Vashti Hardy

I attended the British author's online talk back in 2021 and I was surprised to learn that the book had been translated in Georgian. I bought it for my daughter for her 9th birthday. I'm not a big fan of fantasy so I decided to read it and practice reading in Georgian at the same time. I also purchased this Kindle book and read them in parallel.

I soon realized that I had purchased the US edition where a chapter had been removed and a small part added in another chapter. It's also interesting that the continents are just called First, Second, and Third in the Georgian edition, while they have names - Vornatania (the First Continent), Nadvaaryan (the Second Continent) and the Ice Continent (the Third Continent) - in the American edition, which talks about how arrogant it is to call them just by the ordinal number:

"The names some explorer families in Lontown use are rather arrogant, putting ourselves first and letting everything else we discover in the Wide fall in behind us."

It's clearly that the American publishers felt the need to edit out some colonialism. It's always interesting to compare different translations. I'm really curious to check how it was in the original British edition.

As for the story itself, I really enjoyed it. I realized I missed middle grade books. I also liked that the world was not very different from ours. There is more science and engineering than magic in this book. Even though it's set in another world, it is more adventure than fantasy story in my opinion. The book also deals with more serious topics as grief and disability. The mission of the author in her own words is promoting women in STEM, so Maudie and Harriet are great engineers! Its full of loveable characters, especially Felicity. She reminded me of our ex-nanny.… (mehr)