Customer Reviews

Castles Made of Sand (Gollancz Sf S.)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thought that Bold As Love was brilliant. The best fantasy book I had read in years until I read Castles Made Of Sand which is even better.

All of the same characters except this time we know them better. Still brilliantly portrayed as we have come to expect from Jones. The menage a trois between the principles is portrayed as the fraught and dynamic thing that I suspect such arrangements will always be.

The action moves along at a cracking pace and I challenge anyone not to cheer when Sage does his stuff (I won't say more so as not to spoil it).

So, a more than worthy successor.

Roll on Midnight Lamp.

The Rock and Roll Reich of Ax, Sage and Fiorinda returns to face new challenges and increasingly strange politics. The three of them need to figure out their relationship with each other while keeping the hard-core Celtic underground from undermining every good that the present brought the world.

Jones is one of the smartest writers around, and Castles Made of Sand is a worthy heir to the level set by Bold As Love. She deserves much more of a reputation in the US than she has. This book (set in the "near future" of England) continues to break genre conventions and turn reader assumptions on their head. I love her take on the Arthur legends-- twisted and very loyal at the same time. Also, living in Amsterdam, I had more than a few laugh out loud moments over the Green Nazis who populate her worst case scenarios.

Not to be read without first reading Bold As Love, I would recommend the series for any fans of smart speculative or slipstream novels.

The Arthurian three have brought some sort of hope and stability to the UK, at least, but the world outside still has severe problems. Europe impacts them most closely, but the USA are most definitely not big fans of theirs.

The green revolution could spill over into a rather large amount of violence.

The other thing is, in any Arthurian legend, there is an evil [...] or [...] lurking in the older generation, in general.

It is no different here. In this case, Fiorinda's father is a truly vile man. He is also, basically, now an evil wizard and partly behind what has been going on. The triumvirate has managed to spoil a lot of his fun.

When that happens, what do any heroes of the era do? Yep, attack the evil wizard in his tower stronghold, and hope they survive.

... for the same reasons I did, you might hate the sequel.
I read Castles Made of Sand looking for resolutions and explanations, and expecting the same draw-you-in writing and plot as her earlier novel. Instead, the slick dialogue is much reduced, and what i thought was a celebration of friendship and relationships has deteriorated into a complete mess. And after all the buildup in both books, the final battle is fought between characters we don't understand. The one similarity with Bold As Love is that the lack of explanations is spectacular - but it was forgivable then, knowing that a sequel was coming. Ultimately, this novel is very unsatisfying.