Anna Hoghton: Orla and the Wild Hunt (Chicken House 2022)
Orla and her younger brother Apollo have recently lost their mother. It seems to have turned her world inside out and upside down. Orla hopes that when they visit their grandmother in Ireland, everything will be the way it used to be. Unfortunately, she must be wrong, because their gran is behaving strangely: she hides something in the garden shed, locks all the windows and doors and forbids them to go out after dark, even though she herself leaves the house. Could these strange things have something to do with the disappearances? When their gran also disappears, it is Orla and Apollo’s turn to take control, put aside their grief and anger, and together find their gran before it is too late…
The story draws from Irish-Celtic mythology, bringing its elements into our modern world. However, its main theme is the processing of grief, because after all, humanity has always fled to the world of myths, fairy tales and stories when reality was unbearable. Orla feels broken and incomplete after the death of her mother and she thinks that no one else in the family has endured such tragedy. She distances herself from everyone, even her friends, even though it is not their fault that they have mums and she does not. The story is about Orla’s pathfinding – both real and figurative – and the author presents this with a series of trials familiar from fairy tales. The main lesson of the story for me is that we must make good use of the little time we are given here on Earth.
Anna Hoghton is a writer, poet and copywriter, but she also wrote and directed the short film about climate change titled Never Land. Her first children’s novel, The Mask of Aribella, was published in 2020 and has won several children’s book awards. Orla and the Wild Hunt is her second novel and I hope many more will follow. The book’s wonderful double-sided cover is the work of illustrator David Dean.
