Greenglass House: 05/07/15

Greenglass House by Kate Milford is a multilayered tale of smuggling, role playing, story telling, and family. Milo lives with his adoptive parents in an inn at the edge of ocean. It's accessible by trolley or via a treacherous road. When the snow begins to fall, the inn typically closes. The family celebrates a quiet Christmas together. But this year, one by one, guests start to arrive, unannounced.

Included in the guests, is a girl named Meddy. She uses a Dungeons and Dragons style role playing game to turn the adults' stories of the Greenglass house in its days as a smuggler's den, into an adventure. Through larping Milo and Meddy take on the task of decoding a treasure map and solving the mystery of the Greenglass House.

Greenglass House, like The Boneshaker is a poetic and layered book. Story telling features prominently and each character has his or her story to tell, except for Milo, who has a foundling, is desperate to know his origins. He knows he's Chinese but he doesn't know anything of his parents or how he came to this smuggler's hideout. So instead, he invents a new story for himself which he plays out through his larping as a master thief named Negret.

Although I started reading Greenglass House as a library book, I ended up purchasing a copy for my home library as my renewals ran out. In the nine weeks I had the book, I had only managed to read half a book. It's the sort of story that is so resplendent in language that I needed to record my favorite quotes. These I collected through live blogging on Tumblr.

Five stars

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