Caryl Cude Mullin

Rough Magic is the story of the island in the Tempest. Caliban is the main character with Miranda and Prospero being side notes. It meanders through three generations of powerful witches, the first being Sycorax who makes an inexplicable decision to kill her first husband, leaver her daughter and run off with the king of an invading army (a choice that isn't very well justified or explained and comes out of nowhere) instead of protecting her realm. This eventually leads to her being exiled to the waste of an island by the same king. She is pregnant and mad. She has Caliban on the island, which turns out ot be full of magic. needing more power, she steals the magic from the island releasing a chain of events that would affect the next couple of generations.

Although some sections of the book sing, it is an uneven, patchy song. Her description of the relationship between Caliban and Miranda's daughter, Chiara is beautiful. Prospero is well portrayed, becoming a stubborn, not unkind but petulant alchemist. The story belongs mainly to Chiara and to Caliban, but too much time is spent on Sycorax's past and at the end, an important character is suddenly introduced. The relevance of the first part of Sycorax is not made clear until quite a ways in the book. Characters suddenly appear and then suddenly disappear without much explanation. Choices are not well explained, but seem more like whims. I think this might be Mullen's first novel. Although it is uneven, I am curious to see her more seasoned writing, as the parts in the middle, with Caliban and Chiara were well worth the read.… (plus d'informations)

This is a YA fantasy that spans multiple generations, all of them important to each other and none that could be glossed over without missing some essential element of the tale as a whole. Not an easy task to accomplish, yet Caryl Mullin carries it off with grace and style.

The GoodReads description, I find, does not do this novel justice. With mentions of "earth's power" and "evironmental responsibility", one could almost expect a book filled with heavy-handed preaching and obvious neo-pagan elements. That isn't what you'll find in this novel. This isn't a, "clean up the world or we'll all suffer later," book of doom and gloom, but rather an engaging story that happens to have strong elements of, "one of the last places in which magic freely exists is dying because people arew fallible and we made some serious mistakes." It isn't heavy-handed. It is done beautifully, which makes that message far more enjoyable to see and tolerable to hear.

Because let's face it, nobody really enjoys being preached at.

This book will also be a treat for anybody who enjoys seeing strong female characters in the media. From a powerful sorceress to a girl who's just so very competant and forthright that you can't help but like her, this book puts women in the spotlight and does it with flair, but doesn't relegate males to the background as completely unimportant to the plot. Both sides of the gender coin get their fair and wonderful treatment.

A page-turner from beginning to end! This is one book that I'm proud to recommend to just about everybody!

(Received for review direct from Second Story Press)… (plus d'informations)

Characters of Shakespeare’s The Tempest get revisited and retold in ROUGH MAGIC. Sycorax is a sorceress whose unfortunate lot in life banishes her to live on a magical island with her ugly son, Caliban. A man named Prospero and his daughter Miranda shipwreck on the island, and Prospero makes Caliban his magical slave. Caliban returns with Prospero and Miranda to the mainland, where he befriends Miranda’s plain daughter, the princess Chiara.

To protect Chiara from being a pawn in her father’s political plans, Caliban brings her back to his island, where they must undergo a series of difficult tasks in order to restore the island’s magic. Along the way they meet Calypso, a mysterious and magical woman with connections to them that they don’t know…

ROUGH MAGIC will appeal to lovers of ambitious fantasy chronicles, but not those looking for Shakespeare-related literature or well-written characters. Indeed, I was more than disappointed especially as the premise sounded interesting and promised the discussion of issues such as feminism. Unfortunately, it is a poorly written and narratively overdone tale.

ROUGH MAGIC was difficult to swallow because it tried to tell four characters’ stories in the course of about 200 pages. The story moves over several decades and lifetimes; as a result, important, character-defining events are merely glimpses that poke in and out within one chapter, never to be mentioned again. Additionally, nearly every chapter tends to awkwardly explain in flashbacks the life-altering events that occurred since the last chapter. This skipping-stone method of narration ensures that we readers never feel as if there is any action going on, since everything important seems to have happened invisibly between the chapters!

All of the characters are weak because they did not have the time and room within the book to develop. I had immense difficulties connecting with and understanding the motivations of any character, so either vaguely or lumberingly were they when they took up space on the pages. ROUGH MAGIC reads more like an extensive character study of four very different characters rather than an actual story.

That being said, the world that ROUGH MAGIC creates for us is a rough-and-tumble, fantastical one. I enjoyed the idea of the island’s wildness being almost a character in itself. While the enormous task of developing four characters over a period of several dozen years was ultimately unsuccessful, the storyline did bring up a number of interesting “mini-stories” that I would’ve perhaps liked to see in short story format—in particular, Sycorax’s development from reckless sorceress to repressed courtwoman under her husband’s hand.

Unfortunately, ROUGH MAGIC was not very successful in telling a clear and intelligible story, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its attractions. Readers and writers may do well in considering this book as an example of what not to do with one’s own writing: overly ambitious and directionless saga-stories will drag a perfectly intriguing idea down to its death.… (plus d'informations)