Station Zero

There are two sorts of fantasy story: the sort that feels fake and the sort that feels real. It’s hard to explain the difference, but you know the real ones when you read them, and Skye McKenna’s debut novel  Hedgewitch  is one of them. Young Cassandra Morgan, daughter of missing mother, escapes her grim boarding school and ends up living with her aunt in the visit of Hedgely, which is mapped in exquisite detail by illustrator Tomislav Tomic.* (I think he’s done some illustrations to the text too, but they don’t feature in my proof copy. I wish he’d been allowed to do the cover, too.) Cassandra’s family, it turns out, are witches, whose job it is to keep everyone safe from the fae who dwell on the far side of a weird stretch of forest called the Hedge.  We seem to be in a Jonathan Strange-ish alternate Britain, where a cold war between faeries and humans is starting to hot up as the mysterious Erl King gathers his power beyond the Hedge. With its very English shops and cu...