Books, Films Etc
Feb. 1st, 2004 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanJohn Dickinson, The Cup of the World
Very impresive children's fantasy (first of, presumably, three).
Found this oddly reminiscent of Violet Needham's The Woods of Windri, though part of the reason may be that I picked it up in the shopping trip before Christmas when I also bought the latter for my niece. Medieval inspired setting, but an unusually solid and well-researched one (reminiscent in some ways of Martin), with a carefully thought-through religion and social structure obviously based on medieval Catholicism. Exceptionally dark -characters develop in disturbing ways, and all is not as it seems at the start. At the heart of the novel is the love story of an adolescent girl (to some extent I Capture the Castle came to mind, though the heroine here is nowhere near as mature as Smith's) which goes horribly and surprisingly sour, generating one of the most disturbing children's fantasies I have read in a long time.
Beautiful prose, and careful plotting as one would expect from someone called Dickinson described as "the son of a well known children's author" (cf Peter, married to Robin McKinley, I suspect).
Very impresive children's fantasy (first of, presumably, three).
Found this oddly reminiscent of Violet Needham's The Woods of Windri, though part of the reason may be that I picked it up in the shopping trip before Christmas when I also bought the latter for my niece. Medieval inspired setting, but an unusually solid and well-researched one (reminiscent in some ways of Martin), with a carefully thought-through religion and social structure obviously based on medieval Catholicism. Exceptionally dark -characters develop in disturbing ways, and all is not as it seems at the start. At the heart of the novel is the love story of an adolescent girl (to some extent I Capture the Castle came to mind, though the heroine here is nowhere near as mature as Smith's) which goes horribly and surprisingly sour, generating one of the most disturbing children's fantasies I have read in a long time.
Beautiful prose, and careful plotting as one would expect from someone called Dickinson described as "the son of a well known children's author" (cf Peter, married to Robin McKinley, I suspect).
