![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Silver on the Road Review: The Devil’s in the Deals
An interestingly critical (in the taking-apart sense, not the negative sense) review from GeeklyInc that left me with the Happy Writer sensation of “yeah, you got it, go me.” :-) And today, when I'm feeling low-energy and low-enthusiasm, this kept me from pulling the covers over my head and calling in out-of-everything.
Excerpting some of my favorite bits…
“…. It was a wise choice to play on the eeriness of all that wide-open sky and endless open road: this book will make an agoraphobic of you before it’s done, and make you fear magic as much as you might enjoy it.
The magic system here isn’t Sandersonian, aka with prerequisites in engineering or linguistics. It’s more of the kind of magic I’d actually call magic–not a science with repeatable, testable results, but the bastard offspring of instinct, feeling, and ritual….
Accomplishing that kind of magic without making it seem foolish requires some top-notch writing, and Gilman delivers. The prose is evocative without being purple and the dialogue is period-appropriate without being hokey. Hardest of all, Gilman makes me believe that there’s no romantic yearning on either Isobel or Gabriel’s part–and thank goodness. A well-written romance is fine, but a perfunctory one is hellish, and there’s nothing more perfunctory than “two people on a long, hard journey take solace in each other,” or, more ickily, “male teacher and female student find common ground.” Hooray for Gabriel and Isobel having better things to do, and hooray for the neglected platonic male-female bond.”
An interestingly critical (in the taking-apart sense, not the negative sense) review from GeeklyInc that left me with the Happy Writer sensation of “yeah, you got it, go me.” :-) And today, when I'm feeling low-energy and low-enthusiasm, this kept me from pulling the covers over my head and calling in out-of-everything.
Excerpting some of my favorite bits…
“…. It was a wise choice to play on the eeriness of all that wide-open sky and endless open road: this book will make an agoraphobic of you before it’s done, and make you fear magic as much as you might enjoy it.
The magic system here isn’t Sandersonian, aka with prerequisites in engineering or linguistics. It’s more of the kind of magic I’d actually call magic–not a science with repeatable, testable results, but the bastard offspring of instinct, feeling, and ritual….
Accomplishing that kind of magic without making it seem foolish requires some top-notch writing, and Gilman delivers. The prose is evocative without being purple and the dialogue is period-appropriate without being hokey. Hardest of all, Gilman makes me believe that there’s no romantic yearning on either Isobel or Gabriel’s part–and thank goodness. A well-written romance is fine, but a perfunctory one is hellish, and there’s nothing more perfunctory than “two people on a long, hard journey take solace in each other,” or, more ickily, “male teacher and female student find common ground.” Hooray for Gabriel and Isobel having better things to do, and hooray for the neglected platonic male-female bond.”
