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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Serpentine Spirals, March 16, 2004
This review is from: Mortal Suns (Hardcover)
At her best, Tanith Lee can summon up a hallucinatory dreamscape of things that never were, but should be. At her worst, she devolves into a morass of mystical hoo-hah. This book is somewhere in between. Lee sketches out the landscape of Akhemony in swift, bold strokes: the claustrophobic intrigues of the women's quarters, the hot dust of a besieged town. The characters are stylized archetypes with enough added individuality to bring them to life. Unlike some of her other recent books, it was both easy and pleasurable to submerge into the pages of this one. And yet at its core, the book falters because of the passivity of its supposed heroine. Cemira/Calistra does struggle to overcome the accident of her birth, but beyond and after that, she is nothing but a cherished ornament of the hero. Her only motivation is to be what he wants her to be, and the only thing he really wants her to be is beautiful. Compared to the steely resolve of her (step)mother(-in-law) Udrombis, she is a paltry thing indeed. The book ends with a hint of pending sequels. If there are some, I would hope that Cemira finds some goal in them to inspire action within herself and respect within the reader.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dark-hued mythic tropes, November 15, 2003
This review is from: Mortal Suns (Hardcover)
"Mortal Suns" creates the myth-haunted kingdom of Akemony, a land loosely modeled on Ancient Greece. It follows the vainglorious rise and fall of a dynasty, viewed from the vantage point of one its minor nobles, the queen Calistra, a woman born without feet. The dynasty weathers devastating losses, through both natural and supernatural occurrences. It's a rather thin and episodic plot, one that heavily alludes to Classical mythology and tragedy. Readers familiar with Classical Greek literature and history will enjoy the veiled references. "Mortal Suns" strongly focuses on the women who also control the dynasty-the Widow Consort Udrombis is a wonderful, regal creation, equal parts Circe and Medea. The subtext of the novel is equally as fascinating as the foreground: the enigmatic battle between the masculine (unnamed) Sun god and the feminine Moon goddess Phaidrix. This unseen battle is actualized in Calistra, who is both of the Sun and the Moon. She is the unwitting lynchpin and omen of the power struggles and supernatural incidences. As is expected in a work by Lee, the language and atmosphere reigns supreme. She is particularly good at evoking scenes of ominous beauty, as evidenced by the excerpt below, describing a monstrous creature: "There, on the path, between ourselves and the soldiers, was a cricket made of green chalcedony, through which the afterglow shone, revealing its inner life, bladders and arteries pulsing with dim blood.... And with its forelegs it strummed at its own body, and from that it shrilled the web of glass, its ghastly song."
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth a look, July 29, 2007
This review is from: Mortal Suns (Hardcover)
Beautiful Calistra, also called Cemira, "Snake," was born without feet. Eventually, she rises to become queen of Akhemony...where she has a closeup view of its fall.
"Mortal Suns," set in a land that is a sort of fantasy Greece, is mediocre Tanith Lee. But mediocre Tanith Lee is better than most authors at their best. Typically Lee, this book is filled with images of striking beauty and horror. There is perhaps a bit more horror than usual; while this story has the expected elements of fairy-tale glamor, it's also a bit grittier than classic Lee.
I don't think the rest of this review contains real spoilers; because of the structure of the story, the end is revealed at the beginning of the book. We know where the story is going; the interest comes from how it gets there. However, if you're one of those who hates even the hint of anything spoilerish, bail out now.
The major problem with the book is its heroine, Calistra. Lee's heroines are often very passive, but Calistra is extremely so. Like a beautiful doll, she allows herself to be carried along by events, rather than initiating them. Understandable, perhaps, since she's only a child, but it makes her rather uninteresting, despite her loveliness. Lee's passive heroines are usually forced to learn to be active, and I'm sure that happens with this one, too...but not in this book. Because the story is told in flashback by an elderly Calistra, we know that eventually, she goes on to become renowned in her own right, as a poet and seer, but there's little evidence of her future greatness here. She does show an occasional knack for songwriting, and her struggles to master walking with prosthetic feet crafted of silver are painfully detailed. But like a fairy-tale princess, Calistra exists only to love her prince. And he seems to love her only because she is beautiful and obedient. At first, the story follows the basic outline of a fairy tale, but it doesn't end that way. In fact, the ending is something of a cliffhanger. We know it turns out all right, and that Calistra went on to celebrated achievements without her prince, but that more interesting story isn't covered in this book.
Perhaps Lee intends to write a sequel or two for this book. If so, I will definitely read them. But I'm not holding my breath. "Mortal Suns," with its account of a young girl caught up in great events, reminds me a bit of an earlier Lee work, "A Heroine of the World." Like "Mortal Suns," that book had a cliffhanger ending that implied a sequel. But no sequel has appeared, and it's been over ten years already. I don't know if "Heroine" didn't sell well enough to justify a sequel, or if the author just lost interest. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the latter; Lee seems to prefer writing about adolescents to writing about adults or older people. So be warned: we may never get the most interesting part of Calistra's story.
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