tamaranth | 2021/129: The Crow Folk -- Mark Stay

2021/129: The Crow Folk -- Mark Stay

‘You’re the one who risked a demonic incursion to win best pumpkin at the village fair.’ [loc. 2647]

The setting is Woodville, a small Kentish village, during the Second World War. The protagonist is Faye Bright, seventeen (a period-typical seventeen, rather young for her age by contemporary standards), who's just discovered that her dead mother was a witch. The antagonist is Pumpkinhead, a former scarecrow who has brought other scarecrows -- the Crow Folk -- to life and is determined to emancipate them. ("We ain't their slaves no more.") Faye is a capable young woman: a keen bellringer, she is also an Air Raid Precaution warden ("Put that light out!") though the Local Defence Volunteers -- later to be renamed the Home Guard -- won't accept her application, what with her being female. Faye also helps her dad run the local pub, where she gets to hear all the gossip, and encounters the village witches.

It's a somewhat soft-focus, nostalgic version of wartime, though full of evocative details such as the ban on bell-ringing, the removal of signposts, and so on. Most of the characters are pleasant enough, and there's plenty of humour: there are also intriguing hints of a larger magical society. It didn't really engage me, though, perhaps because I was expecting a darker story.