I was dubious about the "YA" designation for the first book of Paul Park's Roumania series--a label not asserted by either the author or the publisher as far as I can tell. This second volume demonstrates that it just doesn't apply. The story is a decidedly mature fantasy, even if it includes some youngish characters. I don't know if it makes much of a difference now that there is a significant reading demographic of "old adults" who prefer "YA" books, but since I'm not one of those, I figured I might question the label.

It took me over a year to get to this second volume after reading A Princess of Roumania, but the narrative was able to bring me back into the plot efficiently enough, and my slight fuzziness on what had gone before actually kept me sympathetic to the main characters whose perspectives were distressed and transformed over the course of the story.

In The Tourmaline there is a considerable development of definition and detail for the alternate-historical aspects of the Roumanian world. Africa is more technologically advanced than Europe. Christianity, such as it is, seems to be a hero cult within a persistent Roman paganism. This book also provides more clarity on the properties and powers of "the hidden world" that is the basis of its supernatural magic.

The end of this book is the mid-point of the four-volume series, and it resolves in a peculiar way, seeming to present the defeat of the principal villains, without corresponding triumph for the heroes. I'll be taking a breather before The White Tyger, but hopefully not for as long as I let pass between the first two books.

It's been a while since I read A Princess Of Roumania, and my memory of what happened in that books is a bit sketchy, but I remember enjoying it enormously, so I'm delighted to have the next three books in the series to dive into. Miranda Popescu grows up in a small town in America, only to discover that she is, in fact, in a hiding place. Our world is merely a conjuring designed to keep her safe from her enemies. She is, in reality, a princess of Greater Roumania, and when our world vanishes, she and her two friends find themselves in a North America that is nothing but sparsely inhabited wilderness, hunted by soldiers sent by the evil Baroness Ceausescu. At the end of the first book, Miranda is transported to Roumania, leaving her friends behind.

Book 2, and we discover that she has not just been transported through space, but through time. For her, it is now five years later. While Peter and Andromeda set out to find her, their recent identities as American teenagers merging with their old identities as imperial soldiers, Miranda is taken by gypsies to her aunt's shrine, hunted by a vampire and used by the German Elector of Ratisbon in his war against the Baroness.

The Tourmaline is a fantasy in the mould of a fairy tale, a princess returned to reclaim her rightful throne. But Park avoids and defies convention and cliche. His protagonist jumps from young adult to adult in the space of a page. Her friends take on new, less attractive personalities. The careful plan laid by her aunt is immediately thrown away when the letter she leaves is destroyed unread. The political complexities of Europe are beyond Miranda's grasp and the woods and shrines and caves of Roumania are filled with magics and conjurings she cannot understand.

Comparisons with Pullman, Wolfe and LeGuin abound, and there is no question that if you like those authors you should give this a shot. There is also Margo Langan, of whose dark fairy-tale style this reminded me quite strongly. It is a subtle, sophisticated, ambitious work, and I'll be diving into the next volume directly. ( )

This was a follow-up to A Princess of Roumania. I liked it about as well as that book. They're not my favorite fantasy, and they move a little bit slowly for me, but they are definitely worth reading. ( )

Paul Park expands his unique (almost thrillingly so) YA series with The Tourmaline. Free from the need to set-up his complex and exhaustive world, the book has a stronger narrative - though one deployed mostly in heaving its protagonists onto ever stranger shores, literally and metaphorically.

Caught by devious sorceries, Miranda Popescu - the messianic "White Tyger" of Roumania - finds herself flung from a parallel-universe America all the way back to her eastern European homeland. Left behind, geographically and in other ways, are her two friends Peter and Miranda - both housing the uneasy souls of Miranda's long-gone bodyguards. If the previous book in the series was a novel of discoveries, then this is one of journeys - yet much is nonetheless revealed.

I really thought this book was terrific. It's confounding in many ways; not just because of its dream-like qualities, but also because - whilst it has all the trappings - it's really not typical Young Adult literature. Park doesn't just add texture to familiar debates about good and evil, he demonstrates how arbitrary the line is before obliterating it completely. He questions the very idea of monarchy and saviours; at the same time he questions the inherent nobility of democracies. Most of all he captures the oft-times contradictory, vulnerable, and very human emotions that control us more often than we control them.

The result is compelling, and almost sneakily disquieting at times - especially coming from a genre with very familiar tropes and generally limpid morality. In that context, The Tourmaline is a very political novel. It's also a very sensual novel; this isn't just a helter-skelter narrative with some kind of self-discovery metaphor stitched into it. Park shows us the plastic boundaries between interior and exterior states.

The best demonstration of this lies in the book's maturity. YA novels frequently have protagonists plunged into an - unjust - world that is too complex and mature for where they come from. An understandable albeit obvious metaphor for adolescence. Park does that, too, but the difference is that it's not the world that's complex and mature; it's the characters first and foremost. The fact that the two ostensible villains of the book (adults, both) get nearly as many pages - and as much reader sympathy as the teenage protagonists - highlights this.

His originality also shines through in the alternative Europe of "Roumania". No cod-medival knights for him, nor any gear-fetish steampunk blah. Roumania is multifaceted; it presents different qualities when viewed from different angles and it is glittering with original concepts and conceits; all shot through with a nod, a bow, a curtsy or a wink or an out-thrust fist to historical or mythological precedent. It is so much more sophisticated and interesting than what we're used to seeing, within the genre - and largely without, I have to say.

I was so impressed to see someone write something so ambitious and mature - it's like if Thomas Mann was rewriting Narnia. The Tourmaline's splendid characterisation leaves me aching for its lonely heroes and villains, and looking forward very much to the next book in the series. ( )

This book continues the tale begun in A Princess of Roumania in which a young woman named Miranda Popescu learned she was hidden away in our world but is a princess caught amidst political intrigue in an alternate *real* world where Roumania is one of the world's superpowers and is busy fighting off the advances from Germany in a Victorianesque era. The goings-on get even stranger in this second book (of a quartet) and we follow the exploits of Miranda and her friends Peter and Andromeda. Peter is actually a renowned soldier named Pieter de Graz and Andromeda is really a (male) soldier named Sasha Prochenko. But in this story she morphs from a dog to a young woman. Miranda also ventures into the hidden world while conjurers like the Baroness Ceausescu and the Elector of Ratisbon put their own plots into play. It sometimes gets confusing only to clear up later and I enjoyed the real sense of strangeness in this story. It's always interesting and I'll be reading the follow-up soon. It's called The White Tyger. ( )