The other day, a good friend and I were talking about the middle grades we were raised on. 
 To properly describe it, I'd have to draw forward the example of that scene from The Lightning Thief, where Percy sips ambrosia for the first time and finds that it tastes like his mother's brownies - warm, fresh, soothing. 
 If I ever had the chance to taste test ambrosia for myself, I'm quite sure it'd taste like the books I chose carefully when I was younger: wild, deep-rooted in old folklore and enchantments, ancient and yet robust and timeless. 
 Not to say that I'd willingly drink down the taste of musty, pulpy paper and withering ink, as much as I love the real thing. I think it'd be more of a revitalizing tea or maybe a bracing lemonade laced with its fair share of sweet, earthy herbs that are wick to the very center, a few lumps of sugar to keep your spirits up as you run with wolves and hide in old hollows and maybe even find a new world where your winter coats should hang. 
 Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones (always, always Diana Wynne Jones) - they make up the core of my lifelong love story with children's fantasy. 
 And so, now, Beastkeeper. 
 The story drew me in as all those other books did: a young, empathetic, headstrong heroine, an ancient family curse, stumbling through new circumstances and figuring out the set rules of magic with not much else than suspicious, talking animals, a questionable wild boy ally and previously untapped courage and love. 
 I am always won over by the promise of family devotion and love. 
 And lovely prose. The prose, more than anything else, made me settle down and make a nest for myself within the story. 
 To quote one of my own GoodReads status updates from last night (at only 30% into my e-ARC!): "I am starting to realize what a covetous creature I am. And why authors often compare themselves to ravens. I am highlighting words and perfect phrases to attempt to feather my own nest of impossible ideas. Cat Hellisen is pulling out all the stops of her mastery of words thus far, and I must enviously bow to the fact that I'm so very enchanted and my seven-year-old self is giddily spooning it all into her mouth." 
 (Another note I might add: I am quite picky about what goes into my nest. 
 I do not settle for any shade of yarn, any particular antique fork or old pocket watch or shining turn of phrase. 
 It has to be Just Right, like a tuning fork hitting the right frequency and jolting the rest of my heart into catching up and feeling like, "Yes, that word was meant to be right there." 
 Hearing from the author herself that she was very much inspired by classic fantasy, particularly Diana Wynne Jones - her favorite, Dogsbody, was also the very first that I read! - and Susan Cooper also made me quite sure that she is very much my sort of people.) 
 "Sarah tiptoed along the landing towards her parents' room and wondered what flavor silence was, and if it grew hard and brittle if you threw it away, or if people sometimes stepped on wads of discarded silence and it stuck to the soles of their shoes and made their footfalls softer." 
 And 
 "Sarah tiptoed faster, the shadows clinging to her shoulders like shed ghost-skins." 
 Like that. 
 Exactly like that. 
 It also helps that Sarah is such a sympathetic wildwoods child. At times, I just wanted to hug her, to grasp her by her shoulders and tell her how I could see that she was trying, that she was giving it all - in her body's strength and in her emotions - to figure out the tangled web around her family and the circumstances she was forced to shoulder merely for being born into a cursed family. 
 And that is something that I feel children's literature can address so well: the prices paid for jealousy and hatred, how it really feels to struggle under a parent's sins and bear on as your normal world crumbles around you. 
 The particular details of the curse - how it devours her father and threatens her as well, even with her thinned blood and desperation not to succumb - are wrought in particularly deep and dark tones, and makes it all the more pressing for you to turn the page and find out how Sarah fares. 
 And now, a brief word on the ending. I am well aware that it will not be everyone's cup of tea. Approaching Beastkeeper as I did, with the understanding that fairy tales have evolved as they have, as well as the knowledge that not every ending is happy (though, as you well know, many of those tales do and I myself am not at all averse to perfect conclusions), one twist in particular was very much expected. 
 Though it was still not that easy or less bitter to swallow. 
 To me, the entire denouement fit well with the story and the horrific curse as it stood. I won't say more and spoil it for you, but I am well satisfied as it stood and the hope that (to me) it offered for the characters when the curtains closed.