231 pages
Published 1991
Read from June 17 to September 6
Rating: 4 out of 5
I began reading this one in the middle of my couldn’t-focus-on-anything phase early this summer, hoping to squeeze it in before hosting my teenager for his school break. I made it roughly seventeen pages in before abandoning it on my nightstand for the following three months.
Part of the reason for that is McKillip’s prose. She was always a groundbreaker when it came to making fantasy fiction a thing of beauty. At her best, she was like a less-horny Tanith Lee. McKillip’s prose in this book is especially lush, often so dreamlike that the only way forward sometimes is to stop trying to make sense of it and just let it carry you along. That’s hard to do when you have an energetic teen at home with you for the summer (and a world that’s burning down around you).
It’s September now, and I’m happy I decided to persevere.
A wandering wagon-dweller is marked with white hair from his mysterious, mystical ancestry, which links him to strange powers. He stumbles into a quest in order to free his people, and his love, from dreamlike wanderings in an unreal place. From such tired, conventional materials, McKillip crafts tales within tales, stories recorded in the stars, in the wings of swans, in centuries of magic moving through the wood. It isn’t a perfect book, but it is spellbinding.
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