Martha Jane Orlando’s “Revenge!”

Racer, the talking squirrel, is back.

I never imagined I would get attached to a talking squirrel, but I did.

Racer. Once called Gray, is one of the leading characters of Martha Jane Orlando’s Glade series, three children’s books: A Trip, A Tryst, and a Terror; Children in the Garden; and The Moment of Truth. That series began with a boy, Davy Murray, still mourning the death of his military father and resenting his mother Sarah’s remarriage to Jim, facing the prospect of an awful summer away from friends and his computer, “imprisoned” in Jim’s father’s rural home. He’s discovered by Gray, a talking squirrel no one else can see, who lives in the nearby forest with the other “Old Ones” – animals that talk and do other wondrous things.

The focus of the stories was Davy – a special kid, a “chosen one” who is the only human who can see the Old Ones.

Revenge! (Adventures in the Glade) picks up where the trilogy left off – returning home after a celebration in The Glade in the forest for Davy, his family, and all of the Old Ones. What was being celebrating was the upending of plans by Jim’s cousin Ronnie to bulldoze the forest and replace it with homes.

Martha Jane Orlando

Racer isn’t the only one who’s back. So is Cousin Ronnie. You can’t keep a good villain down. Ronnie, suspecting that animals helped Jim and his family stop his plans, takes his two sons into the forest for some mindless hunting – firing at will with aiming at anything in particular. And then things get really interesting, and dangerous.

I love these stories. They’re good in their own right, something any child would enjoy, but they are also quietly filled with Biblical imagery. They are about grace, and redemption, and about the giving of one’s life so that others might live.

My only complaint is that Orlando brings the story to a fever pitch – and then leave me wanting more. I have to wait until the second volume is published in May.

But Racer is back!

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

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.