THE HIDDEN WORLD

Fourth and final installment of Park’s fantasy (The White Tyger, 2007, etc.) set in an alternate world where Roumania battles Turkey in the trenches of an otherworldly World War One.

Teenager Miranda Popescu now lies at the center of a deadly political conflict between conjurers. Though the three most powerful of these—Miranda’s Aunt Aegypta, whom Miranda can perhaps no longer trust; the Elector of Ratisbon, a sinister alchemist; and Miranda’s chief antagonist, the megalomaniac Baroness Ceausescu—are all dead, they still exist in the Hidden World. Miranda possesses an organic jewel, the tourmaline, which enables her to perceive and act in both real and hidden worlds simultaneously. In the Hidden World of animal souls, she’s the white tyger, a creature of irresistible physical force, but always lurking in the background are the cunning ghosts of the Elector and the Baroness. Miranda’s friends and allies are equally strange: Peter Gross of Massachusetts became the Chevalier de Graz, toiling in no-man’s-land between the trenches, while her childhood friend Andromeda became at once a dog and Sasha Prochenko, a soldier and free agent sworn to protect her. Meanwhile, new enemies materialize, such as Colonel Bocu, the murderous head of the secret police.

What we end up with is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unreliable viewpoint, and there’s far too much going on for most readers to sort out. Still, fans of the previous volumes won’t be disappointed.