The Ill-Made Mute (Bitterbynde, Bk 1) [Hardcover]

Cecilia Dart-Thornton (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Warner Books Inc (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446528021
• ISBN-13: 978-0446528023
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (166 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Cecilia was discovered, as a baby, in a wooden lifeboat that washed ashore on the rugged coastline of a remote isle in the southern oceans, between Australia and Antarctica. She spent her early years on Si-Sique Island, raised with the family of the lighthouse-keeper, Albert Ross, who found and adopted her.
Her origins could not be traced. Who were her parents? Had they been drowned in a boating accident? Where had she come from? Was she of noble blood? Alas, no answers could be found.
Cecilia flourished like a rare orchid, even on that windswept isle,in the rough-and-tumble company of her seven stepbrothers. They taught her fencing, archery and equestrian skills, at which she excelled. Her favourite hobby, however, was writing stories.
Recently, at the age of sixteen, she was 'discovered' on the Internet when she posted some of her work to an Online Writing Workshop. An editor contacted her by email, and within a few weeks Time Warner U.S.A. had signed Cecilia in a six-figure deal. They published her first trilogy, THE BITTERBYNDE, in hardcover - the first time they have ever done so with a new author.
Cecilia packed her mascara and departed from Si-Sique isle - to the sorrow of her seven handsome stepbrothers, who were all achingly in love with her.
THE BITTERBYNDE series has now been translated into four languages and is distributed throughout more than seventy countries.
Cecilia's life alternates between seen and unseen worlds of vivid strangeness, beauty, peril and passion.
It is a little-known fact that most authors actually write their own biographies. Some might say that for Cecilia the boundaries between virtuality and reality are blurred. It is for the reader to decide whether this is a completely implausible fairytale or whether it contains a grain of truth...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worthy of all the high praise, June 24, 2001

By 

Ian Nguyen (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ill-Made Mute (The Bitterbynde, Book 1) (Hardcover)

Sometimes when a book gets a lot of very good reviews, your expectations get so high that you are disappointed when you finally get to read it. This was not the case when I read The Ill-Made Mute. It exceeded my expectations.

I have read a lot of fantasy and never have I come across a writer who can create a whole nother world with so much detail, as well as a complicated plot, believeable characters and a style that blew me away.

It's kind of hard to review a book when it's the first of three, and you know the story is far from complete. I get the feeling there are a lot of questions raised in this book which the author has deliberately left unanswered until the next two, so I don't want to make any assumptions about the plot. I can only say, I'm hanging out for the sequels. I've had a long thirst for a real Tolkien-style story and this book slaked it.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is worth any trouble it takes to buy and read!, June 4, 2001

By 

Darcy A. Calhoun (Nara, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ill-Made Mute (The Bitterbynde, Book 1) (Hardcover)

THE ILL-MADE MUTE is worthy of something long and eloquent, but I fear I'll have to leave you with only a few modest observations. Firstly, the author's world is deftly wrought. It's atmosphere is so powerful that it permeates every page of her book, and I think that is why so many people are comparing it with Tolkien's work. Her characters are truly of their world, and just as skillfully constructed. Dart-Thornton sidesteps the over-used conventions and cliches of fantasy to bring something refreshingly new to the genre-- while tipping her cap to the myths, legends, and folklore that inspired her. Don't pass this one by!

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Buried in Mucky Prose, July 1, 2002

By 

E. T. Young (Roanoke, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ill-Made Mute (The Bitterbynde, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)

To start off, I know people are going to disagree with my review. It's my opinion, and I hope readers like me will find it useful. That said, this is not a terrible book, but from my point of view, it is one with many flaws.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton has created a nonstandard fantasy novel in every sense of the word. The plot doesn't follow any easily determinable path, meandering its way around the countryside at the pace of a snail and picking up a tapestry of details from its surroundings. It's an amazing tapestry, to be sure, with a unique and engrossing mythology and bestiary, but it's also a fairly uninteresting tapestry, with very little going on. Most of the actual events in the book are glossed over; characters and plot take a second seat to the realm's lore and legends.

From that, you can probably understand why I don't like this book. While I despise fantasy of a purely formulaic nature, I do politely request that there be some elements of formula in a book's construction, and here there were practically none, especially in terms of plot. The author could have just written a reference book on this land's lore and skipped the story element and I would barely have known the difference.

Of course, the lack of strong plot is only part of my unenthusiastic response. The other part is the book's prose. Yes, poetic language is all good and fine, but when it starts to sidetrack other elements, I get annoyed. Here that distraction took the form of lists of descriptive words. List after list after list... It got to the point where I was banging my head on the table, trying to figure out why the author couldn't phrase things more concisely. At times she seemed to be groping through a thesaurus, unable to find that one word to fit the situation and putting five other words down instead. These lists derailed action sequences and dialogue and left me with a vague feeling, especially when I was able to skip whole paragraphs and not feel like I was missing something.

Many people out there seem to have enjoyed this book a great deal, which is fine. This book will appeal to many readers with its richness and depth. It just really wasn't the right book for me. My suggestion: read a few chapters before you buy it. Notice how very little seems to happen in the first chapters, and understand that it doesn't change the further on you read. If you enjoy that style of writing, by all means, continue! I think vision of this kind deserves some reward. If you don't enjoy it, move on and find another book. You won't be missing much.