The Ghost Drum
First edition
|
|
| Author | Susan Price |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Ghost World |
| Genre | Children's fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
|
Publication date
|
12 January 1987 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover, paperback) |
| Pages | 184 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 59164609 |
| LC Class | PZ7.P9317 Gh 1987 |
| Followed by | Ghost Song |
The Ghost Drum is a children's fantasy novel by Susan Price, published by Faber in 1987, and the first book in the Ghost World trilogy (1987 to 1995). It is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. Like many traditional tales it is full of cruelty, violence and sudden death.
Price won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a U.S. edition within the calendar year, entitled The Ghost Drum: A Cat's Tale.
The novel is represented as a tale told by the "most learned of all cats". At the beginning and at the head of each chapter, the cat introduces the scenes and the characters. At the end, the cat asks the hearer/reader to pass on the tale so that it may "make its own way back to me, riding on another's tongue."
A slave woman gives her new-born daughter to an old witch to be raised as a "Woman of Power". The witch teaches the girl, Chingis, all her arcane wisdom, including the use of the shamanic ghost drum. With the drum she can enter many other worlds including the ghost-world, the land of the dead. When Chingis's apprenticeship is complete, witches come from all around to congratulate her, but the shaman Kuzma envies and fears her potential for greatness.
The Czar Guidon, the latest in a long line of ruthless rulers, has married by the counsel of his advisers, but he is deathly afraid of being overthrown by his son. He imprisons his pregnant wife, Farida, in a windowless room at the top of the tallest tower in the palace, and when she dies in childbirth he orders that his son, the Czarevich Safa, should never leave the room. Marien, Safa's nurse, raises him there. When he becomes restless at his imprisonment, she dares to speak to the Czar about him and is summarily executed.
The Czarevich spends many years alone before his psychic cries of distress reach Chingis, and then, with the help of the ghost drum, she finds and secretly spirits him away. He is filled with astonishment and wonder at the world he has never seen so much as a glimpse of before. Meanwhile the Czar dies, and fighting breaks out in the palace as his sister Margaretta ascends to the throne: she determines to find her nephew, intending to kill him. Kuzma, arriving in the form of a polar bear, offers to help her.
...
Wikipedia