This was tremendous fun, a perfect fantasy book that I can’t help but see the threads that dance between this and The Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and a lot more that I’ve read before. But what struck the me hardest is not so much the content as the lines. There are a lot of liens that I circled and underlined that I absolutely loved. For example:
“A white tree he made spring up from the stone floor. Its branches touched the high roof beams of the hall, and on every twig of every branch a golden apple shone, each a sun, for it was the Year-Tree. A bird flew among the branches suddenly, all white with a tail like a fall of snow, and the golden apples dimming turned to seeds, each one a drop of crystal. These falling from the tree with a sound like rain, all at once there came a sweet fragrance while the tree, swaying, put forth leaves of rosy fire and white flowers like stars.”
Many of the heroic stories in this book are called songs or “Deed of…” whatever character—and that’s what this book reads like—a song. Throughout this book I’m making sentence diagrams of the things, but most especially, I see an old familiar.
But most especially, the book gives me this sense that I’m swimming in a river of words, or a sea.
David Press 