Book Review: Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard is a curious child, one who is well deserving of a name that sounds like an honorary title. She goes wherever her legs take her. Alone in a foreign city, where it doesn't stop snowing, she is expected to go ice skating with her older sister Alice. She, however, prefers exploring the museum. The museum where her father has taken a job. Her father is a leading international expert on swords and has been called at the eleventh hour to prepare an exhibition of swords for Christmas Eve. During her exploration, Ophelia's legs take her to the third floor of the museum to room No. 303, a room with a keyhole.

There, she stumbles upon the marvellous boy. He has no name — it was taken from him by wizards. He was the one they chose, and then trained, to fight the evil Snow Queen.

Now, Ophelia doesn't believe in things that cannot be classified, especially boys with no name. This ardent member of the Children's Science Society just cannot believe in a boy who is over 300 years-old and talks to her about wizards and misery birds and a Snow Queen, who smells like hot chocolate. But her curiosity gets the better of her and she embarks on an adventure to unlock him from his prison and help fight the end of the world (in three days).

Ophelia and…has everything that is appealing in children's fantasy. There is a magical realm with wizards (who love eating biscuit men), a beautiful villain — the Snow Queen, a battle between good and evil, a quest to save the world and good doses of magic.

She is knock-kneed, has asthma, is called Scrap in school and is still trying to recover from her mother's death. She is also very intelligent. The book is her story, the story of any young child and what she would do when faced with something bizarre.

The two lead characters in the book are the ordinary yet courageous children that you would expect as the stars of any good-versus-evil battle. The marvellous boy is ordinary, but he has greatness thrust on him when he is chosen by wizards as the one who can defeat the Snow Queen. It's a burden he would rather not have, considering that he has to leave his mother and go on a long journey alone. He has lived alone and underfed, imprisoned by the Snow Queen, waiting for the Other One who will help him defeat her evil powers.

Ophelia and… like most children's stories, takes a whimsical look at a few moral values. There is friendship, courage and a questioning of one's beliefs and emotions. Except in this case, unlike other fairytales, there's a boy in distress and Ophelia is his knight in shining armour. Karen Foxlee deserves praise for her subversion of gender roles.

The book explores the collision of a real and a fantasy world and the parallels between the two.

There is evil in both worlds, as well as grief and death. Susan Worthington was a horror writer, and though dead, her presence is felt throughout the book. A large section of the book looks at how the family handles their grief at losing her. Her husband, Ophelia's father immerses himself in his swords, sometimes looking at them with a look of reverence that he usually reserved for his wife. Alice cocoons herself in a gloom of music, emerging out only when the museum curator, beautiful Miss Kaminski takes an interest in her. Ophelia keeps count of the days, hours and minutes since her mother died and tries to overcome her grief by pretending her mother is still talking to her.

There is a constant battle between logic and a questioning of the magical world, most of which goes on inside Ophelia's head. Even when in the middle of a magical realm — feeding a misery bird sardines or taking the help of a ghost called Kara — Ophelia is questioning the existence of wizards and how she would explain it to her classmates back home.

The only problem with the book is that it gets too easy. There are no plot twists and any child will instantly guess the identity of the Snow Queen and the ending. The boy's story is the most interesting. His back story is given enough detail but there isn't too much about how he spent his time being locked in one room for 300 years. Even in a magical world, it is a long time.

Ophelia and…is a feel-good book. At a time when the movie Frozen is making waves at the box office, a renewed interest in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen will work in favour of Karen Foxlee's modern retelling.