Out of the Shadows

In Elizabethan England, young teen Elizabeth Dyer lives in trepidation, her family a political target because of their Roman Catholicism. In the course of just a few days, she makes a new friend—a strange, green girl named Isabella—and finds herself to be the protector of a Catholic priest hiding from a menacing tracker adored by Elizabeth’s employer. Isabella, who hails from the thirteenth century, has an association with the world of faerie that the Protestants won’t accept—though the Catholics do with peculiar nonchalance—and helps the sixteenth-century Elizabeth’s efforts to keep her family, the priest, and herself safe. The myriad issues of politics, religion, and time travel (never well explained) present a confusing stew that may be too much for readers not well versed in the systematic differences between Catholicism and the Church of England, or tales of British faeries, but the writing is smooth and character evocation compelling. A tidy ending leaves Isabella’s ultimate fate 300 years after her mortal era unplumbed. Grades 8-10. --Francisca Goldsmith