The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles [Hardcover]

Cecilia Dart-Thornton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2005

Jarred is a young boy who has grown up among his mother's peaceful desert people. While Jarred loves his mother, he longs to know the history of his father, a journeyman who left years earlier, promising to return for his wife and infant son. A broken promise but a token left behind--an amulet for Jarred that he has worn always. Some say it brings more than a bit of good luck his way, for no harm has ever befallen the boy.

When Jarred comes to manhood, he decides to journey into the world to seek his fortune and perhaps along the way find news of his father. In his travels he will come to a place so unlike his own as to boggle his mind--a place of immense tracts of waterways and marshes, where the very air seems to teem with magic and a people surrounded by creatures fey and not, with enough strange customs and superstitions to make his head swirl.

And to the beautiful Lilith, a woman who will haunt his dreams and ultimately steal his heart...who perhaps can provide a key to his heritage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If Tolkien wrote romance, the result might be something like the first volume of Australian author Dart-Thornton's new fantasy trilogy (after the Bitterbynde trilogy, which began with The Ill-Made Mute). While on a journey to discover more about his mysterious antecedents, Jarred, the book's handsome hero, meets the beauteous Lilith, who's cursed by "a malediction of the bloodline" that dooms one spouse of a pair to an early death while the other is "driven mad by some delusion of being followed." She cares for Jarred too much to wed and hurt him and their offspring. Jarred adds a second familial quest to his first in order to thwart the curse, and the lovers are soon involved in years of convoluted if fairly convincing adventures. Fueled by Celtic folklore, the novel is packed with unusual minor characters, including an eccentric queen obsessed with a single color at a time. The author's poetic pseudo-medieval style, evidently inspired by Keats and Shakespeare, veers from the enchantingly effective to the occasionally irritating. The goblet brimmeth over with elements typical of epic fantasy (sorcerers, monsters, magic jewels, untold treasures, etc.) and of the currently fashionable subgenre of paranormal romance (otherworldly amour, supernatural goings-on, great looks, good hair, etc.); the brew will undoubtedly prove popular. Agent, Martha Millard.
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Review

“Cecilia Dart Thornton exhibits strong and authentic evidence of having visited some of the more exotic corners of Faerie...crucially for readers, she proves she’s able to bring the unicorn back alive, netted in golden prose...A sweet surprise.”--Washington Post Book World on The Ill-Made Mute

“Cecilia Dart-Thornton gives new life to fantasy and folklore.”--Locus on The Lady of Sorrows

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (January 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765312050
• ISBN-13: 978-0765312051
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,437,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Iron Tree? More like deadwood.., June 20, 2005

By 

Fantasy Forager (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles (Hardcover)

I must admit that I picked up this book after choosing to ignore the critiques below, which I felt must surely be a little harsh. The scope for an epic, involving fantasy tale seemed intriguing from the book's publicity.

Sadly, I can only confirm what others are saying. This writer desperately needs a ruthless front-line editor to excise the deluges of description that completely sink this story. The author clearly lacks the restraint to rein herself in and evidently needs help to do so. Either a decent editor or back to writing classes, I'm afraid, because this material wouldn't pass muster on an average writing workshop.

I'd like to be able to say something positive, but I'm afraid I can only sympathize with readers who have spent money to buy this book and also for the unfortunate publishers who appear to have a bomb of a trilogy to market now. One to avoid, I fear.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Umm..., June 13, 2005

By 

Jessica G. "lilac_jive" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles (Hardcover)

Wow. This was horrible. I don't say that often, but it was true. The publisher let this out? And worse, she's been compared to Tolkien? No. Apparantly it wasn't just me either (man I wish I had checked out the reviews before getting this), except Harriet Klausner, but its not like she's reading any of these books anyway, and her opinion just cements that.

First of all, there are so many ridiculous lists of things that don't matter. I really don't care about all the fifty types of plants that come to the desert after the rains, sorry. And my lord, the decription. If I hear about how Lilith's lips are like petals one more time, I'll vomit. Some description is good, but geez, there's a thing called balance. I've never in my life seen someone go so overboard on description.

There was a glimmer of an interesting story underneath, which is a shame since it drowned underneath the descriptive swamp of this book. But apparantly the author wanted to have a "Shakespearean" twist to it. Darling, it doesn't work when you write in that style for the narrative, and no one will believe it when you're characters only stick to that style of speaking occasionally with no apparant pattern. Not to mention the fact that her two main characters could be gods for the lack of faults that they have (well, except the one goes nuts, but not for long), and their romance was so incredibly lame I was yearning for a Jennifer Lopez movie for something more realistic.

Please do not even bother. Maybe you can try it in paperback, but be warned, this book is really that bad.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars And the moral of the story? Don't judge a book by its cover!, June 20, 2005

By 

Villonnet (My Basement, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles (Hardcover)

One star for the pretty cover, the other for the quality!

Okay, I admit it- I judge a book by its cover. And maybe I've really learned a lesson about doing that this time. I bought it right when it came out, and man do I wish I had waited for some reviews to show up and the price to be cut in half before buying this horrible volume.

The Iron Tree starts out disappointingly, and predictably, ends disappointingly. The plot is nothing that special, and in fact, I found it quite generic. I wouldn't even have finished this if I hadn't kept waiting for the high point- which, to save you the anticipation, never appears in all the 400 pages. The book is crammed with useless tidbits that have no relevance whatsoever to the story, and it took me forever to finish it. And I must say, I found it rather offensive and mildly blasphemous that the author had to steal Celtic language and culture (druids, etc) and plop it into a landscape she made up. Is Ireland not good enough for her? Or couldn't she have tried a little harder and come up with something more her own? Okay guys, if at this point you're ready to start a Get-This-Sucky-Book-Out-Of-Print-And-Stop-The-Second-Crowthistle-Chronicle-Before-It-Happens Club, please feel free to contact me and we'll have to set something up.

At the end of this book, the narrator speaks to us and apologizes for any grief the story might have caused in its readers. I had to snort at something this presumptuous. Now let's set this straight: if I had cried at the end, I'm pretty sure it would have been because of the sudden realization that I had wasted time and money rather than by any sudden wave of emotion. Does this author qualify herself among Marion Zimmer Bradley and Juliet Marillier? If you want a good read, pick up something by either of them. But by all means, leave this book alone. If for no other reason, then do it for the rainforest.

Usually when I write negative reviews, I feel a tad bit bad about it because I might be causing the writer to lose business. Of course I don't do it undeservingly, but if I didn't write this, I would feel awful about the people wasting their money on such a horrendous piece of work.