Skin - Ilka Tampke
It sounds like the plot of just about any youth fantasy novel, but there is more to Skin than meets the eye. Ailia, a foundling half-born, her parentage unknown, lacks the one thing that is important to everyone in the land she lives in - a totem animal, a 'skin'. Your skin - whether its that of dog, salmon or deer - not only defines who you are in this society, but who you can be. Without a skin, 14 year-old Ailia is lucky even to be working as a servant for her Tribequeen, Fraid of Northern Duntriga, but she has an unknown destiny ahead of her that will be important to her tribe. Wandering near the forbidden Oldforest one day, Ailia meets an injured young man called Taliesin, and from that moment on, her life starts to move in a new and unexpected direction. The location mentioned there might provide a bit of a clue that Skin is not set in some fantasy world, but in the real world, in England in fact, or Albion as it would have been known in the first century AD. Although t...