Otto and the Flying Twins

The Karmidee are a people diversely gifted with magical powers, and once they lived safely and secretly in their City of Trees, ringed by protective mountains. Then an earthquake allowed human beings to break in and occupy the land, forcing the Karmidee to the fringes of their own city. Still their magic survived, and after the mountain walls were closed again to all intruders, the human settlers came to accept some magical things as normal. Now a Minister for Modernisation has taken power in the city, recruiting a secret police to enforce Normality, and the Karmidee are threatened with reduction to a freak show for a new wave of human outsiders. This is the story of their fight for survival.

A mixture of humour and extravagant action, this attractive fantasy is accessible to quite young readers simply as an adventure story. But it is a very thoughtful book, and underlying its invention and suspense are other layers of meaning. The Karmidee stand for the natural world, overrun by human spoliation, or for indigenous peoples like the Native Americans, subjected to white colonisation. Certainly the book depicts humans unappealingly, as destroyers of magic, and encourages children to respect ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’, in the human world of so-called ‘normality’.