Customer Reviews

King & Joker

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Peter Dickinson is one of my favorite authors, so maybe I'm biased, but I really enjoyed this book. I suppose it's not one of Dickinson's best, but his standard is extremely high, so that's faint criticism--I do recommend it strongly. Because its heroine is a teenager, it almost belongs in his 'teenage' line of books, along with 'The Gift', 'AK', etc. But it's a mystery, which they are not, and it has a pretty sophisticated context. Dickinson routinely creates amazing contexts for his mysteries, often making them cross the line into science fiction, and this one--the heroine as Princess in an alternate-universe odd British royal family--is explored quite well. He carries on a theme--of the adolescent in danger of taking refuge in her own private universe, vs. forging mature relations to others--that he develops in a number of other books, especially two in 'The Changes' trilogy. The mystery runs intertwined with the process of the princess discovering who she is, a bigger challenge than is faced by the typical child, perhaps.

This books imagines that Prince Eddy, engaged to marry the late Queen Mary of England, never died. In fact, he did, and she married his brother, King George, the parents of the current Queen Elizabeth. (I think) It's a good thing they put a pedigree chart in the front, because I couldn't keep all these imaginary people straight and I had to keep referring back to it. I suppose the main reason for writing it like this is that the writer can imagine his own royal family instead of having to deal with the one we've got. But I was rather confused. I think the author should have decided to write either a straight mystery based on real people, one based wholely on imaginary people, or an alternate reality book. Instead it's a mix. The characters were well drawn but the mystery was a little unclear and the whole thing was confusing. Some of the relationships were a little unbelievable too.