Young Knights of the Round Table

This sprightly fantasy novel, the first of a planned quartet, starts unfavourably in a welter of sub-Tolkien over-blown rhetoric. But readers who stay the course will then be rewarded with an excellent story where four young visitors from another world battle to pass themselves off as humans in contemporary Oxford. Their mission is to discover who is damaging the order normally existing between the human and the fey world from which they come. With each having their own familiar, and making use of portals between one universe and another, there is more than a touch of Philip Pullman here over and above the Oxford setting. But attending a comprehensive school for this fey cohort brings about quite new problems, particularly for young Rick, who bases his idea of what a human adolescent would be like on very dated sources. The only fault in this story is too much attempted explanation of ‘feysyks’, the science that normally keeps the two worlds apart so avoiding a mighty conflagration. Since this science is all imaginary, it seems unnecessary to dwell upon it in such numbing detail. That apart, this is good writing from a quality author.