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Title: Mortal Suns by Tanith Lee ISBN: 1-58567-207-6 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Serpentine Spirals
Comment: At her best, Tanith Lee can summon up a hallucinatory dreamscape of things that never were, but should be. At her worst, she devolves into a morass of mystical hoo-hah. This book is somewhere in between.
Lee sketches out the landscape of Akhemony in swift, bold strokes: the claustrophobic intrigues of the women's quarters, the hot dust of a besieged town. The characters are stylized archetypes with enough added individuality to bring them to life. Unlike some of her other recent books, it was both easy and pleasurable to submerge into the pages of this one.
And yet at its core, the book falters because of the passivity of its supposed heroine. Cemira/Calistra does struggle to overcome the accident of her birth, but beyond and after that, she is nothing but a cherished ornament of the hero. Her only motivation is to be what he wants her to be, and the only thing he really wants her to be is beautiful. Compared to the steely resolve of her (step)mother(-in-law) Udrombis, she is a paltry thing indeed.
The book ends with a hint of pending sequels. If there are some, I would hope that Cemira finds some goal in them to inspire action within herself and respect within the reader.
Rating: 3
Summary: Dark-hued mythic tropes
Comment: "Mortal Suns" creates the myth-haunted kingdom of Akemony, a land loosely modeled on Ancient Greece. It follows the vainglorious rise and fall of a dynasty, viewed from the vantage point of one its minor nobles, the queen Calistra, a woman born without feet. The dynasty weathers devastating losses, through both natural and supernatural occurrences. It's a rather thin and episodic plot, one that heavily alludes to Classical mythology and tragedy. Readers familiar with Classical Greek literature and history will enjoy the veiled references. "Mortal Suns" strongly focuses on the women who also control the dynasty-the Widow Consort Udrombis is a wonderful, regal creation, equal parts Circe and Medea.
The subtext of the novel is equally as fascinating as the foreground: the enigmatic battle between the masculine (unnamed) Sun god and the feminine Moon goddess Phaidrix. This unseen battle is actualized in Calistra, who is both of the Sun and the Moon. She is the unwitting lynchpin and omen of the power struggles and supernatural incidences.
As is expected in a work by Lee, the language and atmosphere reigns supreme. She is particularly good at evoking scenes of ominous beauty, as evidenced by the excerpt below, describing a monstrous creature: "There, on the path, between ourselves and the soldiers, was a cricket made of green chalcedony, through which the afterglow shone, revealing its inner life, bladders and arteries pulsing with dim blood.... And with its forelegs it strummed at its own body, and from that it shrilled the web of glass, its ghastly song."
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Title: Venus Preserved by Tanith Lee ISBN: 1585674745 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: When Darkness Falls by Tanith Lee, Evelyn Vaughn, Susan Krinard ISBN: 0373218222 Publisher: Silhouette Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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Title: Wolf Wing (The Claidi Journals Book 4) by Tanith Lee ISBN: 0525471626 Publisher: Dutton Books Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.99 |
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Title: A Bed of Earth (Secret Books of Venus, Book 3) by Tanith Lee ISBN: 1585672610 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 03 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Sunshine by Robin McKinley ISBN: 0425191788 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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