The most important rule to follow when you hunt for hat ingredients is this: keep wildness in your wits and magic in your fingertips. Enter a spellbinding world in this soaring magical adventure, perfect for fans of Nevermoor, A Pinch of Magic and Rooftoppers. This book was fun! Cordelia is energetic, and super determined. Though I wish she had opened up to Sam earlier, Cordelia is seemingly tireless at trying to find her father, despite her family's disbelief. I loved how she, Sam and Goose finally got people to begin working together, though it did take things getting pretty bad for all Makers for that to happen. We return to the magical England Tamzin Merchant introduced us to in book one, "The Hatmakers". Cordelia Hatmaker lives with her family of magical hat makers, the Hatmakers, and there are rival families, the Glovemakers, the Bootmakers, the Cloakmakers, and the now disreputable Canemakers. Each family has a Royal charter, and after a falling out years earlier, refuse to even talk to another member of a magical family. But danger is lurking around every corner, and Cordelia must convince the rival Maker families to work together for once - not only to bring her father home, but to save the very essence of magic itself . . .

In Cordelia’s London, magic is real and is woven into objects created by the five Maker families: the Hatmakers, the Bootmakers, the Watchmakers, the Cloakmakers, and the Glovemakers. Growing up in her father Prospero’s footsteps, eleven-year-old Cordelia Hatmaker has learned the family’s ancient skills and secrets so she can one day make her own enchanted hats. Fun, enjoyable with lots of good stuff. I loved the imagination about clothes and hats giving qualities to people. I was a bit annoyed that in some portions Cordelia thinks out loud and tells us what to understand instead of showing it in the story. But this was a nice, fun read nevertheless.A big thing about Ronald Dahl and Diana Wynne Jones is that their books are character driven. They always had wonderful, fully realised characters who made difficult choices and drove the story through their actions. The Hatmakers was 100% plot driven. And while there’s nothing theoretically wrong with a plot-driven story, in this case it meant that the characters had no agency of their own, and were very two-dimensional. They were pushed along by what was happening in the story and didn’t actually need to make any choices of their own, as the story pushed them in the direction it needed them to go. For example, the main character’s best friend, Goose, only actually did one thing in the entire book - he put up a sail at the end. The main character, Cordelia, is something of a Mary-Sue character - she is pretty perfect, has no flaws, is the hero of the day, helps everyone she meets to perfect their lives, and everyone loves her. It doesn’t make for a very interesting main character.

Wildly inventive . . . full of laugh-out-loud humour, enchanting magic and rebellious hope. I loved it' Catherine Doyle What a delightfully magical read! I had such a great time, & I’m so sad I don’t have more in my hands to read right now! Lol Cordelia comes from a long line of magical hatmakers, who weave alchemy & enchantment into every hat. In Cordelia's world, Making - crafting items such as hats, cloaks, watches, boots & gloves from magical ingredients - is a rare & ancient skill, & only a few special Maker families remain. Cordelia comes from a long line of magical milliners, who weave alchemy and enchantment into every hat. In Cordelia's world, Making - crafting items such as hats, cloaks, watches, boots and gloves from magical ingredients - is a rare and ancient skill, and only a few special Maker families remain. When Cordelia's father Prospero and his ship, the Jolly Bonnet, are lost at sea during a mission to collect hat ingredients, Cordelia is determined to find him. But Uncle Tiberius and Aunt Ariadne have no time to help the littlest Hatmaker, for an ancient rivalry between the Maker families is threatening to surface. Worse, someone seems to be using Maker magic to start a war. It's up to Cordelia to find out who, and why . . . And I LOVED the magic system! It was so well thought out and the uniqueness and utter magic of it all just gave me this wonderful fuzzy feeling. I feel like even though there were parts of the magic system explained in Book 1, it was expanded on so much more in this, which was wonderful to see. So, yeah, that was a great part of the story 😁🙌 In her debut novel, British actor Merchant creates an elaborate fantasy world around a family of magical milliners.

Games

The magical elements, which should have really made the book come alive, instead felt shoe-horned in, because there was never any real purpose to them. The central conflict was that of the Maker families decades long quarrel, and the magic wasn’t actually necessary to the story. Instead, crazy magic materials were rattled off in each chapter, creating a laundry list of magical items, that were never fully explored and never came into their own. They were there for the sake of being there, rather than for a specific purpose. At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever. The story is about Cordelia Hatmaker, and begins with her father supposedly drowning at sea, but the main story is about the king going mad and the princess having to take over negotiations with France to stop a war, while it appears that the maker families are being robbed. Merchant's writing is stunning and vivid, written with a beautiful prose style that is both accessible and full of elegance and wit. Some of my favorite parts of Merchant's writing are her focus on detail and her wit, both of which seem to play hand in hand. Something that I am always drawn to in books is when an author includes very minor, quirky details or insights about a world that aren't necessarily necessary, but that for me serve to build up the world and create a more immersive experience, and this is something that I think Merchant captured really well. Similarly, in doing this she includes some strong wit in both her creative details and a bit a humor that acts as an undercurrent and really helps make this story flow even better than it already does.

L’ambiance de la maison chapelier est géniale, un vrai clin d’œil au chapelier fou qu’on aime tant. Remplie d’accessoires et de couleurs, on aimerait y vivre. Puffin started out as a non-fiction publisher, with its first title appearing in 1940. As the most iconic and well-known children’s book brand in the UK today, we are always on the lookout for innovative ways to tell the world’s favourite stories and for brilliant new debut talent and brands that connect with today’s young readers, from newborn up to twelve years old.A world of many Makers—there are Hatmakers, Bootmakers, Glovemakers, Cloakmakers, Watchmakers and Cane makers. Hatmakers weave enchantments into the hats they produce allowing the wearer to be more focussed, brave, daring, violent, angry; anything! And the hats need unique ingredients—like feather of an owl for which you have to undertake a journey, storms in jars, moonbeams etc. Stories featuring strong female hatmakers have captured my heart since meeting Sophie in Market Chipping and this one is no different. Although this isn't quite the next Howls Moving Castle, it's an adorable younger sister to it and delighted my heart as much. Cordelia shares many of the same traits with Sophie: she's determined, loyal and unafraid of doing what's right. The escapades of Cordelia and her friends had me snort-laughing-out-loud, with some delightful twists and a queer romance subplot that just melted my heart. Auf den ersten Teil der "Die Gilde der Hutmacher" Reihe war ich sehr gespannt und ich habe eine Geschichte im Stil der Duftapotheke-Reihe erwartet.