A review by foggy_rosamund
Binny in Secret by Hilary McKay

3.0

The characters from McKay's later novel, The Skylark's War, first appear here. Binny is staying in an old house in Cornwall, and, in the attic, finds handmaid butterflies and carefully printed cards, written by children 100 years earlier. Binny is struggling to fit in at a new school, and inadvertently caused the ire of popular Clare. The natural world draws her in: the butterflies and foxes on the disused train line, the herons and kestrels. She's also drawn to the children who lived in the house so long ago, and their story echoes her own. This novel felt less evocative to me than some of McKay's other works, and Binny isn't my favourite of McKay's characters, but it's still full of human warmth, humour, optimism, and beautiful descriptions of the natural world and how sustaining and moving small glimpses of the wild can be.