Blurb: Suddenly Shielder's Mark is living a fairy tale come true. A commoner's son, he has broken the spell of Red Keep. Now he can collect the hero's reward promised by the king--whatever Mark names. Smitten, he names the king's daughter.That's where his fairy tale ends.The hero's sword he claimed at Red Keep is taken from him. He finds himself scorned and hated by the king's court. And though he is allowed to marry the beautiful princess, she may not be such a prize after al.A hero's life and 'happily ever after' are a lot harder than they look....Comments: I don't know if the Magic Carpet cover and blurb are doing this book any service. The guy on the cover looks to be about 40, balding mullet-head (instead of a callow youth) and by the time Mark is in the scene portrayed he would NOT have been wearing anything like the sorta-Anglo-Saxon peasant getup. And my husband thought from the blurb that this was one of those broad-wink tired parodies of fairy tale conventions.I'd call it more of a subversion of conventions, but done with a love for them as well. Mark is an appealing hero, sometimes full of himself, sometimes horribly self-conscious and uncertain, sometimes insightful, sometimes blind. The other characters are given enough space to reveal their own contradictions and dimensions (and the princess is NOT beautiful, by the way, but he is smitten by her).The setting is yr basic fairytale / fantasy small kingdoms and duchies, with forbidding haunted woods and ruined castles, but Stewart puts a bit more thought into how courts and economies function than one sometimes sees, and I particularly appreciated Mark's awareness of the disparity of wealth - he's callow but not unobservant.The haunted keep and the ghosts are pretty well handled - it's almost more timeslip than haunting, since the ghosts are quite substantial and able to do harm.Overall recommended. It's not the best book ever, but well worth reading.I even forgave the author for giving Mark the habit of fiddling with a bit of haywire. (No actual haybales appear, for those on the haybales-in-fantasy watch. Just the wire. Oh, and one mention of plywood. NO, fantasy writers, just say NO to plywood.)
There's so much I want to say about this book that I don't know where to start.I'm fond of novels in which there are puzzles for the characters to solve, and especially fond when the solutions are not arrived at by pure logic, but instead by intuitive gestalts of a lot of pieces -- like reading a sonnet in which the ending is exactly the ending that had to be there. This book does that, for me, and it's almost all in the first chapter, in which Shielder's Mark sets off in fairy-tale fashion to break the curse on the Ghostwood and claim his reward from the king.But what happens afterwards? That's the rest of the novel, a thoughtful exploration of why fairy-tale heroes choose to become heroes, and the prices they pay as a result, and the challenges awaiting them once all of the cheering is over. Stewart examines father-son relationships from a variety of perspectives, including that of the old men who are packed away out of sight once their approach to death becomes too frightening to the younger generation. Women are not absent -- two of the strongest characters in the book are female -- but they are women deliberately seen from the perspective of young men, and so they appear strange and wonderful, real and frightening, neither plaster saints nor sex objects but human beings whose stories the men long to share. It's not a perfect book; the writing is sometimes painfully clunky, and I think Stewart overloaded some of the dialogue in his desire to both tell a story and get across his themes. The aristocratic characters speak pseudo-Shakespearean for their formal court language, which didn't work at all for me; Stewart doesn't have the ear for Elizabethan prose, and so the switches in register jarred rather than giving me insight into the people speaking. I could come up with other nitpicks, I'm sure -- I noticed more while reading -- but it doesn't matter. I love the book anyway.
Do You like book Nobody's Son (1995)?
Probably the hardest book to understand in terms of language and plot that I`ve ever read.The writing wasn`t as smooth as I had for Stewart`s Firecracker(although the book was as hard to crack as this one)..I`m blaming this on my own shortcoming when it comes to English language..The English was archaic as it can be on Shakespeare`s period..Very old, but less poetry(compared to the big man).In term of plot, I would say the story passed because I get a happy ending! Thats a relief when reaching almost to the penultimate of the book leaved me the fear of everything going downhill.. Really glad that it wasn`t that bad. Stewart is really good at tying up loose things.About the characters. Mark, a very plain name but still a hero nonetheless. I would applaud his patience for dealing with things although his high ambition of greatness somehow made me pictured him as the crook here..Its the moments of regrets that came from him and his bad jinx afterward that kept me liking him..Failure finds you a better friend, when Success sucks envy from others..Other than this will be the last time I read the book considering how fried my brain was after only one read, I would say..Give me more Sean Stewart!A good read to those who love archaic words...Nuff said~
—CekMoNSter
After happily ever after, what then?I loved the dialects, the voices of the characters...... The way Mark was always clearly a yokel, but an intelligent yokel.The search for God puzzled me. He took it up abruptly, then abandoned it when he met the Old Man. Or was that part of his search for a father-figure? Looking for god as some supernatural stand-by-my-side daddy, turned aside for an actually present man, then finally he realized he could stop searching. He had himself and friends and a wife,
—Kristi Thompson
I got this book because it was listed as a recommendation for people who like retellings of, or new takes on classic fairy tales. I agree with the recommendation, and I liked many things about the book. It deals with what happens after the hero gets the title, the lands and the princess... "Happily Ever After" isn't always that simple. I liked how the simple country lad has to deal with the cutthroat politics of court, and 'his' princess, Gail, is a woman with a mind of her own. The plot is just enough classic fairy tale and just enough original story. It deals well with the complexity of emotional relationships between fathers and sons. About halfway through, I thought I might be giving it 5 stars.But I'm not. First, the book suffered from a heavy-handed and gratuitous injection of religion. (Basically, the message is: you might not need God when things are easy, but when the going gets tough, you'll need faith to get you through. Bleah to that.) However, although that was annoying, it wasn't too big a deal.My biggest complaint is: Stewart sets up a realistic and meaningful dilemma: Our Hero and the Princess love each other dearly. However, Our Hero wants a son, and to be a father. Gail, on the other hand, has no interest in children, wants to travel the world, be independent, and does NOT want to be a mother. So, how does Stewart deal with this problem? Um, Gail changes her mind. For no apparent reason. It's just like, at the end, "oh well, I guess having kids won't be so bad after all." Huge cop-out, and failure to meaningfully interact with an issue that is usually a dealbreaker in real relationships.
—Althea Ann
