From Publishers Weekly
In this less than stellar first novel from the author of Ring, a mystical red reindeer symbol loosely links three pairs of star-crossed lovers as the three-part story meanders across many centuries. The novel's first part, "Legend," chronicles the fate of the lovely Fayau and her husband, Bogud, who's left bereft on the prehistoric Mongolian steppes when invaders kidnap his wife and child. In "Paradise," set on a South Pacific island in the 18th century, the European sailor Jones falls for the sensuous native, Laia. "Dessert" leaps forward to 1990s New York City and the arid southwestern U.S., where the editor Flora Aideen follows the classical music composer Leslie Mardoff for a photo essay, and in hopes of helping him to create a masterpiece. Suzuki fans who have been waiting for this first English translation may be disappointed by its stilted language and contrived plot.
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From Booklist
The first book by the author of the oft-adapted international horror hit
Ring (2003) is a millennia-spanning saga-cum-romance based on the Bering "land-bridge" theory of prehistoric migration from Siberia to North America. The book's first part, "Legend," traces the paths of separated lovers whose emblems of leaping red deer mark their trails. "Paradise" leaps to the eighteenth century and an English sailor shipwrecked on a South Pacific island who falls in love with a native girl descended from one of the ancient lovers; she sees a godhead in the same deer image. In the late twentieth century in "The Desert," a composer said to be "a Casanova with Indian blood"--a further descendant from the prehistoric lover who crossed the land-bridge--undertakes a mystical journey below the Arizona sands. Suzuki won the Japan Fantasy Novel Award for this book and went on to international fame for ostensibly creating a new kind of antigore horror with the successfully filmed (in Japanese and American versions) and
manga-adapted Ring, whose fans, in particular, may go for
Paradise.Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
