Water Pearl, a Fantasy by Gloria PiperMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a very involved fantasy novel in which the main protagonist, Skye, grows from a wronged seven year-old to manhood. He is described as being of mixed race, Wildung and Two-Toner, a magical people and those of an unfeeling nature. I was never quite sure whether the author was attempting to explore racial conflict and this was meant to be a metaphor. Skye’s coming of age story is long and complicated with definite tussles between good and evil along the way and two characters, Kwig and O Divine, representing most of the evil. Skye is constantly full of conflict when faced with moral choices and I found his naive directness and innocence, as portrayed by Gloria Piper, charming and skilfully done. The regular switching of the narration between first and third person was something I found most irritating and unhelpful. This is a particular bone of contention of my own and I have never yet, after fifty plus years of reading fiction, found it to be an attractive literary device with any logical reason behind it.
Although I admire the author’s strong story telling talents and intriguing descriptions of her characters there were several points when the story dragged on and others when it jumped timelines too abruptly. Having read Train to Nowhere about 18 months ago and enjoyed it, I was a little disappointed with this book. I doubt whether younger readers would cope with the many machinations of the tale, so I think it has an appeal to the “older” young adult reader of fantasy genre novels. There were a couple of typos/spellings that sprang out which could have been found before publication unfortunately. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
View all my reviews
RSS Feed
