morgandhu's review
4.0
Alison Baird, The Stone of the Stars
I fell in love with one of the main characters, Ailia, the minute she thought to herself: "I always wanted hair like the princesses’ in faerie tales, golden hair that was long enough to sit upon. It was one more item in the long list of things life had denied her. Adventure was another. Adventures, when they happened at all, happened to men and boys. For a girl there were but two possible destinies, housewifery and spinsterhood: and both meant a life confined to the home." It's not just the baby butch girls that long for adventures, after all.
Then we met Damion, the young priest. He seemed a bit stuffy at first, but soon revealed an adventurous heart and an inner longing for romantic quests. In a very short time, he saves the life of the third of the story's significant characters, Lorelyn, who also intrigued me from the start. Appearing mysteriously as an infant in a monastery, hearing voices indistinctly, and dressing up as a boy to save the scroll of destiny from the invading bad guys - she certainly knows how to make a good entrance.
The cast of major characters also includes Ana, the requisite mysterious wise woman who knows much more than she's saying and is clearly something more than she's believed to be, and Mandrake, the requisite mysterious person of great power and questionable motivations who is clearly playing a deep and probably evil game.
There's a quest, of course, for an object of great power that is thought by some to be only a legend, and by others to be just the thing they need to conquer the world. And there is the person with a great destiny - although Baird leaves open the question of exactly who that person really is for rather longer than usual.
There's nothing here that breaks ground in terms of the tropes of fantasy, but it's well-written, smartly put together, and the cast of main characters have charm and depth.
I fell in love with one of the main characters, Ailia, the minute she thought to herself: "I always wanted hair like the princesses’ in faerie tales, golden hair that was long enough to sit upon. It was one more item in the long list of things life had denied her. Adventure was another. Adventures, when they happened at all, happened to men and boys. For a girl there were but two possible destinies, housewifery and spinsterhood: and both meant a life confined to the home." It's not just the baby butch girls that long for adventures, after all.
Then we met Damion, the young priest. He seemed a bit stuffy at first, but soon revealed an adventurous heart and an inner longing for romantic quests. In a very short time, he saves the life of the third of the story's significant characters, Lorelyn, who also intrigued me from the start. Appearing mysteriously as an infant in a monastery, hearing voices indistinctly, and dressing up as a boy to save the scroll of destiny from the invading bad guys - she certainly knows how to make a good entrance.
The cast of major characters also includes Ana, the requisite mysterious wise woman who knows much more than she's saying and is clearly something more than she's believed to be, and Mandrake, the requisite mysterious person of great power and questionable motivations who is clearly playing a deep and probably evil game.
There's a quest, of course, for an object of great power that is thought by some to be only a legend, and by others to be just the thing they need to conquer the world. And there is the person with a great destiny - although Baird leaves open the question of exactly who that person really is for rather longer than usual.
There's nothing here that breaks ground in terms of the tropes of fantasy, but it's well-written, smartly put together, and the cast of main characters have charm and depth.
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