The WriteReads Blog Tour: Scareground by Angela Kecojevic

Blurb

Roll up, roll up, the Scareground is in town!

Twelve-year-old Nancy Crumpet lives above a bakery and her life is a delightful mix of flour, salt, and love. Yet her mind is brimming with questions no one can answer: Why did her birth parents disappear? Why can she speak with the sky? And why must she keep her mysterious birthmark hidden?

Everything is about to change when the Scareground returns to Greenwich. Nancy is convinced it holds the answers to her parents’ disappearance. Nancy and her best friend Arthur Green meet the fair’s spooky owner, Skelter, and discover a world full of dark magic and mystery. Nancy must confront her greatest fears to get to the truth. But is she ready for all the secrets the Scareground will reveal?

Book Review

Nancy, the adopted daughter of Mr and Mrs Crumpet, lives above the bakery, but what she most enjoys is running along the rooftops and speaking with the sky. Although the Crumpets show her nothing but love, she has questions about her mysterious past and her strange ability to understand what the sky is saying. When the Scareground comes to Greenwich, Nancy sees an opportunity to find out more. She and her best friend Arthur decide to attend the fair, against their parents’ wishes.

Full disclosure: there were things in this book I didn’t get along with. Some of it felt down to editing, but some of it I just didn’t click with. For the purposes of this blog tour, I’m going to keep this review largely to the stuff I did like, but I’ll have something a bit more detailed at a later date.

I will start, however, with one thing that kept bugging me throughout: the time period in this felt a little all over the place, and though some reviews have mentioned it’s Victorian (which it did feel like for the most part), there were parts that jarred with that kind of historical setting – whether it’s down to a lack of research or editing, I don’t know, but a (admittedly minor) thing that really stuck out to me was the mention of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ (a particular type of illusion) as having been around for over a 100 years. The illusion became largely popular in the mid-1800s, which would push the timeframe of the book more into the mid-20^th Century, which itself doesn’t fit with the book. It would have been good to get a clearer idea of when it was set – I was reading it as Historical, but maybe it’s more a kind of Fantasy like-ours-world-but-not-quite, similar to His Dark Materials?

Okay, now that’s out of the way –

A lot of this book feels quite whimsical and imaginative, and I would have loved to have spent more time strolling around the Scareground itself with Nancy and Arthur. We meet another character who seems to have similar abilities to Nancy with ‘reading’ the sky, and this was an element I definitely loved – it made Nancy feel really unique, and I loved how she and the sky communicated.

The characters feel memorable, too. Nancy and her friend are brave, but that doesn’t mean there are times where they don’t feel scared. She really does make for a good MG heroine, and as the mystery deepens, she becomes more determined to find out about her past, even though she has loving parents who care for her.

This is a fun book with some imaginative characters and moments, and a decent read for spooky season with an interesting premise.

Thank you to the publisher for providing an ARC for The Write Reads blog tour! Don’t forget to check out the other reviews and spotlights during the tour.

About the Author

Angela Kecojevic is a senior librarian, author and creative writing tutor. She has written for the Oxford Reading Tree programme and the multi-award-winning adventure park Hobbledown where her characters can be seen walking around, something she still finds incredibly charming! She is a member of the Climate Writers Fiction League, a group of international authors who use climate issues in their work. Angela lives in the city of Oxford with her family.