At the start of The Accidental Highwayman, which is set in England in the mid-1700s, sixteen-year-old Kit Bristol feels pretty pleased with where he’s ended up: he’s an orphan who used to be a trick-rider in a traveling circus, and now he’s an indentured servant to a gentleman who isn’t much trouble, though he’s fond of drink and gambling. Kit feels respectable, doing his master’s errands in town on market day. But soon he finds out that his master has a secret: he’s actually a notorious highwayman, Whistling Jack. At the point when Kit finds this out, Whistling Jack has been shot, and is bleeding to death on the kitchen table. Kit rides out on his master’s horse in his master’s riding costume to make the attackers think his master is fine. But this dismays the dying Whistling Jack, who tells Kit that by taking on his identity, however briefly, Kit has become bound to take over a task that he was supposed to do, a task he was afraid of. And with that, Whistling Jack gives Kit his horse, tells him to bring his French bulldog to a witch he’ll find in the forest, and tells Kit that the witch will tell him about this task he now has to do.
Kit isn’t sure what to make of any of this, but goes to the woods and finds the witch, who tells him he has to rescue a lady from an enchanted silver coach the following evening. Kit figures it can’t hurt to try, so he does, and when he succeeds, he finds himself in the middle of magical political intrigue. The lady, it turns out, is a faerie princess who’s rebelling against her father’s wishes by refusing to marry King George II’s grandson. Her father, who is the faerie king, is hoping the marriage will be a shrewd political alliance; King George II is hoping the same. But the princess, Morgana, thinks her father is power-hungry and wicked, and that an alliance between the English King and the Faerie King will be bad news for the magical world and the human world, and some faeries agree with her. So she flees, and Kit travels by her side, and things keep on happening—this is a plot-heavy book, and there are “dark deeds, treacherous villains, and acts of violence,” as well as “bravery, loyalty, and love,” as Kit’s preface to his story puts it (10).
I liked the magic/historical setting of this book and the humor of it, and I really liked the animal characters—the horse, Midnight, and Kit’s love for him, and the dog, Demon, to whom we are introduced in the passage below (which is followed by a full-page illustration of the dog in question looking ridiculously cute):
”Vicious, is he? Jaws like a trap?
“He can snap a bone with one bite,” I said.
This was perfectly true. I did not lie about the dog, who was Master Rattle’s constant companion, but rather omitted a few details: he was a French bulldog, a tiny beast bred not to fight bulls but to snore lustily, and he could snap a bone with one bite, but only a ham bone. In fact, he spent all of his waking moments, which amounted to about an hour each day, gnawing on bones. (17)
That said, I’m not sure if I’ll read the rest of this trilogy: the book sometimes felt too plot-heavy (there are at least two major sub-plots I haven’t mentioned here), and I’m not sure I liked the human or faerie characters enough to want to read more about them.
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