The Dark Shadow

Mary Rhind
Published by Canongate Kelpies
0-86241-253-6, £1.95

Set in sixteenth-century Scotland at the time of the Reformation. That's ambitious perhaps but the story follows well-known patterns. Davie takes his blind sister Lizzie to St Triduana's sacred well, hoping for a cure, against the wishes of their step-father who is a follower of Knox. With riots and piracy this is good adventure stuff with boys being brave and girls being saved. While keeping a firm control of geographical and historical fact, the author chooses modernisms such as 'Crumbs' at a moment of high drama!

Reviewed in BfK No. 57 (July 1989) by Adrian Jackson (AJ)
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