author : Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress's first novel, recently reprinted, is a clever and moving Fairy Tale Quest. (I mean "fairy tale" in the same way as I explain about John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory, although TPoMB is slightly less knowing than OftMG.) Princess Kirila decides to go on a Quest for the Heart of the World, and is soon joined by Chessie, a talking purple labrador who explains that he is an enchanted prince. Before the conclusion they suffer a sequence of enchantments that attempt to divert Kirila from her quest. What makes the story for me is the inventiveness and interest of these enchantments (although quantum chromodynamics has moved on a little in the decades since publication), and the developing characters of Kirila and Chessie.

This is a first novel, and there are a few rough edges (I never did understand the point about the bat, for example). But the virtues well outweigh the vices, and I certainly shed a tear during the final scene.

This welcome reprint has obviously been done by scanning and recognising an earlier print, because there are occasional glitches not caught by the proof-reading: a "we11" rather than a "well", an "0h" rather than an "Oh", some spurious hyphens, and so on. These are mildly irritating (they jolt me out of the story when they occur), but a few typos are a relatively small price to pay for having this book back in print.

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Margin of Error. 1994

Be careful whose work you steal, for even a boiling frog might jump.

• Beggars in Spain. 1991

expanded as Beggars in Spain

• Feigenbaum Number. 1995

• Fault Lines. 1995

• Unto the Daughters. 1995

• Evolution. 1995

• Ars Longa. 1994

• Sex Education. 1996

• Grant Us This Day. 1993

• Flowers of Aulit Prison. 1996

• Summer Wind. 1995

• Always True to Thee, In My Fashion. 1997

• Dancing on Air. 1993