Description de l’éditeur
From the bestselling author of The Last Unicorn comes an “engaging story of a friendship that transcends time”(Library Journal)...
Arriving in the magnificent countryside of Dorset, England, to live with her mother and new stepfather, the young and very American Jenny Gluckstein has little interest in her historic surroundings, including that of the 700 acre Stourhead Farm her stepfather is restoring. Then she meets Tamsin, a kindred spirit that has haunted the lonely estate for 300 years, trapped by a hidden trauma she can't remember, and by a powerful evil even the spirits of night cannot name. To help her, Jenny must delve deeper into the dark world than any human has in centuries, and face a danger that will change her life forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like his enchanting The Last Unicorn, Beagle's newest fantasy features characters so real they leap off his pages and into readers' souls. Tamsin Willoughby, dead some 300 years, haunts ramshackle old Stourhead Farm in Dorset, England, an ancient 700-acre estate that 13-year-old Jenny's new, English stepfather is restoring. Thoroughly American Jenny, miserable at being transplanted from New York City to rural Britain, finds a suffering kindred spirit in Tamsin, a ghost who is mourning Edric, a love she lost during Dorset's punitive Bloody Assizes under King James II. Tamsin leads Jenny through an engrossing night world inhabited by an array of British spirits--the Black Dog, a braggart Boggart, ominous Oakmen, the shapeshifting Pooka and a marvelous mystical army-booted Earth Mother. To save Tamsin and gentle Edric from eternal torment, Jenny faces evil personified: demonic Judge Jeffries, who sentenced hundreds of people to brutal execution during the Assizes. Slipping effortlessly between Jenny's brash 1999 lingo, the raw primeval dialect of ancient Dorset and Tamsin's exquisite Jacobean English, Beagle has created a stunning tale of good battling evil, of wonder and heartbreak and of a love able to outlast the worst vileness of the human heart. Fantasy rarely dances through the imagination in more radiant garb than this.
