Carrie Vaughn, DISCORD'S APPLE
Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In an America of the near future where national security is everyone's overwhelming preoccupation, for excellent reason, and, in spite of stringent government regulation of every aspect of life, there is little safety anywhere to be found, Evie Walker, a young artist in Los Angeles, learns that her father is dying. She heads for Hopes Fort, Colorado, where she grew up and where her father, a widower, still lives, little expecting that her life is about to change in ways she never dreamed it could in her wildest fantasies.
Behind the basement door in her father's home is a storeroom which contains unbelievable treasures, treasures which Evie had never known existed there. In fact, they were treasures which she had supposed had only existed in fairy-tales and quaint myths woven by ancient peoples who had been utterly ignorant of reality. She is astonished to learn that they are, however, not only real, but of wondrous power -- and attended by equally great dangers. Evie's parents had been the most recent of a long, long line of people entrusted with the care and safekeeping of those treasures. But her mother had died several years before, the victim of a terrorist bombing at the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and now her father was dying of inoperable cancer, and her inheritance will include a good deal more than just her childhood home: she will, like her parents before her, become the guardian of the contents of that basement storeroom -- and the one who must decide whether to share them with those who, from time to time, come to the door of the house, asking for something stored there.
The least of it are the glass slippers for which an old woman comes, whom the slippers seemed to know was coming for them, somehow calling out to Evie when she came down the basement steps that they were the things the old woman wanted. She is stunned to find she couldn't not have retrieved them and given them to her. There is also the strange golden fleece, the matched golden and silver quivers full of arrows, the gleaming golden apple bearing the legend "Kallisti." Who will come for them -- and when?
With the help of her father, a mysterious stranger named Alex, a magnificent Irish wolfhound named Mab, and two unexpected heroes straight out of centuries-old legends, Evie must guard the storeroom against ancient, malevolent forces, and somehow guard both the past and the future even as the present itself falls apart. At stake is the fate of the Earth and the prevention of the Apocalypse. Is one young, very mortal woman up to the task?
This novel left me unsatisfied, partly due to the fact that for many years I have been studying and practicing Magick, Qaballah, and other esoteric disciplines all of which involve becoming as familiar as possible with the myths, legends, religions, and histories of many cultures. As a result, in brief, I found the theories of Magick, Gods, and human interactions with the divine a little too simplistic, as well as wide of the mark, both esoterically and historically. In a word, slick, as in tailored for maximum marketing effect. If the novel had been aimed predominantly at young adults, I could understand it; but its intended audience is a general one, adults as well as adolescents, and as a result, at least as far as this adult is concerned, it is unsatisfying.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. The plot is tight, the characters well-realized, the dialogue engaging, the story interesting, and the novel is one that will in some ways have strong appeal to those used to today's graphic novels, science fiction novels and movies, and action-adventure entertainment. My specialties have sensitized me to certain things that most aren't concerned with, and that has probably skewed my appreciation of this novel. Still, I will give it only three stars out of five, for its dependency far more on commercial considerations than on historical or esoteric reality.
View all my reviews