Rating: 
Summary: Fantasy Doesn't Get Any Better Than This!
Review: What a wonderful book! Weaving, retelling and redefining the classic faerie tale in a style at once simple and elegant, McKillip brings a sense of wonder and magic to every page, creating a world at once familiar yet unlike any other I've encountered. The author has created a haunting fiction in which a thin veil exists between the ordinary and magical, the commonplace, medieval setting of fantasy and the barely perceived kingdom of the Other. This is the realm of Faerie, the closest I have come to it, outside of traditional folklore, since reading Tolkien, yet written with an individual vision that while drawing upon the rich heritage of mythology and legend, such as the Wild Hunt and the Queen of the Wood, breathes new life into the faerie tale, until the story has a character and wonder all its own.Lovingly and richly detailed, this is not a book to read on an empty stomach. Scenes of feasts and the kitchen abound, delightfully rendered and salivating. The descriptions of the wood captures nature in all its beauty as well as its at times its frightening indifference. The invocation of magic and the spiritual realm are crafted in a way at once wondrous and believable, and for a few hours the reader steps into a world in which he or she wishes they could linger long after the final page reaches its conclusion. Mystery abounds, and it is impossible not to become captured in the author's written spell. This is not, however, simply a tale of wondrous places and larger than life events. As well as writing lyrically, the author invests her tale with metaphor, and a meditation on words and their relationship to identity. The duality of things perceived is as much a theme throughout the work as is the ostensible tale of magic gone awry, and, as with the characters, one needs to look closely at the nature of what is named. I can think of no other author currently writing fantasy that uses the genre as a means to explore larger existential matters, a reflection upon not only the real world but also the world of myth. This book is truly a feast, not only for the senses but the intellect as well. One of the best works of fantasy I have ever read, at once richly acknowledging the meditative and figurative themes underlying the best traditional folklore, as well as investing the genre with intentions rarely found today in fantasy fiction, written in a style as magical and beautiful as the tale being told. Beside the wonder of this novel, my praise is but a weak and mute substitute.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful story, told in a beautiful way
Review: you know the feeling, when falling really great fantasy book, when you know that you fall on some true words?! that this is not only a writer throwing up words that don't make sense but a true art of creating some new myth, some new world?! well this book does it, and does it extreamly well. i enjoied patricia mckillip books befor but there's is this wholeness to this book that i haven't seen in her words befor, the story's charming and the way she's telling it, each chapter from a diffrent charecter point of veiw keeps you curious and interested all the way through, there are no pauses, the story just rushes from begining to end and you get completly obsorved in it. she still keeps the main motives of her works, like words and their meaning, and those amazing nature description but there's somthing a lot more rich and intence in this book then in other books i've read by her. i have enjoied this book a lot, as i always do with books that takes me to a diffrent world.
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