‘They all turned their heads and saw two caped and hooded figures emerging from the trees about a hundred metres up the slope to their right. Between them they were carrying a pole and suspended from it by the legs …’

From my review of the first book in The White Bird of Kinship series
‘It’s a fantasy story set on the British Isles, now the Seven Kingdoms. The Drowning has already ended the Isles we know. The setting is in a time we would categorise as the dark ages, with the Church Militant, soldiers on horseback, peasants in homesteads, inns, and hard times for all.

Tom [the boy piper] is said to be the harbinger of a prophecy regarding the White Bird of Kinship, foretold to come at the beginning of the third millennium.’

Series continuity
There is a thread of continuity in the series, and A Tapestry of Time (ATOT) is no exception, bridging events from one time period to another to immerse the legend of the White Bird of Kinship into human history. Instead of bridging the gap between the Drowning and the Seven Kingdoms, we’re now looking at the end of the Seven Kingdoms and what legacy it leaves on humankind many years in the future.

Praise
For the first 124 pages, I was riveted. There was a narrative here that followed on from the events in the second book. Tom still has his friendships with David and Witchet, and an incident tests them all. Lost innocence felt to be a prominent theme, where love and death was concerned. I wanted to know who would live, what powers these pipes really had when they were in Tom’s possession, and what difference it would make to the world. Or, just, really, how the story was going to unfold.

Criticism
After the first 124 pages, we fast forward to the future, and my interest in the different characters was flat, even if there was a budding romance between them. I did like the miracle that bound them together, however, I felt the delivery of the prose, in the form of repeated letters and conversations, went away from the style I was used to in this series.

There were some interesting links that give us an insight into what had happened in the past, but it was what a reader may have suspected from Tom’s meeting with the leaders of the faith.

Overall
ATOT is worth reading. The adventure continues, and if you’ve liked what you’ve read in the series before I can’t imagine you’d be disappointed with the majority of what you read. It’s not the best book in the series, but then, I felt the second book did set the bar high.