In the last few years Joanne (author of the best-selling book Chocolat) has quietly been cutting herself a genre niche by writing reimagined traditional folklore tales. So far we’ve had Norse mythology centred around Loki and Celtic sea-myths based on the Child Ballads with A Pocketful of Crows and The Blue Salt Road.

These Child Ballads are important.

According to good old Wikipedia, the Child Ballads are “305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century” which are fairly unknown today but are the basis for many traditional folk-stories.

They’re clearly a potentially rich source of material for writers. They are often in prose but also in poem and song form. Some deal with traditional tales such as Robin Hood or King Arthur, whilst others are often what we would call fairy tales, but as that list of motifs suggests, are often darker, more adult, often bawdy. Just ripe for an author to adapt for contemporary readers!

What has this got to do with Orfeia? Well, this time around, Joanne has taken on more of the Child Ballads, in this case Numbers 2 and 19.  The story is a gender-flipped retelling of the story of Orpheus from the Underworld.

Fay Orr begins the book in deep shock, struggling to cope with the death of her daughter Daisy. She attends therapy but generally struggles to get through the day, running through the streets of London late at night to  try and reduce the pain and deal with the issue that she was not there when Daisy committed suicide.

Revelations mean that Fay discovers that her daughter may not be dead, although whether this belief is caused by some sort of mental breakdown caused by Fay’s grief or by Fay’s guilt (because she was not there for her Daisy when she died) is not clear.

There she meets Alberon, Cobweb, Mab, Peronelle and Moth, first as homeless people but then later as characters that may be more like their true selves. Fay discovers that she has a past that she cannot remember, but clearly others do. Whilst sharing a cigarette with these vagrants, Fay enters some sort of fugue dream-state and is surprised to glimpse Daisy seemingly alive in this strange otherworld named London Beyond.

In this similar yet different otherworld, Fay realises that she can bring Daisy back to life in the real world by meeting the Hallowe’en King. This is not easy. She begins a quest that means that she has to answer three riddles on her journey. It will involve travel on a strange train to the court of King Alberon in the land of Fae and then to the Kingdom of Death to meet the Hallowe'en King. However, the King of the Kingdom of the Dead does not let go of things easily, and Fay is told that the King does not give without taking. She must make a sacrifice in return for her daughter. The conclusion of the story is about the choices Fay makes and the revelations she discovers.

So, we have big bold themes here – life, death, love, sacrifice, all with an element of mystery. Orfeia is a book that, like the best of the old folktales, is determined to touch the reader’s emotions, whilst grounding itself in universal aspects of life and death, such as the bond between a mother and her daughter. It shows how far a person will go and what they will do to save those they love. It is quite a journey – imaginative, yet strange and even in places decidedly creepy.

As I see it, the trick with Fairy tales is that they must always manage to combine the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ to create their setting. Joanne does this supremely well, showing us glimpses of London and then an alternate London (London Beyond) through lush, vivid images to create a magical sense of wonder, as you would hope for in a fairy-tale.

“She saw a row of arches choked with vegetation, and beyond that the railway; the overhead lines now garlanded with bindweed. Trumpet-shaped flowers and heart-shaped leaves cascaded over signals and points, and there were railway carriages, now covered with moss and hanging vines.”

This is also partly shown through a lovely combination of human life and elements of nature, whether it is the Moon, the landscape or the diversity of names of plants, animals and insects. (As you might tell from the illustrations and the cover, moths and butterflies are recurrent themes here.)  You don’t need to know the background to the Child Ballads to love this story, but if you do, you can appreciate how glorious and wonderfully clever this version is.


As with The Blue Salt Road and A Pocketful of Crows, the novella is beautifully illustrated throughout by Bonnie Helen Hawkins. I spoke of the quality of the drawings that were so sympathetic to the prose in my review of The Blue Salt Road, but will say that these are just as good. There’s detail, beauty and even weirdness there in incredibly detailed pencil drawings that reflect that combination of beauty and nature. These interior pencil sketches are further complimented by a foil cover by Sue Gent that photos do not really do justice. Altogether it’s a smashing piece of work.

The timing of the publication of this one could not be more apt. As the nights start to draw in for Autumn here, this would be a great tale to settle down with, perhaps beside a warm fire and with a nice cup of tea. Fans of Neil Gaiman and (going further back) Lord Dunsany’s lyrical prose will appreciate this one as a short tale to spend time in, luxuriating in the imagery and the style.

To summarise, I think that out of all of the novellas Joanne has written so far in this series, this is my favourite so far. I look forward to more.