The Wind Boy

By Ethel Cook Eliot In a quiet cottage in a quiet village there lives a girl named Gentian and her brother, Kay. The War has taken their father away and chased them into this strange, new place, where their friends are few and their mother works in a factory. Their lives change forever when a girl with purple mountains in her eyes arrives to be their mother’s helper. Nan is not just a splendid playmate, but also a wonderful storyteller. In her stories, she introduces Kay and Gentian to the world of the Clear Land—a world different from their own, a higher world. In and between the two worlds, Gentian and Kay befriend the Wind Boy. When the Wind Boy’s idea of a harmless joke is taken up by the frightening Masker, Gentian and Kay—with Nan’s help—must solve the mystery and save the Wind Boy from disgrace. First published in 1923, The Wind Boy followed upon the success of Ethel Cook Eliot’s earlier fairy-stories The House in the Fairy Wood and The House Above the Trees, and firmly established her as an impressive talent in children’s literature. In good company with the fantastical works of George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, and C. S. Lewis, The Wind Boy is a story of imaginative beauty and spiritual brightness. When you have created a beautiful thing, that is happiness. But the next happiness is to find someone who understands what you have done, and knows that it is beautiful. (Ethel Cook Eliot)   Ethel Cook Eliot (1890–1956) was an American author, editor, and wife and mother. First finding success with fairy-stories for children, she turned her talent to writing novels after her conversion to the Catholic faith. Those novels include Green Doors (1933) and Angels’ Mirth (1936). Eliot’s writing, wrote Walter Romig, achieves that difficult task of being at once “sincere and true and unsentimental.”  * * * Paperback: 212pp. ISBN: 978-1685953379