Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Utter rubbish. Badly written, badly edited, and stuffed full of rabid PETA-vegan rantings. (Digression – I have nothing against either vegans or most members of PETA. But this sort of rubbish does nothing to help either cause. A bit like having Paris Hilton stand up and claim to be a spokesm(oro)n for an otherwise intelligent lobby group.)

The biggest crime is that there was an interesting story underneath the purple prose and propaganda. But this is what would have happened if Barbara show more Cartland had been lobotomised and set loose in the genre.

Looks like The Bitterbynde Trilogy was a fluke. Or that her editors at Tor dislike her. show less

Luscious prose and descriptions, an irresistible plot (disfigured young woman, obviously bespelled, also amnesiac, escapes drudgery and ...) also treasure, a love interest . . and many wonderful ideas (the shang wind, a kind of storm during which you can see ghosts replaying scenes of high emotion; sildron a rare and precious metal which floats which the people use to sail boats in the skies--it has an opposite metal) and wonderful storytelling. Dart-Thornton has collected from far and wide show more the older stories, poems and tales of the British Isles. I'm surprised I haven't heard more about this writer and this series. On to book 2! The prose isn't complicated but there are long long lists of what people are eating, wearing, seeing, doing, everything, in short . . . might be too much for some. Most (not all) are real words from the heights of the romantic period of the middle ages and earlier as are most of the stories. **** show less

Cecilia Dart-Thornton's writing style takes some getting used to. She uses a surfeit of words where a handful would do and puts polysyllabic phrases in the mouth of her mentally handicapped protagonist. These stylistic tendencies are so aggravating, in fact, that I almost put the book down several times. But then, unexpectedly, the story began to shine through its clumsy writing, and the writing itself became a waterfall of rich sensory detail oddly suited to the world it describes. The show more story Dart-Thornton begins in The Ill-Made Mute makes use of a wealth of mythology and folklore, combining fey creatures with a quest and a romance for a compelling, if slightly disjointed, adventure. show less

Il secondo capitolo della trilogia di bytterbinde (letteralmente un voto vincolante) si apre laddove La ragazza della torre termina. Imhrien ha riacquistato voce e volto e ora deve compiere la sua missione presso la corte del Re-Imperatore di Erith. Assume quindi la fittizia identità di Rohain delle Isole Sorrows e come nel precedente capitolo da qui si snoda una fitta trama di avventure che porteranno la giovane a scoprire la sua vera identità.
La dama delle isole è un romanzo più show more scorrevole del precedente e meno farraginoso, seppure lo stile della Thornton non si smentisce con le sue minuziose (a volte manieristiche) descrizioni.
Tutta la potenza narrativa dell'autrice però si rivela negli ultimi capitoli, quando diventa evidente che la rievocazione delle mitologia e del folklore non è ridotta solo a qualche sporadico racconto orale e ballata, ma caratterizza fortemente l'etnografia di Erith.
Per questo arrivati alla rivisitazione del mito del Pifferaio Magico di Hamelin adattato al mondo della Thornton, assumendo un ruolo centrale nella vicenda di Imhrien, si capisce che il lavoro condotto dall'autrice è veramente colto e minuzioso. Ovviamente la vicenda non si conclude, giacché la trilogia è un corpo unico. show less