The Riddles of Epsilon

This long novel has a plentiful ancestry in modern children’s literature. It is another struggle between supernatural forces of good and evil, the light and the dark, complete with shape-shifters, perilous journeys through caves, dark towers, and a human child holding the balance between defeat and victory. Moreover, everything takes place on an island, and reaches its climax at a village festival with origins lost in time. We have been here before.

Jessica is 14, transplanted from friends and urban living to a remote island house which her artist mother has inherited. Soon strange happenings begin, and it becomes clear that her mother has been singled out to be the innocent donor of a cursed supernatural object (a tooth) to the evil lord Cimul. Unless the tooth is innocently given, Cimul cannot unlock its powers for evil. Jessica is recruited by the forces of good, in the person of the ghostly Epsilon, to perform a rescue act. To do so she must solve a seemingly endless series of riddles, puzzles, acrostics, symbols, codes and other clues that open up before her. It is never clear quite why the forces of good make life so hard for Jessica. Although her quest is intriguing, the book only really catches fire in the last hundred pages or so, when she comes face to face with the evil powers themselves. Meanwhile, the human agents of darkness (the village doctor and his sinister blue-eyed friend) are mere walk-on parts in the mystery, though potentially far more interesting than language puzzles. The book is readable and quite ingenious, but would work better if Jessica’s struggle was with people instead of linguistic conundrums.