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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Go to any lengths to find this glorious dream of a book!, June 18, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Land of Dreams (Hardcover)
Read any novel by James Blaylock and I predict that you will end up musing about his unique characters, worlds, and images off and on in a dreamlike way for a very long time after finishing the last pages.
I may be slightly biased in favor of Land of Dreams particularly among his books, since it was the first I read. I picking it up largely by a chance selection from a pile of new science-fiction/fantasy paperbacks at a large chain bookstore, never having heard of him before. As I learned that night turning page after page after page, Blaylock's writing is not science fiction. For that matter, most of his novels have a flavor hardly hinted at by the word "fantasy".
Land of Dreams is, like many of Blaylock's California novels, set in a coastal community where the boundary between mundane life and the brilliance of new mysteries keeps fraying.
Appealing characters, scintillating language, hilarious dialogue and observation, and a sense of the weird and wonderful are what I have come to expect when I am lucky enough to read or re-read something by James Blaylock.
Whiffs of Robert Louis Stevenson, P.G. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Baron Munchausen, and Lord knows how many other great story-tellers and writers can be sniffed in the cheery and fragrant clouds from Blaylock's story pipe, but his creations are his alone. I believe he will be remembered as a great fantasist and stylist. He is among the few great fabulists now writing who truly delights in laughter and puzzlement.
.I hope others read him, and recommend him to others as strongly as I do. I hope to write more about his other works in the future....but for now...try to find Land of Dreams
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A MAGIC THAT STAYS, February 18, 2005
While Land of Dreams works admirably as a supernatural thriller (the Solstice heralds a series of weird events, including the return of a sinister carnival, with diabolical results for the people of a northern California coastal town) and as an adventure yarn (three orphans face great perils as they unravel the mystery of the Solstice, the carnival, and the fabled Land of Dreams), the novel ultimately--through Blaylock's visionary prose--transcends both of these genres.
This book shares a virtue with the greatest works of Fantasy: the ability to open our eyes to the magic at work within our everyday lives. Doughnuts, old shoes, rainswept afternoons, fiddler crabs ... in Land of Dreams such commonplace things are transformed into vehicles of wonder, into nothing less than keys that just might open doors to the Other Side (for readers uninterested in the Other Side, or those who haven't the faintest idea of what I mean by the Other Side, a warning: stay clear of rabbit holes and the books of James P. Blaylock).
And while conventional supernatural and adventure novels are content to take the reader from point A to point B (in which conflict unfolds), and then to point C (where said conflict is resolved and mystery explained), Land of Dreams celebrates the wonder of the journey itself rather than in the rushing toward denouement. His inimitable prose style and (what some might perceive as) eccentric sensibility create an atmosphere of enchantment totally unique to Blaylock.
Few contemporary Fantasy novels merit more than one reading--like a magician's trick revealed, a punchline delivered, there is little to draw the reader back for a return visit--but Land of Dreams possesses something quite rare: a magic that stays (to which I can attest, having read this novel several times over the years), Blaylock's artistry undiminished over successive reads (it's really that good).
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A pretty good, it seems to me, book, March 24, 2001
The feel of Land of Dreams is very similar to the very earliest Blaylock novels, Elfin Ship and Disappearing Dwarf. That means great ideas, great (oddball) characters and, of course, Blaylock's incomparable sense of the fantastic and the absurd -- but it also means some seriously clunky writing at times. (JPB might say, "The writing, it seemed to the reviewer, was, apparantly, somewhat awkward"). It's an enjoyable book, but I can't work up the same unbridled enthusiasm that I have for later Blaylock novels -- Paper Grail, Last Coin, All the Bells on Earth , Night Relics -- wherein his prose skills are sharp enough to deliver on the promise of his wild imagination.
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