Customer Reviews

Until the Celebration (Green Sky, Book 3)

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Until the Celebration is the third book in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's fantasy (SF?) trilogy about a world where people make their homes in huge trees (which begins with Below the Root, and continues with And All Between.) All our favorite characters are back, and as usual, Snyder's book gives us no easy answers to the difficult questions of life. A beautiful and disturbing book.

This volume concludes the saga of Green-Sky, beginning with the Rejoyning, where the Erdlings are released from below the root. There is much uncertainty, fear, and distrust between Kindar and Erdlings, causing many disturbances and much mind-pain. There are also still those who wish to gain control of the society through threats and violence, such as the former Ol-Zhaan, D'ol Regle, and the (Erdling) Nekom leader, Axom Befal.
However, crises are averted, and the society is saved without fighting. I think that's Snyder's point, that differences can be resolved without violence, but it doesn't make for a very exciting story. I kept waiting for something calamitous to happen and realized I was most of the way through the book without encountering much in the way of suspense. It's still a very interesting tale of an Utopian society, but I am curious more about the resolution of the minor disputes, as it seems that the answer to the major one, is "All is One." Which, again, great sentiment, but not very exciting story.

The list of characters at the beginning of this book should give you a hint that the book is hard to follow. The main characters from the first two books of this series, BELOW THE ROOT and AND ALL BETWEEN, are back, along with a cast of hundreds. The two girls from different cultures, Teera and Pomma, are the focus of the Rejoyning, the integrating of the Kindar and the Erdlings into one society. The girls soon find out that it is no fun to be revered as messiah figures; in fact it puts them in danger from the splinter groups on each side who want society to remain as it was before the Rejoyning.

I really wanted to love this book, like everything else that Ms. Snyder has written, but making myself finish was a grueling chore. The plot is most likely too convoluted and politically significant for children to read. It is two hundred pages of all the minutiae of council meetings and political machinations to try and integrate two societies. Instead of being written from the children's perspective like the first two books, this one is mainly told by adults and details the boring grown-up concerns, like supply distribution. None of the charm or magic of the first two books. What a yawn! Only read this if you want a detailed account of integrating two superstitious, bigoted societies.