The Book of Atrix Wolfe

One morning I began reading this book for the first time, over breakfast, I woke from the dream after 247 enchanting pages and felt like crying because the book was over. Then I realized I had been sitting on the couch for 7 hours without moving! I would recommend this book to anyone that remembers how they got lost in the fairytale as a child, it's beautiful!

A bare outline of the plot and characters of "The Book of Atrix Wolfe" might deceive you into thinking that this book is yet another modern retelling of an old fairy tale. Here is the beautiful princess, forced into a life as a scullery maid by a powerful mage, who also turns her father into a deadly were-stag with a "black moon rising from his burning horns". Here also is the mage-prince who eventually recognizes the princess for what she is in spite of her formidable disguise, and returns her to her loving mother.The sleeping beauty on the Kinuko Craft cover may do justice to the loveliness of the princess-turned-scullery-maid (at least prior to her transformation by the mage), but it doesn't capture her incredible will to survive after she is torn from her parents and dumped, naked and alone, into an alien universe. Yes, she ends up as a scullery maid, thought to be mute and retarded by her fellow kitchen workers. Yes, she scrubs pots from dawn to midnight. But the prince's kitchen turns out to be lively and warm, and filled with an eccentric hierarchy of cooks, sauce makers, plate washers, mincers, pluckers, boners, choppers, and spit-boys. McKillip goes into loving detail over the making and serving of food fit for a King's table, and when the princess Saro finally leaves the washing cauldron to fulfill her destiny, I for one felt a faint tinge of regret. Who would have thought that a medieval kitchen could be a more interesting place to linger than a fairy forest where "water flowed, silver and sweet as honey among ancient roots"? "The Book of Atrix Wolfe" stands many fairy tale truisms on their heads, including the character of the evil, all-powerful mage. In this story, the mage Atrix Wolfe creates the deadly Hunter that almost destroys the prince's family, but he does so with the intention of stopping a war. The Hunter himself is Death, but even he is not precisely evil. The prince rescues the princess, but only after she steals his book of spells in an attempt to teach herself how to read. Patricia McKillip may have started out with a fairy tale in mind, but what she wrote was ornate, fascinating, and completely her own.

What a wonderful book! Weaving, retelling and redefining the classic faerie tale in a style at once simple and elegant, McKillip brings a sense of wonder and magic to every page, creating a world at once familiar yet unlike any other I've encountered. The author has created a haunting fiction in which a thin veil exists between the ordinary and magical, the commonplace, medieval setting of fantasy and the barely perceived kingdom of the Other. This is the realm of Faerie, the closest I have come to it, outside of traditional folklore, since reading Tolkien, yet written with an individual vision that while drawing upon the rich heritage of mythology and legend, such as the Wild Hunt and the Queen of the Wood, breathes new life into the faerie tale, until the story has a character and wonder all its own.Lovingly and richly detailed, this is not a book to read on an empty stomach. Scenes of feasts and the kitchen abound, delightfully rendered and salivating. The descriptions of the wood captures nature in all its beauty as well as its at times its frightening indifference. The invocation of magic and the spiritual realm are crafted in a way at once wondrous and believable, and for a few hours the reader steps into a world in which he or she wishes they could linger long after the final page reaches its conclusion. Mystery abounds, and it is impossible not to become captured in the author's written spell.This is not, however, simply a tale of wondrous places and larger than life events. As well as writing lyrically, the author invests her tale with metaphor, and a meditation on words and their relationship to identity. The duality of things perceived is as much a theme throughout the work as is the ostensible tale of magic gone awry, and, as with the characters, one needs to look closely at the nature of what is named. I can think of no other author currently writing fantasy that uses the genre as a means to explore larger existential matters, a reflection upon not only the real world but also the world of myth. This book is truly a feast, not only for the senses but the intellect as well.One of the best works of fantasy I have ever read, at once richly acknowledging the meditative and figurative themes underlying the best traditional folklore, as well as investing the genre with intentions rarely found today in fantasy fiction, written in a style as magical and beautiful as the tale being told. Beside the wonder of this novel, my praise is but a weak and mute substitute.

What a treasure this book turned out to be... This book is a well crafted piece of fantasy, with its deliciously vivid descriptions and twisting plot. A breath of magic and a touch of suspense, it is a story of darkness, desperation, loss and love. I found myself hanging on every word. Tragic and very human, the characters touched me in a way very few characters do. There seemed to be a veil of mystery and as I read this book I kept thinking that there was something that I just kept missing, something that was hinted at, yet eluded me. This book was a challenge, not just some book you pick up and read and when you put it down you forget... no this is a book that will force you to think and feel as the characters do. Wow! One of my favorite books of all time. Great work from Ms. McKillip, and I can't wait for her next one!

For all of those fantasy readers out there who have read fairy tale upon fairy tale, here is a familiar feeling original tale which captures all of human emotion and brings you into a dream. It has been said that a composer's power is the ability to bring the listener, unwilling, into his state of mind. And so it is here, as you are drawn in so subtly and powerfully to each moment in the story until a tension so high has built up it is impossible to rip yourself away. The language is stunning, as in all Patricia McKillip books, and yet here she seems to even surpass herself, every sentence a line of poetry, never pretentious but always full of meaning. Even though I myself have read many fairy tales, both the originals and retellings, and admire greatly such authors as Angela Carter and Anne Sexton who brings a wonderful edge and newness to the tales, I was entranced by this book both because of its originality and its homage to the form of a fairy tale or myth. The most wonderful thing, however, is that each character is human, suffering all of the emotions each of us know so well, and therefore the story is always a grounded and effective odyssey. I would highly reccomend this book to anyone who misses magic in the modern world, the sense that the Fair Folk are indeed there, watching us. The feeling that imagination, superstition and dreams are still very much a part of us, and can never truly be forgotten.