The image of an angel struck by an arrow featured in last week's Middle Grade Gallery is from The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walsh (Chicken House, 2010). According to the old story, illuminated on a manuscript page, the angel was buried by monks in the forest behind Crowfield Abbey over a hundred years ago. Now Master Jacobus Bone and his servant Shadlock are looking for the angel's grave, and they want William, an orphan boy living at the abbey, to help them find it. The mystery of angel, forest, and abbey combines elements from Christian belief (in angels) and British mythology (the fay); setting them in the medieval world of 1347.

The Crowfield Curse was nominated for a Cybil in the Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy category (which is how I came to read it). To subcategorize even further, it's the sort of book I think of as historical fantasy (which is also a sort of book I tend to like). There's a "Winter Timetable for Daily Life at Crowfield Abbey" at the back, and a hobgoblin! Authentic and atmospheric, it's also perfect snow day reading.