This loses a star because I am from Cornwall, and did not recognise Cornwall at all in this book. Other than that minor point, a great read. Bizarre, multi-faceted, fantastical...just as I like it. This book made me forget where I was, thanks to this skilled author. ( )

Eh. It's got Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, faeries, outsider art, Tristan & Iseult, and rock in it. She twines three narrative threads together. The large story is about men's desire for women/women as objects of men's desire/subjects of their art. This is not a new story and so I don't find it that interesting. Much more interesting is the submerged bits of a woman artist, the treatment of her art, and the assertion that faeires don't make art, and the revelation that one did. *That's* much more interesting. I'm also familiar with only the Tristan/Isolde (MHG) variant, didn't get the references to the other T/I material, and didn't really find it integral as a trope. ( )

I keep having this feeling that the *next* book I read by Elizabeth Hand will be one of my favorite books of all time. But she keeps not-quite-getting-there, for me.
I did really like this book, however - it may be her best yet. (And, can't beat the cover art! [a Rossetti painting]).
The plot is complex and twisting, encompassing times frames from the Victorian to today, all dealing with the intersection of Faerie and our world, all featuring a woman of Faerie, powerful, beautiful and compelling, artists' muse, lover, femme fatale, who inspires the men she touches to artistic genius, but leaves them mentally broken, obsessed, literally 'burned.' Here, transcendence is always touched by the impure... ( )

This is one of those books that is REALLY hard to put into a category. Is it fantasy? Is it supernatural? Is it a psychological thriller? It has elements of all three and a touch of historical fiction, but it doesn’t dwell in any of these. Instead it dwells in mythic darkness, madness, sexual longing, dire warnings and artistic agony. But in a good way.

Early on I was put in mind of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio because of the way Hand layers time and consistency with some elements such as the acorn motif and the color green. She also laces together multiple timelines replete with the fanciful and the mundane. Later in the book I was reminded of A Maggot by John Fowles and that was mostly because of what I’m going to call hallucinations on a page. Pieces of the story that leave the bounds of reality behind and make you go back over paragraphs and paragraphs looking for the point you missed; the disconnection.

The three main narratives are at first confusing, but there are many small details that pull them together; Val Comstock in the modern time is the descendent of Radborne Comstock in the past timeline. Radborne was a painter and did studies related to Tristram and Isolde which is the subject of Daniel Rowlands’s latest writing project. They are also bound to one another through their obsession with a mysterious woman; a muse with green eyes and an allure so powerful she has driven other men mad. One of them is confined to a mental hospital run by a Dr. Thomas Learmont. The hospital also confines one Evienne Upstone, a chestnut haired beauty with haunting green eyes. The very same woman who captivated Radborne’s attention on Blackfriar Bridge and who has been invading his psyche both awake and in dreams. So he paints, frenetically and eventually ends up on an island on the coast of Maine. It is to there that Russell Learmont, present-day captain of industry, sails to acquire the other half of a Radborne Comstock painting that he already owns.

There’s more, oh so much more, so many threads that you better take good notes or have a prodigious memory. Each revelation and insight is a joy that sizzles through your brain and once you start to see the whole, you’ll be staggered by its entirety. Imaginations like this don’t come along often and I’m grateful that Hand has one and can write like a dream as well. ( )

There is a twinge of terror in the heart of any good fairy tale - a touch of awe, or a sense of how small we really are in the face of the unknown, tiny mortal creatures huddled together in the dark. Hand captures this feeling better than anyone, and it lends a delicious, haunting edge to this story about the pleasures and perils of courting the muse. ( )