Customer Reviews

Footprints at the Window (York Trilogy, 3)

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Phyllis Ann Naylor's haunting York trilogy dips back into time travel and the haunting presence of the gypsy family. Though it doesn't answer all the questions, "Footprints at the Window" gives a note of finality to this trilogy.

It's been a stressful summer for Dan: He's found that Huntington's Disease runs in his family and may strike him down when he's in his forties, his father is being tested, and he is haunted by magpies and visions of the Faws, gypsies, whom he encountered in York -- even to the point of being drawn back into the waning days of the Roman Empire. Now a family of gypsies has come to the land near where his grandmother lives, and it's making Dan nervous.

What he finds is seemingly another Faw family, a few years down the line and with radically different names. And while trying to help the girl Oriole -- who bears a striking resemblance to Orlenda -- Dan is drawn back in time. Now it's the Middle-Ages, during the time of the Black Death, and he is the only person to recover from the disease. He encounters another incarnation of the Faw family, and for the second time tries to help the beautiful Orlenda escape to safety. What will happen will change Dan's life forever...

Perhaps the only flaw of this trilogy is that in the third book, some of the threads are left dangling. For example, I was never entirely sure why it is that Joe, Dan, and the Faws are repeatedly featured in the past; the implication seems to be that they were reincarnated, especially since Blossom refers to her grandfather being the exact image of Ambrose Faw.

Naylor hasn't lost her talent for atmosphere, either between the characters or in a given place. Dan shows a plausible growth in character, and a new philosophical bent that he did not have in the first book. This new maturity is reflected in his actions in the Middle-Ages and his increased acceptance of "what will come will come."

As the story progresses, we also see that it is less a story about gypsies, past lives or incarnations, or time travel, but rather a story about Dan and the inner struggles that are brought into focus and greater clarity by the events of the trilogy. Gratifyingly, there is also a note both of finality and of "starting again" in this book, a wistful acceptance, and a very real sense that sometimes a thing like Huntington's Disease can't be predicted.

A good conclusion to an extremely good trilogy, "Footprints" is definitely worth checking out.

The York Trilogy, of which this is the third and final book, is probably for slightly older readers than the 9 years set out in the description. That's not because of language or violence, (or scariness), but because the plot involves a fair amount of time travel and multiple characters who appear and reappear in slightly different guises during the course of the travel. It's not simple time travel, where the hero touches something or goes through a doorway and clearly ends up somewhere else. Rather, time periods and locations overlap, so that our hero may be in the here and now, but ghostly roman legions march by him, while the girl from then in her form as the girl from now is talking to him. You get the idea.

That said, if your reader is good at reading carefully, this is a very rewarding trilogy. The hero kid is neither ridiculously heroic nor annoyingly lame, but solid, average and identifiable. The trilogy is not about magic, in the witch and wizard sense, but about something more subtle and ambiguous - there is much more of a mythical feel to the story, which is sustained by the solid, suggestive and not overdone writing.

If there is a weakness to the trilogy, it is a weakness found in almost all time shifting stories that try to incorporate old Welsh and English myth themes and tales, (I'm thinking of Nimmo's "Magician Trilogy", or Alan Garner's "The Owl Service", or Elizabeth Kimmel's "In the Stone Circle"). The problem is that almost all of those tales are not linear, do not have neat resolutions, and are sometimes internally inconsistent. As a consequence, it is very hard to incorporate them into modern tales, where we have been sort of trained to expect a beginning, a middle and a tidy end. There is always some element, at the end, of "what exactly just happened here?". So, if your reader is not tolerant of a certain degree of ambiguity in a story, this series might be a little frustrating.

Also, while it's not essential, it is a lot easier to follow the trilogy if the books are read in the right order, since each book is sort of a standalone, but themes, characters and plot points are developed over the course of the three books, and for the conclusion to be really satisfying I think you'd have to be familiar with the earlier books.