Scabbit Isle

For a short novel, Scabbit Isle covers a great deal: bullying, bereavement and the effect of a family breakup. It is not, however, an ‘issues’ book. Pow has contained all of these reflections of modern life within a highly entertaining ghost story encasing social and familial disintegration centuries earlier.

Sam’s family is still struggling to recover from the tragic death of his twin sister. Perhaps it is this loss that enables him to see the mysterious girl who is in some way connected to Scabbit Isle, the place to which plague victims were banished, rarely to return. Pow nicely interweaves a ghostly mystery with the sense of a normal family struggling in different ways to come to terms with an awful loss. Gradually the horror of the plague which terrorized the Scottish town that is now Sam’s home is revealed, and Sam discovers that he is being asked to bring peace to Janet, the Provost’s daughter who suffered cruelly at that time. There are a number of interesting subsidiary characters, and the main characters are well-drawn in this intelligently constructed debut novel. I shall be on the lookout for Pow’s next book.