There, she finds a magical rock which enables her to understand the speech of animals. Pervis, captain of the Bridewell guards, catches her with a spyglass looking over the wall to the forest and reports her to the triumvirate, but her father ignores the complaint and notes that some day, with Warvold's son, Alexa will run the realm.Īs the administration discusses the threat of domination by Ainsworth, Alexa finds a way out of the walled city and meets a little man, Yipes, who takes her into the mountains. His offer was accepted, and he employed the convicts in building the walled roads and the walls around the cities.Īlexa "burns to feel the freedom of forests and mountains." She is with Old Warvold, a grandfather figure, when he dies.
Afterwards, they sent them to parts of Australia.Įarly in the novel, readers learn that Warvold, the founder of the "kingdom," offered to house 300 criminals from Ainsworth for 10 years and then return them. Prior to the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, England transported prisoners to Virginia. Could they have come from Europe to North America? If so, there is an explanation for the presence of convicts in Ainsworth. The author of The Dark Hills Divide, however, does not explain where the "people" came from. One thinks of Gulliver's Travels or The Odyssey in which the hero starts out from an actual, real, historical place. Good fantasy, like its cousin, science fiction, starts out from reality. This sounds like the North American wilderness as described by some of its earliest settlers. Old Warvold, who began life as an orphan in the nearby town of Ainsworth, travelled the world and, on returning, persuaded people to settle in the area "which everybody believed was haunted, dark and dangerous." Old Warvold, the founder and head of state, administers Lunenburg, and a man named Ganesh administers Bridewell. "Our kingdom was a wagon wheel made of stone," says Alexa, referring to the walled routes linking the three walled cities.Īlexa's father is one of three co-rulers or administrators (not kings). Alexa is travelling by horse drawn vehicle with her father who is one of a triumvirate administering the towns of Lunenburg, Lathbury and Bridewell, which make up the "kingdom" of Elyon. Young readers, however, will probably not pick up on such words as clues to another level of meaning but will accept the story at face value.Ĭarman begins in medias res, spinning his tale through the heart and mind of Alexa Daley, a strong female protagonist, 12-years-old. "Lunenburg" made me wonder about a Nova Scotia setting for a while until I realized that I was mistaken. "Bridewell" echoes Thomas Hardy and Evelyn Waugh. Moveable type is available in this culture which has the wheel, but not the internal combustion engine. There are some new elements: jewels in cat collars provide clues, and convicts are the source of fear in the kingdom of Elyon.Ĭertain elements suggest to this adult reader that Elyon exists somewhere in the "New World," in the northern hemisphere, in the 1600s. A decoding stone found in a forest pool, hidden letters, and talking animals-all add to the magic. Carman presses all the time-tested buttons to create a suspenseful tale. So says Anders the grizzly bear, king of the forest, in Patrick Carman's fantasy novel. The monster is not the collection of criminals who live in the Dark Hills. New York, NY: Orchard Books (Distributed in Canada by Scholastic Canada), 2005.
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