Customer Reviews

Through a Brazen Mirror (The Ultra Violet Library , No 3)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very strong, unique novel, with some wonderful characters and a realistic setting, ending, and feel throughout the story. The medieval/Renaissance aspect to the novel is perfectly, professionally done.

It took me a while to like the heroine of the tale, William/Elinor, but when her frosty, standoffish attitude finally faded into a likeable, strong protagonist, I really began to enjoy and like her character.

The young King of the tale is a gem, who starts out as a headstrong, almost ignorant young monarch and blossoms into a truly wonderful, amiable, sympathetic and attractive character. His multidimensional character glows throughout the book.

Margaret is the most tragic character of this story, and while she is definitely the villain of the tale, I couldn't help but hope she'd make it out all right. The reader really does feel for her, and sympathises with her (for lack of a better word) plight.

This is a wonderful novel with the most unique flavor, and the people who move through the tale, from protagonists to antagonists to supporting players, are all excellently crafted. The queer/gay/transgender slant to this novel is splashed all over the back cover blurbs and Publisher's Notes and Introduction, but reading the book, I didn't once think of it as a queer/gay/transgender work. It's just an excellent story whose emphasis is on the plot and the characters, and to pigeon-hole the thing into a queer work is a shame. The book is a great deal more than just that.

All in all, highly recommended!

I can't really find anything bad to say about this book! The ballad that provides its story-line has always been a favorite of mine, and has all the elements you'd expect from such a thing -- tragedy, perseverance, mystery, magic, revenge, love... and Delia Sherman makes use of all of these, sometimes in unexpected ways. The historical details are flawless (as you would expect when the author has a PhD in Renaissance Studies), and even the magic has the feeling of alchemy and medieval grimoires and herbals, rather than the overly simplified or overly cutesey styles so prevalent in the fantasy genre. And I appreciated the author's courage in devising an ending that was not the conventional happily-ever-after scenario.

My only complaint is about the introduction to the Circlet Press edition. Don't get me wrong -- I am all for queer-themed fantasy and SF, and in fact the description in the introduction was one of the things that led me to buy the book -- but it telegraphed a bit too much about the story! I think I would have liked the introduction to be a little more vague so that I wouldn't have had the expectations about the king, and made some premature assumptions that diminished the impact of what should have been a dramatic revelation.

Other than that, I have no complaints, and I plan on loaning this book to four or five friends, by which time someone will have kept it and I'll need to buy another copy. So please, Circlet, keep it in print!

This is the sort of book that deserves a wider audience than it's gotten so far. The author is a lesbian, and the book contains a gay character. Since mainstream publishers are still a little squeamish about such things, this book gets the label "Queer Fantasy" slapped on it, gets published by a small press, and the upshot of it is that most straight readers have never heard of the darn thing. And that's a shame. This isn't just a good "gay book", it's a good book.

_Through a Brazen Mirror_ fleshes out the ballad "The Famous Flower of Serving-Men". It is compelling from the first few pages, wherein a young man stumbles into the King's kitchens during a rainstorm. He announces he's looking for a job, proclaims his robust health, and promptly faints. But the young man, William Flower, is more than he seems; his quiet diligence causes him to rise quickly through the ranks of the castle servants, until eventually he comes to the attention of the handsome young King, who is questioning his sexuality. Meanwhile, in a mysterious tower in the woods, a sorceress has foreseen that her daughter will cause her death. Since the rules of magic forbid killing one's own blood, the sorceress instead tries to destroy everything around her daughter, releasing plagues and storms upon the land. I'll warn you right now, don't expect a "fairy-tale" happy ending; Sherman's ending is sadder but much truer to life than the ballad's original ending. But she leaves one major plot point open to imagination, softening the tragedy a bit. And everyone is a little wiser at the end.

Delia Sherman writes in a lovely style of prose, atmospheric and somewhat archaic, reminding me of the early books of Patricia McKillip, before her work became more abstract. The magic in Sherman's world is not cheesy D-and-D stuff; it's the very sort of magic that medieval people actually believed in. And through it all, even though it's a sad story, Sherman weaves a delightful ribbon of dry humor. I very much enjoyed this book.

I read this book when it was first released by Ace. It's a shame it hasn't received the attention it merits. Ms. Sherman's writing is beautiful, compelling... she doesn't waste the reader's time, every perfectly chosen word matters.

Anyone looking for a GOOD book (including those who don't usually read Fantasy) will not be disappointed.

A friend recommended this book to me and it is now one of my five favorite books. It's a wonderful, interesting read. Delia Sherman makes the Middle Ages come alive. Through telling details and habits of speech, she shows you just exactly who these characters are, and why. And though it's sent in an oppressive era of history, she puts a woman-friendly twinge on events, filling in extant fragments of a ballad to tell of William Flower's arrival at the king's palace, his work as a cook, his ascent through the ranks, and the unexpected circumstances that led to his retirement. But the book is more than that. Much, much more. I absolutely loved it and am recommending it to my book club, and my sister, and my niece, and my mother, and my aunt, and...

I enjoyed this book because of the author's pagan themes. Christianity and the Old Religion of the area seem to rub together well enough. While there is an evil sorceress, Margaret, who is trying to indirectly kill her daughter, Elinor, witchcraft has its positive side in that the people of Albian relied on their hedgewitches to scry the future and cure their ills.

Elinor, who disguises herself as a man in order to find employment in the King's kitchen, is an interesting figure. She is not a great warrior queen or lightning-fingered mage. She is a middle-aged woman just trying to survive after having everything taken from her. What Elinor lacks in humor or liveliness of spirit, Sherman suffuses her with discipline, focus, and total devotion to the tasks at hand. This makes for a rather grim character, but all the more compelling.

While I wished that the book could have been more "gay positive", the story would probably have rang less true. The young king is struggling to cope with his sexuality while, at the same time, trying to provide for the needs of his kingdom and subjects. His resolution at the end of the tale, while not the most satisfactory, is perhaps more "realistic" because of it.

Recommended.

This is a most wonderful novel: the author based her story on the few remaining fragments of a medieval ballad and builds a complete novel out of her imagination and competence about medieval England.

The only flaw I see in it is the use of ancient spellings to render the texts written by the characters: a most unnecessary display of erudition.

A woman wronged, an immature but kind young king, an evil sorceress: all these classical ingredients are mixed into a story which mightily differs from a classical fantasy plot.

The evil sorceress, who of course is beautiful and pityless, has her good reasons to be such a villain: not that Ms Sherman justify her conduct but she gives us reasons to understand it and even to pity her.

The young king is courageous and good natured but he was thrown too early into his responsabilities and through a painful coming of age he has to become wiser and stronger to cope with them; to become a real king he also has to give up his personal hopes of happiness and this, if believable, is nonetheless very hard to stomach.

The wronged woman has a strong personality; she can tell right from wrong and act accordingly, but she is not likeable. Even before the evil sorceress wronged her by killing her family and her hopes for a happy life she was hard, determined, even cold. We have to take sides with her without liking her.

This is perhaps the reason why an extremely well written novel is so hard to like: the orderly world of fantasy, where black is black and white spotlessly so takes unpleasant shades of grey, different from the usual device of the main hero being a former thief or rascal.

I was not able to hate the sorceress, who I looked upon as a wild animal fighting bloodily for her survival; I looked with kind of disgust upon the rise of the woman up the hierarchy of the king's court, at her gaining the king's love without being able to love him at least a little in return.

Ms Sherman has chosen the stony path to a good story: the result is bitter but the quality of her writing and the development of her characters are such as not to allow any rating below the five stars.

The sexual gender issue and the homosexuality of the king have delivered this valuable novel to a minor queer fiction publisher... A shame such a book is not distributed worldwide as it deserves.

When you think about it someways, this book is more historical fiction than fantasy. That is, if the reader can accept a past where vengeful witches release plagues, murderers and assassins. I've read Christopher Marlowe so the king who is not very secure in his heterosexuality is not fantastical. The Elinor/ William character: again not very fantastical, it's what she needed to do, so she did it. I like fantasy, I like historical fiction. What is difficult about this book, is the language. Sherman wanted us to know so much about the medieval setting that she uses medieval vocabulary. For me, who reads voraciously it's not a problem, for my high school students to whom reading is decidedly _not_ a pleasure, it is a barrier to refer to cows as kine and vespers and matins as times of day. I could wish this very good story were more accessible to more readers.

Another thing I could wish for: this book is so long out of print and recently re-printed. Why was it re-printed as an expensive trade paperback? This forced me to look for it for years used. (It was well worth the wait...)

I was unfamiliar with the ballad on which this book is based, so the unfolding story herein was a complete surprise to me. I absolutely adored this book. The prose is lovely and the story is bittersweet. The tale of a young woman who discuises herself as a man and serves a handsome lord who falls for her--in her male guise, much to her distress. Classy and destined to be a classic. Highly recommended.

I had read some of Ms. Sherman's short fiction and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, this novel disappointed.

The lengthily titled Through a Brazen Mirror: The Famous Flower of Servingmen is based on a ballad, and as such should have had a workable plot. Essentially, a sorceress is trying to kill her daughter because of a prophecy that the daughter will be her death, but she can't kill her directly because of the rules of magic. In her efforts to kill the daughter indirectly, she kills the daughter's family. The daughter dresses as a man and goes to join the king's household, where she rises to a high position. The king falls in love with him/her, of course. I found this basically solid plot to be expressed very slowly and without tension. Character motivations never really seemed strong. The essential tragedy of the story, the fact that the young king is in love with the man he thinks the daughter is, only comes in at the very end and isn't adequately supported throughout the novel. Margaret, the morally ambivalent sorceress, never convinced me somehow.

The novel is written in a self-consciously Renaissance style that sounds as if the author had worked RenFaire several too many times. It is fluent and correct, but to me it comes across as a little precious.

There's some originality here and some appealing scenes, but overall, I didn't find it to be something I would recommend.