Customer Reviews

Child of Light

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An incredible journey with time traveler Poma as she travels through skillfully woven history and cultures along the silk road in search of the Royal Purple. The loves and lives of Poma are engrossing in themselves and the visual scenes of another time and place add to the pleasure.

This book does not use the mechanism of time travel. What happens is that the protagonist, Poma, dies and is resurrected every ten years. She is supposed to be following the path to the color royal purple and her journeys take her to different time periods and different cultures. This book is not historically or culturally accurate. In one scene, when Poma is in Japan, she is taught the Japanese tea ceremony in about five to ten minutes. Not possible. When she is with a group of nomads, who are expert dyers through the use of herbs and other plants, there is a description of Poma sitting next to a field of crocuses. I researched that and there were crocuses in 480 A.D., but they were saffron crocuses. Saffron crocuses were very valuable and would have made the nomads wealthy, but apparently these experts in plant life never noticed a whole field of wealth sitting right next to them. There is no mention anywhere in the book that Poma learns anything other than medicine, dyeing, weaving, and knitting. Yet, when she is confronted by a wild animal, she miraculously pulls out a bow and arrow to shoot it. Poma does something that is called one-needle knitting. Actually, the correct name is nalbinding. Then in 1400s Constantinople, she is taught to knit with circular knitting needles. Sorry, but there is no archeological evidence that there were circular knitting needles in 1400s Constantinople - they are a modern invention. As a fiber artist, I was excited to find a time traveling fantasy novel dealing with the fiber arts. However, the cultural, scientific, and historical inaccuracies, along with editing inaccuracies and no richness of language (it reads like an outline for a book, not an actual book), made this a huge disappointment. I would not recommend it.