After spending seven years with him, secluded and forced to wear a mask on the rare occasions that he has visitors, Neverfell follows a white rabbit out a hole into the wider world of Caverna-a Wonderland that is just as confusing but far more dangerous than Alice's. Discovering that she can remember nothing about her parents or how she came to be hiding out in his tunnels, he decides to adopt her and make her his apprentice as a cheesemaker. She's called this because she falls into a vat of Neverfell milk curds in the private tunnels of Master Grandible. Neverfell, the protagonist of A Face Like Glass, has a wonderfully ironic name.

The first of these is fairly common, especially in children's and teens' literature, but the second is far less so, at least when it's not done in a consciously clever, postmodern way. The reason I consider this so important is that I've come to see A Face Like Glass as a novel that does two things simultaneously: it shows us a protagonist learning to see things clearly, and it shows readers that the appearance of the very story they are reading may be just that, and that there may be other possible readings to it.

This could also be said to be a moral of A Face Like Glass, but here it's developed with great complexity into something rather new, so that its apparent familiarity is itself deceptive. Shortly after finishing A Face Like Glass, I read Martin Lewis's review of Hardinge's previous book, Twilight Robbery (2011), and was struck by his discussion of its 'true' and 'sensible' but overly familiar moral: that appearances can be deceptive. A Face Like Glass is Frances Hardinge's fifth novel, and I'm going to start this review by saying that much as I have loved every one of those novels, I think this might be her best.

A face like glass