Petronella
is not a physically attractive woman, nor is she sophisticated
or genteel. When she buys a house near Fort Willow the children
make fun of her and the adults are rude. Her only friend is
her cat, Maalox, who came with the house. The other thing
that came with the house is an evil-looking tree that seems
to move around the back yard. At the village ball she asks
the butcher and the arrogant Farmer Giles to marry her with
bad results, whereby she cursed them all and went home. Meanwhile
Maalox was making time with the village cats and is spurned
by a pretty little kitty. He was so mad that he started tearing
up the turf and found a skull, which in true cat fashion he
dragged into Petronella’s living room. Then he went
back and got the torso and hid it in the garden. That night
Petronella runs into the soul of the Hooded Horseman who wants
to come back and talk to her again.
There are a lot of ideas in this story like the evils of absolute
power, mistreated spirits returning from the dead to live
out normal lives, a trip through Hell in a modern version
of Dante’s Inferno, an evil presence in the mortal world
capturing decent people and trapping them in its lair, mind
control and becoming the hero, but none of them are deeply
developed. For example Petronella learns that she is “The
Chosen One” and receives a metal disc with “TCO”
on one side and a skull on the other. With it she can make
the wakened spirits do her bidding or send them all to perdition.
Why is she TCO? “Because she is a good woman,”
says the Horseman. But why is she more “good”
than any other in Fort Willow or the rest of Westshire? What
makes her so special? And I didn’t think she was so
good. The first thing she does with her influence is tell
the spirits they can go into the town and live in their old
homes, which drives most of the modern people away! Sounds
vindictive to me, but she’s not all bad as she takes
in a boy and leads him on a journey to find his parents who
had been captured by the Trogot and taken below the tree.
This is a book I think was probably better as a concept than
in its execution, or the author tried to dumb down or soften
it for kids. It could have easily been a gory horror story
with a little more description, but it falls short on the
gross stuff so it probably wasn’t meant to go there.
I would read another of this author’s books if I like
the publisher’s blurb just because of the potential
and originality I see in this one. I will recommend Petronella
and the Trogot to most of my younger teenage nieces and
nephews.
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