The Weather Woman is the children’s writer Sally Gardner’s first novel for adults under her own name (previously, she used the pseudonym Wray Delaney). Spanning the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, the story describes an England trembling at the French Revolution and haunted by the threat of Napoleon while aristocrats gamble and roister. Gardner’s sense of atmosphere is acute. The frost fairs, the grand ballrooms, the stinking alleyways all come alive.
The novel’s major theme is the subjugation of women; its secondary, the border between rationality and intuition. Our thoughtful, unconventional heroine is Neva Tarshin. Her mother, a genius chess player, was forced to hide her talents, only playing as a wayside attraction, disguised as an automated bear. Having set up a booth on the frozen Thames, Neva’s parents are killed when the river suddenly thaws, and the strange little girl is adopted by a Russian clockmaker, Victor Friezland.
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