Solving The Mystery Of The Lamp

The Age

Saturday November 24, 2007

Dianne Dempsey

Amelia Dee & the Peacock Lamp

By Odo Hirsch

Allen & Unwin, $15.95

Odo Hirsch seduces with his characters and their charms, says Dianne Dempsey.

Odo Hirsch is a children's writer who eschews fat bums and smelly farts for allegorical tales with a distinct phantasmagorical bent. His first book, Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman featured a little boy whose father happened to be a magician - Scarrabo the Magnificent.

In Hirsch's latest offering a mysterious brass peacock lamp shines throughout the book as a powerful metaphor for all that is true and happy. The lamp hangs outside the bedroom of Amelia Dee, a delightful character whose father is an inventor and whose mother paints, sculpts and weaves. Downstairs in their tall and peculiar house there lives a yoga teacher with only one pupil - but what a pupil she is - the Princess Parvin Kha-Douri. But far from being kind and beautiful, the princess is old and bitter and in exile from her kingdom. The princess and Amelia have one thing in common - their fascination for the peacock lamp.

So fascinated is Amelia by the lamp that one day she reaches over the banister to try to touch it. In an indelible moment Amelia loses her balance and finds herself perilously swinging over the deep stairwell. According to Amelia it was a scary experience. "But an interesting one."

This wryly written fable seduces the reader with distinct and engaging characters, much charm and great humour.