Saturday, June 23, 2007

THIEF WITH NO SHADOW - Stunned

I'm completely stunned and blown away by THIEF WITH NO SHADOW. If I had not been busy all day, I probably would be done with it by now, because it has been so difficult to put down.

In most fantasies, the public stakes are huge. A world is at risk, or at the very least, a nation. In THIEF, the world does not seem to be in any danger, nor is any nation, or any city, or even any town or village.

So what is at stake? A family. Or rather, the remnants of two families. In each family, a brother and a sister are all that is left. There is a curse at work, and perhaps even more than one. It is so rare to have such subtle stakes in a fantasy. Yet, you are so drawn into the story, the stakes are so enormous at a personal level that I cannot imagine the stakes getting any higher. Yet Emily Gee keeps piling it on and on.

In her interview on Nalini Singh's blog, Emily Gee promises a happy ending, but at this point, 4/5ths of the way through the novel, I sure don't see how that's going to happen. However, that's exactly what authors are supposed to do with us, isn't it? I am learning a lot from this novel.

I'll probably finish this up by the end of the weekend.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think by the end you'll be suitably shocked. I'm interested to see what you think about the ending and I'll pop back by to see if you've posted anything.

Tia Nevitt said...

Thanks for stopping by! I have finished THIEF and will be putting up two more posts, one about the ending (without giving anything away) and the other about the book as a whole.

Anonymous said...

Tia,
Oooo, THIEF sounds good! I'll have to add it to my "must read" stack. I wanted to let you know that my blog is now live. Just go to lisashearin.com and click on Blog.

Lisa

Tia Nevitt said...

I went by your blog and left a comment, but it seems to have gone away. Maybe you have comment moderation on and I didn't notice? I'll pop by again later to see if it showed up.