Greer Ilene Gilman

Crowd of Bone

Sparse and perfect prose as poetry. Old tales piled upon myth and returning back to tale. If your bones could tell the tale through the ashes, they would step through the seasons. You would run in the clouds.

This is poetry. There's no other description for it. If anyone had been able to report on the days of the old Celts and extrapolate a real and magical landscape of both thought and being, then Ms. Gilman is the transplant from time. Not only is the fantasy world deep and complex, but I could feel the love between Kit and Thea, the bittersweet and beautiful, the tragedy and the delight. It was short, but so jam packed with information and gorgeous phrases that I was forced to taste every word and slow down to a point that I wanted to tear my hair out.

Of course, that just meant that the text was worth it, and I was suddenly in a different depth, requiring me to swim to a far underground shore.

Sure, I could sum up the plot in a few easy sentences, but that would rob the richness of the magical world in these pages. And certainly, I could point to the recurring imagery drawn out of old civilizations and myth and cultures, but it was done in such a smart way that I could never unravel just what was cribbed or imagined.

If this weren't a modern work of fiction, I probably would have assumed it had come out of one of the past masters, like Spenser or Pope. It's certainly thick enough to be the punchlines in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets.

Do I think this work is amazing? Yes. Do I think that you, the reader, needs to be willing and able to fly slow through the clouds? Yes.

This is not an easy work, but it is fantastically delicious and subtle.… (mer)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3273210.html

Lots of people loved Cloud and Ashes; I didn't. Its a dense fairy tale set in northern England, with lots of sex (not at all titillating) and magic (which may or may not work). Maybe it will reward readers who put in the effort to understand who the characters are and what is going on. I read for relaxation and escapism, and this was too much like hard work for me. It won the Tiptree Award in 2006, along with the first two volumes of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, which I enjoyed.… (mer)