[In "Drowned Ammet" set in] the southern part of Dalemark (a country first described in "Cart and Cwidder"), a boy grows up with one idea in his mind, that his duty is to avenge his father's betrayal by fellow revolutionaries; he discovers when it is almost too late that his father was the villain all the time and that not all the members of the ruling family against whom the Holanders were plotting are tyrannical…. Turbulent, superstition-ruled Holand, somewhat between Nursery-land and Ruritania in atmosphere, has in this book, as in the earlier one, an extraordinary reality that comes from an alternation of precise domestic detail and deliberately enigmatic utterances. The author uncovers people's feelings in the anonymous, unmoral and beguiling way of folk-tale.