sheenaghpugh | Crown of Acorns: Catherine Fisher (Reply)

Crown of Acorns, Catherine Fisher's latest, has three separate strands, taking place in three time zones. In prehistory, Bladud the leprous king is cured by the sacred spring of Sulis, but the circles he builds to her honour in his gratitude come to imprison him. In the 18th century, Zachariah Stoke works as apprentice to Jonathan Forrest, who dreams of building a perfect circle of houses. And in the present day, a girl of 17, calling herself Sulis, arrives in Bath, with a false identity provided for her by social services and a habit of looking over her shoulder for a man who may or may not be there.

It will be clear already that what links the three strands, apart from images and themes, is a location, the city of Bath. To the young Sulis, it is her "ideal city", bewitching her both with its golden stone and its unimaginably long history, and it works much the same magic on the reader. So does the grand obsession of Forrest, a slightly fictionalised version of John Wood, architect of the King's Circus in Bath, a visionary artist plagued by mole-eyed money men. Meanwhile in the best Fisher tradition we have not one but two refreshingly chippy, unorthodox young protagonists in Sulis and Zac, (not to mention their two equally chippy foils, Josh and Sylvia).

Like the perfect circle of houses, the themes and images in this book constantly mirror each other, but though what goes around comes around, it is subtly changed; history does not simply repeat itself in a new time but rather reinvents itself constantly, as no two acorns produce identical oak trees.

If having two teenage protagonists - albeit pretty late teens - makes a book "young adult" rather than adult, I suppose that's what this is, despite the fact that the portrayal of 18th-century Bath's gambling hells, and the girl who used to work in one, is as grim and gritty as you'd expect. But the adult/young adult boundary is meaningless when the book is good enough - does anyone stop reading Treasure Island when they grow up, just because Jim is young? - and this is the most enjoyable novel I've reviewed for a while (S. Pugh. aged 59 and a quarter).