In this story, David lives with his unpleasant great aunt, great uncle, and cousins. On a particularly despairing day, David manages to summon up a mysterious mischief-maker, an amiable boy named Luke, who lands David into all sorts of trouble. Through Luke, David encounters Mr. Wedding, who was once known by another name, and is able to do this stranger a service. Besides all its other excellences, this novel wonderfully portrays Loki's ambivalent nature, charming, dangerous, but often helpful much like fire itself. This book is an early masterpiece from a giant of juvenile literature.
Celtic literature provides a motherlode of characters and motifs for authors.
Arthurian elements have been used in enough books to amount to a library all by themselves. Less well known than Arthurian stories are the Welsh tales of the Mabinogion. Alexander makes his own use of Welsh mythic elements to create his parallel world. Still other elements such as Ffewddur Fflam are outright invention. Cooper blends these ingredients together to create as close to an epic as one may find in modern children's literature.