Cbr15bingo Dwelling, illustrations by Claire Powell
This is a really fun work of kids lit (ages 8-12) that involves a murder mystery set in a very old ancestral home. Swift manor is a house full of secret passages and rooms, a place that has evolved over time along with the highly unusual Swift family. Each member of the family, at birth, is given a name chosen at random from the family Dictionary. Names seem to turn out to be strangely fitting for each member; is that because the Dictionary “knows” a person’s character or is it that your name influences how others treat you and so you become more like your name? That is one of the burning questions for protagonist Shenanigan Swift, a mischievous 13-year-old who, as the family reunion approaches, has big plans to find the missing family treasure hidden somewhere on the house grounds. But with a missing treasure and a house full of relatives with names like Atrocious and Pique, Shenanigan and her sisters Phenomena and Felicity find themselves investigating murder.
There’s a lot to like about this story. The murder mystery/treasure hunt combo is good and keeps the reader and Shenanigan guessing as to who did it and where that treasure is. The characters in this story are loads of fun and I think will be appealing to fans of Roald Dahl and Flavia de Luce from Alan Bradley’s series. The family matriarch, Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude, requires Shenanigan and her sisters to practice for her funeral and seems to delight in criticizing their efforts. Phenomena is a budding scientist with a mind for research and no sense of smell, while Felicity, the eldest sister, is devoted to fashion and design. Felicity is an interesting character; she has an especially combative relationship with Shenanigan, often thwarting Shenanigan’s plans and then being on the receiving end of Shenanigan’s revenge. Felicity seems not at all happy despite her name, and we learn that that is because in the Swift family a name like Felicity — which even a non-Swift might have — makes her seem less special.
The matter of names is important to the story and part of a very important larger message of this novel. Shenanigan, because of her name, is thought to be incorrigible and perhaps incapable of being a good and trustworthy person. This bothers her quite a lot. The Swift sisters’ cousin Erf named themselves Erf just a year ago; we never learn what name the Dictionary chose for Erf and I like it that way. Shenanigan, upon meeting Erf, is not sure if Erf is a boy or a girl, and as Erf never answers the question, Shenanigan simply refers to Erf as they/them. Erf has an important conversation in the story with another character named Fauna about names and identity. Fauna reveals that when she was born, everyone thought she was a boy and that she had to learn how to speak in order to set them straight. When Erf asks Fauna whether it was hard to get people to listen to her about this, Fauna replies:
“Sometimes.” Fauna sipped her tea. “There will always be people who think they know you better than you know yourself. But I quickly learned that they don’t matter; the people who love you are the people who listen.”
“Your gran doesn’t get a say in who you are. No one in the world makes that decision but you.”
Fauna is an outstanding character and has more important and interesting things to say about self definition at the end of the story. It’s beautiful and it’s a wonderful message for kids (and adults).
The Swifts is also an incredible vocabulary builder! Pretty much every character’s name is also defined (Maelstrom, Candour, Fortissimo, to name a few) and the reader gets plenty of synonyms to boot (and wonderfully awful puns). Shenanigan and her family are a delight to know and it looks like this is the beginning of a series. Book 2 is available for pre-order, and I want to know more about Shenanigan’s absentee parents along with the rest of her family. I can’t wait to see what they get up to next.