Martha Orlando’s “A Trip, A Tryst, and a Terror”

Ten-year-old Davy Murray has serious problems. His mother has just remarried after his father’s death, he doesn’t like his new stepfather, and now he has to spend the summer in a rural, wooded area with Grandpa Will, his stepfather’s relative. No friends, no familiar haunts, and the prospect of three months with people he doesn’t like at all.

But he’s not at Grandpa Will’s for very long before he knows that the unexpected becomes the normal, and strange things are afoot. For one thing, the animals talk to Davy, as if they knew he was coming and he was expected. And for another, Grandpa Will knows David is the chosen one, even if Davy himself doesn’t know it.

Thus begins Martha Orlando’s A Trip, A Tryst, and a Terror, the first book in a series called The Glade. And what a story it is. Orlando gets inside the mind of a young boy struggling to come to terms with his changed family, and to his own feelings of loyalty to his father. Davy Murray is beginning a great adventure, and taking the reader along with him.

To step into A Trip, A Tryst and a Terror is to step into a kind of contemporary Narnia (animals talk there, too). There’s a wise owl, talking squirrels --- and who knows what else, except one sense that it’s not going to be all wise owls and talking squirrels. Aimed at younger readers, this story of faith and redemption will resonate with older readers as well.

Related:

Martha Orlando’s author’s site.

Martha Orlando’s blog, Meditations of My Heart.