Billings Better Bookstore & Brasserie
In Melbourne, Australia, in 1875, a nine-year-old girl, Fidelia Knight, is harried off a boat from England, suddenly orphaned during the voyage. She is deposited at an asylum, with her only possession being a single volume of Samuel Johnson’s 1775 dictionary. She is told that her mother died in childbirth, and her father, in his grief, jumped overboard. While she accepts her mother’s demise, her father’s suicide seems unlikely, but there is no proof, nor does she ever investigate. As one may expect, she runs away from the asylum, displays her cleverness, and ultimately gets adopted by an unlikely employee of Billings Better Bookstore. Adventures ensue, including meeting up with other orphans, opening a school, and writing alliterative abecedarian texts.
In addition to Fidelia’s almost absurd vocabulary, she displays an emotional maturity well beyond her years. The only child-like thing I could find was an aversion to green vegetables. Most of the book centers around the other characters’ adulation of Fidelia. She is generous, she is wise, and once she gets to the age of fourteen, she is uncommonly pretty. Most of the book seemed to be a picaresque adventure of a girl with an impressive command of 18th-century language and a tendency to condescend.
In the last quarter, we find the conflict, with much work from the deus ex machina: the mystery of her lost parents, which we were told was not a mystery, and there is very little development until a chance encounter with a little girl who looks like Fidelia’s long-dead sister.
This reader was not a fan, but for those in search of a low-stakes novel where orphans pull off stunningly unlikely successes while also finding families, this novel might be the answer.
