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Lindholm, Megan - Wizard of the Pigeons
Tue, Aug. 31st, 2004 10:44 pmWizard is a wizard of Seattle; he protects the city, and in return, the city protects him. His magic works as long as he takes care of the city's pigeons, has less than a dollar in his pocket, and other strictures. But something called the Grey Mir is coming after him, and he doesn't know if he can manage to thwart it.
What I particularly liked about this book was the sense of Seattle as an almost living city, written by someone who (presumably) knows it and loves it. And I loved the sense of magic everywhere, buried in the most innocuous things, like children's jump rope verses, and if you could only see slantwise somehow, you could fall into that magical Seattle where there are true wishes and wizards. In this Seattle, buskers or homeless people on the streets could be wielders of powerful magic. I also liked the descriptions of how Wizard managed each day as a street person, how Lindholm shows us his means to procure meals and coffee, his way of looking respectable so that no one suspects that he is homeless.
On the other hand... I don't know if this is Lindholm's first book, but it feels like it was written fairly early in her career. I got a bit lost during Wizard's crisis and am still not quite sure what Grey Mir was, and there are bits about his past life that I would have liked to be more fleshed out, or tied to the plot, or something. And while I enjoy the prose narration, the dialogue between the characters sounds somewhat artificial to me -- something in the rhythm or the vocabulary feels just a little off. This may be because it was written in the eighties? Or maybe Lindholm/Hobb's dialogue is always a little clunky, and I just don't tend to notice so much in her books as Hobb, since they take place in unfamiliar locales, as opposed to present-day Seattle. Maybe the high fantasy trappings of the Hobb books somewhat disguises the unnaturalness while the modern setting in this book amplifies it.
Still a good read though, and worth the effort of finding it.
What I particularly liked about this book was the sense of Seattle as an almost living city, written by someone who (presumably) knows it and loves it. And I loved the sense of magic everywhere, buried in the most innocuous things, like children's jump rope verses, and if you could only see slantwise somehow, you could fall into that magical Seattle where there are true wishes and wizards. In this Seattle, buskers or homeless people on the streets could be wielders of powerful magic. I also liked the descriptions of how Wizard managed each day as a street person, how Lindholm shows us his means to procure meals and coffee, his way of looking respectable so that no one suspects that he is homeless.
On the other hand... I don't know if this is Lindholm's first book, but it feels like it was written fairly early in her career. I got a bit lost during Wizard's crisis and am still not quite sure what Grey Mir was, and there are bits about his past life that I would have liked to be more fleshed out, or tied to the plot, or something. And while I enjoy the prose narration, the dialogue between the characters sounds somewhat artificial to me -- something in the rhythm or the vocabulary feels just a little off. This may be because it was written in the eighties? Or maybe Lindholm/Hobb's dialogue is always a little clunky, and I just don't tend to notice so much in her books as Hobb, since they take place in unfamiliar locales, as opposed to present-day Seattle. Maybe the high fantasy trappings of the Hobb books somewhat disguises the unnaturalness while the modern setting in this book amplifies it.
Still a good read though, and worth the effort of finding it.