Unhallowed Halls

Lili Wilkinson just gets better and better, she is right at the top of her game (disclaimer: we've been friendly for years, she lives near me and we run into each other sometimes). Over the course of her writing career, she has produced delightful rom-coms, gripping realist novels about cults and apocalypse, and lately she's turned to chunky volumes of fantasy, all of which have been standalone stories with a fresh world and magic each time. Gee, she's good.

Unhallowed Halls has been deservedly shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year, and at this stage (without having read all the shortlisted books), I hope it wins. It's a terrific tale of elemental magic, set in a remote Scottish school for troubled, rich teenagers (surely there is a nod to Hogwarts here). Page has been brought from Florida to Agathion on a scholarship -- but why? Among a host of gifted adolescents, her gift is a particularly dark and mysterious one. For the first time in her life, Page finds herself part of a friendship group, and even falling in love with a boy. But a web of lies and a horrifying history of deception and murder lies beneath Agathion's seductive surface.

There is a lot of body-swapping in this story and Wilkinson does a stellar job of helping the reader keep track of whose soul is inhabiting who, and when. Underlying the plot (and surely this too might be a gesture toward the weird cruel creature that JK Rowling has become) is a concern with minds, souls and bodies -- are they, and can they be, split? What if mind and body don't feel as if they belong together? Is the body a gross flesh machine to be despised and mortified, or a gift to be relished? These deep questions are wrapped in a thoroughly thrilling and often beautiful fantasy tale that weaves together the boarding school, magic, romance and sacrifice in a fresh and gorgeous way.