Negative Positive
Title: Skip this & read Riddlemaster again
Review: When McKillip's good, she's very very good, and when she's bad it comes out like this. As in many of her other books, McKillip deals with mysterious characters who live on the edge between reality and dream. However, here she errs by making the character who should be mysterious her narrator. This makes all Roisin's eccentric behavior (slipping off into the forest to commune with the brook, that sort of thing) seem like a pose. A real child of nature, living by instinct, wouldn't be writing this book; a narrator, by definition, has to be self-conscious, and Roisin shouldn't be. It's too bad, because this could have been a good one if told from a different point of view.
Is the review positive or negative? 