Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star by Laura Noakes

Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star by Laura Noakes
Buy Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star by Laura Noakes at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: Attaching modern sensitivities to a Victorian era drama of youthful shenanigans makes for a slightly raised eyebrow in response, but the rich plot here is enough to beat away all such concerns.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 304	Date: May 2023
Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9780008579050
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Meet Number One. Or rather, Cosima Unfortunate. Or rather, just Cos to her friends. The practice in the home she lives in is for the girls to just be named by the number they correspond to in the ledger, and they're all Unfortunates – young people with disabilities, uncommon mentalities or suchlike that Victorian society frowns greatly upon. But Cosima bears the tag as a surname because nothing else seems to be known about where she came from, as the first ever inmate, and unique in having no known family in the outside world. During a daring escapade to steal some posh cakes from the kitchen one afternoon, she discovers a plan involving said outside world – a devilish Lord Fitzroy seems to want to adopt all the girls for his Institute. But why, and what does that body entail? And could it possibly bring Cos closer to the past she has so little link with?

On the hunt for a middle-grade drama that ticked all the right boxes, I found something that seemed too concerned with ticking a few of the righteous ones and nothing else. We start with a sample of a newspaper of the day, allowing us to read about horrid workhouse conditions being exposed. Ooh, an exhibition has a rare gem on show (for the right audiences) because, you know, empire is bad. Then we get to the disparate girls – the highly nervous, the ones of an exotic origin, those weak of body. This seemed to be more concerned with woke representation than the story. It's fifty/fifty whether or not being in the home is supposed to have given them super-power levels of empathy, but it comes across a bit strong, as does one girl's reaction to anything with even a taint of the colonial India about it.

Note, I say 'seemed'. These elements of the book are here, but if they ever seemed ruinous flaws, they certainly were not. Principal in making sure of that is the plot, adding more than a little Ocean's Eleven to the Victorian-waifs-and-strays-coming-good genre. These children are supposed to be idly repurposing rope, but are far too engaged with other ideas, and the story is a great one, carefully concentrating on their immediate intentions as well as Cos's back-story, and never letting you know to the very end whether or not that will need a sequel to resolve itself.

Yes, it is still flawed – the way it forces some of the score of girls inside to be anonymous to keep the cast-list and our concentrations focused; the way an interloper's true identity is secret to the girls and not to the readership (for I hope the intended readers see it as obvious as I did); the way mechanisms get invented and we don't ever quite believe in any of them. But again, those are nothing like a hill to die on – mere molehills instead. What hiccups the book has are all excusable, and the rare flavour of this drama ends up being really quite memorable. I still think it wish-fulfilment to have all the girls so sympathetic, caring and with such a modern, accepting mindset, but once more such concerns get batted into the long grass by the energy with which the plot's richness is conveyed.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

More distinctive MG historical fiction can be had with The Miraculous Sweetmakers: The Frost Fair by Natasha Hastings and Alex T Smith.

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