Hilary McKay excels in conveying the anarchic bedlam of family life, and she has excelled herself in her marvellous new novel, Saffy’s Angel (Hodder Children’s Books pound;10), which deserves to be placed alongside such classics as Little Women and The Railway Children. McKay’s writing is pacier and lighter in tone than that of Alcott or Nesbit, but the effect is no less heart-warming.
The parents of the four Casson children are artists. Dad spends all week at his studio in London, returning to Banana House only at the weekends. Eve, their mother, is always in the shed, working on her latest canvas. So the children - Cadmium, Saffron, Indigo and Rose - are loose cannon, providing McKay with rich material for comic tours de force.
These proceed with breathtaking inventiveness, from the opening chapter in which an exasperated health visitor discovers that baby Rose has been sucking on a tube of yellow-ochre paint, to the final climactic journeys, with Saffy stowing away in another family’s car en route for Siena while Caddy, having finally passed her driving test after more than 90 lessons, drives the other children to Wales. Both trips are in search of a stone angel, mysteriously bequeathed to Saffy by her grandfather.
Saffy discovers at the age of eight that she is not the other children’s sister, but their cousin - brought into the household after her parents died in a car crash. While she is quite a serious soul, every other character is crazy. The book will be difficult to read aloud without breaking off for a bout of watery-eyed chuckling.
