Evil Afoot! Grayling's Song by Karen Cushman

"Grayling, come. Attend me now! Her mother's voice!

The mist was clearing elsewhere, but the cottage was still shadowed. Not mist, but... smoke. Too much smoke! Suddenly the roof thatch exploded in flames.

What had happened? Where was Hannah Strong? "Mother!" Grayling screamed. "Come away with me, do!"

Her mother stood at the edge of the clearing--straight and strong--and still. Still? Grayling's mother was never still.

"Witless child, open your eyes and look," her mother said, gesturing toward her feet. They were rooted in the earth. What had been soft skin was as rough and brown as a tree trunk.

An evil force of smoke and shadow is afoot in the land, Hannah Strong's grimoire, her spell book, has been taken. Hannah is a wise woman, whose curative potions and simple spells can fight sickness, but without her book she is unable to save herself from turning inch by inch into a rooted tree, and now all depends on the daughter she has always called "Feeble Wits" to save her and the other magic folk from the evil force afoot. Hannah can only teach Grayling two songs, a "gathering song" to call forth the other "wise folk," and a song that can locate her grimoire and make it sing back to her from wherever it has been taken. She sends Grayling forth with the songs and some herbs and jars with some little magic in them to rally the magic folk to save those of them already rooted in the earth before they are totally transformed to trees.

But Grayling's first night ends badly, with a mouse crawling into her basket while she sleeps and eating from each jar. Suddenly, the mouse she names Pook can speak and shape-shift haphazardly into a goat or a raven, but with nothing left but her mother's songs, Grayling's mission seems to have already failed.

But her gathering song seems to work, as it calls forth a motley crew of wise folk: Auld Nancy, an elderly weather witch who can call forth sunshine or rain--and lightning, which unfortunately she can control not at all, and her lumpen and sulky great-niece Pansy, who claims great powers, but displays none, except to eat most of the little they find to eat. Joining their journey also is an enchantress, Desdemona Cork, whose powers seem to work only on moneyed gentlemen, and a scholarly sorcerer who knows much of magic and little of working it. But Grayling's calling-forth song to the grimoire is answered, and following its song, she leads her grumbling, shambling group through the forest and past hostile villages, as the song of the grimoire grows stronger. Grayling herself begins to come into her own powers, and at last she grasps the secret of the unlikely source of the evil.

In the Newbery-winning Karen Cushman's forthcoming medieval adventure, Grayling's Song (Houghton Mifflin Clarion Books, 2016), the quest is all. Grayling finds the confidence that she can vanquish the forces of fire and smoke, at least for the nonce. Her companions return to their previous lives intact, and she finds her mother freed, her feet once more broad and strong. But Grayling has learned too much on her journey to again become Hannah Strong's handmaiden, and she determines to set forth to fulfill her own powers, in ways yet unknown.

Seasons change, winter's nigh,
Leaves change color, fall, an die.
Everything changes by and by.
Seasons change, and so do I.

As in Cushman's celebrated Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice, the ambiance of the Middle Ages provides the setting for the coming-of-age of a resourceful girl whose personal journey leads her into a new life of her own, while Cushman's colorful and clearly-drawn characters add humor to the masterful storytelling in which the journey, not the destination, is most of the fun for middle readers.

Justice for None: The Wicked and the Just by J. Anderson Coats

Tonight, at supper, over capon and relish, my father ruined my life.

He smiled big, scrubbed his mouth with the end of his cloak, and said, "We're moving house."

"Thank the blessed Virgin!" I sat up straighter and smoothed my kirtle. "Will we be back at Edgeley Hall in time for the Maypole?"

"No, sweeting. We're moving to Caernarvon."

"What in God's name is that?"

It is 1293. Edward I, victorious over the Welsh, is seeking Englishmen for his newly built garrison cities, settlers for his occupied lands, and Cecily's father, a landless second son, jumps at the chance to become a burgess in that settlement, a walled town surrounded by barely subjugated Welsh farmers.

After a harrowing journey, with only her dead mother's old dog as a reminder of her happy former life, Cecily arrives in Caernarvon. She is dazzled by the beauty of the castle, but dismayed at life on the frontier, the primitiveness and anger of the Welsh, their strange language, and the pretentiousness of the honesti, English "old settlers," who look down on the newcomers, the scorned novi. Her father is delighted with the chance to become a powerful landowner on the new border; their housekeeper Mrs. Tipley suffers no guff from Cecily as the imperious, would-be mistress of their house: and she is left to take her resentment and spite out on the Welsh housemaid, a servant girl about her age, Gwenhwyfar, whose family, unknown to Cecily, once owned the lands now assigned by the Crown to Cecily's father.

The two girls, both strong-willed, are natural enemies. Cecily is determined to be the mistress of the house, and Gwinny, dependent upon her small wages to maintain her life and that of her desperately ill mother, is determined to do her work without submission to Cecily's frequent tantrums, secretly calling her "the brat." Cecily takes offense at Gwinny's brother's frank stares, and sets out to humiliate him and have him unjustly punished at every opportunity. Gwinny takes revenge by shredding Cecily's wardrobe, for which Cecily sees that Gwinny is lashed within an inch of her life.

But Mrs. Tipley insists that Cecily give the injured girl her own bed and care for her as she recovers, and as time passes, the two come to a grudging respect for the other's dogged strength. Cecily rescues Gwinny from mistreatment so that "justice must be done," and Gwinny saves Cecily from an unwanted attack by the lascivious Edward, and finally reveals to her that the young man that Cecily has been persecuting is her only surviving brother.

"To think you almost had me hoodwinked. With your pitiful nod to justice and your feeding the poor. More fool I, thinking you were any different from the rest. Especially the likes of that shrew in the gilded townhouse you cannot complain of enough."

"Name one thing she does that I do!"

"Murder. Your hands won't be on the rope, but his blood will be on your hands."

"Whose blood?" I gesture toward the backyard. "His? What is he to you?"

"My brother," Gwinny chokes. "And he's all I've got, rot you."

Cecily understands. She has only her father, and he has only her. To atone, Cecily quietly arranges for her father to get Gwinny's brother Gruffwyd a secure job cutting wood, and when the Welsh rebel Madog leads a bloody insurrection in which Caernavon is sacked and the English are slaughtered, it is Gruffyd who saves Cecily, who then finds herself a servant to Gwinny, living in their poor hut and her life dependent upon them to hide her from the rebels.

As Aeschylus said, if "in war, the first casualty is truth, surely the second is justice." J. Anderson Coats' forthcoming novel, The Wicked and the Just (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) explores the nature of that justice, in one of those all-too-familiar human situations in which the passion for vengeance overcomes the restraints of law, justice, and faith itself. This is a powerful novel which deals with a little-known period of history, but the lesson of which has not yet been learned in the life of nations, and it does so through the words and thoughts of two narrators portrayed in all their humanity. Cecily and Gwinny cannot change the times or their bloody conjoined history, but they do find a way to change their hearts in the recognition of their common nature. Coats offers, in her appended historical note, the reassuring theme that over the many intervening centuries the Welsh and the English have come to a still uneasy accommodation to their common destiny, but this glimpse of the wages of vengeance make the reader wish that somehow they, and we, had found a better way.

"Brilliant: a vision of history before the victors wrote it," says Kirkus Reviews.