Patricia McKillip
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Beautiful... 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.
"Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."Lovers Jonah and Megan--he the owner of an art store somewhere on the Pacific Northwest coast, she an artist who sketches the sea--find themselves changing into things "rich and strange" when a pair of elusive and fascinating strangers enter their lives. The strangeness begins with little things--images appear of their own accord in Megan's drawings, an enigmatic sculptor named Adam Fin begins to frequent the store--but when a mysterious singer claimed as Adam's sister lures Jonah into her own realm, it changes from a mystery of the everyday world to a mystery of the Otherworld. To find Jonah, Megan will have to first discover and then see past the legends in which Adam and his powerful sister have clothed themselves, and Jonah must learn to look past his fascination with the siren song to see what provokes such terrible beauty, grief, and rage.
The story of "Something Rich and Strange" unfolds like a dream, all the while ringing very true to life. Patricia McKillip's writing is rich in texture and imagery: vivid, precise, and often surreal; she is equally adept at describing the luminous beauty of an undersea kingdom as well as Megan and Jonah's banter over dinner. The images she sculpts have a true ring of otherworldly beauty to them; Adam and his sister speak in human words, but they are not human, and while humans spin stories around their powerful realm, that is not human either. McKillip never lets the reader forget that; her mysterious sea is never ours to claim, only ours to remember and preserve.
Read "Something Rich and Strange" three times: once for the story, once for the jeweled prose, once for its message. And then read it a fourth time, for no reason except that the story deserves it. It will still be good: the changeable sea is eternal.
Editorial Review:
They have lived among us for centuries--distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from the air, from water, from earth, and from fire. What are these creatures that enjoin out imagination? Faeries. Something Rich and Strange creates a faerie story that's not to be missed: Megan is an artist who draws seascapes. Jonah owns a shop devoted to treasures from the deep. Their lives, so strongly touched by the ocean, become forever intertwined when enchanting people of the sea lure them further into the underwater world--and away from each other.
