so mysterious it keeps you hooked page after page.......

this is the perfect book to read on a frosty night. my fist thought was how much interest can one get from a book about a lost kid found and a river. boy, was i wrong! this book is mysterious from start to finish, but in an awesome way. the time period is set in times of olde where inns and pubs are the hang out spots for everything be it ale, medical care, or to find a lost love. the "Swan" is the holder of myths and conclusions, of good times and bad, but the plot really opens up when a child is found in the river dead and self-resuscitates in the pub under the care of the town nurse, who needs some resuscitating of her own.
once the child is alive and well, you wonder "ok, how is ms. setterfield going to carry the story now." there is so much more! there are a whole host of characters, some real but others not (wink, wink), but she describes them in a way where it's easy to tell them one from another. the child has a special meaning to each one of the described characters but in the end, belongs to a character that you would never imagine. the book certainly ends where it starts, on the river of course.