What lies behind such a beautiful cover?
Mysterious keys, locked doors, quests, a gloomy house? No, not quite. This is not a quest book where the reader solves riddles alongside the characters. And the house isn't gloomy, either. No corpses, not even a single ghost—nothing scary at all!
...The old house is located in a sunny French village, surrounded by fields and people—in short, nothing will frighten the reader. A mother comes here on vacation with her two children. The house was left to them in their late grandfather's will, and the family doesn't yet know what to do with it. It’s a large, three-story house with many locked rooms. There are keys, but they have to be searched for and matched, so it's impossible to open all the rooms at once—the house is in no hurry to share its secrets with its new inhabitants. One by one, the children open the doors and realize that this isn't just a regular residential house. But what exactly happened here? Their mother clearly knows the answer, but for some reason, she avoids the conversation and becomes sad whenever she is asked about it.
It seems that a multitude of guests stayed at the house... The children find strange objects, photographs, and letters—step by step, these pieces of the puzzle form a bigger picture: this was something like a clinic, and guests would come to be cured of some ailment, and the one treating them was their grandfather, who wasn't actually a doctor at all. Hmm, how so? And were the things happening here entirely legal? Not quite.
The grandfather, an inventor, really wanted to find a remedy to cure human sorrow. He never found the remedy, but there were plenty of people who wanted treatment: after all, the story takes place after the Second World War. Grandfather didn't take money from the guests; he took in anyone who wanted to come, giving them a placebo and something else, and after the course of treatment, people felt better. What, then, is this secret ingredient that brings relief to a grieving person? There is no mysticism here; this ingredient is entirely real.
The book invites the reader to reflect: does a "white lie" have a right to exist, or should one never lie under any circumstances? In particular, is it permissible to deceive patients? Can a lie be beneficial? Is it necessary or even possible to get rid of sad memories? What helps one survive sorrow? Is it possible to find happiness again after deep grief?
"36 Keys" by Nadine Debertoli for children ages 10-14:
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