Alchemy and Meggy Swann

Alchemy and Meggy Swann / Karen Cushman.—Boston : Clarion Books, 2010.

176 p. : ill., map ; 22 cm.
ISBN: 9780547231846

1. Alchemy -- Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters -- Fiction. 3. Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction. 4. London (England) -- History -- 16th century -- Fiction. 5. People with disabilities -- Fiction.

813.54

When her beloved granny died, Margaret Swann is informed by her mother that her father has sent for her, and she’s to go live with him in London. Meggy is shocked; she never knew that she had a father. Well, she knew that she must have had a father because everyone has or had one, but never in her thirteen years has her mother mentioned him to her. So she arrives in London with her only friend: her pet goose Louise. Louise has a sprung wing and cannot fly, just as Meggy has crooked legs and cannot walk. Using two walking sticks she can lurch forward from side to side painfully dragging her legs along with her, but she doesn’t call it walking; she calls it “wabbling.”

London, when she arrives in 1573, does not impress her. It’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s filthy, it stinks, and they have dead men’s heads hung on their bridges! “Ye toads and vipers!” she exclaims upon arrival at her father’s house at the Sign of the Sun on Crooked Lane. Insult is added to injury when her father, Master Ambrose the Alchemist expresses his disappointment that she is not a son, wonders aloud if she is a crackbrain, and then walks away from her upstairs into his attic room. The only civil person she meets that day is Roger Oldham, Master Ambrose’s assistant, a boy of about her own age, who is delighted to have just found a new job as a player with a troop of actors. Eventually Roger and Meggy will become friends and verbal sparring partners, but now with Roger leaving and her father—Master Peevish—as she thinks of him, obsessed with finding the secret of immortality, Meggy must find a way to care for herself in this challenging new world.