Review by Frank Plowright

Until very recently Bea lived with her grandfather deep in the woods running a shop selling potions. He’s a bit absent minded, and she returned one day to a note saying he’d remembered it was his duty to check an ancient seal remained unbroken. Bea’s been looking for him ever since, sharing a series of adventures with Cad, cheerful, strong and with a friend in every place.

The Girl & the Galdurian ended with them having survived a fearful battle, and recovering somewhere unknown, yet as drawn by Tim Probert it also supplied a beautiful world in which younger readers can immerse themselves. It’s a world under threat, though, with the limited areas where there’s light in danger of that light being extinguished by the recently returned bird spirit Kest.

Probert’s magnificent scenery is restricted to the early pages this time, and the artistic wonder thereafter comes from the designs of the creatures Bea and Cad meet, and what they’re capable of. Before they were on a quest to locate her grandfather, and now on his behalf they’re to find a mythical water spirit who was among those who created their planet.

Whereas the previous book was primarily a quest with stopovers, there’s far more action in Shadow of the Bird, as Kest’s desires dominate. Another difference is there being cast members other than Bea and Cad to follow. Probert uses them, and Cad, to explain more about the world of Irpa, and how things come to be, and the map preceding the story is now of a far larger area. After their encounter at the end of the previous book there’s now a connection between Bea and Kest. This first manifests as what seems just a visual device representing Bea’s doubts, but becomes something more interesting, with the suggestion that Kest’s motivations aren’t what might be presumed.

By the end there’s been another gloriously drawn adventure, but things haven’t turned out exactly the way Bea planned. Perhaps things will go better for her in The Dark Times.