(by Kate Milford)
I read Greenglass House in February 2021, so it’s taken me a few years to get around to this sequel, but I think I’m OK with that: I thought this would be a good late-December book and it definitely is. It takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and the so-called “Raw Nights” of the year (“the days between either the twenty-first and the second day of the New Year or the twenty-fourth and the fifth of the New Year,” depending on how you count/who you ask) play a role, both in plot and in mood. As one character puts it, the Raw Nights are “uncertain nights, nights when it is said spirits and haunts come out to walk. But also they are oracle nights, augury nights, lot nights—nights when fortunes can be told, and good luck can be assured…or the opposite.”
So: here we are back at Greenglass House in late December (this book takes place a year after the first one). Milo, who’s 13 now, is done with school for the year. There’s one guest at the inn his parents run, but everyone expects that guest (an art student named Emmett who’s been excitedly sketching the house’s stained-glass windows) to leave soon so that Milo and his parents can have a quiet family Christmas. Except Emmett extends his stay, and then more guests arrive. First are Georgie and Clem (who were characters in the first book)—a pair of thieves who have just collaborated on a job and need someplace to hide out for a bit. And then come the Waits, a band of carolers in costume who go out during the Raw Nights every year, weather permitting, to sing songs and bring luck to neighbors. But having more people around is the opposite of what Georgie and Clem want: they’re worried that someone who knows about their find wants to double-cross them, and they’re also worried that a master thief might be on their trail and hoping to take the cache from them. When a series of incidents force the Waits to spend the night at Greenglass House, Georgie and Clem and Milo are all convinced it can’t be a coincidence. But what’s going on exactly? Is Emmett really who he says he is? And which of the Waits might be there with an ulterior motive?
As in the previous book, it’s up to Milo and his friend Meddy to solve the mystery, using their smarts and some ideas/strategies from a role-playing game called Odd Trails. In a lot of ways, this book is a rehash of the first one—but I liked the first one enough, and it’d been long enough since I’d read it, that I didn’t particularly mind. Highlights of this book for me included the parts about maps and how to map things, and all the winter lore, especially the figure of the hobby horse (which prompted me to watch this great BBC Wales video showing the Mari Lwyd tradition).
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