Customer Reviews

The Great Wheel

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First of all I am a biased reviewer since I am the niece of Joyce Gregorian. The Great Wheel is the third book in a trilogy of sophisticated fantasy fiction. Sibyl has visited the alternate world of Tredana twice in her life, once as a little girl in The Broken Citadel and once as a college student in Castledown. Now as a divorcee Sibyl slips into the alternate universe of her youth with no memory of ever having visited. She is taken up into the army of a Timerlaine conqueror who is threatening her friends (and the daughter she left behind) from her last visits. This book's framework is based on the zodiac, and allows the reader to examine the history of the conqueror as well as the conquered.

... I grew up loving fantastical stories, and as a pre-teen, Joyce's Tredana trilogy were the first fantasy novels I ever read. "The Broken Citadel" and "Castledown" were both side by side on the shelves at the Public library. I checked them out, took them home, and fell in love with Sibby and Leron. I am 21-years-old now, and looking back, I remember it was always hard to find books for my age group that didn't talk down to me. It was so refreshing to read Joyce's novels about Sibby's adventures in a parallel existence. At that age, growing up so confused and awkward, all pre-teens feel out of place, and Sibby's adventures is a version of the story of the girl who takes a step out of the realm where she feels she doesn't belong, into the world where she feels she does. It took me almost ten years to track down a copy of "The Third Wheel", the last book in the series. I never gave up. I sent a fan letter to Joyce when I was 12, but was saddened to find out later that she had passed away. I definitely recommend this book to pre-teens who want to take a step in the door as a fan of fantasy lit. This author does an excellent job of introducing the genre to young adults. Even if you have been a fan of fantasy for awhile and want to try something new, I still recommend the Tredana trilogy. ...

As a teenager I loved The Broken Citadel and Castledown, and read both of them several times. Sibby is a compelling, vibrant, assertive character and her adventures in a parallel world (one which is unusual in being drawn from the culture and mythology of the Middle East) were completely engrossing. I spent years waiting for the final book to be published, by which time I was in my early 20s. From the first few chapters I felt a sinking sense of disappointment which didn't evaporate the more I read. So much had changed about the characters that in fact I always wondered if this book was written by someone other than Gregorian herself! The events which happened in the intervening period between the end of Castledown and the beginning of The Great Wheel were inconsistent with how the characters had been developed in the previous books. At the beginning of Castledown, Sibby has little memory of her experiences as a child in Tredana, but as soon as she returns to Tredana it all comes back to her. But in the Great Wheel, she arrives in Tredana with no recollection of her previous experiences there, and she remains an amnesiac throughout this final novel. As a result any opportunities to develop on what happened to her in the first two books, to add nuance to her further experiences in Tredana, are completely lost. For several years after this book was published I unrealistically hoped that Gregorian would revisit Tredana and write the conclusion to this trilogy differently. It was with great sadness that I learned in 1991 that she had died and that there would be no more written about Sibby and Tredana.

I don't know why the Tredana Trilogy is still out of print. With the increasing popularity of epic fantasy fiction with female lead characters (i.e. the Outlander series, the Twilight series, and the entirety of the "paranormal romance" genre...) I would think this series would have reemerged by now. This series recounts the adventures of eleven-year-old Sibby, a Massachusetts fifth-grader who enters through a window in an abandoned Victorian house and finds herself transported into an alternate, magical world. The 3 books in the series follow her as she grows up in this world and the alternate world of Tredana: The Broken Citadel (book 1), Castledown (book 2), and The Great Wheel (book 3, the final book in the trilogy).

I've waited 20 yrs to read this book. After doing a search online one night, I discovered that Ms Gregorian did indeed write the 3rd and final book. Very sad to also read that she died soon after it was published. The book was worth the wait. A bit different than the first two books but ended on a good note.