A touch of magic

Christchurch writer spins an enchanting story around shape-shifting kelpies.

- ANN PACKER

A lonely teenager. Parents missing in action.

A boy who appears from nowhere. An enormous black stallion. So far, so classic.

Yet nothing is what it seems in this first children's book in more than a decade from Christchurch writer, reviewer and former festival director Rachael King. While each of these elements is present in many of the best books for children, King knits them together with more than a touch of magic to create a dynamic new adventure that will reverberate in the reader's memory.

In her earlier children's book, Red Rocks, it was selkies, the seal-like creatures of Scottish legend, around which the story was spun. This time, it's kelpies, those beguiling water-horse shape-shifters, taking centre stage in a story that starts in Scotland but ends somewhere in Central Otago.

At the heart of the story is Ella, isolated geographically and socially with her fatherless family - fragile younger sister Fiona, mother Morag and ailing granny Griselda, known as Grizzly - on a farm somewhere in the south of New Zealand. Or so one assumes, although it took this reader some effort to resist the pull of the Scottish landscape in which the plot is so strongly rooted.