FernFolio

Fifteen-year old Ned Marriner wanders the deserted chapels and aisles of the ancient cathedral at Aix-en-Provence, passing the time while his famous photographer father sets up his photo shoot outside.  Though he is glad to be out of school two months early, and enjoys watching his father and his team of assistants plan the pictures for a coffee table book of Provence, one of France’s most beautiful and storied regions, he is too worried by his mother’s work with Médicins-Sans-Frontières to get involved.
Instead, Ned reads the signs posted throughout the cathedral’s interior that indicate that parts of this building are over a thousand years old, and that beneath it lie the ruins of a Roman arena.  He is surprised to see a girl of about his age enter the cathedral from a side door, and learns that the girl, Kate Wenger, is an American exchange student who has found the door from the cloister unlocked.  As they talk together, Ned and Kate hear a scraping noise and watch as a strange scarred man climbs out of a hole in the cathedral floor.  When they challenge the stranger, he reveals that, though he has killed children before, he has no wish to kill them.  So begins Ned’s and Kate’s strange adventure with three individuals, two men and a beautiful and elusive woman, whose story of love and revenge has spanned over twenty-five hundred years.
Ned’s meeting with the scarred man in Saint-Sauveur Cathedral awakens in him an unexpected gift, the ability to sense forces that remain unseen by most mortals.  Drawn into a deadly game between two ancient rivals who have repeatedly returned to Provence over the centuries to fight for a woman they both love, Ned needs Kate’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Provence’s history to try and sort out what is going on.  When Melanie, his father’s bright and funny assistant, disappears on Beltane, the night that, for the ancient Celts, marked the beginning of summer, Ned and Kate find themselves in a desperate race against time to rescue the young assistant before she is lost forever.
Set in Provence, a region steeped in thousands of years of history, Ysabel pulls back some of its many layers, and draws the reader into a story that is both never and constantly changing.  Ned, caught between the present and the shadowy  past, between the rational science of his practical mother and a new and unnerving gift of second sight, finds himself thrown from the certainty and reassurance of childhood into unsettling adulthood.  A story that will be sure to capture the imaginations of young adult readers!
FernFolio Editor