This fantasy novel set in France delicately weaves a modern juvenile’s ennui with Celtic history, situating a pouting teenager on the hills and inside the Saint-Saveur cathedral of Aix-en-Provence.

When our narrator, Ned, gets frightened, he thinks of a video game. “There was a silence; no one moved. This would be a good time to save the game, Ned thought. Then restart if my character gets killed.”

Ned is gawky and ignorant and petulant and turned on by women much older than he is. Some of the women he sighs over are just a decade older, and others are thousands of years old, as it turns out.

One particular woman, Ysabel, according to legend, was the daughter of a Celtic chief. When she picked a visiting Greek trader as her husband, it ignited anger among her tribe. Ned sees her image first, mislabeled, on a pillar. Later, when he stands before her, he has a different impression.

“He thought of the sculpture in the cloister… showing her as half gone from the beginning, even before time began its work. Eluding as she emerged. He understood it now. You saw Ysabel as you stood before her, heard that voice, and you felt loss in the moment because you feared she might leave you.”

Repercussions from that night disturb the tourist dark of a rented villa, summoning a pale, giant wild boar to wander through the warm nights near the spring solstice.

“It really was massive. The size of a small bear, practically, with short matted bristly hair, more gray than white. The tusks were curved and heavy. There was mud on them, and on the body, caked and plastered to the hair. The boar was dead center in the road, and there was no way around it.”

Ned and his teen friend, Kate, have found the other side of an historic looking glass. They meet oversized warriors from long-extinct civilizations and become snared inside a developing drama. Typical fantasy powers emerge for Ned, bringing him occasional strength and, at other times, excruciating vulnerability:

“… [A] Swiss army knife was just about useless against a wolf. He [Ned] had his blade ready in time — he had it open in his pocket not long after the druid appeared — but unless you were good enough to stab a hurtling animal in the eye your knife was a distraction, nothing more.”

Love plays an unusual role in the book, more sophisticated in defining character than simple romantic love frosted with glamour. Ned’s love for his mother, respect for his aunt, and fascination with his female friend all factor in the way he makes decisions. His ancient friends are in thrall to a lust that threatens lives, but hearkens back to the roots of their civilizations.

The author, Kay, reveals his own love of this serene and savage part of France. He makes a mountain important to the painter Cezanne play a crucial role, suggesting that seeing Montagne Sainte-Victoire differently, from another time and a different side, can literally save someone’s life. Sainte-Victoire looms above the last third of this tale, bringing some of the lonely majesty that Cezanne saw, but a lot of other themes. There is blood in the soil of the battlegrounds, even if tourists troop across them obliviously. Kay makes us see the people who fought, died and faded. His hero’s history lesson transcends any classroom experience. Ned “imagined a ship sailing from Greece a really long time ago, passing dark, forbidding forests and mountain ranges that hid whatever was inland from view, leaving it shrouded and mysterious…. He imagined those native warriors with their druids and rituals and forest gods, and goddesses of still pools, pictured them coming through the woods to see these strangers.”