The Stolen Lake
by Joan Aiken

The sixth book in the beloved Wolves series actually has no wolves in it; but there are a lot of other dangerous things, and some of them are quite magical. In fact, with this story Ms. Aiken has created a truly original fantasy. Starting with an alternate history in which James III is King of England instead of Queen Victoria (though at one point, she slips and refers to Queen Victoria), she spins a wild and weird tale combining elements of the King Arthur legend with the Incas of Peru, the tribes of the Brazilian rain forest, and such mythical creatures as the roc (or, to be exact, the auroc).

I believe this whole adventure was inspired by a footnote in history, which says that Brazil was named after a legendary magical isle, associated with King Arthur, which its discoverers believed they had found. What if there actually was some truth to that story? What if, at the Battle of Dyrham in the year 577, the Britons and Romans were defeated by the Saxons and sailed away to South America to start a civilization known, in modern times, as Roman America? And what if, after King Arthur was wounded and taken away to the island of Avalon in the middle of a sacred lake, the fleeing Romans took the lake with them?

And now, in the mid-19th-century, one of the allies of James III’s England is the isolated nation of New Cumbria, deep in the forests and volcanic mountains of South America. And Dido Twite, on board His Majesty’s ship Thrush, sailing home to England after her adventures in Nantucket, finds herself in the middle of a right fix, when Captain Hughes receives orders summoning him to the aid of the Queen of New Cumbria. The problem, it turns out, is that the sacred lake has been stolen, just when it seems that the Once and Future King was going to return from across its waters. She wants Hughes and Co. to get her lake back from a neighboring king, who apparently stole it in retaliation for the abduction of his daughter. And bright, brave cockney child Dido Twite is going to be part of the plan.

There’s a lot of sinister and weird stuff going on, though: fantastically, frighteningly, outrageously weird stuff that shares in the same legendary background as Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King; stuff that involves witchcraft (which is defined as what happens when two or more evil people combine their evil for a common purpose), abduction, human sacrifice, daring escapes, gruesome deaths, star-crossed lovers, cruel hexes, a hideous 1300-year-old woman whose diet and interior décor are as awful as her personality, and a minstrel who tells stories whose “point” you have to figure out for yourself; also, there are man-eating fish, man-eating birds, a man-eating leopard, a hell-hound hunt in which humans are the quarry, a case of amnesia, and a series of desperate messages torn out of a dictionary and tied around the necks of pussy-cats. Who can ask for anything more?

This story takes place between the events in Nightbirds on Nantucket and The Cuckoo Tree, though it was written after both. For other adventures featuring the winning Ms. Twite, enjoy Black Hearts in Battersea and Dido and Pa. The series is currently available in a charming reprint edition from the Houghton Mifflin Company.

Robbie Fischer
Arizona USA

Recommended Age: 12+

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