The Hats of Marvello by Amanda Graham

Title: The Hats of Marvello

Author: Amanda Graham

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 8^th March 2023

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 304

Price: $19.99

Synopsis:  A delightfully fantastical story for middle-grade readers that sparkles with magic and mystery. Perfect for Emily Rodda fans.

No matter how much Olive longs for a pet rabbit, it’s never going to happen. Not when she lives in an Australian country town where most people think they’re a pest.

So imagine Olive’s shock when she unexpectedly finds not one, but one hundred and one rabbits. And one of them can talk!

How Olive will ever be able to hide and protect the rabbits is going to be her greatest challenge, and all while preparing for the Year 5 play. At least she has her costume ready, although the old top hat she found in the local op-shop seems very odd …

Perfect for fans of Emily Rodda, The Hats of Marvello is a delightful, magical adventure story that will keep readers spellbound.

~*~

Olive lives in Mount Dry, a small country town on the border of Victoria and South Australia that hates rabbits. At eleven years old, Olive is in year five and her class is set to put on a play called Fab Fox and Superdingo about all the wonderful animals in the world – except, according to her grandfather, rabbits. Olive lives with her mum and grandfather on their farm, whilst her father works in a FIFO job. And now Olive needs a fantastic costume befitting a narrator for the play, so she heads to Poppy’s Oppy with Mum to get her costume. Here, she finds an old green top hat – perfect for a narrator! But one day it starts to buzz, and a hundred white rabbits and one black rabbit appear from the hat. Olive loves rabbits but most of the people in Mount Dry don’t, so she has to hide them until she can get them back to where they came from.

At the same time in England, two magicians – Reynard and Wilby, are practising a trick to pull one hundred rabbits out of a hat. One is good, and one is bad – and this is where the mystery and fantasy come into play – how do the rabbits – so many of them – come out of one hat, and what is Reynard really up to? Olive will soon be caught up in something that is magical and fantastical. She discovers that the rabbits can travel between hats – and between Australia and England! But where did the hats come from, and how did Olive’s hat end up in Australia? She sets off on a trail of discovery – about the hats, about magic, about a man called Marvello and his link to her home town. So can Olive help Robbit, the talking black rabbits, his friends, Wilby, and her town, and solve the mystery of Marvello and his magical hats and still participate in her school play? Read on to find out!

Amanda Graham’s new middle reader’s book for readers aged eight and older starts off as an unassuming story – quite normal, and quite straightforward, but by chapter two, is becomes clear that it is anything but a straightforward, normal story. As the magical hat starts to release the bunnies, and we meet the sinister magician half a world away from Olive as the book alternates between Reynard and Olive, England and Australia, the story and the crux behind it is revealed slowly and we learn what we need to know as we need to know it – so that when we as readers reach the climax, there are many ways that the story could end and I know which one I was hoping for. I liked the way this was done, as it allowed the story to remain simple to follow but had layers of complexity that allowed the layers of magic to be revealed as we needed to know about them. Like any good mystery, hints are dropped at the start, and explained later on, and done in a way that is befitting of the novel and doesn’t leave the reader in the dark as to what it is all about.

Whilst all the magic and mayhem is going on, is the very real family dynamics, and what it is like to live in a country town, on a farm, and in a family struggling for money. As Olive’s family struggles with crops and rabbits, money and what to do after accidents, we get to see how this reality impacts Olive and her desires, her dreams, and her anxieties about so many things. So the story is about her finding her place, and working out how to help Robbit and his friends, Wilby, and the bunnies in her town that everyone wants to get rid of. The intersection of reality and magic worked well together – you would think it would be quite out of place, but I think Amanda has woven the themes together well, so that they make sense and are entertaining for readers of all ages. It is one of those fun reads that has layers, but you can read it for any of these layers and nuances, or just read for a fun story filled with rabbits and magic.

I think readers aged eight and older will enjoy this, in particular confident readers however, as the chapters are short, it is also good to read aloud to reluctant readers, as the themes might be what they need to encourage them to explore a book like this, and it has illustrations throughout by Lavanya Naidu that add to the magic of the story, and cement the setting and characters in the minds of readers, and I hope people enjoy this book.