Greenglass House

Greenglass House by Kate Milford, 2014.

Milo Pine lives with his adoptive parents in the inn they run, a strange, rambling mansion called Greenglass House. Their inn is mainly a smugglers’ inn, one that caters to smugglers as well as normal travelers and sailors. The area where they live sees a lot of smugglers, and the Pines are often paid in random smuggled goods.

Milo is looking forward to the Christmas holidays, when their inn is usually empty. However, this year, an unexpected series of guests arrive shortly before Christmas. Milo is never happy when things don’t go according to plan. It makes him feel out-of-control and panicky, and he was really looking forward to having a relaxing vacation.

The unexpected guests are a motley crew, who all seem unsure exactly how long they plan to be staying.

• Mr. Vinge – A boring-looking old man with oddly colorful socks.
• Georgie – A young woman with blue hair, who is making a pinhole camera out of an old cigar box. She loans an incredible book of stories to Milo.
• Dr. Gowervine – He smokes a pipe and argues constantly with Mrs. Hereward.
• Mrs. Hereward – A fussy woman with mauve luggage.
• Clem – An unusually athletic woman with red hair, who may be a cat burglar.

With all of these unexpected guests, Mrs. Pine calls the inn’s chef, Mrs. Caraway, to come back and cook for them. Mrs. Caraway also brings her two daughters with her: Lizzie, who owns a bakery and also sometimes helps at the inn, and Meddy, the younger daughter, who is into role-playing games.

Milo never likes it when people ask him about being adopted or point out that he looks nothing like his parents. He loves his adoptive parents and thinks of them as being his parents, but he is sensitive that it’s obvious at a glance, even to total strangers, that they’re not his birth parents. Milo is obviously of Chinese descent, and Mr. and Mrs. Pine aren’t. Meddy rubs Milo the wrong way when they first meet by asking him about his adoption and where he came from. He tells her that he’s always lived in this town and that his adoption is none of her business. He doesn’t want to have to tell her, or anyone, that he was a foundling (an abandoned baby). The Pines adopted him as a baby, and he knows nothing about his birth parents. Privately, he has sometimes imagined what his birth parents might have been like or what his life might have been like if he had been adopted by a different family, but he doesn’t like to say so because imaginings like this seem disloyal to the only parents he’s ever known, and he really does love them.

Then, Milo finds a strange map in a blue leather wallet. He has no idea who it belongs to, but it looks like a nautical map. It doesn’t look like the nearby bay or river, but it does have the different shades of blue that are supposed to indicate the depth of water. When a strange sound wakes Meddy early in the morning, she comes to talk to Milo sees the map, recognizing it as an old navigation chart. Meddy is bored because they’re snowed-in at the inn, and she proposes that she and Milo try to figure out which of the guests lost this strange map and what the map is supposed to show. Meddy turns it into one of her role-playing games, getting Milo to design a character as his alter-ego, so they can act the parts.

At first, Milo doesn’t understand quite how the role-playing game is supposed to work, and Meddy has to explain to him how to imagine himself as the kind of character he wants to be. Milo imagines his alter-ego as someone who is always in control, even when unexpected things happen. He imagines himself as athletic and that he has the ability to sense things about the house. Meddy uses Milo’s imaginings to help him build a rogue-like character. Milo knows that this character isn’t the same as himself, but it’s the kind of character he’s always wanted to be, someone self-confident, with unique abilities.

As they begin to investigate the map and the mysterious guests staying at the inn, Milo finds himself thinking in the way his character would think. He also begins to discover that he has some of the abilities that he’s given his character, unique skills and knowledge that he’s never fully appreciated before.

He notices right away that someone has been in his room while he was away, recognizing small changes that have taken place there. Someone has removed the map from the leather wallet and substituted a blank piece of paper in its place! When Milo and Meddy discuss it, they realize that it probably wasn’t the original owner of the map who took it. The rightful owner would probably have taken the wallet as well as the map, and they wouldn’t have needed to resort to a trick to fool people into thinking that the map was still there when it wasn’t. This suggests to Milo that at least two people are involved with the map – the one who lost it and the one who stole it from Milo. More and more, Milo begins to think that the eclectic group of strangers who have descended upon the inn this Christmas might be more involved with each other than they first appear. They might have all come to the inn at the same time for the same purpose, finding whatever the map leads to. Milo also realizes that both the map and the substitute piece of paper have the same watermark, and that watermark matches a symbol in one of the stained glass windows of Greenglass House.

Milo knows that, before his grandfather bought the old mansion and turned it into a smugglers’ inn, it once belonged to a famous smuggler. Although he doesn’t know anything about a hidden treasure or any particular secret about the old house, Meddy thinks that it stands to reason that a smuggler’s mansion that became a smugglers’ inn would hold secrets and possibly hidden treasure.

Three more things are stolen from various guests: an embroidered bag, a pocket watch, and a notebook. Were they stolen by the same person who took the map? Do they have something to do with the map? What are the secrets of Greenglass House and its mysterious guests?

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed this book for its mystery. It is sort of like an old-fashioned country house mystery, with a group of people, all of whom have secrets, in an isolated mansion. Readers are tasked with puzzling out everyone’s secrets and motives along with our hero. You know everyone has done something and everyone has something they’re not telling. The challenge is figuring out what!

There is also a twist to this story that I didn’t see coming, and in a way, I’m almost surprised that I didn’t see it coming sooner. It’s a spoiler to say this, but this story isn’t just a mystery. It’s also a ghost story. I’m not going to say who it is, but one of the characters turns out to be a ghost. Everything in the story hinges on events that took place many years ago, when the former owner the house lived there. Unraveling the current mystery means understanding past events.

Something that I particularly liked about the story was its focus on role-playing games. Through the game, Milo begins to understand more about his own character, the kind of person he would like to be, and who he really is. Playing the role of someone who has qualities that Milo wishes he had brings out some of the qualities that he really does have and hasn’t fully appreciated yet. 

During the course of the story, Milo also confronts his feelings about being adopted. He comes to understand that it’s perfectly normal to think about his birth parents and wonder who they were and that it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love or appreciate the parents who raised him. Events from the past also help him to understand that, whoever his parents were and whatever was happening in their lives that made them give him up, they did the best they could for him, ensuring that he would continue to live and giving him a chance at a good life with people who love him, even if those people couldn’t be them.

As people who run a smugglers’ inn, Milo and his parents have natural sympathy with the smugglers. It seems like many of the local people support the smugglers and the smugglers support them. The events of this story and the explanations about events from the past reveal some of the reasons why smuggling is so prevalent and supported in this town. In real life, smuggled goods tend to be things that are either illegal or heavily regulated, like weapons or drugs. There are usually reasons why these items are banned or restricted. For example, weapons and drugs pose obvious safety risks. Sometimes, luxury goods are smuggled to avoid paying large taxes imposed on these types of goods. In the story, the people are smuggling more ordinary and harmless goods, the sort of things that would be pointless to smuggle in real life because they’re easily obtainable legally. 

It is revealed during the story that the reason why people in this area smuggle very ordinary goods is that there is a corporation that wields too much power and influence and has manipulated shipping regulations to give themselves a monopoly on too many ordinary goods. Publicly, the corporation and the government agencies under their influence spread stories that the smugglers are smuggling harmful goods, like weapons, but the smugglers themselves and the people who know them and their activities know this isn’t the case. It’s just an excuse to shut down competitors, making the smugglers and their activities more acceptable to the readers as well. I was glad to get this explanation because I wondered, from the beginning of the story, what the point of the smugglers were because the first smuggled goods mentioned just didn’t make sense to me as things anyone would want to smuggle.

The book that Milo reads throughout the story and takes inspiration from is called The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. It’s not a book from real life, and the stories he describes aren’t stories that exist outside of this book, but it is the kind of book that I would have liked to read myself, with plenty of elements to intrigue readers. The story explains that a “raconteur” is a storyteller, but it doesn’t explain what a “commonplace book” is. A “commonplace book” is a collection of knowledge and information, sort of like a scrapbook, but with more of an emphasis on writings rather than pictures. They usually contain short pieces of writing, stories or parts of stories, interesting or inspirational quotes, and pieces of information that the person keeping the book wants to remember, all stored in a single volume, one “common” (in the sense of “shared”) place. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in keeping commonplace books, and there are many YouTube videos about how to do it. I think it’s a trend that came from the covid pandemic, renewed interest in DIY trends, and the related Internet aesthetics/genres of Dark Academia and Cottagecore that became popular because of these things. There are aspects of this book that would appeal to fans of both Dark Academia and Cottagecore, and I enjoyed how the story has the potential to spark interest in folklore, role-playing games, commonplace books, and further reading in general!