Wormwood Gate

Julie and Aisling would not have chosen each other as companions; the first few pages of Wormwood Gate capture the edgy, bickering relationship between these classmates. But when they are thrust into the City of Three Castles, while making their way to a friend’s party at a city club, their differences become subordinate to their efforts to escape an alternative, dystopian version of Dublin. It’s not often that the Wormwood Gate into this strange city, lying in the Realms Between, opens, but when it does and a white horse with a red mane emerges, the girls find themselves in a city that is familiar but alien, and where expected codes of behaviour on the part of a citizenry do not apply. This is the place of the three queens: the Queen-that-was, the Queen-that-is and the Queen-that-will be, one of whom succeeds the other in a perpetual cycle of death and resurrection. Unfortunately for Aisling and Julie they arrive in the city at a time when the three queens have disagreed and are now all alive, and prison is the only place for anyone who might be conspiring with the Lord of Shadows or Molly Red to overthrow the reigning Queen-that-is.

Farmar has an excellent touch with all of this: action is leavened with humour, and the unwinding plot gently nudges along the growing respect – and maybe more – that the girls discover they have for each other. The voices of the characters are captured convincingly and entertainingly; Julie and Aisling speak as contemporary Dublin teenagers do, while there is a distinctly ‘Alice in Wonderlandish’ tone to the utterances of the merhorse inhabitants of the river area and the rabbit who assists the girls. An engaging offering for readers who like their fantasy spiked with intelligence and wit.