Customer Reviews

The Sorceress and the Cygnet

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

McKillip weaves a complex web of magic and desire in this book. What a shame it's out of print! I rate McKillip right up there with my all-time favorite authors, right up there with Tolkien and Le Guin. The stars come down to manipulate the future of humanity, stories take on reality, and love and desire meet. Places shift: houses fly, rooms move from place to place as they explore their own memories, and a maze at the root of a castle hold slips through time. Delightful! I liked the Riddle-Master trilogy, but this was even richer, more literary. I want to read everything by this author.

I just finished rereading this book. This is probably the hardest Mckillip book to read, because you really are left wondering what just happened after reading a dense, colorful passage. However, I find that the author's style is refreshing and makes this book unique. No other author fires my imagination like she does.
The Sorceress and the Cygnet is told from two perspectives: Corleu, a light-haired Wayfolk man, and Meguet Vervaine, the guardian of Ro Holding. Corleu is coerced by legends come to life (the Gold King, the Blind Lady, etc.) to find the heart of the Cygnet, which rules over Ro Holding. Corleu finds help from a bog-witch who happens to be the third daughter of the Holder of Ro Holding. Meguet Vervaine, on the other hand, must protect the Cygnet and Ro Holding at all cost.
I'm pretty sure the Sorceress and the Cygnet is out of print. I had to pay $20 for a paperback at an obscure bookstore way back when I was in high school or middle school (I was that desperate). Luckily, Sorceress and the Cygnet is being rereleased, combined with the Cygnet and the Firebird as one book. I hope Mckillip writes a third Cygnet book. Mckillip is my favorite author, and I must say that the Cygnet books contain her most memorable characters ever.

This is an absolutely wonderful book, the one that got me hooked on Patricia McKillip in the first place. A young man finds himself trapped in a story of magic and gods, used as a pawn to find the heart of the Cygnet. Wading through myths come to life, he finds himself drawn to his bloodkin and trapped in a story that began with them long ago.

It remains to this day one of my all-time favorite novels and I recommend it to anyone.

Other people have written som e wonderful reviews, and I agree that it's a shame that it's out of print--I had to pay an atrocious price for my copy. I think that another Cygnet book would be great, for there are a lot of loose ends in The Cygnet and the Firebird that need to be tied up, and I've noticed that McKillip only seems to be doing stand-alones now, good as they are. I, too, buy everything she writes, not for the plot, necessarily, but for the beauty of the images she evokes. Try Winter Rose, that is just as bitter and strange and lovely. I agree that the ending of the Sorceress and the Cygnet was very hard to understand, and I've read it a million times, seeking to understand. Does anyone know what happened?

This is my favorite of McKillip's works -- I'm sorry and surprised to see it's out of print. Patricia McKillip draws from the standard toolbox of recent American fantasy -- a re-imagined Europeanish background, simple folk and nobles, magicians and sorceresses, and magical creatures. I thought the plot pretty good -- a young man is magically kidnapped by a power that he knew as a territorial symbol, and used to trick the sorceress, daughter of the ruling family, into searching for something that may kill her and destroy the current power structure. McKillip's superiority to so much that uses the same toolbox is in three things. Her language is beautiful. Her characters are more deeply and truly imagined than most. And her magic is more psychologically resonant. She draws upon old fairy tale imagery, but also reminds me of surrealism. Perhaps the reason McKillip is not better read (not to say she's unknown!) is that she straddles genres, those genres being pop-fantasy and more literary fantasy. Genre crossers can be hard to market, I hear.

Patricia A. McKillip's novel, The Sorceress and the Cygnet, may begin with the boy Corleu, but the women of Ro Holding on whom the book ends are what made me love it. Corleu, a boy of questionable heritage, is caught up in stories of the gods -- the Gold King, the Blind Lady, and others -- and literally steps inside their stories, freeing them to renew old battles with one another. He ends up in a many-roomed house in the swamp of the Blood Fox, which is home to the sorceress Nyx, and eventually clashes with Nyx's cousin, Meguet, guardian of the Cygnet as he seeks the Cygnet's heart in exchange for saving the love of his life from the Gold King.

Without giving away the ending, what I like about this book is the richness of the descriptions. You know it's going to be good from the first couple sentences:

"He was a child of the horned moon. That much Corleu's great-gran told him after, pipe between her last few teeth, she washed the mud out of his old man's hair and stood him between her knees to dry it" (1).

This level of specificity & detail is present throughout this brief novel. McKillip offers proof that a novel doesn't have to be long to have substance. She invents myths, rhymes, and family histories that are believably complex and richer than your average monster of a fantasy novel. The narrative works because we discover reality alongside Corleu. While the movement from Corleu's point of view (POV) to Meguet's POV feels abrupt and leaves the book feeling slightly disjointed, I understand why she structured the book this way: without Corleu, readers would have been completely lost. In a way, she uses Corleu to set up not just this book but its sequel, The Cygnet and the Firebird, which continues the women's POV and, in my opinion, is a stronger story that nevertheless would be difficult to understand without reading this one first. Enjoy!

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This book is one of my all-time favorites, and it established my habit of buying whatever Patricia McKillip writes. I know of no other who creates such beautiful, yet entirely believable, surrealistic images.

If you don't like this novel, you probably won't like the others. I like it most because it's different from other fantasy stories that rely on heavy description and creating new systems of magic with it's own lingo.

This is the first book by Patricia McKillip I've read. I wanted to hurry to the end of the book so I could read more of her works, but I didn't want to leave the gorgeous fantasy landscape Ms. McKillip created. The author's idea of making familiar constellations come to life was brilliant. The book's rhythm is perfect and the imagery is flawless. I felt like I really was in Nyx's rambling, shape-shifting mansion or the dank depths of Ro Hold. I was dismayed to see that this book is out of print, because every fantasy lover must read it!

This book is utterly incomprehensible and however much poetry and flowery words it is overflowing with, remains daft.
What am I trying to say? A moment to order my thoughts. That book ought to have taken similar. The author does not seem to have taken a moment or even longer, to order hers. How can you get drawn into a story when you really can't understand what the heck is going on? veiled references to folklore we don't know, it's like a nightmare-dream where the book just ISN"T MAKING SENSE.

I can understand how an author could do that, leave you with just a hazy notion that it's all interesting and exciting, but they must at leave you with enough of a feeling of familiararity or attachement to the characters to keep on reading. I got to page 48 and stopped (feeling herioc to have gotten this far). Now normally I'm a trojan reader, can read anything, dictionaries to poetry blah blah blah However I had no desire to keep reading this book and THAT in my opinion, says a great deal about the book.
This is my very biased review of the book and there must be a lot of people who disagree, as this author is very popular. Stephen Donaldson gives a recommendation - & I greatly admire him. But I couldn't get into it. I may try again, one day.