Like many of David Almond's novels (Skellig; Clay; Kit's Wilderness; Heaven Eyes), his latest dark masterpiece transcends the everyday world to exist in a mystical landscape all its own.
Narrator Billy Dean lives in a time of never-ending war. He's the secret love child of a priest and a hairdresser, and he's been locked away all his life, left to ponder "the mistry of the stars & the beests & the mistry of the syz of things & the mistry of what had been dun to Billy Dean." When his father stops visiting, Billy finally emerges into the bombed-out remains of the town of Blinkbonny. He is introduced to the butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and he meets the elderly Mrs. Malone. Because he "slitherd owt into the world on the day of doom," Billy is used as a medium by Mrs. Malone, to contact the spirits of the dead. She suspects he has "the graytest [of] gifts" and, indeed, before long, Billy begins to heal the sick.
The author repeatedly shows Billy's life to be a tug of war between matters of the flesh and matters of the soul, between the human and the divine. Crowds of people seek miracles from Billy, and two men appear who begin acting as his disciples. But someone has "a nife in his hand." The author challenges his readers with phonetic spellings, which, along with a deft use of magical realism, build a world that--like so many that Almond creates--is both darker and more wondrous than our own. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators