'Fagin’s infamous gang comes to life once again in this exciting Oliver Twist-inspired adventure from bestselling author Karen McCombie.
'Orphan Ettie Shaw is penniless and homeless on the streets of London when she is spotted by her older brother Joe.
'Joe has fallen in with a notorious pickpocket gang run by a man called Fagin, and Ettie has to disguise herself as a boy so she can come back with him to Fagin’s lair.
'At first Ettie is able to help out with mending and other domestic jobs, but when one of the other boys falls ill, Fagin demands that Ettie go out pickpocketing with Joe and everything goes horribly wrong …'
Fagin's Girl is one of the new releases from children's publisher Barrington Stoke, one that takes some inspiration from the famous Dickens novel Oliver Twist to tell a surprising tale.
The book begins in London in 1936, where we meet Ettie Shaw. Ettie is a young girl who lives in a small one room apartment with her mother, and older brother Joe, and is struggling to get by following the death of her father. The family are doing what they can, having moved to a smaller home, and everyone is pitching in to help. Ettie and her mother make fake flowers to sell, whilst Joe works as a table boy at a local brewery.
However, when Joe reveals that the owner of the brewery was beating him, showing the huge bruises that cover his back, he admits that he left the job over a week ago. When he refuses to admit to his mother what he's been doing since, and how he's been getting money for the family an argument breaks out and Joe leaves.
With Joe gone, and with even less money coming in, Ettie and her mother have to move once again, and tragedy soon strikes. Suffering from arsenic poisoning, Ettie's mother passes away, leaving Ettie completely alone in the world. She tries to make it on her own for a while, sleeping rough and trying to earn pennies as a road sweep, but just when all hope seems lost she finds Joe once again. Joe tells her of a man, Fagin, who gives him work and a place to sleep. Joe and Ettie come up with a plan to disguise Ettie as a boy, convincing Fagin to give her a job. But now Joe has to try and hide the truth of just what it is he and Fagin's other boys actually do.
Karen McCombie doesn't hide things from her younger readers with Fagin's Girl, she puts the harshness and cruelty of this era at the forefront of things, showing how children would grow up in poverty, barely surviving, watching parents and siblings die. It's a shocking opening to a book, sure, but it's one that isn't hugely far from the truth of things. And that's something that I always like about Barrington Stoke's historical novels, and McCombie's work, such as The Girl With Her Head In The Clouds, they might be telling fictitious stories but they're very much grounded in reality.
That being said, this book does draw from some more fictitious places, as the name suggests. The book features Fagin, the famous figure from Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, which was first published in the same year that Fagin's Girl is set. Fagin is very much the same character here as in the Dickens book, though I did get the sense that this is him when he's still getting used to his system. He has less children working for him, there's no characters like Dodger there, and it very much seems to be his early days. And I really liked that approach. I think if the book did feature more characters from the original novel it would have felt a bit too much, a bit pastiche, but McCombie manages to walk a perfect line where it feels enough of a nod to the other boo, without going too far.
One of the things that surprised me the most, and this is a spoiler for the ending, so skip ahead if you don't want to know, is how the book shifted gears suddenly at the end. In the penultimate chapter of the book Ettie and Joe are caught pick-pocketing, and thanks to Joe's quick thinking only he gets in trouble for the crime. The next chapter then jumps forward 150 years to 1988, where a young schoolgirl in Australia is giving a talk to her class. It turns out that what we'd been reading the story about how this girls family came to Australia, as Joe was her ancestor. This whole thing was a bit of a shock, a twist I didn't see coming, but it actually worked really well, turning the book into more than a simple Georgian/Victorian era historical piece.
The book also comes with a number of illustrations scattered throughout the narrative, provided by Anneli Bray. Bray's work features on the front cover in colour, and looks absolutely wonderful, showing Ettie playing above the streets of London as the sun sets in beautiful oranges. But from here the artwork takes a darker turn, mostly due to being printed in black and white in the book itself. Now, I really liked this choice to not have the art in colour, as it fit with the narrative. Ettie's life is so hard, and the events so awful that there often feels like there's very little joy in her life, and the gloomy, black and white illustrations really highlight this, as they don't let the reader escape into brightness or bold colours.
Fagin's Girl ended up being an interesting look into life as a poor, downtrodden child on the streets of London in an era where no one would care is you lived or not, where survival was a daily battle. These can be topics that are hard to approach with younger audiences, but McCombie does it wonderfully, making it accessible, whilst not shying away from the awfulness.
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