The Return of the Golden Age
Author: Marilyn Peake
Reviewer: Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing
Format: Young Adult, Fiction, Paperback, 140 Pages, 2005, $14.99
ISBN: 1554042569
Rating: * * * * Quills
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1554042569/scriquil
 
Ahhh. The legend continues. In The Return of the Golden Age, sequel to The Fisherman's Son and The City of the Golden Sun, our hero Wiley is charged with revealing the secrets of their own heritage to the people to whom he was born. They, a charmed race, now live in a poverty stricken village. It will not be easy. He must first hide his six young friends and then introduce them without rousing suspicion. It is a job similar to convincing a modern — but backward — population of Atlantis' reality.
 
In this, Marilyn Peake's third book, young readers are the beneficiaries of the author's ingenious description of undersea life, as they were in her other books. We see eels and turtles and even talking porpoises and whales. Still, she somehow creates them as real, breathing animals; they maintain the personalities we, as humans, sense they have, and though the colors and shapes of the fish swimming by seem dreamlike, anyone who has snorkeled will know them intimately.
 
Marilyn's Peake's language is up to the task of creating fantasy from our real world. When Peake says, "…as the moon rose higher in the sky, it lit up the edges of the trees, illuminating them with a gentle white glow. It reminded Wiley of his mother lighting candles at night…," a young reader will accept the simile and also come to love the music of the language, the images it creates and its ability to enchant.
 
This trilogy's mantra is indeed fitting: "Drink deeply by land or sea. Earth comes only once."

 

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