![]() The setup - that after the death of Iris, Bluebell’s twin sister, the family has come apart, parents burying themselves in work, children running riot - does what a lot of good children’s fiction aims to do: sidelines the parents from the start. ![]() ![]() There are a clutch of siblings, a bossy grandmother and a male au pair named Zoran, a Bosnian refugee, graduate student and happy addition to the nanny pantheon. ![]() Bluebell’s father teaches medieval history at a distant university and writes “books that nobody ever read except his students because he made them.” Her mother works for a big cosmetics company when she talks with her children, it is usually via Skype. It is set in London, among a family of means (they live in a house on “Chatsworth Square,” which the 12-year-old narrator says is rundown but “apparently quite valuable”). There is a pleasing mixture of the modern and the old-fashioned in “After Iris,” Natasha Farrant’s first middle-grade novel and her first book to be published in the United States. “And stop looking at everyone through that stupid camera.” ![]() “Stop creeping up on people!” exclaims her elder sister, Flora. Bluebell Gadsby is the kind of heroine who brings to mind Cassandra Mortmain in “I Capture the Castle” or Harriet the Spy: awkward, lonely and always off to one side, scribbling, or - in the latest iteration of the teenage journal - filming. ![]()
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