Customer Reviews

Veil of Gold, The

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

 

 

After breaking with her boyfriend the historian Daniel St. Clair, Rosa Kovalenka returns to her homeland Russia for the first time in years to assist her uncle at a St. Petersburg dilapidated bathhouse. Workers uncover a golden statue of a bear buried in the walls. Rosa asks Daniel to authenticate the find. Accompanied by Em Hayward, Daniel suggests asking his former professor in Archangelsk to take a look at the artifact; Rosa agrees.

Daniel and Em drive towards Archangelsk, but vanish somewhere on the two day trek without a trace. While Rosa searches for her missing former lover, the bear has taken the pair into another realm Swazi; a place where a millennium ago when a Russian princess adopted Jesus the country split apart into the land of men called Mir and the realm of dangerous magic Skazki.

This engaging horror fantasy is played out along three well written subplots. First there is Daniel and Em trying to survive the dangerous Skazi realm while finding a way home; then there is Rosa in Russia trying to rescue Daniel; and finally there are asides starring an elderly person telling tales of the history of Russia to his daughter (and readers) around the time that princess caused the split. However, the key to this excellent saga is no one is incredibly courageous or 100 percent evil. Everyone is a little of both with a basic instinct, whether you are a human in Russia or Skazi or a mythical creature, to survive. Thus the underlying message of this exciting tale is ethics are personal so what the reader might find horrific, another person (or creature) might find as the norm. This is a great work by a terrific author.

Harriet Klausner

"The Autumn Castle" is an amazing novel from one of Australia's best authors.

Storywise, she combines European folklore and mythology with contemporary influences into a charming, hypnotic tale of search and rescue through time and space. A golden bear leads the way to the storied past of Russia inhablited by entities more at home in Grimms' Fairy Tales than modern day Russia. Daniel St Clair's love, Rosa Kovalenka, goes searching for him and encounters her past and the guidance of a wanderer with more mystery than answers.

Truly, this is a novel far removed from the usual fantasy realm, yet it beckons to a time before fairy tales were replaced by modern day mythologies.

Outstanding!

Tim Lasiuta

An exquisit modern novel. With drama, suspense, love, magic. Russian tales and some of the country's historic events come alive with this book...

Beautifully written, the stories unfold surprising the reader, never a boring chapter. the main characters, Rosa, Daniel and Em, are somehow unusual. I greatly enjoyed how the author used the heroines as modern strong-willed women.

although I had never been fond of creatures and demons, I was pleasantly surprised on how well they fit in the story.

I very much enjoyed a couple of this Australian author's other books--The Autumn Castle and Giants of the Frost, both released in the U.S. as mass market paperbacks--so I was excited to see her first U.S.-released hardback on the shelf. Her writing style is much more literary in this book, but not inaccessibly so. In addition, the story is well-plotted. Even five pages from the end, I wondered how she was going to wrap up loose ends. But she managed it and still left me satisfied as a reader.

She also managed to create a rich, alternate world, both terrifying and fascinating, based on Russian myth and folklore that she superimposes over the "true" Russian landscape of history and of today. Woven into the quest her three modern-day protagonists are forced to accept are imagined stories of Russian royalty, tsars and rulers from centuries past up to the ill-fated family of Nicolas II--and its these stories that finally culminate to solve the puzzle Daniel, Em, and Rosa were handed the day they found the mysterious golden bear that sets the whole novel in motion.

It has been a long time since a book became more important than my sleep. The Veil of Gold is both captivating and costly in terms of things I should be pursuing. The writing is stellar and the plot is impossible to guess - but not so much that you feel cheated at the end. She is a stellar author and I can't wait to read her other books - an incredible mind - creative, unusual, prone to a rare understanding of darkness and joy. She'll make you cry, then laugh, then feel very, very scared.

I discovered Ms. Wilkins a couple of years ago and was ecstatic her newest novel was available on amazon. A hidden golden bear is found in a wall and changes the world of the main characters. Well written, you care about the characters, and I hated for the book to come to an end. I read this over my Christmas vacation and was sad when it ended.

Wilkins taps into the theme of a hidden, yet very powerful, mythical world alongside our own. A golden bear draws an unwitting researcher into the mysterious, thousand-year-old divide between our world (the Mir) and that of the story (Skazka). His rescue by his girlfriend requires her to confront her own magical past - with magic, there is always a cost. An entertaining read. (Reviewed in Russian Life)