A little research on Amazon told me that there are actually four books in this series and the fourth (and final, bringing back some of our favorite characters) is due out in 2009. So I’m not quite as surprised by the third book in this series. Melling still has degrees in Celtic stuff and whatnot, and her books are still set in Ireland.

This, the third volume, has roughly the same plot as the last two: young female must travel around Ireland alone to save a female relative and also Faerie. In this book, the young female is Dana; she’s twelve, which is five or six years younger than the heroines of the previous two novels. The female relative is her mother, who disappeared some years ago. That is again a change; formerly the missing female relative was of the same generation. Dana is also Irish, not American, although her father is Canadian by birth. There are themes in this plot that are not present in the other books; Dana and her father are environmentally aware and active. There is a section of old-growth forest near where they live that has been threatened by developers. A group of eco-activists come to live in the trees to save them.

Anyway, the plot surrounding Dana is that her father has accepted a job in Canada, and Dana does not want to go. This is at least in part because of the lack of closure surrounding her mother. Even her father suffers from some issues with that. When a fey woman in the forest, quite close to the eco-activists, asks Dana to deliver a message to the king of the Forest and tells her that if she does, she will be granted her heart’s desire, she does without hesitation. This quest necessitates a fair amount of travel and danger; there’s an evil force at work, and the plight of the trees and the king of the Forest are, of course, linked.

Every other chapter in this book — well, nearly so — was in italics, because it was part of an overarching legend of the Forest King and the Sky Woman. It reads a bit like a creation myth, but its importance becomes obvious before too long. Those sections were a bit boring at the beginning, but got better and more interesting as the book went along.

Frankly, the tree-hugging stuff was a bit too preachy for me. I would like to point out that I’m an inveterate tree-hugger, and obviously I don’t use the term pejoratively. I have been environmentally active in small and large ways since I was about eight. I agreed with every single point raised in the book, but I thought Melling beat that, and Dana’s vegetarianism, into our heads a bit too much. I don’t know if Melling herself is a vegetarian, but I do know that she is an environmentalist (read her link page), and I applaud her dedication to the cause. I also like the fact that she brought it into her books . . . except I think she overdid it.

Twelve is one of those strange ages that I can barely remember, so I don’t really know how realistic Dana is. She seemed a bit younger than twelve, to me. Despite all her complaining about being old enough to take on the task, she played outside like a much younger child and reacted, in many ways, like she was perhaps nine or ten. I think I remember that twelve years of age (seventh grade, for most Americans) was a time when I and my friends were trying to be as adult as possible. We were in a new school, and we had different teachers for each subject. Dana, of course, may not have the same schooling, and thinking about it, I do realize that the vacillation between maturity and immaturity is very realistic. However, she read as vaguely wrong to me.

The non-human characters introduced in this plot are definitely the most interesting in the series. The boggles are wonderful, and Dana’s interactions with them are delightful. Even the cluracaun, whom we’ve met before, was much more interesting in this installment. Perhaps the younger main character meant that she could interact with the non-humans in a different way than the older characters. Also, there was more time to spend on non-humans (especially non-Sidhe non-humans), being that there was no love story involving Dana.

I would say that, perhaps, if you’ve read the other books, this would be a good one to read. However, on its own, I didn’t find it to be all that interesting. If you’re going to read any of the three, read The Summer King and perhaps read the other two for completeness’s sake. This one rates only 3/5 stars.