The Radiant Road
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this dreamy novel, a young girl returns to her Irish home where she can finally embrace her innate sense of the Strange—fair folk and magical creatures that contain both beauty and darkness.
“An unforgettable tale . . . that contains all the darkness and light of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”—School Library Journal, starred review
“A haunting fable inflected with mythological and fairy-tale motifs.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Clare Macleod has lived all her life with an awareness of the Strange, tales of fairies and magic-making told to her by her mother who died years ago. No longer a child, Clare has learned to suppress the magic that haunted the corners of her life, to say the word “fairy” with the appropriate disbelief. But after years of living in America, Clare and her father return to Ireland, to the house Clare was born in—a house built into a hillside with an ancient tree for a wall.
For Clare, the house is not only full of memories of her mother, but of the Strange and a mysterious boy with raven-dark hair and of dreamlike nights filled with stars and magic. In this place, magic—both bright and dark—will not sit quietly in a corner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clare Macleod learns that she is the guardian of a gate between worlds in this numinous fantasy from Catmull (Summer and Bird). When Clare was small, before her mother died, her family lived in an ancient stone house in modern Ireland with a living yew tree in it. After years of aimless grief, Clare and her father return to the house, and Clare finds that the tree has a door. On the other side of the door is a boy named Finn, who isn't exactly human, and both Finn and the doors are threatened by a vicious enemy. Catmull's take on fairies uses conventional elements in original ways, building a stunningly atmospheric, gorgeously complicated dream of a book. Genuinely frightening and eerie moments are drawn as masterfully as the joyous, glowing, peculiar images that populate Catmull's version of a world inexorably linked to, yet separate from, our own. The gentle romance between Clare and Finn is understatedly believable, the quiet emotional core of a story that deserves the word epic. Ages 12 up.
