From: Margaret Parish <parishm>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 16:26:03 -0500

Although it has been many years since I read Enchantress from the Stars, I remember it rather well. One thing I especially liked about it was the differing perspectives and voices of the characters from the three different cultures (as today I find that one of the many things I like most about The View from Saturday is the differing perspectives of the four different characters).

  Another thing I liked about Enchantress is the fact that the central character is female, which, I think, has not often enough been the case in young people's fantasy, at least until fairly recently. I have enjoyed identifying with the strong female central characters in The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, but I definitely did _not_ enjoy identifying with the central female character in the middle book of what was once The Earthsea Trilogy! I'm looking forward to reading the relatively new fourth Earthsea book, which turns LeGuin's work into a quartette and presents a much stronger central female character, I understand. And it might be that one reason I find it hard to be truly enthusiastic about the Hobbit is that there are so few female characters - and so much unending warfare! I wonder if anyone agrees with me about this.( I almost hesitate to confess it!)

  What is probably most important to me about Enchantress is that like like Harry Potter, like Tom's Midnight Garden and The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time, it made me suspend disbelief and travel into a hold-your-breath place where I found it hard to predict what would happen next. (Can Rowling sustain that for seven books, I wonder.) While I read Enchantress , I was someplace else and all bets were off. Realistic fiction never creates a different kind of experience in quite the same way that fantasy does!

Maggie Parish English Department University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Received on Tue 06 Nov 2001 03:26:03 PM CST