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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9781594264887
ISBN number: 1594264880
Label: Mundania Press LLC
Manufacturer: Mundania Press LLC
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: June 01, 2008
Publishing house: Mundania Press LLC
Sale Popularity Level: 1741248
Studio: Mundania Press LLC
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
For Astrid, a blacksmith who makes swords for dragonslayers, the emergence of a strange gemstone from her body sets in motion a chain of events that threaten to destroy her life. Her happiness is shattered when her lover-the dragonslayer-disappears without a trace, and the life that she knows and loves implodes without warning. Astrid lives in a world of shapeshifters whose thoughts have the power to change not only themselves but others. Everything Astrid knows to be true is called into question when she learns the truth about her past and the mysterious family from which she was separated as a child. Reality turns inside out as Astrid gradually learns the truth about the people she loves as well as those she disdains. With the fate of dragons, ghosts, and slaves in foreign lands resting on her shoulders, Astrid faces the challenge of deciding who she is and how she will stand up inside her own skin. Will she withdraw and hide from the world that has disappointed her so much...or will she rise to lead others to freedom and peace?
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
This is really really something quite different. If you're looking for clichés, they won't come from Resa Nelson. She has taken the myth of the Dragonslayer and made it into something very new and enticing.
I have to admit I was taken aback when the heroine very first started doing things -- magical things -- that you usually don't see in heroic fantasy. It jarred me out of traditional fantasy reading mold and into a much more active mindset. Nelson's Astrid is a proactive heroine -- but not just because she picks up a sword and waves it around. We've seen that going on for years in woman-oriented fantasy. Astrid acts and reacts in a parable-like realm that is something entirely new in the world of fantasy. Think of one of the short, dreamlike tales of the brilliant Cat Valente (The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden), expanded to examine all the psychic implications of the magical things that happen.
I wonder what would have happened a story like this had been submitted to the late great (and wonderfully opinionated) Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress (Set of Sword And Sorceress Anthologies by Marion Zimmer Bradley) series. Would Bradley have loved it or hated it? So much of what Nelson does breaks the mold.
If you hanker for stories that touch some deep archetype within (as in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series)), this is a book that will satisfy this desire.
Another comparison is that Nelson's plots and themes have the direct, heart-to-heart appeal of an M. Night Shyamalan script (see The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale and Lost).
At the same time, Nelson's humour and insight into human needs and emotional development leave you with a feeling of warm human fulfillment. And it's got action and romance galore. It's a doggone good story, and if it means something to you the reader in terms of how the hero changes and grows, that's paydirt.
I'll be very curious as to the attitude of such review zines as Locus. Will they be open to how Nelson overlays her icon-shattering vision on the mythos of dragonslayers? I hope so. The book is well worth it.
Rated by buyers -
Don't read The Dragonslayer's Sword by Resa Nelson if you like your heroines as limp as Sleeping Beauty, as clueless as Snow White, and as suspect as Cinderella.
This reader has longed to see heroines who break from the traditional archetype of the beauteous victim valuable simply because of her looks and her faultless character. What about the scarred heroines, those living under the yoke of self-doubt, and those who have often been the unwanted?
Read this only if you want to read about female heroes who chose to live on through betrayal, abandonment, and even being disfigured.
Read on if you want a female blacksmith for a hero. Read on if you want to take the journey with Astrid to stand up inside her own skin. Read on if you want your dragons to have happy endings. Read on because you want to witness the power of belief to mold and shape Astrid into something as effective as welded iron. Read on because you want to read about the kind of love that survives even death and the kind of fear and hate that makes men even worse than dragons.
Read on because the last time you read about a woman who conversed with dragons it was in Ursula LeGuinn's Tehanu and you wanted another immersive experience like that.
Read on...only...if you dare and let the dragons stand with you whatever you choose.
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