This familiar-feeling fantasy devotes much energy to culture creation and culture clash but disquietingly favors one over others. Taoshira, nicknamed Tashi, is the Fourth Crown Princess of the Blue Crescent Islands. Her existence is lonely and formal, as she recites ritual prayer after ritual prayer and helps rule. Prince Ramil, in the mainland nation of Gerfal, rebels against his father’s plan that he wed Taoshira in a military alliance. Tashi and Ram meet, hate, spar and predictably fall in love as they survive kidnapping by a warlord, imprisonment, bandit attacks and separation. Pivotal military and romantic events seem oddly brief and anticlimactic. The Blue Crescents resemble a stylized Japan except for their inhabitants’ repeatedly mentioned—almost fetishized—golden hair; Tashi, disturbingly, is an Orientalized blond who can only flourish in Ram’s British/European-type country. Ram is interracial, his (dead) mother from a desert-dwelling, “dark-skinned people known as the Horse Followers,” but his culture is the normative white one that the text and Tashi prefer. For large collections or critical race/gender study. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5582-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
In this third outing, the fictional but animate characters inhabiting The Great Good Thing (2001) find themselves headed for Jupiter, thanks to a switched dust jacket. “Living inside a book can be more work than you’d think,” the unnamed narrator ruefully writes—and proceeds to demonstrate. Gentle Princess Sylvie and her literary co-stars struggle to cope with microgravity, sudden acceleration and the mind-bending sight of outer space, while increasing conflict among the spacecraft’s crew of human Readers parallels the schemes of malign court jester Pingree to coerce Sylvie into marriage. Then an accident threatens the years-long voyage with disaster, and it’s up to the disembodied characters to find a way to help their fleshly audience. Townley takes his tale through tropes both witty and tragic, subjecting the courage and ingenuity of figures on both sides of the metafictional page to hard tests before closing, most satisfyingly, with a pair of unexpected weddings. As clever and captivating as its predecessors, this tale-about-a-tale will please fans of N.E. Bode’s The Anybodies (2004) and its ilk. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-689-85713-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Richard Jackson/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
Bruchac, in top form here, crafts an exhilarating journey tale that not only promotes the value of listening, asking questions and telling stories, but is laced with folkloric elements, heroic deeds, romance, toothy monsters and transformations. Born an owl with oddly pale feathers and the ability to understand all creatures, Wabi finds himself falling in love with Dojihla, a young woman from the local village. Discovering from his wise great-grandmother that he has the power to change his form, he becomes human (though retaining his owl’s ears). But when Dojihla rejects his suit, as she has those of all other men, he sorrowfully departs on a quest to discover what became of the wolf pack from which Malsumsis, his oversized best friend, had come. No, the plot doesn’t exactly hang together—but readers aren’t likely to care that much, as, along the way, Wabi faces one malign, magical swamp or forest creature after another, culminating in a titanic battle to save a repentant Dojihla from a crazed giant bear. Parts of this, particularly the climax, will seem familiar to fans of Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother (2005), but Bruchac gives the story a distinctive Native American cast, and readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8037-3098-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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