The Skrayling Tree

Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: This book is just awful. The longwinded explanations of the nature of reality bog the story down. The plot didn't make any sense, and only some of it actually features Elric. The rest of the characters are boring. They weren't boring in A Dreamthief's Daughter but they're boring here. Oona and Ulric had some life then. This, and the stupid metaphysics, make for an incredibly dull book. The earlier Elric books were great fun and I was looking forward to more, but I was let down. Good thing I checked this out of the library!

Rating:
Summary: Moorcock only gets better
Review: This is Michael Moorcock coming to grips with what he calls The Matter of America. He is using his Elric character and his gift for fantasy to deal with some fundamental ideas in American mythology. In this book he continues the saga begun in The Dreamthief's Daughter and the same main characters appear here, but now they are on the American continent, meeting the likes of Hiawatha, the legendary native American first written about by Longfellow. He starts from three different geographical points, slowly bring his characters together as they seek either to destroy or save the legendary 'Skrayling Tree':- the native American Tree of Life, the Viking World Tree, which also represents Moorcock's own vast Multiverse. Moorcock's theories based on Mandelbrot's Chaos theories give us characters of physically different sizes as they merge from different parts of the multiverse. There is history here, both European and American, and as usual a moral and symbolic dimension to the book, which is the mark of a Moorcock fantasy novel. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Oh, yes!
Review: Yeah. This one'll do it. Cream of the crop. Not a trace
of fat in the whole hamburger. Where other fantasy drags
along with its chin in the dirt, Moorcock races and glides.
Covering fifty times the territory in ideas and sheer
invention than anything else I've read in a long time, it
keeps giving it to you. Longfellow riffs, Viking riffs,
Mayan riffs. This truly is the Albino in America and it
delivers food for thought on almost every page until the
finale which is stunning. I don't know what book the
previous reviewer thought he'd gotten hold of, but he must
have had it upside down the whole time he was trying to
read it. Here's a tip: The picture on the front is a
clue (assuming the wrapper hasn't been reversed, which
could explain a lot). I loved this book with its evocation of Pre-Colombian plains scenery and culture, with its extraordinary wit. It isn't sword and sorcery like anything you've ever read. It has humor. It's smart. It's beautifully written. It has my vote for the best fantasy novel since Carroll's White Apples or VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen. When they say adult fantasy, that's what they mean. It's written for adults, like people who know how to read good
books. I can one hundred percent totally and absolutely recommend this tome as both well up to Moorcock's usual amazingly high standard and a stand-alone you'll never regret
having read (so long as you take my tips).

Rating:
Summary: Oh, yes!
Review: Yeah. This one'll do it. Cream of the crop. Not a trace
of fat in the whole hamburger. Where other fantasy drags
along with its chin in the dirt, Moorcock races and glides.
Covering fifty times the territory in ideas and sheer
invention than anything else I've read in a long time, it
keeps giving it to you. Longfellow riffs, Viking riffs,
Mayan riffs. This truly is the Albino in America and it
delivers food for thought on almost every page until the
finale which is stunning. I don't know what book the
previous reviewer thought he'd gotten hold of, but he must
have had it upside down the whole time he was trying to
read it. Here's a tip: The picture on the front is a
clue (assuming the wrapper hasn't been reversed, which
could explain a lot). I loved this book with its evocation of Pre-Colombian plains scenery and culture, with its extraordinary wit. It isn't sword and sorcery like anything you've ever read. It has humor. It's smart. It's beautifully written. It has my vote for the best fantasy novel since Carroll's White Apples or VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen. When they say adult fantasy, that's what they mean. It's written for adults, like people who know how to read good
books. I can one hundred percent totally and absolutely recommend this tome as both well up to Moorcock's usual amazingly high standard and a stand-alone you'll never regret
having read (so long as you take my tips).