Starred review from December 17, 2012
“I always prefer a walk that goes in a circle.... Don’t you?” a woman named Bridget says to her daughter, Merle, at one point in this heady mystery that joins the remote northern setting of Sedgwick’s Revolver with the multigenerational scope of his White Crow. Sedgwick appears to share Bridget’s sentiment: as he moves backward through time in seven interconnected stories—from the late 21st century to an unspecified ancient era—character names, spoken phrases, and references to hares, dragons, and sacrifice reverberate, mutate, and reappear. Set on a mysterious and isolated Nordic island, the stories all include characters with variations on the names of Eric and Merle. In a present-day story about an archeological dig, Eric is a oddly strong, brain-damaged teenager and Merle his mother; in the 10th century, when the island was inhabited by Vikings, Eirek and Melle are young twins, whose story answers questions raised by what the archeologists discover. Teenage characters are few and far between, but a story that’s simultaneously romantic, tragic, horrifying, and transcendental is more than enough to hold readers’ attention, no matter their age. Ages 12–up.