294 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 19 to June 26
Rating: 4 out of 5
It’s a novel from McKillip in her courtly fantasy prime. Of course it has multiple ladies in multiple towers weaving multiple tapestries of magic. Of course it has knights stumbling through dreams, and dragons coiled around treasure. Story becomes reality and words are magic, in the manner of classic 1980s romantic fantasy. But all of it is illuminated with such grace and strangeness that it all feels new.
This book takes all the Victorian clichés of courtly fable and weaves of them a palimpsest of impressions, of ladies in their towers watching other ladies in other towers through enchanted mirrors, of the dead unraveling into the threads of their tapestries, of men sent on quests by cryptic bards only to find their own histories rewritten. All the hoary tropes of kingdoms and nobles and war are rendered into beautiful movements of poetic inevitability.
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