By Douglas Hill
[Armadillo 5.1 Spring 2003]

Catherine Fisher's fantasy presents an imagined antiquity, freely adapted from ancient Greece and Egypt, where people worship their oracular god in often savage rituals. Teenage Mirany, an outwardly timid servitor of the god, feels growing doubt about its reality. As she looks for answers amid a welter of treachery and murder, she finds that the god is real and is speaking to her, putting her in even greater peril.

Some might find a potential for confusion in this fictionalised melange of historical actuality. But young readers are unlikely to care, once gripped by the deeper truths of the story and the compelling, vivid intensity of the writing.

Chris Wooding offers another fantasy world and another teenage heroine, but with a difference. Poison is her self-inflicted name, a defiantly sharp-edged girl whose village lies in a ghastly swamp in the human Realm. When her little sister is stolen by malevolent "phaeries", she does the unthinkable and goes after her. The journey through the Realms brings her new friends, plenty of monstrous enemies such as the Bone Witch and the Spider Queen, and scary excitements galore.

Yes, it's the good old "quest" motif, but Wooding's boundless imagination lifts it far above the merely formulary.

Andrew Matthews brings us back to this world with Danni, neither timid nor defiant, just a lively teenage girl with normal boy troubles. Until she starts getting strange phone calls and being stalked ® all coinciding with the reappearance of a weird childhood friend, Leah. Which reawakens, for Danni, old terrors involving Leah, and werewolves, and fearful danger.

Matthews seems to have a hot line to teenage authenticity, which makes his slow building of this chilling mystery even more effective.

Then there's Herbie Brennan, brilliantly combining elements of folklore and occultism, heroic fantasy, advanced physics, science fiction and more, to produce an utterly captivating, breathlessly pacy adventure.

In just the first few chapters we find teenage Henry (in this world) shattered by his parents' break-up, while in an alternate world a teenage prince, Pyrgus, is a target as the evil faeries of the Night plan war against those of the Light. After they meet, things get more hectic, with wizards and demons and spells and high-tech weapons and an elderly retired bank robber and the prince's feisty sister Holly Blue....

Don't miss this; it's just about as good as fantasy gets. And, I'm happy to say, it's quietly open-ended, promising more to come.