Annika has actually signed over La Rondine's jewels, including her famous Star of Kazan, but is unaware of what she has done. They manage to alert Annika and inform her that Frau Edeltraut is not her mother, which Annika instantly acknowledges and jumps into the river to evade her. But when Frau Edeltraut ships Annika off to a miserably strict boarding school, Zed suspects that there is more to the von Tannenberg legacy than meets the eye. Annika goes to live with her mother and new family, but finds out that things are not quite as they appeared when she first met her mother. I wasn't in the mood to read a depressing story, so I skimmed the rest of the book, because I was interested in seeing what happened.

The Star of Kazan | PDF - Scribd The Star of Kazan | PDF - Scribd

Although her friends back in Vienna are pleased for Annika they can't help but feel uneasy about the whole thing - especially Ellie. However given the evocative description of the neighbourhoods in Vienna, the Spanish Riding school, brooding castles in the German countryside and food delicacies, it could very well pass for a fantasy novel as well! Frau Edeltraut von Tannenberg whisks Annika off to Spittal, a sprawling estate in northeastern Germany.And the author takes the time to show us Annika’s life, from when she is raised as a foundling by a housemaid and a cook who work in the professors’ house in Vienna to when she thinks she has finally found her true home at Spittal with her mother, one of the great “vons”. The author, with ancestry from Vienna herself, dedicates the second chapter of the book to discussing life there at that time. Her books are imaginative and humorous, and most of them feature magical creatures and places, despite the fact that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because she wanted to decrease her readers' fear of such things. They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors.

The star of Kazan : Ibbotson, Eva : Free Download, Borrow The star of Kazan : Ibbotson, Eva : Free Download, Borrow

There, Annika has made a happy life in the servants’ quarters, surrounded with friends, including the elderly woman next door who regales Annika with stories of her performing days and her countless admirers – especially the Russian count who gave her the legendary emerald, the Star of Kazan. The true nature of her society becomes horribly clear when the Singer appears for his annual performance with chained, bloody ankles, followed by Kira’s long-lost father, who, it turns out, was blinded and left for dead by a Guardian. She had a chest of jewels she thought to be fake, and as she died without knowing that they were real, she bequeathed them to Annika in her will. After twelve-year-old Annika, a foundling living in late nineteenth-century Vienna, inherits a trunk of costume jewelry, a woman claiming to be her aristocratic mother arrives and takes her to live in a strangely decrepit mansion in Germany.The mansion is enormous—but decaying; the von Tannenberg family is glamorous and noble—but secretive.

The Star of Kazan (Audio Download): Eva Ibbotson, Ruth Jones The Star of Kazan (Audio Download): Eva Ibbotson, Ruth Jones

Ibbotson wrote more than twenty books for children and young adults, many of which garnered nominations for major awards for children's literature in the UK, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and the Whitbread Prize. A splendid orphan story --- and a good one for reinforcing the idea that we can make our own families. Abandonnée dans une église en pleine montagne, elle a été élevée par une famille excentrique de Vienne. learning to cook Viennese delicacies from Ellie, keeping the house sparkling clean and doing a multitude of odd jobs for the eccentric professors who are the owners of the house.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to Ibbotson's The Secret of Platform 13, which came out three years before the first Harry Potter book.