Riding the Storm

Holliday's novel belongs in that category of children's fiction in which the power of ancient legend seeps through to contemporary life. Here, the principal link has to do with healing. As young Welsh teenager Alun Roberts recovers from the nightmarish experiences which have led to his hospital bed, he, like the reader, is simultaneously drawn into the misty domains of the Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach and her physician sons. The parallels between real and imaginary worlds are established quite convincingly. But the most haunting presence in the book is less its ghostly backdrop than Alun himself, a boy sadly adrift in his feelings about his parents, the new man in his mother's life and, most dramatically of all, his new baby sister.