A fantastic summer trio

REVIEWS BY GAVIN J. GRANT

Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania will delight fantasy readers with its mix of intrigue, death and the possibility of rebirth. Park, author of half a dozen science fiction novels and a wonderful short story collection, has turned in an interesting first volume in what promises to be an exciting and thought-provoking series. Miranda is a teenager in a college town in northwestern Massachusetts. She has at least one odd habit—she remembers all of her dreams—and occasionally she finds herself thinking about her birth mother in Roumania. Even though her best friend is in Europe, she is bent on enjoying the last weeks of summer before the return to school and the rush toward college. However, everything is not as it seems. And everything that phrase might usually mean in a fantasy novel is also not what it seems. Miranda's birth family is much farther away than she thought; she finds unexpected help and discovers new enemies; and the boy she meets in the forest becomes much more to her than she thought possible. One of the best characters, Baroness Ceausescu, is also one of the scariest: she acts first and only later works out her motivations. She mirrors the novel from within as Park gives us nuggets of story which only come to fruition and understanding much later. Miranda finds she must face up to the dreams and responsibilities of a nation. It is no life for a teenage girl. But is Miranda actually that young? Or are there even more differences between the land she was born in and the place she grew up? Readers will be kept guessing until the end, when they will begin the wait for the next book.


Magical tales from a master
Short story master Gene Wolfe's latest collection, Starwater Strains, is a great companion piece to his collection from last year, Innocents Aboard. One of Wolfe's favorite devices is the retold tale, in which one character is telling another a story. So in "The Dog of the Drops" a man's work takes him out "beyond the bombed cities" where the people are "poor, lonely, loquacious, and insular" and an elderly man tells him about something out in the wastes which watches the family he is staying with. Or in "The Far Magician," written as a letter that tells the story of a series of stories about a supposedly real-life magician, Ernst the Great (or Fat Ernst). Wolfe gets in a few shots against totalitarian governments but never lets the story fall into demagoguery. The last story, "Golden City Far," was also the anchor story in the massive fantasy anthology, Flights. It is a fable similar in tone and subject to Wolfe's recent novel The Wizard Knight and the deceptively simple voice and the possibility of a coming quest combine to make it a distillation of pure Wolfian excellence.


The mysterious realm of Mélusine
Sarah Monette's debut fantasy, Mélusine, is the first half of a wonderful long novel (the second book comes out next year). Felix Harrowgate and Mildmay the Fox were raised (separately) as the lowest of the low. Felix finds a mentor, Malkar, who changes him until Felix can pass as highborn. Malkar, however, has long-range plans to bring down the Melusine government and uses Felix as his passkey into the most sacred and magical halls. From here on, Felix is a passive man to whom things happen—including a fall from grace, a stay at a nightmarish asylum and a journey outside the only city and country he has ever known. Mildmay, meanwhile, is a violent cat burglar who, despite his youth, has gained the respect and fear of those in the street. His eventual meeting with Felix and the discoveries they make about one another are predictable, but it is a testament to Monette's skill that she can keep the reader going until then. Monette mixes British and American slang from the 19th century and the present day to come up with an inventive and enjoyable mongrel language. Mélusine is a strong debut which suffers only from a lack of resolution so that the reader is left stranded like Mildmay, waiting to see what will happen next.


Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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