Ivy - Hardcover

Hearn, Julie

3.35

1,560 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416925066 ISBN 13: 9781416925064

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2008

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Ivy is used to being overlooked. The youngest in a family of thieves, scoundrels, and roustabouts, the girl with the flame-colored hair and odd-colored eyes is declared useless by her father from the day she is born. But that's only if you look at her but don't see. For Ivy has a quality that makes people take notice. It's more than beauty -- and it draws people toward her.

Which makes her the perfect subject for an aspiring painter named Oscar Aretino Frosdick, a member of the pre-Raphaelite school of artists. Oscar is determined to make his mark on the art world, with Ivy as his model and muse. But behind Ivy's angelic looks lurk dark secrets and a troubled past -- a past that has given her an unfortunate taste for laudanum. And when treachery and jealousy surface in the Eden that is the artist's garden, Ivy must learn to be more than a pretty face if she is to survive.

Julie Hearn, author of The Minister's Daughter and The Sign of the Raven, has created a memorable tale of nineteenth-century England with a character destined to take her place alongside Dickens's Pip and Oliver Twist.

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About the Author:

Julie Hearn was born in Abingdon, England, near Oxford, and has been writing all her life. After studying to be a journalist, she worked in Australia and lived in Spain, before returning to England, where she worked as a features editor and columnist. She is now a full-time writer. Her first book published in the United States was The Minister's Daughter.

From Booklist:

Hearn (The Minister’s Daughter, 2005) pulls off an intriguing, Dickensian tale that combines authentic nineteenth-century period detail with well-developed, credible characters and an out-of-the-ordinary setting—the Pre-Raphaelite art world. London slum-dweller Ivy was kidnapped at five, on her first and only day of school, by a small band of gentle thieves. She returned home a few years later, a laudanum addict. At 15, she’s roused from her typical drugged state in order to earn money as a painter’s model, at which point the adventure goes full throttle: the painter’s mother is jealous enough to try both poison and imprisonment to do away with Ivy; the painter himself is so self-centered that he only notices Ivy’s physical strikingness, not any of her social or emotional needs. Eventually, Ivy eschews her laudanum in order to take control of her life, which, in spite of a bad beginning proceeds promisingly—with some help from the thieves introduced earlier. Fans of Eleanor Updale’s books will immediately take to this tale of Victorian trials, tribulations, and scamps. Grades 8-10. --Francisca Goldsmith

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