Notable for its avid sense of fun ... the preoccupations are standard Ridley: stories ... and home, our constant yearning for each and the way we sometimes use the former to build the latter ... if you watch attentively you can spot substantive and complex ideas gliding past ... Ridley is stressing the “fun” in profundity.

Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times

Ridley's storytelling combines the fantastical and the down to earth, and leavens the darkness with humour ... like all Ridley's work, it's distinctively different, never patronising its young audience, and it celebrates the power of storytelling to see us through the darkest times.

Lyn Gardner, Guardian

A further instance of Ridley's preoccupation with the power – for good and ill – of story-telling in our attempts to make sense of experience. What's new here, though, is the spirit of antic knockabout playfulness ... [a] resilience in Ridley's writing that offsets the harshness of the subject matter - its spring recurring rhythms and its larky knowingness about narrative tropes.

Paul Taylor, Independent

The story has an epic structure ... gripping, confronting issues such as the unreliability of historians. Children around me seemed attentive, fascinated, serious

Libby Purves, The Times