From: Mats Ohrman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 May 89 00:35:15 +0200

Path: liuida!sunic!kth!mcvax!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!haven!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!haste+
From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
Subject: The Whim of the Dragon
Message-ID: <sYOUxcy00V43A=[email-masked]>
Date: 11 May 89 22:55:36 GMT
Organization: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 38

"The Whim of the Dragon", by Pamela Dean (Ace, 5/89, abargainat$4.50) is
out!  It completes the trilogy started in "The Secret Country" and "The
Hidden Land".

When "The Secret Country" first came out, I thought it one of the most
enjoyable fantasies I'd ever read.  I spent two years worrying that the
author would step in front of a truck before writing the sequel.

When the sequel, "The Hidden Land", did come out, I was quite
disappointed.  For various reasons, I didn't realize that there was a
third book to come; I thought that the story ended there.  In fact, that
would have been both a workable and a justifiable ending, but it did
leave an unconscionable number of questions unanswered.  Having read the
third book, I can now view the second book not as a disappointing second
book but as a good middle to one large story.  

WoD lives up to all the promise of the first book in the trilogy.

The story, for those of you who missed it the first time round, is the
slightly familiar one of a group of children who find themselves
actually within their own imaginary world.  Not a role-playing game,
thank heavens, but a product of their collective imagination. 
Fortunately, where most such books use this as a clumsy gimmick to
transport characters into a generic D&D-shaped fantasy, here the
relationship between the real Secret Land and the imagined one becomes
the central mystery of the book, rather than an embarrassment quickly to
be forgotten.

The author obviously had a lot of fun with this.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who hasn't read the first two,
but if you haven't what are you waiting for?

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked] 

   Aphorism is better than none.