Title: Kingfisher
Author:
Patricia McKillip
Genre: Fantasy
About the book…
Pierce
Oliver longs for more than the small fishing town he’s grown up in and when his
mother, a sorceress, finally reveals to him that the father he has never known is
a knight, he knows he has to go to the city to find him. Headed there, he comes
across a small town with an inn where they hold an unusual weekly ritual and
upon stealing a knife used in that ritual begins an unexpected journey that
leads him to family and a quest for a missing artifact.
What I
think...
Okay, so I actually have a negative review for once. McKillip tends to be a hit
or miss author for me and this book was a definite miss.
She chooses to look
at the grail/king fisher king myth in a contemporary setting. Having read a
number of her other books, which do not take place in a contemporary setting, I
found it jarring when sunglasses or limos came up in the story. In later
portions of the book this is not quite as bad as cars, motor bikes, and phones
are mentioned more frequently. This is not to say I did not find reading about
a basilisk sitting on a fire engine to create an interesting image, it just
wasn’t expected for what she usually writes about and it wasn’t well integrated.
Certain parts dragged out and were
seemingly more for the purpose of filling space than for the benefit of the
story. Similarly, there were a considerable amount of intentional misleads as
to where the plot was going which got annoying. The ending is somewhat rushed, though there’s a semi-second ending following to wrap things up in some ways.
I’d forget who certain
characters were, as there seemed to be a lot with little purpose other than to
fill space.
To
sum it all up…
Not
one of my favorite McKillip books, especially having read other better ones to
compare it with. Overall, I wish I would have re-read The Bell at Sealey Head or Ombria
in Shadow instead (both which I highly recommend). ♥
