Yolen has created a world in which magic is the prime moving source, the natural realm of the human imagination. Animals talk as they do in Aesop's fables and fairy tales. Good and evil, life and death, are personified in this world as forces of nature that implacably perform their rituals year after year. Two boys and a dog play roles in the contest between winter, personified as Herne the Hunter, and summer, the White Goddess, who appears in the story as a white cat and prefers to be nameless. The White Goddess requires heroes to win her contest with Herne, and these heroes must be innocent. The two boys, Jerold and Gerund, for the most part are innocent—tainted slightly, however, by their humanity. As the cat/goddess says: "It is hard to purchase innocence today. Even childhood has been corrupted." Mully...