Bertram of Butter Cross

If you haven't yet read Jeffrey Barlough's delightful "Western Lights" series, you are in for a treat. The setting is "the sundered world," the time after a great cataclysm of some sort occurred, but I can't really explain this very well -- there's a website just for the Western Lights series: http://www.westernlightsbooks.com/.

This is the fourth entry in the series, and the action takes place in the village of Market Snailsby, which is situated at the edge of the dark and mysterious Marley Wood. People don't go into the wood very much, because of the dangerous beasts that live there. As the story opens, Jemma Hathaway along with her young maid Molly Grime, is driving home to Market Snailsbury when she notices two children playing near show more the Wood, and she wants to caution them against going any further. The children run away when they see her and actually enter the wood. Jemma chases after them, but is stopped cold by a strange monster with a neck like a snake.

Soon word of her experience gets out to her friends in Market Snailsby, and word of other terrors that emanate from the Wood reach the villagers. This situation arises at a time when the town has put up a lot of money to create a road through Marley Wood, only halfway finished, to connect the village with other towns, causing a great deal of consternation among the villagers, who decide that they must conquer their fears and investigate.

This is an awesome series of books, which are like a cross between the Victorian writing of Charles Dickens and modern fantasy. The characters are very well drawn, the setting of the sundered world is amazing, and the mystery between the covers is well worth waiting for. I can definitely recommend them most highly -- I just bought Anchorwick, the next in the series. If you like fantasy, you'll really enjoy these books. show less