On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
Must the youngest open the oldest hills.
Through the door of the birds where the breeze breaks.
There fire shall fly from the raven boy,
And the silver eyes that see the wind,
And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

By the pleasant lake, the Sleepers lie,
On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call;
Though grim from the Grey King the shadows fall,
Yet singing the golden harp shall guide
To break their sleep and bid them ride.

This book is set at New Year’s – but a Celtic New Year of November 1, just following the Day of the Dead (what we in the states call Halloween). I suppose I should have written about it at Halloween but I didn’t and since it’s about the ending and beginning that happen around a new year, if not this new year, it fits with this week’s books.

And besides, I like this book, this whole series of books. I love them so much that, when I forced my mother to go on vacation with me in Wales many years ago, I stopped in a bookstore and bought a second copy of this book because I didn’t have mine with me, and then went looking for the places that it mentions – the oldest hills, the pleasant lake, Cadfan’s Way – and found them! All of them! They really exist!

That’s like knowing that the town in Dirty Dancing actually exists – and that’s where Glen Beck grew up! No wonder he’s such a tool.¹

This book starts with a loss. Will Stanton has been very ill with hepatitis and has lost an important memory, and knows that he has lost it. That knowledge of loss worries him. Whatever it was he lost was vitally important. His parents, worrying about his recovery, send him to an uncle in Wales, who owns a sheep farm, where he can recover his strength.

There Will meets Bran, the adopted son of his uncle’s right-hand man, a motherless boy Will’s age, who has adopted a solitary existence, partially due to the isolated location of his home, partially because his albinism causes other boys his age to either bully or avoid him. Bran’s best friend is his sheepdog, Cafall, the dog with silver eyes. Will actually meets Cafall first, before meeting Bran, and the dog leads him to the Cadfan’s Way in the poem.

And then Will remembers: he is an Old One, one of the Light, charged with protecting the world and defeating the Dark – and he is in Wales on a quest. A quest of critical importance to the Light’s war against the Dark.

Through the course of the book, both boys undergo change, the kind of enormous change that people often seek out at the end of one year and the start of the next. Some of the changes are sought, some are forced unwillingly upon them, some are positive, some are devastating. Long lost secrets are revealed, wrongs are righted, and Bran learns the truth about who his mother and father are, and the power and confidence and maturity which that information gives him.

And, as they used to say in Dawson’s Creek every week, life will never be the same.

This is a beautiful book, with poetic mysteries, sweeping landscapes, and children who work together to save the world. It comes from a time when threats to the world were grounded in historical myth, not in post-apocalyptic dystopias where children are forced to fight each other to right the wrongs of the future. And yet, when a beloved character dies in this book, the impact it has on Bran is more devastating than deaths in other books. It’s simple and real and horrific and Bran does not immediately rise above but flounders and isolates himself again, as a child does when they are bereft.

It is up to Will to bring Bran back, to raise his concern from his broken heart and the erosion of his belief in adults to protect and shelter him from the harm that other adults seek to cause.

To help Bran put the past in perspective and figure out how he can use that to step into the future.

This book is, more than the other books set at New Year’s that I’ve been writing about this week, about change, about figuring out who you are, and doing something different with that.

1. He’s always been a jerk, at least as long as I’ve known him and that goes back to the summer before my sophomore year in high school. So FOREVER. ↩︎