The Wild Way Home, by Sophie Kirtley, for Timeslip Tuesday

I subjected The Wild Way Home, by Sophie Kirtley, to one of the harshest tests known for a book--I read it on an airplane that took off at 5:40 am, and then finished it in a busy international airport.  It passed this test with flying colors; it was a riveting and moving read!

Charlie  regularly adventures in the scrappy bit of woods near home; it's a far cry from the ancient forests of Ireland, but its landmarks are a huge part of their emotional geography.  When Charlie's much anticipated little brother is born with a heart problem, and everything becomes too unknown and scary to cope with, Charlie runs into the woods....

But though the major landmarks are still there, the woods are not the same familiar place.  

Then Charlie sees an injured boy face down in the stream, and sets to work rescuing him  But the boy is confused, and can't remember what's happened to him.  Communication is difficult; the boy, called Harby, speaks a strangely broken English, and can't understand much of what Charlie is saying.  And so Charlie realizes that time has slipped backwards--these are the woods of early Neolithic Ireland, and Harby is a Stone Age boy.

As his memories begin to come back to him, Harby manages to communicate his desperation to find and save his little sister, and Charlie's thoughts circle around similar anxieties for the little baby in the hospital at home.  The two kids work together to stay alive (there are wolves in the woods, and food must be worked for), and at last Harby is reunited with his sister and father, and Charlie finds the way back home, with a sturdier mindset about the little brother waiting there.

It is a vivid picture of prehistoric life, the friendship and trust that grows between the kids is convincing, and the mechanism of time travel (a deer tooth Charlie has picked up, which turns out to be Harby's most meaningful talisman) is satisfactory.  The mix of contemporary realism and the Stone Age past works really well, and there's enough adventure in the past to keep things moving nicely. What makes the book really sing though is how moving it is.  I was so emotionally invested that I grew teary toward the end, and thought loving thoughts about my own family...(which I do regularly, but not always with such heightened emotion).

And now I look forward lots to reading the follow up story, The Way to Impossible Island, which features Harby's little sister and Charlie's little brother several years later....

(The story is told in the first person, and I read in someone else's review that Charlie is not identified specifically as boy or girl, which I hadn't noticed, and so I've avoided using pronouns here!)