The Crosswood

Volume XXVII / Issue 13 - November 27 / 2020
The Crosswood
The Crosswood
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The Crosswood

Author: 
Gabrielle Prendergast
Series: 
Orca Currents
Victoria, BC: Orca, January, 2021
106 pp., trade pbk., pdf & epub, $10.95 (pbk.)
ISBN: 
9781459826625 (pbk.)
9781459826632 (pdf)
9781459826649 (epub)
Grades: 
Grades 4-9
Ages: 
Ages 9-14
Review by: 
Jonine Bergen (Reviewed from Advance Reading Copy)
4
Excerpt: 

I grab a broom and sweep the kitchen. I quickly do the dishes. I gather some clothes and towels off the floor and drop them in the laundry basket. When that’s done I sit with Mom for a few minutes. The twins are playing with a long piece of knitting yarn while they listen to the story. They tie and tangle it into impossibly intricate knots and webs. I watch for a while, trying to figure out what to say to Mom.

“Maybe the twins could go to a day camp,” I try.

Mom just laughs.

“Seriously. There’s a sports camp at the community center. They could run around all day.”

“That would end in tears,” Mom says. “And blood. And neither of them coming from the twins.”

I look down at the twins on the floor. Violet has tied Indigo’s wrist to the chair leg with yarn. Her ankle is tied to his knee. One of his toes is tied to one of her braids. They don’t seem worried about it, so I decide to leave them for now. At least they can’t run around this way.

“What about school?” I ask. “Maybe they could start school in September?”

“Blue,” Mom says. “The twins are fine here with me. Regular school won’t work for them. They’re too…”

“Smart?” I ask. “They have a gifted class at school.” I always wanted to be in the gifted class. Unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough.

“Special,” Mom says. “The twins are too special.”

Blue Jasper loves his siblings - he really does - but their antics are so frustrating! They literally climb the walls, play in the rafters, and talk to fireflies. His mother insists on being with them all the time. They don’t go to school, never have babysitters, and the family lives off-grid as his mother likes to say. Blue just wants a little me time. He is going into grade 9 at the end of the summer, and, instead of having fun and acting like a teenager, he is stuck cleaning the house, chopping wood, and corralling the twins. Then his mother breaks her ankle and things go from frustrating to otherworldly weird.

It turns out that the twins are actually the children of a fairy queen who made a pact with Blue’s mother to protect the queen’s children in exchange for saving Blue’s life as a child. When the twins are kidnapped, Blue must find a way to rescue the children to save his mother’s life. Plunged into the world of fairy, he has to decide whom to trust while struggling to understand the rules of this beautifully strange world.

The Crosswood is an excellent addition to the “Orca Currents” series. Gabrielle Prendergast has written a fast-moving urban fantasy with a likeable hero trying to do his best in an untenable situation. The first-person narrative helps draw the reader quickly into the story while providing the sparse backstory needed to understand the plot’s arc. Although a quick 100 page read, Prendergast used the pages to create a strong protagonist and several interesting secondary characters and a story with a solid narrative arc.

The Crosswood is a great high interest addition to the fantasy genre.

Highly Recommended
Reviewer: 

Jonine Bergen is a teacher-librarian in Winnipeg, Manitoba.