Books
Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood by Meredith Anne Pierce
Description: In Brown Hannah’s hair grows flowers that she must pluck for the
wizard’s as she watches young heroes ride into the Tanglewood in search of the
treasure.
The secret of this story isn’t really the nature of the treasure. That’s fairly
obvious. What’s important in this story is the wonderful stretch into seasons.
Hannah begins the story unnaturally frozen in the brown season. Gray and chill.
Forgetful. Isolated even from herself. It’s about stretching out into the world
in that first Maiden’s journey.
Meredith Pierce has a wonderful languorous control of the English language. Not
mere yellows, but saffrons and russets. A luscious roll into the seasonal.
The Shape Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn
Description: A young wizard, Aubrey, is apprenticed to a master shape changer,
but gradually comes to see shape of things for himself.
The mystery here is a bit more serpentine that in the Treasure, but this is also
a perfect book to greet spring.
There’s an insidious pull to the shapechanger, Glyrenden’s evil. The subtle
horror of forcing things from their natural design. Imposing one’s will on the
heart of things for amusement.
Aubrey’s journey into becoming himself and learning the price of knowledge is
exactly what I would expect from Shinn. Complex, luminous, brilliant.
Primavera by Francesca Lia Block
Description: Young Primavera lives in a paradise, soft, lush, suffocating. She
longs for hard, brittle adventure. So, into the desert and the cities she rides.
The story of Persephone in a post apocalyptic world where radiation has created
mutant centaurs and mermaids and Primavera, who when she sings makes the world
bloom flowers.
A classic journey from innocence into adulthood with all the attendant descents
into the abyss and climb into the sun. What’s interesting about this version is
that we not only read Primavera’s perspective, but that of her parents Calliope
and Dionisio's and of several other characters.
The prose is strewn with razor candy flowers and wounded Rivers, plucking their
own feathers in the city of the lost. Not really a light read, but if you’re in
the mood for dense rich, brew up a pot of tea and enjoy.
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