The Tapestry 2 – The Second Siege

Henry H. Neff's Second Siege is the second book in The Tapestry, a magic-school fantasy for 10 year olds.

What happens

It opens with Max McDaniels flat on his back in the dirt, beaten.

He has been losing to nobody lately. That is the problem. The older students at Rowan Academy have refused to train with him because he keeps flattening them, so the school sends a professional instead. Cooper is an Agent. He hunts the school's enemies for a living, and he catches Max in about twenty minutes.

Then Cooper tells him exactly what he did wrong, in a flat little list, which is somehow worse.

By eleven that morning there is a witch in the Director's office. Dame Mala is very old and very polite and covered head to foot in tattooed spells. She has come to collect on an agreement made four hundred years ago. Rowan's greatest hero promised the witches three children blessed by the Old Magic, and she would like to take Max's roommate David home with her now.

The grown-ups say no. She smiles and says she will be back in a month.

That is the whole engine of the book. A child is being argued over by adults, and none of the arguing is about what he wants.

Around that, though, it is very funny. Mum the hag does a little dance round the kitchen with a raw turkey on her head. Connor arrives from Dublin with golf clubs and a bag of cookies and a small demon in a banker's suit who offers everyone lemonade. Your reader will spot the problem with Mr Sikes long before Connor does, which is half the fun of him.

The world is a big one and it moves fast, with a lot of names to hold. If your child has already read the first book they'll be fine. Starting here would be hard work.

A word about the fighting, though. It is real fighting, with knives, and Cooper is described plainly as a killer. Nobody is badly hurt on the page, and the tone stays adventurous rather than grim, but the opening chapter is twenty minutes of a grown man hunting a boy through a wood. If your reader is happy with that sort of chase they'll be thrilled by it. If they're not, this isn't the one.

What to read next

So start at the beginning, with the first Tapestry book. It has Max at twelve, still living in the suburbs of Chicago, finding a strange Celtic tapestry in a museum and being watched by a man on a train with one green eye and one white one.