Weekend Reading

Spent the weekend reading Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur trilogy. I also tried to get on with The Prophecy of the Gems by Flavia Bujold. In the end I gave up and started on a re-read of Elizabeth George's Playing for the Ashes.

Below are reviews of the Crossley-Holland and Bujold books.

THE PROPHECY OF THE GEMS
By Flavia Bujor
(Collins, 224 pages)
Hmm, yes, I guess I said it all when I admitted to giving up on this book in favour of a tried-and-tested murder mystery.

The author was 14 when she wrote this book and much has been made of her tender years, so much so that you get the feeling that the amazing thing about Prophecy is that its author is 14, not that it is actually a good book.

I would definitely not describe Prophecy as good. Its faults are what you would expect of a novel written by a 14-year-old - an unoriginal. uninspired plot; stilted dialogue; badly developed, cardboard-cutout characters. If your little sister were to present you with something like it you would say, "How nice, how sweet," but you would not rush to post the manuscript off to HarperCollins.

So, why has the book sold thousands and been translated into god knows how many languages? Why are journalists all talking excitedly about Bujor? I truly have no answers to those questions, except that, as I said earlier, maybe it's her age that's making people sit up and take notice.

Anyway, about the story: it's about three girls, Jade, Amber and Opal, who discover on their 14th birthday that they are destined to play a part in some huge battle between good and evil.

Read it for yourself if you think that sounds interesting, but you have been warned ... *

ARTHUR: THE SEEING STONE
ARTHUR: At THE CROSSING-PLACES
ARTHUR: THE KING OF THE MIDDLE MARCH
By Kevin Crossley-Holland
(Orion, 352, 384 and 400 pages)
I had no problems completing all three books. I read them in about four days - very , very quickly. I was able to do this partly because each one is divided into a hundred extremely short chapters. Some were only a page long. Also, the story is told mainly in the first person (Arthur, who is 13 in the first book, is learning to read and write and he practises by writing a sort of journal), therefore the tone of the narrative is very personal, which I liked because Arthur, as it turns out, is a very intelligent and sensitive boy, who has interesting and rather progressive ideas considering the time he lives in (the middle ages).

Before I read the books I thought they were going to be wholly about King Arthur. Actually, that's only part of it. This Arthur chap is given a magical stone in which he can see the story of the King unfold. It turns out that parts of King Arthur's story mirror Arthur, the Boy's life, so the latter ends up using the stone as a sort of medieval TV set cum Psychic Network station!

I really liked reading about the details of medieval life in Crossley-Holland's trilogy, although some of the grimmer aspects, especially involving sickly and dying children, and the crusades, upset me terribly. At one point in the first book, I bawled like a baby, really loudly too. Sniff.

But all in all, a must read. ****

Comments

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what !!!!!!!!
the prophecy of the stones or gems is
BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!
and i think flavia bujor
was great !!!!!!!!!!
and she wasnt 14 she was 13 when she wrote that !!!!!!
and yeah its one thing that her age that inspired other people
younger people and the characters were unoriginal it inspired me so much and i bet i touched a lot of people to maybe you didnt get the whole story