Bridget

Crepeau (Turn Back Time, 2014, etc.) offers a YA fantasy in which a teenage orphan inherits property in Ireland and stumbles into a war that threatens the fae kingdom.

Sixteen-year-old Bridget Kerins lives alone in a shabby apartment in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. She works two jobs, both of her parents have passed away, and her neighbor Mrs. Miller vouches for her as an “aunt” to the authorities. Miraculously, Bridget learns from Ana Gurney, an Irish lawyer, that she’s inherited land near the Irish village of Swinford. Using money she’s saved, Bridget crosses the Atlantic in the hope of starting a new life. The situation changes, however, when Ana is mistaken for Bridget on the road to the property; a foul creature named Dagda, who works for the evil sorceress Morrigan, kidnaps the lawyer, believing her to be the one prophesied to save the fae peoples. Bridget safely rents a car at the airport and makes her way toward Swinford. She meets Aunt Polly, a brownie, and is indoctrinated into the fae world—and the notion that she has special powers, due to faerie and leprechaun ancestry. But even with the help of the handsome Lord Howth, who’s disguised as a Brittany spaniel, can Bridget master her abilities in time to save Ana and the fae? Author Crepeau begins a new YA fantasy series featuring a vibrant cast of mythological characters and a deep appreciation for the majesty of Ireland. The lousiness of Bridget’s Red Hook life is hammered home in lines such as, “she washes the stairs with buckets of bleach water, but nothing removes the odor of urine and stale beer.” (High school for this teenager isn’t even mentioned.) Later, in Ireland and eventually Scotland, the “green hilly pastures that go on for miles” enchant her, as do ruins and ancient castles. When Morrigan’s machinations begin, readers meet creatures such as the strange Anthropophagi (“a headless creature appears, his eyes placed on his shoulders, and his mouth is in the center of his chest. He has no nose”) but also heroic fae royalty, including King Padraig and Queen Geraldine and even a few Arthurian legends. Bridget learns much about herself by the end, including that “Sometimes it is easier...to believe in things outside ourselves, rather than believe in ourselves.”

Readers will be charmed by both the characters and scenery in this moral, upbeat YA fantasy.