The 27th Kingdom

Readers touched by the charms of Fairy Tale and The Sin Eater (both 1998) will be happy at Ellis's latest peering through the amusements of daily life into the paranormal behind. The time is 1954, the place London - the house, specifically, of Irene Wojtyla, a woman twice married but now long single, of Russian extraction, and possessed of a certain cosmopolitan air even amid the squalors of her Chelsea neighborhood and rather common friends. Insisting that her name be pronounced "Irina," she's always known as "Aunt" by dint of having inherited in his infancy a nephew to raise as her own. This person, named Kyril, is now a classically handsome adult who runs an art gallery and who is snide, condescending, spoiled, sadistic, and very suave indeed. Into this household (it includes a cat named Focus, whose mother ate its siblings) enters a beautiful girl named Valentine, postulate at the convent in Wales where Irene's sister Berthe is Mother Superior. Berthe, it seems, feels that Valentine must "test her vocation" not only in the convent but also "in the world," and so sends her for a time to live with Irene and Kyril in "Dancing Master House" (as it's called). This means not only that the one boarder, meek Mr. Sirocco, must be put out of his room (he'll hang himself), but that a new pressure will come upon Kyril by proximity to Valentine, this black, placid, gorgeous young woman from the Caribbean. And poor Kyril: whenever he's about to pounce on Valentine, she silently disappears; and what about the time Mrs. O'Connor saw light between Valentine's feet and the church floor? Just the beginning, mind you, to all the fine, light, lovely chaos - and salvation - that will visit the house and neighborhood under the demure Valentine's influence, every whit of it delivered in Ellis's masterfully perfected tones of understatement and drollery. A wonderful little treasure. On second thought, take back the little. (Kirkus Reviews)