The Girl of Ink and Stars ~ Kiran Millwood Hargrave

This isn’t the first Kiran Millwood Hargrave book that I have read. The first was The Deathless Girls which I adored. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading more of her work and The Girl of Ink and Stars is the first on my list.

Whilst The Deathless Girls is YA, The Girl of Ink and Stars is Middle-Grade fantasy and is Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut novel. It is set on a fictional island named Joya (which if you look up the longitude and latitude, you will find is based on an island in the Canaries). Isabella lives with her cartographer father in a town that has been cut off from the rest of the island by the governor. Then one day, a girl is murdered, the only clue the mysterious scrapes on the ground that look as if they have been made by animal claws. In a moment of anger, Isabella tells her friend, the governor’s daughter, that the governor and his entire family are rotten. Lupe, in response, sets off to find the murderer in an effort to prove that she is not rotten. 

Despite this book being middle grade, it kind of straddles the line between middle grade and YA. It is steeped in tragedy and Isabella’s life is very much defined by loss. Her motivation is definitely from fear of losing anybody else, especially after having already lost her mother and twin brother. 

The blurring of age-groups means that sometimes the characters seemed mature for their age and the book dealt with death maturely but then other moments it made the characters seem extremely childish (especially when one tried to win an argument with because I’m older) when in fact they were only acting their ages. It was the only issue I had with the book.

I loved this story and the casual weaving of myths and family stories into the narrative. Kiran Millwood Hargrave made such realistic stories that I could easily believe were real (and for all I know they could’ve been inspired by real mythology) and something that people believe in. 

This book ticked a lot of boxes for me and so I give it four stars.

 C🌙