R- War for the Oaks (v,x), Falcon (v,b)
I have only read one book of Bull's novels, so I have no point of comparison. Her style seems to be clear, with a tendency to add lots of references to ground her work in the "real" world. The book I read was urban fantasy, which seems to be her usual sub-genre.
The only book of Bull's that I have read is the urban fantasy War for the Oaks, which takes place in Minneapolis. An unusual romance, this novel stars Eddi, a rock guitarist and Bard, who catches the wrong sort of attention from a desperate Seelie Court. Though there are a number of serious moments in the novel, it is a mostly light-hearted, down-to-earth look at the wilder side of the city, with delightful characters and settings. Unlike many other urban fantasies, this one describes the common faeries as well as the royal ones, and commoners are some of the more interesting characters. Bull also mixes in the rock & roll scene quite effectively. With a combination of straightforward writing and believable psychology, Bull has woven a story that will never let you know how deep you are into it until it's too late.
Falcon is written in what at first may seem to be two separate parts of the life of Niki Glyndwr, youngest nephew to the Prince of Cymru. Cymru is a Welsh-based planetary culture which is trying to maintain its independence from the Central Worlds Concorde. Niki comes back from a summer vacation to find the capitol city erupting in turmoil and near-riot, and discovers he's interested in the welfare of Cymru after all. But someone is trying hard to create that chaos, and Niki runs the risk of dying many times over as he tries to counteract whoever is on the opposition. The second part begins ten years after the conflict on Cymru, when he has become a gestalt pilot - surgically altered to interface awareness with his spaceship - a prototype project which ends with his alteration. As soon as the surgery is complete, Niki begins to die, a slave to the drugs which make the interface possible and will eventually kill him. His past indentities seem to overlap in a continuous spiral, pieces of one life coming back to touch another and all reaching for a final rebirth in true death at the end. But even as Niki is dying, the lives that he touches are enriched and changed for the better. The complex and elegant connections between the lives and motives of all the characters is like Celtic knotwork, a pleasure to follow and become entangled in.
(Main Page)
(Categories)
(Awards)
(Authors)
(Titles)
(Top 100)
(Rewrites)
This page owned by: Raven
Questions? Comments? Smart Remarks?
Email me at
[email protected]
Last Updated: February 9, 2000
Author and book reviews are the copyrighted property and responsibility of the person named at the end of the review. If no one is named, they belong to Raven. Any author or publisher who does not want their copyrighted material to be on this page email the reviewer and it will be removed immediately. The reviewer reserves the right to remove material rather than alter it in any way.
