Queen Among the Dead

Written by Lesley Livingston

Zando Young Readers

978-1-63893-018-1

416 pp.

Ages 14+

January 2023

Hold onto the reins of your horse or your chariot because Lesley Livingston is going to take you on an epic ride through Celtic mythology. There will be conflict and battles, romance and magic, questionable birthrights, and imminent death, and oh so many characters. Like I said, epic.

 

Young Neve lives with her older sister Úna and their father who is the Dagda, leader of the Tuatha Dé, the descendants of the Scathach Queen, and rulers of Eire. Neve wishes she could become a warrior and that her sister could become the next Dagda, but neither is possible for the two crown princesses. Still Neve likes to sneak away from the palace and head into more dangerous areas like Blackwater Town of the oppressed Fir Bolg villagers. As a child, Neve had met a rogue Druid apprentice and thief named Ronan on one of these jaunts and he'd helped her fight a demon using a banned spell stone. Seven years later the two restless spirits become reacquainted when Neve saves Ronan from the óglach who are sent out with their harrow hounds to hunt down illicit magic users and spell traders. But more than this reintroduction is the recognition that there is some magic between them, and not just of the romantic kind.

As Gofannon, the Dagda's chief Druid advisor and monument builder, begins to assert control while the Dagda obsesses over the erection of his formidable mortuary temple, it becomes evident that there is much manipulation of persons and magic in a struggle for power. Who will survive and who will rule is all up to Lesley Livingston.

This is another world, something Lesley Livingston creates with finesse. It's Eire, long ruled by the Tuatha Dé people, led by the Dagda after defeat of the shape-shifting Fomori and their elite female warriors, the Faoladh. It's the oppression of peasants and the Druids usurping the power of magic. It's a high fantasy built upon Celtic mythology with mythical creatures, potent magic and struggles for control. But it's also the story of a boy and a girl from different backgrounds who are drawn together to make the world right for themselves and others. 

The two of them would never truly be able to understand each other. Or each other's worlds. They both carried hidden fire, but they were not the same. Unleashed, Ronan's would be snuffed out by harrow hounds.

     Neve's, he feared, might just burn until the whole realm was on fire. (pg. 125)

This is Zando Young Readers inaugural young adult novel, and I can't think of a more dramatic entry to the YA booksphere than with Lesley Livingston and her Queen Among the Dead. Both have the drama of superb storytelling. As she has done in her earlier series like Wondrous Strange, Starling and The Valiant, Lesley Livingston drops us into worlds that are real and yet not. That's because she bases these stories in legitimate mythologies and immerses readers in the cultures of those legends. The stories were real to those cultures, and they become real to readers of Lesley Livingston's books. Even though she embeds magic and creates the fantastic characters who can make the impossible happen, she will have you convinced to look up the Fir Domnann and the Fé Fíada in Wikipedia. I won't give it away though I will warn you to keep crib notes as Queen Among the Dead is packed with characters, creatures, places, and cultures of wildly unique names. At over four hundred pages, this novel packs a lot of story and it's a story that will draw you and hold you there and take you for a wild ride. And all I can hope is that there is more story to come because I need more of Neve, a young woman who learned she was a warrior in more ways than she'd known.

Now and For Never

by Lesley Livingston

Razorbill

978-0143182108

280 pp.

Ages 12+

May, 2014

Lesley Livingston left off both Once Every Never (Puffin, 2011) and Every Never After (Razorbill, 2013) with someone left hundreds of years in the past and a pair of hearts tenuously separated.  Always a cliff-hanger but, rest assured, Lesley Livingston is charitable in her story-plotting.  Sweet endings, without the sugar, are her specialty.

When Clare Reid, BFF Allie McAllister and Milo McAllister, Allie’s cousin and Clare’s crush, shimmered back to present day Glastonbury Tor, the site of the archaeological dig, Marcus Donatus a.k.a. Mark O’Donnell–who’d been left as a teen in Ancient Rome–remains behind because of the manipulative Stuart Morholt.  Morholt had told Roman Governor Paulinus that Marcus knew the whereabouts of the Druid gold stolen from Boudicca and hidden by now-dead Posthumus.  Allie refuses to leave Marcus/Mark in the past and she and Clare make plans to return to 500 A.D., leaving Milo and Piper behind to ground them when they shimmer.

But Allie and Clare shimmer onto a Roman ship lead by Paulinus, chasing a second Roman ship which the Scathians stole with Boudicca’s gold and taking Marcus and Morholt with it.  Both ships have something the other wants: the Romans want the stolen gold back, and Mallora–Boudicca’s sister–wants Llassar, the Druid blacksmith who knows the black magic.

The saving grace is a digital camera memory card upon which Clare had recorded images that would be useful to them in the future (actually their present).  Milo gets a hacker friend to help them recover the images and he and Piper pursue the clues to get themselves in position to help Clare, Allie and, hopefully, Marcus/Mark shimmer back.

Add some weird ocean vector spirals, an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the reappearance of Boudicca’s daughter Comorra and her prince Connal, a kidnapping by Skraelings (skin-walkers), a power-hungry Roman, and a big oops moment, and Now and For Never takes the reader from one cardio crash to another.  Just when it looks like it’s all going to work out, Lesley Livingston throws in another twist that will prevent the future from turning out as it should.

Though readers will have their favourite characters, whether the geeky but romantic Milo, or the girl-inexperieced Marcus Donatus/Mark O’Donnell or the unlucky Clare, all the characters add to the story, showing growth and change, learning from their mistakes (some sooner than others), and revealing that sometimes they are misunderstood, rarely in a positive way.  But, I defy anyone to read the series and not enjoy Lesley Livingston’s fantastical storylines of Celtic and Roman history that intertwine the past as present, the present as the future, history, treachery, boy-girl crushes, and supernatural elements into a story bigger than the sum of all its parts.

Every Never After

by Lesley Livingston

Razorbill

978-0-14-318208-5

242 pp.

Ages 12+

2013

Since curses are the order of the day in Every Never After, and in its prequel Once Every Never (Puffin, 2011), I would like to serve up my own.  OK, not really but Lesley Livingston: Why? Why? Why? Why would you drop readers cliffside, or at least Glastonbury Tor-side, with the last four sentences of your newest book?  And no respite until when? 2014? Not fair!

Now that I've got my Mercer-esque rant out, I can surprisingly and honestly inform the reader that I was so captivated by Every Never After, and every nuance of every interaction between familiar and new characters, that I was devastated by its ending.  So, if Lesley Livingston had not created yet another fantasy of such richness and emotional quality, I would not have yelled out, "NO!" upon reading those last words.  So, Lesley Livingston, it's your fault.

Wow.  That rant does seem to go on, doesn't it?  

Every Never After begins shortly after Once Every Never (reviewed here) resolves itself with 17-year-old Clare Reid's successful return from her "shimmering" time slip into the first century AD when Boudicca, Queen of the British Iceni tribe, fought the advances of the Romans.  Now, Clare and her best friend, Allie McAllister, have been accepted to help out on an archaeological dig at Glastonbury Tor, a distinctive hill with known historical significance and claims of faery and Arthurian connections.  Along with the other "trowel monkeys" excavating under the direction of Dr. Nicky Ashbourne, the girls will be recording a video blog of their work. And Allie's cousin, Milo McAllister, who Clare is dating, is joining them to put his computer and mapping skills to work developing a virtual dig-site app for the museum. 

Clare's relationship with Milo is making Allie feel a bit like a third-wheel so she is happy to continue working one day when Clare and Milo go off early for lunch.  Videotaping it on her iPad for the blog, Allie excavates a skull and disappears in a flashes and waves of darkness and colours before dropping into the midst of violent clashes between Roman cavalry soldiers and berserking Druidesses.  Though rescued by a Roman legionnaire, Marcus Donatus, Allie is manacled and kept with the other prisoners until her status is clarified and her fate determined by the ailing Praefect Postumus.  And who should she discover in the prisoners' tent but Stuart Morholt, the same "ass-hat" who'd grabbed the torc from Clare (in Once Every Never), resulting in his deliverance to the first century AD.

Meanwhile, once realizing that Allie has disappeared by some very unlike "shimmering" episode, Clare and Milo are desperate to locate her.  Destiny has them making the acquaintance of Piper Gimble, snidely nicknamed Goggles by Clare.  Piper is in possession of a family "heirloom" that has been passed from generation to generation -- a tin box scratched with instructions from Stuart Morholt that it only be opened by Clarinet Reid.  Seems the pompous Stuart Morholt (yes, a man from the present) is an ancestor of Piper's having had a dalliance with Boudicca's sister centuries before he is/was actually born. 

(Temporally it might be difficult to keep straight what happened first and then what arose from that point. Maybe it's a chicken-egg argument.  Just remember: this is fantasy.  It doesn't have to make sense in our world.  Just believe that Lesley Livingston capably keeps the plot lines synced.)

Clare and Allie may have been sympathetic to the Celts whose land is/was being annexed violently by the Romans but, through the eyes of Marcus Donatus, Allie begins to see the Romans, or at least some of them, in a different light.  It seems Marcus Donatus is actually teen Mark O'Donnell who disappeared from Glastonbury Tor in the 1980's when Stuart Morholt and several of his devotees, including Clare's Aunt Maggie, performed some mystic ritual.  Twenty-five years may have passed in our world but it has only been four years in Marcus' new one.  And geeky Mark O'Donnell is/was now a hunky Roman legionnaire whose loyalty to Postumus and concern for Allie has her crushing on him. 

Confused yet?  Well, it's just the way I tell it, because from Lesley Livingston's pen, it is all handled beautifully.  The subplots of the two different time periods (or are there three?) merge courtesy of Clare and Milo's actions bringing them to the Roman camp of Allie's current circumstances. (OK, that's definitely an oxymoron.  How can the past be current?)  I won't tell you how it ends, though you might recall my earlier rant.  Suffice it to say that Every Never After climaxes with a maelstrom of ancient battles, romantic revelations, sacrifice, and mystic time-slips that will leave the reader reassured that Clare has accomplished her "mission" but, if the readers are anything like me, desperately awaiting the third book in the series, ever hopeful for a happy ending.

Once Every Never

by Lesley Livingston
Puffin Canada
978-0-14-317795-1
302 pp.
Ages 12+
2011


Lesley Livingston, author of the Canadian Library Association's Young Adult Book of the Year Wondrous Strange (HarperCollins Canada, 2008), continues to provide young adult readers with riveting fantasy based in the supernatural with just a shimmering of romance and an ample seasoning of humour in her newest, Once Every Never (Puffin Canada, 2011).

Torontonian Clare (Clarinet) Reid is sent to England to stay with her Aunt Maggie, a professor of archaeology, while her parents are away on their orchestra's world tour.  Luckily her best friend, Allie (Alice) McAllister, also 17, has managed to arrange a stay in London with relatives including her former-geek-turned-hottie cousin, Milo, an Oxford student working with the British map-making agency.

Although Clare considers her supervision under her aunt mundane, Allie, an archaeology buff, is thrilled to get an opportunity to examine a new exhibit of bog people (perfectly preserved corpses found in a peat bog) and a variety of antiquities such as a shield, torcs (neck rings), and helmets set for restoration.  While her Aunt Maggie consults with the curator, Dr. Ceciley Jenkins, Clare unpardonably touches the shield and discovers herself in another time and place, witnessing a meeting of two men, one in possession of the shield.

Returning to the museum, Clare enlists Allie's help to witness her disappearance after touching the Snettisham Great Torc (a particularly unique torc).  This time Clare returns with an account of the handsome young man seen earlier interacting with a raging, red-haired woman who'd been whipped and to whom he gives the torc.   Hidden behind a rock, Clare is not seen by anyone until a young woman chances to touch her, thereby making her visible.  After asking for Clare's help and surreptitiously slipping a brooch to her, the young woman is grabbed by a Roman soldier.

Based on Clare's observations and what she hears (and understands, although in a unknown language), the girls' internet research reveals the injured woman to be Boudicca, the Queen of Britain in 1 AD, who rebels against the Romans, and the young woman who asks for Clare's help is Comorra, one of Boudicca's two daughters.

When the Snettisham Torc is stolen from the museum, Aunt Maggie suspects a former colleague, now presumed dead.  Unfortunately, she is correct and this same man, Stuart Morholt, who claims to be a Celtic mystic, learns of Clare's gift of shimmering (that's what they call her time-travel) and uses threats to coerce her into locating a buried cache from Bouticca's time.

The plot is complex but not confounding, all the more substantial for the different times into which Clare shimmers, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, always revealing.  Livingston excels at bringing two very different worlds into contact, without either losing integrity.  In each, the voices, hearts and actions of the times' characters successfully immerse the reader in that time.  Even poor Clare, who must modify her behaviour to meld with those in the past, is true to herself, showing less cockiness  when dealing with the Celts and Druids, although her erratic train of thoughts still compel her to misspeak occasionally.

But, it is the humour that continues to pull me along for the journey, particularly Clare's attitude that comes across as self-deprecation with snarkiness.   When returning from the time when Connal's blue body paint (in preparation for his sacrifice) smeared onto her, Clare declares that, "I was partying with Smurfs.  I wanted to fit in." Teens will also appreciate the hint of romance in Once Every Never, particularly as Clare is attracted to two different young men, one in the present, one in the past, confusing her even more.  Expertly, Livingston epitomizes the teenage mind, sharing Clare's thoughts, both erratic and sure, as she tries to figure things out, whether it be history or people and their motivations.

Just added: video of Lesley Livingston talking about Once Every Never