INGLEDOVE

Youmans’s second Adantis offering hovers between novel and fairytale. Orphans Ingledove and Lang live in the city, refugees from a pastoral paradise flooded for electricity during WWII. When Lang has a nightmare, the children’s folksy and uncanny nurse sends them on a strange journey. She tells Lang to beware of snakes, but the boy scoffs at her superstition. Yet while the children wander the backwoods, he’s seduced by a snakelike succubus who leaves him near death. It’s up to Ingledove to save her brother, and she brings him deep into the wild to meet an Adantan Witchmaster. The children’s mother, she learns, was from Adantis—a tribe of Celtic-Cherokee crosses inhabiting magical Appalachia. Together with the young Witchmaster, Ingledove quests into the land of the Little People to defeat Lang’s monstrous seducer. Ingledove’s magical journey, lovingly enriched by Celtic and Cherokee mythology, ends too suddenly and with too little personal growth for conventional fiction. But the intricate and unorthodox mythos is fascinating; Ingledove’s story, though set in the 20th century, is clearly folklore. (Fiction. 10-13)