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Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu is a delightful middle grade novel that will please the 5th grader in all of us.
I’ve got to say, wow … Anne Ursu can create wonderfully engaging characters, and knows how to evoke an amazing sense of wonder and dread. Breadcrumbs takes us on an epic journey with a girl who wants to save her friend, from her school to the deepest winter.
One of the things that amazed me about Breadcrumbs was the way Anne Ursu evolved the story from one of a girl struggling to feel like she belongs somewhere to the story of a girl who will stop at nothing to save her friend. In the beginning, Hazel’s world is real, tangible, filled with practicalities. But when our Hazel sets herself to the task of being the heroine, the story evolves with her, transforming from the very real to the very fantastic.
Anne Ursu’s prose is proof too that middle grade novels don’t have to be dumbed down or limited in their vocabulary … they just have to be authentic. In Breadcrumbs, Ursu has no problems tossing out words that look like they’d feel more at home in an adult novel (in complexity, not propriety), but those words fit so perfectly that the reading never falters.
In all, Breadcrumbs is a fairy tale that deserves attention.
Read Breadcrumbs if you love beautifully written prose, a pervasive sense of wonder, and you just want to be sucked away into the magic woods and don’t care whether you return again or not.
Do not read Breadcrumbs if you’re a stodgy, nasty teacher who enjoys mean looks and hexagonal symmetry, or if you’re so entranced by the real world that the idea of getting a dose of wonder in another makes you sick.
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