Review of Paul Collins - Quentaris: The Spell of Undoing

-

So here's the problem. You have a successful young adult fantasy series that's run to more than two dozen titles. How do you keep it fresh? After all, even in a city as rich as Quentaris, there are only so many stories you can tell - surely? That's the dilemma that faced Paul Collins and Michael Pryor - the creators and editors of the Quentaris novel series.

Well their idea is just about the most original I've ever come across. Quentaris has been ripped out of this world and thrown into the rift-maze to end up… - well no one knows where. Different! Oh, and just to make it more fun, the city is now equipped with sails so it can now navigate through the various other worlds, meeting other city-ships as they go.

Brilliant surreal, it's like a Terry Gilliam young adult novel. Quentaris travels see them encounter dragons and pirate cities (the former helping, the latter attacking) and generally trying to find a way to adapt to their new environs.

As a counterpoint to this grand scale main story Collins has provided, interspersed with the city's ordeal, a very personal story of struggle. Tab Vidler is an orphan, determined to make it as magician. You just know she is going to be important in Quentaris's survival.

This is quite simply wonderful. Enough of the old Quentaris remains - the city is still the city we know, the people are the same people we've read about before but everything is different. Collins and Pryor should be applauded for this. Not only is it one of the most inspired of directions I've ever seen an established series taken, but to make such a change without it feeling forced is commendable.

They've given the city a new life and set the stage for a whole new, and eager anticipated (by me), new set of adventures whilst producing one of the best books in the series so far. This could have been so easily a "necessary" book, one that was not all that enjoyable to read but needed to give the subsequent titles somewhere to roam. It's not. This is great.

Long may Quentaris reign!

Book Details

Ford Street Publishing (and Imprint of Hybrid Publishers)

http://www.hybridpublishers.com.au/fordst.html

186 pages

ISBN: 978-1-876462-53-6

March 2008

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Ray Garton - Bestial

-
In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems
Read more

Review of Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

-
Although best known for his travel books this is far from Bryson's first venture into other fields. He has written the obligatory (for a writer) book of personal memoirs ("The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid"), a book or two on the English language ("Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words") and even one on the sum total of human knowledge ("A Short History of Nearly Everything"). And now he has turned his hand to biography with this book on the greatest of all authors. This feels remarkably well researched - despite being such a short book he lists three and a half pages of selected bibliography. This amount of available research material does not mean, however, that much is actually known about Shakespeare life - far from it. Bryson even makes fun of this fact throughout the book. The book explains the few known facts of Shakespeare's life and how they are known - his birth (or rather his baptism, the exact date of his birth being infe
Read more

Attempts at regaining the writing saddle

-
Image
Anyone who has been reading my earlier postings here and on twitter knows I have been going through a difficult patch in my writing over the past few weeks and months. When my wife had her mini-stoke earlier this year writing was irrelevant. Everything was. Now she is recovered I have chance to pick it up again only I'm finding I'm a different person to this time last year. The novel I was writing back in December/January that is maybe three quarters done does not interest me . Maybe this is because that's what I was writing when... I don't know. All I know is try as I might that is not happening. So I needed something else to try. And then when that failed something else...and something else...and something else again. Being honest the only thing that has gone okay since January - at least okay enough to see my type "The End" - was another Ben Williamson novella, called Room 1B. Now this is not a bad thing as I have had the first two of these publish
Read more