petals at a breath.  Virtue is fragile."