Today is my stop on the blog tour for How to be Brave by Daisy May Johnson. I was lucky enough to be sent this gorgeous book by the wonderful people at Pushkin Press and I can't wait to tell you all about how great it is.
How to be Brave is a school story crossed with a rescue mission and it's really, really good. It has strange old buildings, a villain with a decades old grudge, secret passageways, abseiling nuns and copious biscuit references - what more could you possibly want? From the blurb alone I knew it was going to be exactly my kind of book.
At the start of the book we meet Elizabeth North, an unusual girl whose parents swiftly die. She is then placed into the care of the Good Sisters, a somewhat unconventional order of nuns, and taken to live at their boarding school, where she grows up to become obsessed with a rare species of duck. After spending a little time in Elizabeth's childhood the book jumps forward to years later, when Elizabeth is offered the chance of a lifetime to pursue her duck research, and sends her daughter Calla to the School of the Good Sisters, where she had such a wonderful time herself as a child.
How to be Brave brought together everything that's great about both school stories and adventure stories and blended them together so fantastically that everything that happened in the story, no matter how farfetched, always felt entirely believable. It is filled with characters who are both incredibly grounded and intensely imaginative (often at the same time). Of course, as all good school stories are, it's an ensemble piece, with Calla quickly finding best friends for life in her two roommates, fantastically dramatic French girl Edie, and much more prgamatic Hanna. The villain of the story, Magda DeWitt, has been Elizabeth's self proclaimed rival since childhood and is so ridiculously over the top about her competitiveness with Elizabeth that she's spent years pretty much obsessing about her, eventually becoming headmistress at the school they both attended as children, but as her grand scheme is revealed it becomes obvious that she's missed several essential things about the School of the Good Sisters despite her years attending it. This is very much a story about friendship and its power, and it's really lovely.
I loved the unapologetic self determination of How to be Brave. The story is so definite and so confidently told that it leaves no room to do anything other than love it. The regular biscuit references are just an added bonus, but as biscuits are a very important part of life it seems fitting that they're also an important part of a story where knowing which kind of biscuit to offer for a given emotional situation is a crucial life skill.
As we follow Calla and her friends through their troubles and discover more about what the Good Sisters can really do, and what can really be achieved when people stick together in the face of wannabe dictator headmistresses, it's hard not to be inspired by the tenacious bravery of How to be Brave. I can't wait to read Daisy May Johnson's next book. Oh, and the cover is beautiful too!
The blog tour is just starting, so you can read what lots of other fantastic people thought about How to be Brave and order your own copy from Pushkin Press here.
"I'm delighted to announce that this review has been shared by Twinkl! For even more great recommendations, make sure to visit their TBR blog"
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