Circle of Stones

May 26, 2014
Ominous in tone and deliberately paced, Fisher’s standalone fantasy (published as Crown of Acorns in the U.K. in 2010) unfolds across three narrative voices linked by imagery rather than event. There’s Sulis, a modern teenager who’s been assigned a new identity after years in foster care, hiding from an unidentified man who murdered her playmate. Zac is a debtor’s son and architect’s apprentice, who loathes his master and pursues a desperate secret agenda in the Georgian era. And briefly, at intervals, there’s Bladud, a druid king who runs mad like Lear across the ancient wilderness of southwest England. They’re all tied to the city of Bath, whose origin Fisher (Obsidian Mirror) places at the moment when a goddess says to Bladud, “Hold me in a circle of stone.” The agency of men and imprisonment of women are at play throughout, even in the narration—Sulis is the only character whose story is told for her, in third-person. There’s a romance of sorts and elements of a thriller, but Fisher’s real interest is in resonance, as images and patterns of relationship come under scrutiny through each narrative lens. Ages 12–up. Agent: Pollinger Limited.

June 15, 2014
Myth, fiction and history are layered into a narrative edifice as impressive and impenetrable as the architecture the story celebrates.In ancient Britain, the druid king Bladud vows to build a great stone temple to honor the healing waters of the goddess Sulis. In 18th-century Aquae Sulis, Zac Stoke is apprenticed to a mystically inclined architect obsessed with transforming the city. And in modern Bath, a troubled teenage girl takes the name Sulis, hoping to elude the terrifying specters from a past that haunts her. Told in alternating chapters with different typefaces and distinctive voices, each protagonist's account echoes and intertwines with the others: Names, places, events, behavior, words, images-all repeat, reverberating back and forth through time. This is a dazzling literary exercise, constructed with careful precision with patterns and symbols, but it's so precise and mannered that it repels emotional involvement. Spot illustrations do help illuminate many of these motifs, but readers unfamiliar with the history and architecture of the English city may still be left adrift. The personalities of the characters don't help: Bladud is grandiloquent and obscure, Zac arrogant and contemptuous, and Sulis shuttered and paranoid. Their interactions with the eponymous stone circles help each to heal and grow, but the mechanism of this transformation remains frustratingly opaque.Elegant, admirable and thought-provoking-but not, alas, engaging. (Historical fiction/suspense. 12-18)

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2014

Gr 8 Up-Long ago in ancient Briton, a leper king named Bladud was cast out by his people and later healed in the hot springs of the goddess Sulis. Bladud founded a city around the springs and built a great stone circle to honor his goddess. In 1740, a young nobleman with too many debts worked for an English architect on a development of townhouses called the King's Circus, based on the design of Bladud's stone circle. In the present day, a girl with no name lives there. She is hiding and knows too much. The girl has lived in more cities than she can count. But when she comes to the place that was once known as Aquae Sulis, now called Bath, the young woman feels at home. An exiled king, an architect's apprentice, and a girl on the run: three corners of a triangle come together as three related but distinctly stylized narratives. Events and themes are echoed over the centuries, and characters face similar dilemmas again and again, suggesting that the separate time lines are connected by more than just location. Fisher intricately weaves a haunting story about choices, perception, and greed. A well-researched novel that is unlike anything else on the young adult market. While ancient Druidic magic and 18th-century architecture by themselves will not find a wide audience in teen readers, romance, betrayal, sabotage, and an unsolved murder just might.-Liz Overberg, Darlington School, Rome, GA

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2014
Grades 7-10 Ever since her friend was murdered when they were both seven, Sulis (an assumed name) keeps seeing shadows of the vagrant accused of the murder, a man only she has seen. She's constantly on the move to different foster families to maintain her anonymity and safety, and now she's in Bath, living in the grand King's Circus, a street modeled on druidic magic. Woven throughout Sulis' story is the myth of Bladud, the druid who discovered the hot springs at Bath, as well as the story of Zac, the young apprentice to the architect who designed the King's Circus, in the late eighteenth century. Although each story on its own is fairly straightforward, the small echoes among themcircles, oak trees, jackdaws, and some muted elements of magicsuggest an eerie, haunting deeper connection, not only among the three characters but in the very power of the place. Though some of the links seem a little too neat, Fisher's compelling mystery subtly evokes ancient magic and a satisfying discovery of personal strength, all at once.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)