I read Blackfire, the first in the Bairnmoor trilogy, when it first came out a few years back, and I’ve been dying to know what happens next ever since! Well, I have now gobbled up the second and third volumes, and I still love this series. The tale explores how four “outsider” teens, overlooked and even bullied in their own world, might work together to rescue an alternate, fantastic world in chaos—and how the adventure itself might serve to “rescue” the kids.But the twisting and turning plot is only half the fun. This writer is wildly imaginative and produces an endless stream of memorable characters—winged toads, Blackfire himself, a giant grub who brings to mind the kind of sly, cryptic characters in Through the Looking Glass, and a buffet of others. The ever-changing settings are a sort of “otherworldly gothic”—alive, decaying, and with geophysical rules all their own.One thing that separates this trilogy from others in this genre is that the characters wrestle with the larger questions in life: What is time? What does it mean to trust? And perhaps my favorite: “How do I know if he’s dead?” “How do you know that you aren’t dead?” Hmmmm…interesting question.