Hawkmistress (A Darkover Novel) [Hardcover]

Marion Zimmer Bradley (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Arrow Books (1985)
• ASIN: B0014D0XIG
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Marion Eleanor Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.
She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens. She had written as long as she could remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until 1952, when she sold her first professional short story to VORTEX SCIENCE FICTION. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels and for her Arthurian novel, THE MISTS OF AVALON.
In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called SWORD AND SORCERESS, which is still published annually under the title MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S SWORD AND SORCERESS.
She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of imagination!!!, August 8, 2000

By 

"valai" - See all my reviews

This review is from: HawkMistress! (Darkover) (Vol 2) (Paperback)

I loved reading this book!!! The heroine doesn't like being a "lady". She loves working with the animals and helping with outside things rather than being inside. Her "gift" is a rare kind of laran, to feel the emotions of animals and what they are thinking.

She travels in the disguise of a boy and everyone believes that's just what she is. A boy with a very special talent. Helping a group of men with some birds, a kind of bird where if you link your mind with it you can see through it's eyes, she learns that a war is starting to take effect. Adventure is teeming everywhere and she enters places that no other girl, or woman could enter. But her gift isn't always good. Sometimes she feels too much and sometimes she could almost loose control on what's human ... and what's animal.

This is one of my favorite books in the MZB series and it's a wonderful read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantasy with a Point, May 22, 2000

By 

Larry Eischen - See all my reviews

This review is from: HawkMistress! (Darkover) (Vol 2) (Paperback)

Hawkmistress is one of Bradley's Darkover series and one of the best. This is the story of a woman's liberation from a male dominated society intent on marrying her to an undesirable match. Escaping from her family she roams Darkover enroute to battling usurpers and earning fame as a swordwoman.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but Stormqueen! was better., August 1, 2000

By 

A.J. Chodan - See all my reviews

This review is from: HawkMistress! (Darkover) (Vol 2) (Paperback)

Hawkmistress! is valuable to Darkover fans as part of the history of the Swordswomen/Renunciates and as a tale of one of the more unusual forms of laran to be mentioned.

However, since I had just finished reading Stormqueen! (IMHO, the best of the series), almost anything would have disappointed me at that point. And I just couldn't warm up to Romily the way I did to Renata Leynier or Magda Lorne (my two favorite Darkover heroines). My original impulse was to post a three-star review, but the book did improve on re-reading, so four stars it is.