A Green and Ancient Light

Starred review from April 4, 2016
Durbin (Dragonfly) returns to adult fiction with this quiet, charming tale of a young boy in a deliberately obscured setting; most of the characters are left nameless, and all the reader knows is that this is a time of war. Sent to spend the summer with a grandmother he’s never met, the boy finds more of an adventure than he could have expected. One of his grandmother’s mysterious old friends arrives in the night to ask for their help rescuing an enemy soldier whose plane was shot down nearby. The effort to hide the soldier leads them to a ruined garden in the woods that’s filled with statues of monsters. The boy’s wonder and astonishment suffuses the narrative as he and the others work to solve the puzzle presented by the garden. The prose is frequently as beautiful as the images it evokes: “They had forgotten all about me, but I didn’t mind. It was good to hear them talking this way, their voices warm and soft and worn as old leather.” Durbin skillfully ties together the shared quest of three generations even as one of them, the boy’s father, is rendered absent by the war. This gentle, engaging, and very personal coming-of-age story is mythic in its universality.

May 15, 2016

With his country caught in the midst of battle (a distorted version of World War II), a young boy is shipped off to his grandmother's home in the countryside for safety. When an enemy plane is shot down near their village, the boy and his grandmother find the wounded survivor in the woods considered haunted by the villagers. Thus there is no one around to witness the pair help the pilot hide on the grounds of a long-abandoned estate. No one, that is, except Mr. Girondole, an old friend of the boy's grandmother, who happens to be a faun. The three work together to nurse the man back to health, but when a tenacious army major comes looking for the downed pilot, they will all be in danger. Durbin (Dragonfly) gives his story an old-fashioned fairy-tale feel (with the exception of Mr. Girondole, the other characters are given initials) and imbues his settings with a languorous sense of being outside of time. VERDICT This is a magical book that will appeal to those who loved Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things.--MM

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016
Durbin's gorgeously atmospheric novel (after The Star Shard, 2012) solidly shares the fantasy- and historical-fiction genres. Set in a rural village during an unnamed war, the story begins with a plane crash. A nine-year-old boy, his grandmother, and her mysterious friend, Mr. Girandole, find a severely wounded enemy pilot at the crash site. After deciding not to turn him in, the trio transports the pilot to a secluded garden in the mountains dubbed the grove of monsters to nurse him back to health, knowing most locals avoid the supposedly haunted ground. The garden is filled with otherworldly statues, from the beautiful to the grotesque, and the boy is immediately enchanted by them and their cryptic inscriptions. Mr. Girandole soon reveals that the garden itself is a riddle and may hold the key to the land of Fairy. What follows is a delicate dance between reality and fantasy, ominous soldiers and late-night fairy music. Fans of John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things (2006) will enjoy this bittersweet fantasy with a mystery at its core.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)