The feel of the wild independence of the forest and its distance from the outside world is great to read. This is reinforced by the use of dialect. To an even greater extent than The Lark and the Laurel this book uses dialect to emphasis where people feel they belong and how they feel about their social class. This is brilliantly done, with individual characters varying the way they speak depending on what parts of themselves they want to emphasise. This gives the book a theme of being comfortable in your own skin that I really enjoyed, I also liked that it didn't give an over simplistic sense of what being true to yourself meant. When deciding not to read his fathers journal, Medley uses this phrase, "Every man used words a little in his own way, even though the words themselves could not be changed." This ties into the idea that how you use words is an important part of you, both contributing to and steming from your identity. It also speaks to how we take on meaning from our experiences, as a result of this book I will now read "surelye" with a particular fondness.

To finish I wanted to talk a little bit now about the power of series, I love a good series for the familiarity and security of well known characters. I love the sense that they become more and more real as we see them in more and more aspects. I think this book in particular, while in many respects it would work well as a stand alone book, benefits from being part of a series. It is not a matter of foreknowledge, you could read the first two books of this series in the reverse order and it would work quite well. It is a matter of depth of background characters, you understand how Catherine has come to be brought up with the independence she has, far beyond her times, not because of what the book tell you about her mother but because of what you know about her. This allows us to stretch what our sense of realism will allow characters to be which is great fun and allows us to disrupt our simplified narratives of history.