ANARCHY by James Treadwell

ANARCHY by James TreadwellThe second in his trilogy—the first, Advent, was reviewed in Agenda’s last issue—Anarchy opens in British Columbia Canada, where strange things are happening.  Jennifer, a fifteen-year-old girl, suspected of murdering her brother, is locked in a cell, but disappears, leaving nothing behind but a horrible rotten fish smell; a boy is found alive on the beach; all electronics go haywire—computers, phones, televisions.  All over the world people are disappearing.  How is this connected to the events at the end of Advent, the first book in the trilogy?  Marina, the thirteen-year-old child of a human and a mermaid, is all alone in Pendurra, everyone but the priest, Father Owen, having left her.  She decides to venture at the urging of Holly, the dryad guard at the gate that has up to now kept her in.  Thus begins her wanderings where she eventually meets Gawain’s mother, who has traveled from London to Cornwall in search of him.

The apocalyptic nature of Treadwell’s trilogy becomes clear with this second book.  Shifting constantly from England to Canada, the events and the settings are symbolic of happenings all over the world:  the death and destruction, the lawlessness . . . all having begun back in 1537 with the gift of a ring.  As we follow “Goose” Maculloch, the lovely dedicated and ever optimistic RCMP policewoman (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), and like her remain hopeful that somehow the world will right itself, we refuse to accept the inevitability of the world gone amok.  The two books are so well written on so many levels.  The suspense alone, plus the beauty of Treadwell’s narration in which mythology, fantasy, and reality intermix, has me eagerly awaiting the publication of the third and last book. (Expected date of publication is sometime in 2014.)

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