TBR Pile Book #7 – The House with Chicken Legs

Medium – Book

About this Book – Marinka dreams of living an ordinary life, where she can make friends and her house stays in one place. However, she lives in a house with chicken legs, and the job of this house is to guide the dead. Marinka’s grandmother is Baba Yaga. She helps dead souls pass from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and she believes that Marinka’s destiny is to be a Guardian too. However, Marinka doesn’t want this – she wants a normal life, with friends among the living, a different job and other interests. She makes a plan to break away from her life of guiding – however, the house may just have other ideas…

My thoughts – I really enjoy these books by Sophie Anderson – both this one and the previous one, The Girl who Speaks Bear, which was part of the previous reading challenge I did. She writes beautifully, incorporating some lovely Russian fairy tales and folk tales with a new twist. You can never quite work out the time frame they are happening in, giving them a mystical, enigmatic quality. The characters are interesting, with lots of development and a female lead who does lots of growing by the end of the book.

I found the end of this book hopeful, but sad, which is why I have chosen to only give this book 4 stars rather than 5. I also liked the general storyline of the previous book more than this one, but that is more my personal preference than anything else. I know it’s nothing to do with the contents of the book, but can we all, just for a moment, revel in the beauty of the cover illustration? It’s lovely, and I also really enjoyed the illustrations inside. At the moment I am really busy with work – it’s so lovely to read books which are interesting, quite light reading and have such lovely pictures!