Subject: Williams and Hoffman: Child of an Ancient City

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 22:44:26 GMT

"Child of an Ancient City" is an exercise in good story-telling, fashioned
after the traditional Arabian model of people telling stories within stories.
It opens with a successful, no-longer-young man, surrounded by friends at
a dinner party, telling the tale of an expedition to Armenia, of which he
was a member.  When the expedition is attacked, the survivors try to make
their way home, but wander into the domain of a vampire -- and find themselves
telling stories for their lives.  Thus the book gives us the framing story
of the dinner party, the story of the expedition, and the stories told be
the expedition members.

It works.  The prose is clean, the reader's interest never flags, and if
not all the stories the expedition members tell are successful, well,
they're not necessarily meant to be.  The book is worth reading.

A word of warning about format is in place.  The book is nominally a
280-page trade paperback, but it's in *very* large print, further eked out
by some illustrations.  If the story were part of a regular paperback
anthology, it would occupy some eighty pages.  Aside from the fact that
this means that there's less to this book than meets the eye (in terms of
minutes of reading enjoyment), having that few words per line of print is
actively distracting and annoying.

%A Williams, Tad and Hoffman, Nina Kiriki
%T Child of an Ancient City
%I Tor
%C New York
%D September 1994
%G ISBN 0-812-53391-7
%P 280pp (very large print)
%O trade pb, $6.99

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope