{"id":676,"date":"2009-05-13T21:51:10","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T21:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=676"},"modified":"2024-01-21T18:55:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T23:55:32","slug":"mckillip_forgotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2009\/05\/mckillip_forgotten\/","title":{"rendered":"McKillip, Patricia A.: Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate it when I re-read a book and discover that it’s not as good as I remember. Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld<\/cite><\/strong> absolutely enthralled me when I first read it—I distinctly remember sitting at the kitchen table in my D.C. apartment during a college internship and being dimly aware of my roommates coming and going, but being unable to stop reading to say hello or move somewhere more comfortable. I re-read it recently when I was thinking about post-Tolkien fantasy with beautiful prose.<\/p>\n

Sybel is a wizard and the daughter of wizards who have buit a menagerie of fantastic animals by calling them—summoning them by name and binding their wills. Her only desire is to call the Liralen, a great white bird with trailing wings: until Coren, one of the Lords of Sirle, comes to her gate with an infant, her cousin and a pawn in the struggle between Sirle and the King of Eldwold. The story is about power, revenge, and what one will, won’t, and should do for love.<\/p>\n

The prose is exquisite, the characters sympathetic, the moral and emotional dilemmas gripping, and the magic numinous. But on this re-read, two things bothered me. The first was small: “Blammor” is a terrible name, especially for a thing of dread and terror. The second, alas, is large: the very ending struck me as an unnoticed undercutting or contradiction of what I took to be the moral force of the entire story. As a result, I’m not sure I can recommend this book any more, which is too bad, because it had been the one novel of McKillip’s that I really liked.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I should re-read the Riddlemaster series and see if it makes any sense to me now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate it when I re-read a book and discover that it’s not as good as I remember. Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld absolutely enthralled me when I first read it—I distinctly remember sitting at the kitchen table in my D.C. apartment during a college internship and being dimly aware of my … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “McKillip, Patricia A.: Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[315],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-mckillip-patricia-a"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2545,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/2545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}