Changes

The other thing that really impressed me about the book was the way the time travel was handled – this is a bugbear for me as I've read some dreadfully convoluted stories in the past concerning the subject. Denning sets things up well, never goes into too much detail on how everything works, and trust in his ability to keep the action flowing so well that the fine points aren't particularly important. Speaking of details, while the historical sequences are fairly short and they're set in times which I'm not particularly familiar with, they certainly all seem authentic.

In many ways, the story – young boy finds out he had mysterious powers he didn't know about and is plunged into a quest which has been going on for years – is reminiscent of the Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, still probably my favourite children's fantasy sequence twenty years after I originally read it. I'm not saying that I'll return to this one again as often as I've done that series – but I'll definitely reread it at least once in the future, and I'll recommend it to readers around Tom's age, many of whom I confidently expect to absolutely love it. I'm not sure whether older teens will like it quite so much, given the huge amount of great fantasy out there today and the lack of much character development, but I'd encourage them to at least try it.