Thursday, July 25, 2013

The Owl Service Review

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

(from the back of the book)
The valley of myth and power where magic made a woman out of flowers, where a doomed warrior won vengeance from beyond the grave, where the power of sorcery built and built and sought release.

Then Alison found plates with owl patterns that vanished; Roger felt screams near an ancient stone, and Gwyn touched the force of a tragic Celtic legend – unknowing, they broke the seals that bound the sorcery.

Mythic forces, of love and damnation, lived again.  The magic was loose…




This is an odd little book.  I kept waiting for the moment when things would start to fall into place.  Unfortunately they never really did.  Maybe if I was familiar with the myth the book is based on I would have had a chance of following along.  As it was I had trouble understanding what was going on most of the time.  It did have a creepy feel to it that I think it was going for and made you want to know why things were happening and how it would turn out.  But I never found out.  It never made it clear why the characters were caught in this loop, or what the owl pattern plates were about or anything.  And the ending was just confusing and didn’t explain anything.  It was interesting to read but disappointing in the end because it never came together and ended up being a series of odd, unexplained events that happened for no apparent reason.  

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