Rusalka [Mass Market Paperback]

First gripe: the endless and tedious scenes of Pyetr, Sasha, and Uulamets wandering around in the woods acting like jerks to one another. Pages upon pages of one of the characters musing about what morons the other two are. The use of the word "woodcraft" on what seems like every page, as Sasha or Pyetr admires Uulamets' skill in navigating the forest. It begins to feel like we are reading the same chapter over and over after a while.

But that's the little gripe. The big one is what seems like a big continuity mistake. Do not read on if you absolutely can't stand spoilers! This spoiler refers to an incident in the middle of the book, not the ending, if that changes your feelings at all.

About a third of the way into the book, a false Eveshka is brought to lfe by Uulamets' magic. He was trying to resurrect his dead daughter, but instead resurrected a version of her who was as he wanted her to be rather than as she was. Now, Pyetr never had sexual or romantic feelings about Eveshka until this false Eveshka showed up; it was then that he started noticing her beauty. BUT...later, Pyetr claims that he knew all along that the Eveshka look-alike was a fake, and all of a sudden he is in love with the real one. Why? He wasn't in love with her before. He was annoyed by her until he met the fake one. I don't think I understand.

At the forefront of this small group are Walter Miller's Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and CJ Cherryh's Rusalka trilogy. Saint Leibowitz... for being the best work of science fiction ever published, the Wheel of Time for being the best and most ambitious meditation on escapism ever attempted and Rusalka, for simply being Rusalka.

Spare and unpretentious, Rusalka is a fairy tale, and nothing more. Though the characters sometimes do tend to seem stereotypical, as Julia Alvarez' In The Time of the Butterflies shows us, this needn't detract from the value of the work as a whole.

Rusalka may be a fairy tale, but it is a decidedly dark one at that. The whole of the first book's action takes place in a wet, Cummingly mudluscious spring. The woods are dead and dying, the forest of the Rusalka shapeless gray trunks protruding grossly from brittle brown grass and marshes.

To quote the old cliche: you can't judge a book by its cover. But, simply put, I can think of no one more qualified than Keith Parkinson to evoke the entire world of Rusalka in one single image. And he succeeds beautifully. Parkinson's Rusalka covers are easily some of the best paintings to ever grace any book in any genre.

This is as good as fantasy literature gets and I would advise you, regardless of your past experiences with the genre to seriously consider driving out to your used book store and picking up a copy of Rusalka. Hell, pick up the entire series. And if you don't like your books used, order it off of this site. Buy it now, read it later, whatever. Just read it.