The White Tyger (A Princess of Roumania)

I'm aware of the extreme praise this series of books has gotten. I was disappointed with the first book, A Princess of Roumania. In the second book, The Tourmaline, I started to see the light a little bit. But it wasn't until this third book that I finally found what the critics apparently knew all along. This is an extremely imaginative, rich fantasy that is a delightful mirror to our own world, an "alternate history" presented in a way that I've never seen before. So, the world itself is interesting...my gripe is with the characters. Besides one very important exception, I feel no connection with the characters in this book. If, at any moment, any of the main characters (except one!) were to be killed, my only reaction would be an interested "huh". There's 4 main characters who form the bulk of the reader's viewpoint. Of the 4, Miranda - the main character - is, unfortunately, the most boring. It's interesting to see how a "typical teenager" from the USA deals with this incredible world and the responsibilities it entails for her, but her extreme "RUN AWAY" attitude irritates me. This is the attitude she has regarding everything from the people's beliefs in the White Tyger (a political position) to her own birth mother. Just...run away. Her two "best friends" are slightly more interesting. Both are actually, as we discovered in The Tourmaline, legendary soldiers who once served her father. They were sent to the made-up USA (OUR world) as Miranda's high school friends, to fulfill the oaths they made to protect her, and there they lost all memory of who they truly were, and came to believe they really were the high school students Peter Gross and Andromeda. It wasn't until they left that imaginary world that their true personalities awoke. It's semi-interesting to see the duality between the gruff warrior Pieter de Graz and the poetry-spewing Peter Gross, and we're supposed to be sad because Peter Gross is the high school student we knew from the series' beginning, and Pieter de Graz is a stranger to us. But I can't manage anything other than a 'huh'. It is obviously an interesting idea, though. Andromeda is more interesting, although I still don't really understand what's going on here. Andromeda the high school student was a female, but Sasha the soldier (her true identity) is a male. And, just for kicks, when s/he first came back to the world, s/he was a dog. So this one character has 3 different identities swarming around inside, although in this book it's Sasha the entire time. Finally, the last character, and the most interesting by far - the Baroness. I won't go into detail here. The jacket of the book calls her a character of Shakespearean complexity and depth, and I won't argue that. Sometimes it seemed like she was the only reason I kept reading these books. She is the one character who'se death would actually affect me...I can't imagine reading this series without her. Not only because of the strengt

In these virtuoso Princess of Roumania novels Paul Park successfully undoes the tropes and themes of the fantasy genre at the very moment that he is making use of them, leaving them to unravel behind us as we move through the narrative. A classic equivalent is Rousseau's brilliant, defiant Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, after the publication of which no one could ever tell another "State of Nature" story again in the same way, if at all. For this reason alone, these are books to be taken seriously. What I liked best about the third volume, The White Tyger, is the relationship between Sasha Prochenko and the Baroness. It is, to my mind, the psychological center of gravity of the story thus far. It's compelling, shot through with sexual and dramatic tension as it is, and it's also interesting. Amidst the many different characters in this story, and their many different mirrored and fragmented selves, the pairing of these two is essential. At a minimum, Prochenko is the Baroness' only perceived equal. He is her twin, her undamaged alter-ego - and it is in virtue of the ways in which they are the same that he holds the kind of power over her that she holds over others. The book is great. Buy it.

The White Tyger is just as wonderful as the previous two novels in Paul Park's Roumania sreies. The novels are profoundly character driven in a way that few genre novels are; they deliberately and specifically refuse to conform to a conventional quest narrative. No-one knows exactly what they're supposed to do; they're making it up as they go along. All of the main protagonists (and some of the minor ones) are in some sense or another doubled; their selves are split in two so that they have difficulty in explaining their motivations to themselves. The book is less a conventional fantasy story in which the story is external to the characters, determining who they are and what they do, than a working through of the ways that individuals make up their own fantasies, spinning out ex post narratives to explain their actions to themselves and others. The main protagonists don't know themselves. This is most obvious in the character of Baroness Ceaucescu, who sees herself as the heroine of an opera, smoothing away the grubby and selfish motivations for her actions and reconfiguring them as the essential elements of a grand and inexorable tragedy, where she has no personal responsibility for what she does. She steals every scene that she's in. The three novels are vertiginous, and a little jarring. They don't have the feeling of safeness and stability that most fantasy novels do. All that is solid melts into air. Yet nor are they self-consciously or coyly reflexive (their contingency doesn't seem playful to me; rather it appears like a very serious attempt to talk about how the world is). I don't want to say more about The White Tyger for fear of ruining surprises; I do want to recommend it (and I can't wait to see what the fourth and final novel does).

Massachusetts resident fifteen years old Miranda Popescu continues to be yanked in two directions since she was drawn into the German occupied Roumania, a world where she is a princess instead of a mall teen and alchemy is a working science. In Roumania, two factions skirmish over controlling the American as her Aunt Aegypta Schenck tries to keep her safe while the power hungry Baroness Ceaucescu and her ally evil alchemist Elector of Ratisbon. Accompanying her from her old Berkshires world are Peter Gross known in Roumania as Chevalier de Graz and the shape-shifter Lieutenant Prochenko formerly a female named Andromeda. Meanwhile Miranda just wants to return to being a normal New England teen even though she begins to understand the mage like powers she possesses like when she studies the souls of animals (Penguin Island aside). However, normalcy can never return for someone battling the likes of the wickedly astute Baroness Ceausescu, as Miranda soon learns when Miranda meets her biological mother as both are captives of their adversaries. The third Roumania fantasy (see THE TOURMALINE and A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA) is a fabulous entry in one of the better genre series. Miranda, her fellow "displaced" pals, her enemies; and her relatives make the worlds of the Berkshires and that of alternate Europe seem real as each key player feels genuine. The action never lets up as Miranda, Peter and Andromeda learn more about just who they are even while trying to survive a devious brilliant opponent. Harriet Klausner