Snow, Fire, Sword

A K-6 fantasy novel with workmanlike prose and paint-by-numbers plot development whose main distinguishing characteristic is its setting. Jayangan's parallels to modern day Indonesia are so obvious as to make one wonder why Masson bothered with them at all. Indeed, the novel would have benefited greatly had it been set in the real world, but unfortunately Masson is attempting to have her cake and eat it too. The value of religious tolerance lies at the crux of this novel, but by setting this moralizing in a imaginary Indonesia instead of the actual country, Masson avoids confronting difficult truths about religious intolerance as it actually exist in the world, to say nothing of what is really needed to overcome it. To put it another show more way, xenophobic religious fanaticism is surely far easier to triumph over when one has a host of magical artefacts and powerful supernatural beings at one's disposal that can come to the rescue whenever purely human urges like compassion and empathy fail, than through "mere" human effort alone. Young children encountering fantasy for the first time will find this story compelling, but it's likely to fall flat for readers even slightly familiar with the genre (to say nothing of readers with Indonesian/Melayu language skills, for whom key characters' roles will be telegraphed by their names from the get-go). The bottom line is that an intriguing concept underpins this book; it's just too bad that its execution doesn't live up to its promise. Snow, Fire, Sword would have been a far better novel had it been either a straight fantasy romp in an unusual setting or a real life parable, but it doesn't manage to succeed at being both. show less