The Midwatch by Judith Rossell

Title: The Midwatch

Author: Judith Rossell

Genre: Mystery

Publisher: Hardie Grant

Published: 1^st October 2024

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 320

Price: $24.99

Synopsis: The biggest children’s book of the year! The Midwatch is the long-awaited new middle-grade novel from internationally bestselling author–illustrator Judith Rossell, creator of the multi-award-winning novel Withering-by-Sea.

‘The city was stuffed full of wickedness, everyone knew that …’

Banished to the Midwatch Institute for Orphans, Runaways and Unwanted Girls, Maggie Fishbone is sure she’s in for a life of drudgery. But she quickly discovers there’s more to the Midwatch than meets the eye …

The city shimmers with jewels and secrets, and soon Maggie is thrust into an adventure that takes her deep underground, high above the clouds and face to face with danger itself.

Turn the page and prepare to be drawn into a lavishly illustrated world, brimming with mystery, unlikely heroines and an adventure as big as the sky.

~*~

Welcome to the Midwatch Institute for Orphans, Runaways and Unwanted Girls, along with Maggie Fishbone, Nell Wozniak and Sofie Zorescu. They’re orphaned, unwanted and seen as useless by society – so they’ve ended up at the Midwatch – the very last place that wants Maggie, it seems. But there’s much more to the Midwatch than meets the eye. The city has many secrets to discover. Mysteries that need to be solved that nobody else is concerned about. Midwatch is a mysterious place – one where the new girls are uncertain about their fate at first, though upon learning that they keep the city safe, things start to get interesting. The main mystery kicks off when Dr Entwhistle appears to announce Miss Fenchurch is missing, and this is where the adventure and mystery kicks off. And from here, the pace quickens at times to draw readers into the story.

The Midwatch is a mystery story powered by girls who use inventive ways to solve the mysteries that come their way. The girls learn useful skills in secret, and do what they can to hide the realities from the Inspector of Orphans. It’s a clever way of teaching girls to look into mysteries and be detectives in what felt like an interwar period in an unnamed European or English city, which adds to the mystery of the novel as well. Maggie’s new world has airships, secrets and jewels that are very much sought after. Sinister forces are out to stop them, and even the women running the Midwatch have their secrets and connections that nobody really knows about. This is a fun novel, because it uses the girl detective trope well, and plays with it. It allows the girls to be brave and doing things that nobody expects them to do whilst finding ways to blend in with the society.

Its inventiveness is in how it brings things together and the tools the girls use, which made this book shine for me. The mystery at the heart of this book is serious, yet at the same time, it suits the audience. There’s something comforting as well as adventurous in this book. It allows the girls – Maggie, Sofie and Nell in particular – to have a distinct voice that shows what they are really capable of. And it gets the balance of bravery and fear right as well. The children are allowed to be shocked and scared, or worried, and I feel like this is what makes the novel work well. It shows that the children are human. It is, at heart, a book about human nature and mystery, and the lengths people will go to so they can get what they want, or save the world, effectively. The novel is in blue text, and accompanied by beautiful illustrations by the author that help build the setting and story in a wonderfully complimentary way. It reinforces that this is a fictional city set in our real world, and that there are elements of the real world and an imagined one. What this book does is bring these elements together and creates a book that is exciting and invites the reader into a fantastic world and mystery. This amazing book is one that has something for all readers who come to this book, and is magical for all ages.