Amadans

The first badge Jimmy MacIver finds bears a mysterious message: ‘AmadansAnonymous. Comingtogetyou.’ Soon the badges are everywhere – in cereal packets, outside the newsagents and on a park bench. Jimmy’s best friend, Nita, is finding them too. The messages are getting alarming: ‘AmadansAnonymous. Comingyour way…. Comingevercloser.’ Jimmy’s Grandad mutters darkly about the ‘Stroke Lads’, a form of Irish fairy with the ability to paralyse misbehaving humans and whose task it is to keep our world in order. Just what do they want from Jimmy and how can he contact them?

The answer lies, literally, through the Internet. When Jimmy and Nita key in the name, they are pulled through the screen into the Amadan world. It is a troubled one: The Amadans are losing their crucial powers of paralysis and Queen Alisha is desperate for some human help… Subtlety is not the name of the game in this modern fantasy, but verbal ingenuity most definitely is. Doyle is knowing about his cast of cartoon characters and assumes a degree of reading sophistication: the telling, complete with reference to earlier pages, becomes a prolonged shared joke. The plot, aside from its hi-tech framing, is comfortably predictable and the story is told at a rollicking pace with a completely infectious energy and good-humour.