I love Patricia McKillip's writing. It is very poetic and can occasionally be hard to get into, but it's well worth the effort. This is my favorite McKillip book. There was something about the converging of the different story lines and the nature of the quest described that resonated deeply with me. It is not fantasy fast food so invest in this book if you have time to digest it.
Not much action - a lot of description. Excellent writing but I couldn't get into it.
This is Patricia McKillip at her most dream-like. . . the prose is lyrical and winds its way through the story, the characters border are more mythic than realistic, and the plot sacrifices rational logic for the logic of fairy tales. Her novels are soap bubbles, frothy and delicate but with magical colors and lights sparking out of them at unexpected moments. This particular novel does not resonate with me quite as strongly as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Sorceress and the Cygnet, or Alphabet of Thorn did, but I still can do nothing but recommend it highly.
A wonderful fantasy, with strange twists and turns.
