The summer that her parents move to Grandpa MacFey's farm, 15-year-old Emma finds that nothing will ever be the same again. Her mother has become the keeper of her dead father's bees, her father is building a strange sculpture in a nearby field, and her sister Summer is fading away.

Who are The Watchers? Emma knows that they are not the people she has grown up with --- or are they? She alone in her family has the strange birthmark, two moons with an arrow shaft through them. When Tom Krift comes to work for her father, Emma discovers that he also bears the birthmark.

Is her father's sculpture, which he has named Bruide Henge, a portal to another world? Who are the strange people who have suddenly appeared in the village and who inhabit Emma's dreams? Emma seeks answers from Tom Krift who claims that he too is a Watcher and that they must save Summer. Can she trust him, or is he part of the plot to harm her sister and her family?

Emma's life spins out of control when she takes a job caring for an eccentric elderly neighbor and becomes involved in the board game Fidchell. Emma proves herself a worthy opponent. However, does she have the courage to play out the real game of life and death that will draw in each member of her family as she tries to understand her role in this frightening new magical world? Once again, Winnipeg writer and artist Margaret Buffie has taken seeming ordinary people and thrust them into a bizarre, magical world to create a frightening and intriguing story.

--- Reviewed by Audrey Marie Danielson

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