Review No.53 – A Corner of White

A Corner of White – Jaclyn Moriarty

Pan Macmillan Australia, 2012

It begins with a note found poking out from underneath a broken parking meter. Madeleine Tully, a chronic runaway living with her zany mother in a cheap Cambridge flat, thinks that it’s a joke and impulsively decides to write back. Only the note was not a joke, and the letter she writes is found by a boy called Elliot Baranski, who lives quite literally a world away in a farming town called Bonfire in the Kingdom of Cello. He realises that the letter has come through a crack – a space between their worlds. Cracks are dangerous, he knows, but instead of reporting it, he writes a reply, beginning a correspondence of mutual nonsense. Madeleine doesn’t believe in him and Elliot doesn’t understand her, but there is something that holds them together: a hole of loss in both their lives, and the desperate hope that somehow they can fix it.

Jaclyn Moriarty is a Sydney-based author whose previous works include Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Year of Secret Assignments. A Corner of White is the first in a new series, ‘The Colours of Madeleine’, and is a book of distinct but interconnected halves. Madeleine’s rainy Cambridge is the stronger of the two, richly whimsical yet consistent, while Elliot’s Cello is a peculiar cross between the caricature of a traditional ‘magical kingdom’ and modern North America, complete with baseball caps and television soap operas. There are some wonderful elements of fantasy – carnivorous Colours that can rip a man to shreds, unpredictable seasons that wander at will throughout the kingdom – but they are not given a stable context in which to shine, and the characters in Cello range from believable to irritatingly twee. A Corner of White is not entirely satisfying, but it sets up a clever concept and fleshes that out with the beautiful musings of Isaac Newton and Lord Byron. I’ll be interested to see what happens when the second book of the series is released.