"Slowly, almost against her will, she left Kenneth, walked up to the crest of the hillock, and there, in the hollow, she saw them."
The them are a crone singing in gaelic and playing the harp, and two men, in strange clothing, staring down at a third man, lying still. The crone switches to English, with a sound of calling that begins thus
"We call from the star-heart of Dunadd
We call the Healer from the Unborn Years"
and the reader knows they are in for a nice timeslip back to the ancient past of Scotland.
And then there was a bit I enjoyed about the family and Bridie travelling to the family's summer cottage on the island of Mull, and we get some nice Scottish island and some good tension between Bridie, with her troubling tendency to retreat into fantastical imaginings of her dead father, and the other kids.
Then the time travel kicks in for real. All four kids travel back to the 6th century, where the three youngest of them slot into the roles existing persons in the kingdom of Dunadd, retaining at first dreamlike memories of their own time. The oldest, training to be a doctor, boy, stays himself and is faced with the nightmarish task of healing the badly wounded prince. And since he still has all his memories of his own time, this is very good medical time travel.
But things go badly south for me after this. Bridie becomes the sole pov character and in her aspect of living Dark Ages goddess (believing she had magic powers and was the most important person around), she wasn't as interesting a character to me as troubled modern Bridie was. She becomes immersed in the tensions of the past, with no memory of the present. And what I find most interesting in time travel is the tension between the two, I was both resentful and disappointed. Even the looping around of her experiences in the past to starting to heal her troubled mind in the present wasn't enough to make past and present work in tandem for a better story.
There were moments of interest, beauty, strange Celtic magic, and character development, and it is so easy to imagine it being one I really loved. And Finlay does a fine job bringing Dark Age Scotland to life, and I appreciated Saint Columba showing up and adding a bit of Pagan vs Christian tension--old gods giving way to the new and all that. If the time in the past had been presented to me, somewhat expanded, as a book on its own, I would probably have enjoyed it.
But it wasn't, and so I am a bit reluctant to spend more money on Finlay's books because what if this sort of bait and switch is something she does in all of them? (that being said, the The Castle and the Cave, which isn't time travel, looks very appealing, but at $728, is not obtainable at this time....)
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