WWW: Greenglass House by Kate Milford

I requested Greenglass House by Kate Milford at my library after reading Sherry’s review of it.  It’s a 2014 Cybils nominee in the middle grade speculative fiction category, so I’m also reading it as a part of my Armchair Cybils challenge.  I love how the story begins:

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smugglers’ town.

You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing.  And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money.  Smugglers are always going to be flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today.  You should, if you are going to run a smugglers’ hotel, get a big account book and assume that whatever you write in it, the reality is, you’re going to get paid in fountain pen cartridges.  If you’re lucky.  You could just as easily get paid with something even more useless.

Milo Pine did not run a smugglers’ hotel, but his parents did.  It was an inn, actually; a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities.  It was called Greenglass House, and it was on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb.  It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn’s private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill.  And of course the inn wasn’t only for smugglers, but that was who turned up most often, so that was how Milo thought of it.  (1-2)

Intrigued yet? 🙂