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** spoiler alert ** An evocative story but it was, as the inner blurb described it, "unsettling".

Set in the hills of Damar. Maddy lives with her large family, her mother runs the farm, father makes jewellery to sell at market, Maddy is the sheep farmer, brother Ifgold going off to school soon. Her fiance, Donal, hired himself away for the year as a logger. They plan to live far far out in the remote hills and farm and keep sheep. One day a lamb gets lost and Maddy and her sheepdog Aerlich go to find it. A stone fey brings it to them (the shyest of all the fey). He is watching her afterwards, from rocks, and soon she approaches him, then he her. He smells of green things, moss and rocks. With very little speech, they become lovers. But it's a bad thing for Maddy. She becomes vague and unlike herself, uninterested in her shepherding, her family, anything but going to Fel everyday. He leaves stone Ms everywhere and she feels him calling her. But it seems he doesn't love her - talks very little, says he has family but prefers to be alone, shows her how to walk quietly around the remote hills - but she feels maybe he accepts her as something lesser than himself, like she does the dumb sheep. He never smiles; when she says, hopelessly, that she loves him, he simply looks at her with his black black eyes. When she leaves him he calls her endlessly but the Ms stop and he does not come after her. Donal comes home and they are lovers again straight away and she cries and says she can't stay in their planned home, he thinks it was his mistake and they go to live in the south.

Because McKinley never showed any of the love scenes between Maddy and Fel, the reader can't determine to their own satisfaction whether he loved her or not. There is no satisfactory resolution to their tale. Maddy wonders on one page, why did it all happen, and we're left to wonder too...