![]() ![]() One of the most famous pello players, known as The Bull, comes from the village where the main character, Esteya, lives, and the story begins when he returns for a visit and is challenged to a game. Every year the top players compete for the King’s Cup. It’s a brutal, aggressive game involving two players bouncing a ball against a wall, hard enough to do each other considerable damage. It gives it a mythical quality that makes the story resonate, it increases the sense of isolation and thus the intensity, and finally, it allows Collins to create a national sport, pello, which the characters are fanatical about. But the refusal to tie Love in Revolution to a particular time or place is a very successful decision. She’s written historical before ( The Broken Road, a story about the Children’s Crusade, based in medieval Germany) and a ghost story with a brilliantly realised partly historical setting ( Tyme’s End). ![]() ![]() There are televisions, but many of the people still live a peasant lifestyle, so it’s some time in the late twentieth century. I had this book in my ‘Young Adult Historical’ folder for a while but it was only when I was a few chapters in that I realised it wasn’t historical: Collins has set her story in an imagined country at a time that is never made clear. ![]()
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