The Tower at Stony Wood (Paperback)

~ (Author) "She saw the knight in the mirror at sunset..." (more)
Key Phrases: North Islands, Thayne Ysse, Regis Aurum (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

World Fantasy Award-winning author McKillip (Song for the Basilisk) returns with another lyrical, richly detailed fantasy. Cyan Dag, knight of Gloinmere, is sworn to serve King Regis Aurum of Yves. Cyan's oath leads him headlong into dangerous magical territory, however, when Idra, Bard of Skye, reveals that the King's new bride, Lady Gwynne, is an impostor. The true Lady Gwynne is trapped in an enchanted stone tower in distant Skye, a magical mirror her only means of viewing the outside world. Bound by his oath to protect the King, Cyan rides west to free Lady Gwynne. In the meantime, Thayne Ysse, son of the king of Ysse, has never forgotten his father's defeat at the hands of King Regis Aurum. Now he seeks a tower guarded by a dragon, a tower filled with gold enough to raise a new army and defeat Yves once and for all. And in another ancient tower outside the coastal village of Stony Wood, Melanthos, the daughter of a land-bound selkie and a fisherman, obsessively embroiders pictures of a lonely woman trapped in a distant tower who may or may not be real. Although Cyan Dag took up his quest with one goal in mind, he soon realizes that the only route to saving Lady Gwynne lies tangled with the lives of Thayne and Melanthos, and in the mysterious motives of Idra and her woods-wise sister Sidera. Once again McKillip skillfully knits disparate threads into a rewardingly rich and satisfying story. --Charlene Brusso --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Like her previous Winter Rose and Song for the Basilisk, McKillip's latest bardic fantasy, a tale full of fierce longing and bright courage, the mystery of honor and the enigmas of love, issues comes out of the Celtic twilight at the edge of the unknown. When the ravishing Lady Gwynne from the magic realm of Skye comes to wed Regis Aurum, king of prosaic Yves, only Cyan Dag, Regis's most powerful knight, can heed an eerie warning from the ancient Bard of Skye: this Gwynne is a sorcerous reptilian imposter who holds the real Gwynne captive in a faraway tower. Sworn to protect the king whose life he has already saved once in battle against the North Islanders of Ysse, Cyan leaves his own fair lady, Cria, and follows his duty to free the true queen and preserve his warlike lord from treachery. In the misty land of Skye, Cyan soon finds nothing is as it seems. Skye's bards can hear the moon sing; Cyan's former enemy Thayne Ysse buries himself in the heart of a dragon to save his own people; and by piecing her own simple life together like a selkie skin, the humble baker Sel rescues her whole world--and Cyan Dag's. Richly intoxicating with the mythic Otherworld of the old Celts, McKillip's iridescent prose cloaks a simple quest with effervescing images and tantalizing, shifting arpeggios of shapes, as a Celtic triple goddess spins and weaves Cyan Dag's fate. By showing that out of her hero's forgotten gesture of mercy in battle long ago came hope, compassion, peace, McKillip concurs with the poet Rilke that perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Ace Trade; 1st THUS edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441008291
• ISBN-13: 978-0441008292
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #759,621 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bewitching, enchanting, intoxicating..., June 4, 2000

By	Jennifer Mo - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Tower at Stony Wood: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have nothing but praise for all of Patricia A. McKillip's recent novels, and her latest only strengthens my conviction that she is one of the finest fantasy writers out there. I would go so far as to say that she has the most lyrical prose of anyone in the genre.

The Tower at Stony Wood is a typically enthralling offering, loosely based on Tennyson's poem, "The Lady of Shallot." McKillip never retells, however; she expands, using the lady with her mirror in a tower motif as the bare framework for her story. In Tower, there is more than one tower to be surmounted, more than one maiden to be rescued, more than one quest to finish. The mundane and overdone-- knights on quests, evil queens, dragons, and bards are all given new life and shown at different angles. Rarest of all, there are no evil or malevolent characters. As bewildered protagonist Cyan Dag discovers, not all is as it seems. In fact, very little is as it initially appears.

Each apparently disparate thread is successfully woven into the whole, creating a surreal, beautiful novel of the sort only Patricia McKillip could create. If you have never read anything by McKillip, but appreciate gorgeous writing and intricate plots, do yourself a favor and read this one. And after you've finished, go on and read Song for the Basilisk, Winter Rose, The Book of Atrix Wolfe...

Ailanna

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting..., June 11, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Tower at Stony Wood: A Novel (Hardcover)

A strange, shape-shifting monster has imprisoned the King's bride, Gwynne of Skye, in a tower, and taken her place. Cyan Dag is sent by a mysterious old bard to rescue Gwynne. But his quest--so simple and desperate at first--keeps changing, twisting, turning in on itself. Instead of Gwynne's tower he finds a dark tower of dreams, a dragon-guarded tower full of gold, and a mouldering tower by the sea. And instead of the lady of Skye, he finds Melanthos, a village girl who obsessively embroiders what she sees in a magic mirror; Thayne Ysse, prince of Ysse, who wants to free his country from Gloinmere's rule; and Sel, a strange old woman haunted by something she has forgotten. No matter how hard he tries to keep to his one simple task, he is inexorably drawn into their many stories, which turn out, in the end, to all be different parts of the same story.

Patricia McKillip has created yet another compelling novel that combines beautiful language, evocative imagery, a deceptively simple plot, and well-drawn characters. The only disappointing thing about it, to my mind, is the ending, which solves some problems a little too neatly and easily. It is still, however, a story well worth reading.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Silken prose and prickly knights!, July 29, 2000

By	Stephen Richmond "Librarian/Teacher/Reader an... (Newton, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Tower at Stony Wood: A Novel (Hardcover)

There are a very small number of writers who are extraordinary literary stylists. Patricia A. McKillip is one such and this latest novel reads like honey-coated silk. Her stories, always larger than life fairy tale romps in darkened woods, while maintaining a certain strength of characterization and intricate plots, become, at times, almost secondary to the beautiful prose in which they are written. This particular story, based loosely on Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott and more specifically on Loreena McKennitt's song of the same name, tells of a woman, cursed half-mad with love who is locked away in a tower to observe the happenings of the world from her magic mirror, not the window of her chamber. The hero is of course a knight in the grandest of Lancelotian traditions, full of angst and some self-doubt, all kept well-hidden beneath the virilest exteriors. The tale is truly great fun, but again it is the magnificently wrought prose that makes reading such a divine pleasure.