Song of the Saltings

Curiously, this is the second book I have reviewed in the last year that involves child sacrifice. Such is the world of children’s fantasy. Thankfully, in Rachael King’s dark tale, the people of the isolated island of Brack have recently stopped strapping their offspring to a stone on the shoreline as food for the watery Glimm. This mysterious monster, as is often the case, demands its regular tribute in exchange for the necessities won from the soil and the sea. However, a while ago, the Glimm turned its nose up at the tethered child and took her pony instead and so now, equally disturbing for many readers, it lives on an entirely equine diet. Lotta was the Glimm’s rejected meal and now she tends the horses at the manor house, sensibly refusing to become attached to them since they may not last long. The sacrifice is chosen by lot amid rituals presided over by the Council, a sinister male cabal. The villagers are entirely in their power, but an outcast group, known as the hidelings, who have always refused to give up their children, scrape a living on the margins. It is the developing friendship between Lotta and Moss, a hidelings youth, initially bonding over the rescue of Moss’s horse from the marsh, that begins to prise open the cracks in this cruel regime, leads to revelations of the island’s past, and brings its people at last face to face with the Glimm. A little long for me at nearly four hundred pages, this is an atmospheric and incident crammed novel, rooted in working lives wrested from an inhospitable environment, and the beliefs and attitudes that grow and are tested there: people who can be sometimes suspicious, selfish and cruel, but also generous, loyal and brave.