[Drowned Ammet] takes place in the same land of Dalemark as the author's earlier Cart and Cwidder, where the southern earls are forever bickering while the north is united and the Holy Isles are in between. It cannot be said that this is a powerfully imagined country, like [C. S. Lewis's] Narnia or [J.R.R. Tolkien's] Mordor: it simply is, and is with utter consistency. The hero, Mitt, is a free soul who at the beginning has a mighty childhood vision of a place "just beyond somewhere", from which he learns that where he lives is not the same as home…. He enjoys a laughing childhood, but things turn grey when his father is lost through revolutionary activity. By the taste of it, the story is about late medieval; but even then, there were political revolutionaries, and so Mitt follows in his father's footsteps. He tries to...