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55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally...A Book That Inspires, May 24, 2004
This review is from: Sparrowhawk, Book One: Jack Frake (Paperback)
Everywhere I go, every book store and library I walk into, I find myself faced with "important" books, books I "should" read, and books that have garnered all kinds of critical acclaim. All too often, I read these books and end up feeling dissatisfied or depressed. I'd like to blame the authors' writing skills, but that wouldn't be fair, because sometimes, it's only the writer's evocative prose or clever style that gets me to the end of the book. So what is it that disappoints me? It's the pictures their words paint. So many of these "important" books paint pictures of dull, desperate lives, weak minds, and general hopelessness. As accurate as these portrayals may be, I don't need to see them over and over again. Honestly, I'm surrounded by dead-end people, dead-end jobs, and dead-end ideas in my daily life. I fight my own battles against laziness and mediocrity every day. So, where are the books that portray brilliance and worth, instead of just misery and dependence? Look no further than the Sparrowhawk series. In these books, you won't find heroes who deny themselves in hyper-melodramatic self-sacrifice or who wear white robes and fling lightning bolts at their enemies. If that's what you're looking for, go read "Lord of the Rings" again. What Sparrowhawk's heroes display is belief in themselves, indomitable will, honesty, and the courage to strive for greatness in the face of a world that fears, resents, and tries to destroy greatness. I may never have the extraordinary abilities of a Jack Frake or a Hugh Kenrick, but the very idea of them inspires me in a way that no Oprah book has ever managed to do. I wish there were more books like these.
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Adventure at its Best, November 20, 2001
What a rare pleasure to read a new novel by an author who shares my values explicitly and consistently. It's been 20 years or more since I have enjoyed a reading experience as much as I enjoyed reading Edward Cline's just-published Sparrowhawk. The hero of the story, Jack Frake, is introduced as a ten-year-old boy in the process of discovering that his mind can measure all things. His teacher has shown him a map of his homeland, and for the first time he realizes that there is more to the world than the range of his immediate awareness. There is a land called England, great enough to extend far beyond his vision and small enough to fit comfortably within his thoughts. The realization begins Jack's great adventure and ours. Cline calls the moment when Jack realizes that there is more to the world than what he can see a "charge" that precipitates an event of startling perception in the boy's mind. "...Where before he had been aware only of hills, fields and cliffs...now he held in his mind an abstraction...Beyond that tiny realm lay the thrilling, unexplored empire of the island." Cline describes this revelation in a manner that leaves no doubt as to its importance and its nature. We are witnessing a watershed event in the life of Jack Frake. "It is when the fog clears," he writes, "and the moon and stars are brilliant, and the white sails of faraway ships on an invisible horizon are sharp and almost luminescent as they glide past on their grand, unknown errands, that a boy of ten may take stock of himself and of the world he knows. This is a quiet, precious time; he knows that the world is not so much focused on him, as he on it, through a special lens in his inchoate soul. The brevity and suddenness of this moment...signals its own importance, for its incandescent violence must make one passionately certain that one is a worthy crucible." This is a brilliant and perceptive description of a profound intellectual connection; at once deeply personal and universal. I recall with clarity moments of my own such as this. They are the turning points of my life. Cline tells Jack's story not as a group of isolated, random events but as a journey illustrating the self-making of a soul. He learns to trust his own judgment, that life is to be enjoyed to the fullest, that enjoyment is a selfish emotion that consists of achieving personal values, and that values are worth fighting for. He learns about the nature of evil and why one must oppose it. He learns these things for himself, with nothing to guide him but his ability to observe, make connections and apply his conclusions to his choices of action. The writing is intelligent, clear, essentialized, eloquent, frequently poetic and always historically accurate. The characters are consistent, the action rational and often heroic. This is a book and a series that deserves to be a big success. I highly recommend it.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Spirit of America in the Soul of a Boy., November 24, 2001
Edward Cline's novel Sparrowhawk brings to mind Ayn Rand's dictum, "Just as Man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul." This novel is the story of young Jack Frake growing up in early eighteenth century England and the process by which he makes his own soul. The greatest value in the novel lies in the climax, when young Jack Frake observes the fate of the two men who have meant the most to him, one the father he never had, the other an older brother he never had, both of them lost to Jack because of laws that treat people as servants of the Crown. Jack resolves to understand the cause of the injustice brought down upon the men he has admired, and to write it down, and thus reclaim the liberties taken from the best men in England. And so the stage is set for Jack Frake's arrival in America, where, one hopes, he will meet men of like mind and soul. Stylistically, the novel is as pure and clean as the white sails of a great clipper ship. Cline's descriptions of the English countryside and the intimate details of individual life of that time immerse the reader in the physical reality of the time. His dialogue rings true, but is never hard to follow. And of particular note is Cline's riveting and visceral description of old London in all its filthy hectic madhouse magnificence, at once a city awe-inspiring and horrifying, attractive and repulsive, irresistible and repugnant--and exactly the type of place to flash a young boy's imagination with both the brutal and noble possibilities of life. Also of note, some keen action sequences, especially the climactic battle at sea, where Jack Frake fights for and wins more than he can possibly know. This scene is a stirring finale to the novel, and a fitting final tribute to the character of Jack Frake and the possibilities implicit in the soul he has forged through the events of the novel. Sparrowhawk is the novel of a mature Objectivist writing a form of inductive Romanticism, a writer who has found his own voice and given it full flower, a novel containing only dim echoes of Rand and Hugo. I first read excerpts of this novel in the Atlantean Press Review way back in 1994--and can honestly say that waiting this long for the complete story was well worth it! As Jack Frake would say, "Huzza!"
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