Description
The year is 1918 and Grace Pike is 11. A precocious outcast at prestigious Victoria Street School in Harbour Grace, she is severely challenged as a young adult reader. A difficult year of studies is made worse when her mother, a recent war widow, is faced with a proposition which could change the future of both the family and the town they call home.
But when Grace encounters two visiting children at the Fairy Ring, a magical cluster of trees on an abandoned farm, everything changes. Now a star student, Grace must contend with the jealously and feverish smears of a community on the edge of irrevocable change, inflamed by the building of an aerodrome for the pioneer flight of the Handley Page Atlantic in 1919.
What if her family’s newfound circumstances are too good to be true, if she and her mother have somehow made a deal with the devil? Does life rest on such mysterious fortunes? And for families and communities does fortune favour the brave?
These are the tensions author Patrick J. Collins negotiates in The Secret of the Fairy Ring, a welcome departure melding fantasy with realism. Here is historical Newfoundland as you’ve never seen it before.
