Literature / The Theodosia Throckmorton Series

I'm beginning to suspect he's up to something. What's worse, I think he suspects I'm up to something. Which I usually am.

-Theodosia Throckmorton

Curses are real.

They ooze out of moldering tombs to set trespassers' clothes on fire. They seep through the seams of protective gloves to eat the flesh off your hand. They make your pants itch like you have the sands of the desert in them. They cause falls down the stairs, thefts in the night, crippling injury and illness—misfortune, destruction, and death.

They can even rot the heart of an empire.

Unfortunately for young Theodosia Throckmorton, no one else seems able to sense them. Which means if something's going to be done about them, she's got to do it herself.

The Theodosia Throckmorton series by R.L. LaFevers is a Historical Fantasy series that has been described as Indiana Jones meets Harry Potter. The series follows the preteen Theodosia "Theo" Throckmorton as she struggles in the bowels of the Museum of Legends and Antiquities to manage its collection of cursed and haunted artifacts. As it turns out, the methods of the past may still have relevance in the present.

The series currently consists of four novels:

• Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (2007)
• Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris (2009)
• Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus (2011)
• Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh (2012)

The books have been adapted into a television series titled Theodosia starring Eloise Little, which premiered in 2022.

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The books contain examples of:

• Accidental Truth: In The Staff of Osiris, when pressed into making a prophecy by the lunatic leader of the Order of the Black Sun, Theo makes one up using a bunch of random symbols and figurative language, hoping it appeases them enough that they'll let her out of this uncomfortable situation. It still comes true.
• Alliterative Name: Theodosia Throckmorton.
• All of the Other Reindeer: At one point prior to the story Theodosia tried to attend boarding school as Henry does, but she wasn't welcome among her peers and she made no friends. She hypothesizes this was due to resentment over her high marks, which she didn't know to keep secret, but there's an implication it could also have been because of her bossy personality and eccentric interests. When she returned home for break, she took advantage of her family's neglect and simply didn't remind them she was supposed to go back.

• Animate Inanimate Object: The jackal atop the Shrine of Anubis in the basement comes to life to protect the Orb of Ra hidden inside it—or, later, whenever there's disorder afoot. Awi Bubu implies in The Eyes of Horus that the jackal was sent from the actual god Anubis to assist Theo. He implies a similar origin for Isis, Theo's cat.

• Baker Street Regular: Will becomes this to Theo, and then to the Brotherhood of Chosen Keepers.

• Classy Cane: Theo's father is a well-to-do man who has walked with one of these ever since he had an "accident" on one of the museum's stairways.

• Contrived Coincidence: Subverted. It initially seems pretty fortunate that seemingly the only person in Britain able to perceive magic is born to a family of archaeologists in constant contact with it. It's actually because of her parents' jobs that she has her abilities in the first place, since her powers are theorized to come from being born on the Altar of the Temple of Isis and being claimed as the goddess' emissary. This also explains why people like her are so rare—because with the fall of the ancient pagan religions, almost no one would be born in those circumstances anymore.

• Counterspell: One of Theo's go-to techniques is to magically influence the existing spell to transfer to something else more disposable, then dispose of that far less precious newly-cursed object. She doesn't think of this as her actually performing magic herself until the fourth book—until then, she merely thought of it as redirecting what already existed.

• Creepy Good: Theo. She's devoted herself to studying old arcane knowledge, specializes in curses, and when stuck in the museum overnight, routinely sleeps in a sarcophagus she had moved to her closet for the use of its protective spells. She argues when criticized over the last that it's okay because the previous occupant probably wouldn't mind. She also works diligently to protect her family and her family's coworkers from the dangerous magic clinging to the objects in the museum.

• Death by Falling Over: Subverted and discussed. One day while working in the museum, Theo's father took a tumble down a flight of stairs, seriously injuring him and permanently damaging his leg, leaving him to walk with a limp and a cane for the rest of his life. While there had appeared to be no one around him, he insisted at the time that he was pushed. Theo narrates this story in very light language, but it's implied she's fully aware he could have died.

• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Escapist Character Kid Hero. Theodosia is introduced as smart, competent, usually right while the adults around her are wrong, living an exciting double life as someone very respected and important in her own social circles, wielding unique magical abilities, and of course saving the day... but, as the books go on, these usually escapist attributes are shown to have more and more obvious negative consequences.
  • Being the only person she knows able to tangibly perceive magic meant her childhood was terrifying, partially because her Absent-Minded Professor of a father runs a museum full of cursed and haunted artifacts, and partially because no one around her could give her any explanation or real comfort for what any of this was or what it could do to her, or even validate that the horrors she witnessed around her were real. They just thought she had an active imagination, and she was left to suffer alone. It also means that, despite her young age, there are responsibilities she must bear simply because no one else can bear them for her.
  • Her Wise Beyond Their Years independence and assertiveness are a consequence of having to find ways to take care of herself in spite of her neglectful parents, and further, shouldering the weight of defending the lives of the museum staff and her family from curses at a young age, without any guidance or support. Not only did she have to learn to take care of herself and everyone around her, but this cost her any ability to relate to the lives of "normal" children, and is implied to have made her largely blind to how creepy and strange she can seem to outside perspectives.
  • Her exciting double life strains her as an individual and alienates her further from any real relationship with her family, which isn't something to sneeze at, given that she's a twelve year old girl with no other interpersonal connections at the start of the series.
  • Even her supernatural abilities turns out to highlight her parents' irresponsibility towards her; her mother continued to do hands-on excavation in Egypt in the last stage of her pregnancy, eventually giving birth to Theodosia during a dig on the altar of a temple to Isis on a day when the gods traditionally claimed all offerings left in their temples as their property. And this was back when Egypt was hardly a sanitary place, let alone a dig site.

• Demonic Possession: Henry suffers this in Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris, having been affected by the spirit of Mr. Tetley, who'd been murdered and mummified without the proper rites.

• The Edwardian Era: The four books take place between December of 1906 and the 1907-1908 Winter Season. While generally isolated in the museum, occasionally the events of the day intersect with Theo's life, such as the Egyptian Independence Movement and the launch of the Dreadnought.

• Emotion Suppression: While Theodosia has become extremely independent to compensate, it's increasingly clear that her parents' neglect towards her in particular hurts her deeply, especially since she admires them so much—she just continuously chooses to push it down and takes care of herself as best she can.

• Energy Donation: Most cursed objects work like this... regardless of whether the donor knows it. Most maintain activity only in the presence of lifeforce, meaning that if they've been untouched for too long, Theo can't sense what it is until someone triggers it. The apparitions and manifestations caused by haunted objects work the same way, with those manifestations becoming stronger if you look at them, since looking at them focuses your lifeforce upon it.

• Everyone Calls Them Barkeep: Discussed and downplayed. Theo's grandmother is only known as Grandmother for most of the series because eveyone Theo sees interact with her calls her "Grandmother," "your grandmother," or, in Theo's father's case, "Mother." Theo mentions that she'd actually almost forgotten the woman had a real first name. Her real name is Lavinia.

• Foreshadowing: In Serpents of Chaos, Wigmere hypothesizes that the Ancient Egyptians were so much more capable with magic because they were closer to their gods. Later in the book, Theo is told by a fortune teller that she has "the thumbprint of Isis" glowing on her forehead. These are early hints that Theo's abilities may also come from being closer to the Ancient Egyptian gods. We later learn in The Eyes of Horus that Theo was born an unintentional offering to Isis—an offering that was accepted.

• Foregone Conclusion: Theodosia's efforts to stop the Serpents of Chaos from instigating a global conflict that ravages and destabilizes the world have so far been successful. However, while it's not explicitly confirmed they were involved since the books take place years before, the Serpents' wish will inevitably come true in 1914.

• A God I Am Not: In The Staff of Osiris, Trawley tells his cult, the Order of the Black Sun, that Theo is the reincarnation of Isis. She denies this but doesn't protest too hard, recognizing this as an unsafe situation since they've taken her to an unknown place in the city blindfolded. They continue to venerate her until their leader becomes unsatisfied with the amount of power she can provide them and decides to steal artifacts from her instead.

• Grande Dame: Theodosia's widowed grandmother is a wealthy and very proper British matriarch who nonetheless refuses to be gainsaid by anyone.

• Hermetic Magic:
  • Played with in regards to the museum's cursed and magical artifacts. Most magical and cursed objects initially become this way through ritual or something having gone wrong due to lack thereof, but after undergoing the rituals that bestow them with power, they generally don't need any further ritual to work—the Staff of Osiris works even when no one is touching it, the Orb of Ra can blind people just by touching it in the right place, and the first cursed item we really hear about in detail sets itself on fire whenever it's taken out into the sun. Makes sense, since for cursed objects, the whole point is for the magic to take affect when the person who's tripped the curse isn't trying to instigate it.
  • Theo's practices for undoing curses are mostly Ancient Egyptian and are thus heavily ritualistic. The first book's introduction to her cobbled-together process shows her creating a duplicate of a cursed statuette from wax, carving it with inscriptions, and chanting spells to transfer the curse from the artifact onto the wax facsimile so it can be burned. Before she begins the actual work, she ritualistically cleans herself with water and natron and dresses in special clothing made of non-animal materials. The Last Pharaoh shows she can actually perform this kind of magic herself to bring new curses and spells into existence, not just undo them.

• Historical Fantasy: The series takes place in The Edwardian Era and features takes on historical events such as The Dreadnought hoax. It also heavily features Ancient Egyptian magic.

• Horrible Judge of Character: Downplayed. Theo's snap assumptions of others are very hit or miss. While she was right to trust Will, Wigmere, and Stilton, she also marked Clive Fagenbush as an enemy solely because of his unpleasant disposition, thought Nigel Bollingsworth and Admiral Sopcoate were kind when they were really terrorists, and assumed Miss Sharpe would be a much more cooperative and understanding governess than those before her just because she looked prettier.

• The Kindnapper: Stilton, who rescues Theo from an attack by the Serpents of Chaos only to bring her, blindfolded, to the Order of the Black Sun. He later admits he did it because he needed their resources to rescue Theo in the first place, but does continue to enact their will onto Theo's life thereafter.

• Mage Born of Muggles: Exaggerated. Theo's seemingly the only magical person in London and everyone else around her is entirely ordinary, including her family. Besides Theo, those who wield magic do so entirely through cursed or enchanted objects, which already have their own magic.

• Magic Fire: There's a particular cursed statue in the Egyptian gallery that, if moved into sunlight, instantly sets itself on fire.

• The Masquerade: As the books go on, Theodosia is exposed to more and more people who know perfectly well that magic and curses are real, but she tries to keep all of this from her family. It breaks for her family in Book 4.

• Menacing Museum: Theodosia's parents' museum is relatively fine during the day but crawling with curses and spirits at night. She explicitly says she wouldn't walk the halls without some sort of protection and even then scurries quickly through the worse areas while refusing to look at what's on either side of her.

• Military Mage: Most of the Egyptian priests involved with imbuing magic into weapons, but especially Amenemhab, vizier under Thutmose III, the Greater-Scope Villain of the first book. He devised a plan to make the Heart of Egypt a cursed object before all other cursed objects, turning it into a Trojan Horse so that any enemy of Egypt who took the Heart would bring a civilization-destroying curse upon their people and make them easy for Egypt to conquer. It's implied some members of the Serpents of Chaos are there to wield magic for the alleged benefit of their respective countries' military efforts.

• Museum of the Strange and Unusual: The Museum of Legends and Antiquities hosts—what else?—artifacts of legend and antiquity. Naturally, a good portion of them are cursed. Theo's father is Head Curator and her mother is their lead archeologist, and due to their Parental Neglect, she literally lives there half the time.

• Mystery Cult: The Order of the Black Sun.

• Mystical Pregnancy: Downplayed. Theo's mother's pregnancy with Theo was normal right up until the point where she gave birth on her dig site, a Temple of Isis, and the only suitable surface to give birth on was the Altar. This happened to occur on the day in which the Egyptian gods traditionally claimed everything presented to them in their temples as their property. The result was Theo's marked difference from... everyone, really.

• Never Mess with Granny: At the climax of Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus, Theodosia's grandmother happens across the scuffle between the Cult of the Black Sun and the Brotherhood of the Chosen Keepers and promptly starts beating the man attempting to kidnap her granddaughter with her cane, all while maintaining an extremely dignified aire.

• Not Now, Kiddo: Theo's parents are usually too wrapped up in themselves and their own business to pay attention to her or what she's trying to tell them. It gets to the point where she just lies and works around them because it's easier.

• The Not Secret: The longer the books go on, the more it becomes clear that Theo's nowhere near as secretive about her curse-breaking as she thinks. By the second book, Fagenbush, Bollingsworth, and Stilton all know. Of the curators and their assistants, only Weems and her father haven't noticed, the first because he's too self-important to care, and the second because he simply doesn't pay attention to her.

• Nothing Is Scarier: A lot of the more menacing parts of the museum are so because we don't know what's there. Theo mentions that looking at something focuses your lifeforce upon it and makes it stronger, so when dealing with unknown supernatural forces that appear to have manifested into something tangible, she wards herself with homemade amulets, hides, and refuses to look until it's gone.

• Omniglot: Theo is known to speak and write fluently in Latin, Ancient Greek, and all the various forms of Ancient Egyptian.

• The Order: The Brotherhood of Chosen Keepers. The Order of the Black Sun may call itself an Order, but it's more of a Cult.

• Parental Favoritism: Downplayed. Theodosia notes that when her brother Henry returns from boarding school, her parents make much more of an effort to be a functional family. The Throckmortons actually stay at their house for extended periods of time, ensure consistent access to clean clothes, and enjoy real family dinners. However it's implied this isn't done out of conscious favoritism but because Theo is so independent that her parents have gotten used to relying on her to take care of herself, while Henry is a lot more openly needy.

• Parental Neglect: Theodosia's parents love her, but her mother is often in Egypt and her father is an Absent-Minded Professor who doesn't remember to leave work, let alone to take care of her. While she talks as if it's normal, she's essentially had to move into a closet in her parents' museum and set herself up a makeshift bed and a small store of food items that don't require cooking in order to survive. She downplays the impact, but muses in the first book that it'd be nice if her father remembered she was there every once in a while.

• Parents as People: Theodosia admires her parents very much, but their relationships with her have... issues.
  • Theo's father is extremely neglectful and absent-minded. He tends to dismiss what she says and assumes she's playing around or being silly when she's doing something he doesn't understand. He's often taken aback when she says something insightful because of this. However, he does love her dearly and is terrified and furious when she takes off in the middle of the night to head to the tomb of Thutmose III, nearly getting herself killed in the process.
  • Her mother is more gentle but equally confused by her daughter, not really around enough to understand her but ready to defend her from critical and less accepting people outside of their family regardless. When she discovers Theo's involvement with curses and magic, which are very real, she does her best to be open and accepting despite clearly being terrified by both what her daughter's involved with and what she saw her daughter do.

• Precocious Crush: Theo initially has one on Nigel Bollingsworth, which promptly ends when she finds out he's essentially a terrorist.

• Private Tutor: Starting in the second novel, Theo's grandmother decides she needs to be better-disciplined, and so hires a string of governesses to try to reign in Theo. Since these governesses would seriously get in the way of her secret work, Theo does her best to scare them off... which only succeeds in landing her the toughest and most difficult to deal with of the lot, Nanny Sharpe.

• Protective Charm: Theo makes these to manage supernatural dangers around the museum. Some can be tied or placed around a dangerous object, others are kept near the body for self-protection. She tends to slip them into museum employees' pockets whenever they're working with an artifact with a particularly nasty curse she hasn't managed to remove yet, and she always wears at least three for herself.

• Randomly Gifted: Subverted. Theodosia's gift with perceiving magic appears to be this. It turns out her parents accidentally dedicated her life to Isis when she was born.

• Real Event, Fictional Cause:
  • The Dreadnought Hoax. In reality it was just Virginia Woolf and her friends playing a racist joke on the British military by posing as visiting Abyssinian dignitaries and getting a free tour of the ship; in The Staff of Osiris, it's a magical terrorist organization seeking to sneak aboard, murder the crew with the titular staff, then use it to puppeteer their corpses and hijack the ship.
  • Von Braggenschott's description of the great war he and The Serpents of Chaos plan to instigate via curses almost certainly implies that World War I was their success job.

• Shoot the Messenger: In the opening of the second book, the adults of Theodosia's family become furious at her for disrupting Lord Chudleigh's party... by exclaiming in shock that the "ancient" mummy Chudleigh was unwrapping was actually the deceased corpse of a recently vanished British Museum employee. Most seem more concerned with Theo embarrassing them by publically highlighting that their very wealthy host is an ignorant Know-Nothing Know-It-All and drawing wide attention to the scandal than they are with the fact that a man was clearly murdered and his corpse has been put on display for a party. While not wanting their child to embarrass their host is understandable, things were bound to come out minutes later anyways as soon as they fully unwrapped the corpse and saw his modern three-piece suit. Theo was just first on the uptake, and their host's previous braggadocio combined with his inability to tell real from fake being pointed out by a child meant the scandal was personally humiliating.

• Street Urchin: Theo's friend Will, who is initially a pick-pocket and rat catcher. By the end of the first novel, Theo's gotten him a job working for the Brotherhood of the Chosen Keepers, and agrees to help educate him in Egyptology so he can hopefully move up the ranks.

• Strong Family Resemblance: Zig-zagged. When Theo first realizes that her parents treat the story of her birth as a scandalous forbidden topic, she looks into the mirror and contemplates about how she doesn't look like anyone else in her family. It turns out she takes after her grandparents, both in temperment and in looks—she heavily resembles her long-deceased grandfather, while having her grandmother's assertive nature.

• Supernatural Sensitivity: How Theo's unique abilities initially manifest. She can sense the curses and magic in objects acutely enough to be able to tell what kind of curse it is, although she doesn't know the details unless she can read the curse itself, which she can do if the object is placed under moonlight. To her, the curse appears as a jumble of words buzzing around the surface of the cursed object.

• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Theodosia having to take charge of extremely serious matters few else in her life even know about means her parents don't actually know her, either, and witnessing some of the genuinely supernatural chaos that is her life terrifies them, not only because they don't understand what they're witnessing but because they don't understand her.

• Too Much Alike: The heart of the conflict between Theo and her grandmother, though it's not initially obvious due to them butting heads over her grandmother's insistence on propriety. They're both extremely strong willed and assertive, believing that they must deal with problems themselves because no one else can be trusted to handle things correctly, and their family members don't know them anywhere near as well as they think because they're not very open with them.

• Victorian London: While the series technically takes place several years into The Edwardian Era, the setting still has plenty of the hallmarks of this trope; what with dodgy murders on foggy streets (some of which are committed by a gruesome figure called the Grim Nipper), boarding schools, spiritualist cults, and a large family of pick-pocketing street kids.

• War for Fun and Profit: The Serpents of Chaos want to start a global war that will dispel all the major world powers into chaos so they can step in and take the reigns of power. Given the time period and the description, the war they're talking about instigating is almost certainly World War I.

• We Can Rule Together: Nigel Bollingsworth to Theo. Creepily, he's also openly playing on and encouraging her crush on him while doing so.

• Wife Husbandry: Nigel Bollingsworth, the First Assistant Curator of the museum and one of her father's employees, implies he's open to the idea of doing this to Theo, proving both aware of Theo's Precocious Crush and disturbingly willing to bribe Theo with the idea of becoming a Villainous Power Couple if she joins the Dark Side. Nigel Bollingsworth is a grown man; Theo is eleven.

• Wise Beyond Their Years: Justified. Theo's had to become this, due to being the museum staff's only line of defense against curses. She makes executive crisis decisions on every dangerous object that enters the museum collection—what treatments it should undergo and how—and does routine patrols throughout the museum at night in order to protect against any particularly nefarious forces. Because of her parents' neglect and lack of awareness towards her concerns, she had to become her own advocate and line of defense when interacting with the various magic-seeking secret organizations she encounters in her line of work, despite these communities otherwise consisting mostly of adult men, all of whom have more power, influence, and authority than her. By the time she's a teenager, she's had to lead and undertake multiple magical antiterrorism operations, mostly because the adults involved are either completely ignorant, not predisposed to assertiveness, or too ill-equipped to help.