Wednesday, April 05, 2023

2023 book 59

 Peter S. Beagle's The Way Home

So this is two novellas set in the world of The Last Unicorn—the first, which isn’t new, is totally beautiful and moving, about a little girl who goes to find the now elderly King Lir to get help dealing with a griffin that is preying on the children of her village, and of course she runs into Schmendrick and Molly Grue on the way. Great narrative voice, I’ve read it several times and always love it. The second one is new, and picks up with that same little girl on her seventeenth birthday, off on a journey to rescue her sister from Fairyland. But it’s one of those stories where someone is just JOURNEYING the entire time, and not getting anywhere (literally, bc it’s Fairyland), and it’s a bummer, and also she gets raped which is entirely unnecessary for this story. It has a vibe that I would say is “suffused with melancholy” and I found it very slow and occasionally tiresome. It does pain me to say that. I guess that averages out to a B+?

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