The Crystal Stair; The Starstone, Grace Chetwin (365 Books, Days 147 & 151)

[rushthatspeaks]

I am starting to have some review brain back, but only very slowly, so I'm going to be hopping around chronologically a bit with my reviews from the last nearly-a-week. I will get to them all eventually, but some books take more time and thought to write about than others.

The Crystal Stair and The Starstone are the final two of the Grace Chetwin series beginning with Gom on Windy Mountain; I've read all four of them while visiting B., as they are books he liked very much when he was younger.

And I do indeed recommend this series for younger people, though I'm not really sure it holds up for an adult. As I said about the earlier two books, they're much better than they have to be. But the last two books have a problem that I can only describe as galloping madly off in all directions at once. One of the virtues of the first book was that after it, you can't tell where the series is going; and after the second book, you still can't tell where the series is going; and the reason for this turns out to be that it is going to throw everything possible in.

Which is fun, in some ways. The third and fourth books have an interesting fusion of science fiction in with the magic-- Gom's world is very classic fantasy pseudo-medieval with vaguely Earthsea-style magic, but the plot turns out to be tangled up with some people from another set of planets entirely, who are using his world as a jumpoff point for a stargate. I always enjoy seeing people do things that are not quite expected for the genre they appear to be writing in.

But there is so much plot and so many things that fifty pages from the end of the last book I was wondering whether there was actually yet another book afterward that no one had mentioned, because I simply could not see how it was all going to wrap up. And the answer to that is 'kind of satisfactorily, but very very abruptly'.

So I think these would be good for middle-grade fantasy-lovers, because they do stretch genre boundaries, they do have thought in them, they're not extruded trendy book-product. But, unless you are as tired and ill as I've been this last while, that's as far as my recommendation goes.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Welcome back!

Nine

my gom books

[(Anonymous)]

There are nine books in my Gom series - as I always intended from the start. You can find the titles of the rest easily around the web. On my own web page, on feralpressinc.com. Info on every one. I conceived the series as a set of nesting boxes, if you like; you open one and there's another inside revealing a totally different aspect of Gom, his world, and his place in it. I delighted initially in making the reader think that this newbie was a "folk writer." Nah. Gom begins life in a hut on a mountain and ends way up in the - not to be a spoiler! I intended the element of surprise for the patient reader as each book opened out onto the next. My books are not genre and not aimed at any narrow specific reader group. Thanks for saying they're not "trendy book-products." I hope that you're feeling better! gc