Customer Reviews

Travellers in Magic

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Lisa Goldstein has a very unusual style among fantasy writers. She doesn't fall do anything resembling Tolkien's writing style (as many try) or his epic world of elves and dwarves. She doesn't fancify, she doesn't try to make her works grandiose. She refuses to write a series, as almost every other fantasy author does.

She enchants instead, but using surprisingly simple language, depicting surprisingly normal-seeming events, and evoking wonder on every page despite. I have heard her work compared to oriental brushwork - the description fits.

This collection of short stories is one of the best single author collections I have read. She explores a huge variety of subjects, from the historical, with Sir Walter Raleigh, to the disturbing story of an old woman, neglected for years, chosen by aliens to decide if the human race should be exterminated, to the story of a man, given photos that show his future, in a desperate search for the woman who appears ion one picture.

She skirts her personal rule of never writing series' a bit closely, by returning to the same fictional country of Amaz in two stories (also featured in her novel Tourists), but those stories are decidedly stand-alones, each exploring the theme of being a stranger in a foreign country, but viewing that theme from a different angle each time.

A reader looking for sweeping action will likely be disappointed; even Walter Raleigh's journey across the sea to seek El Dorado is not an action-adventure, but rather a smart moral dilemma. Anyone seeking intelligence, creativity, truly human characters, and sudden moments of beauty, will be delighted.