Subject: McCaffrey: Crystal Line

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 05:00:59 GMT

"Crystal Line" is probably the best thing McCaffrey's written in the past
five years -- though in my opinion it's not nearly as good as her best
work, which is two decades and more behind her.

We return to Killashandra Ree for the third, and probably last, time.
She's been cutting crystal for a couple of centuries now, and it's taken
its toll of her memory.  (At the start of the book it's not so bad, but
she hits a crisis part way through, by the end of which there's not much
of her still home.)

The resolution to her personal problems is a generic-McCaffrey Deus Ex Machina,
and the solution to the Guild's problems is more handwaving (many of them
are only problems because the author has declared them to be problems,
although it seems odd that they would be, and they disappear with farcical
ease as the book runs out of pages), but that's okay:  The so-called
problems are only a foil for Killashandra, who is one of McCaffrey's more
engaging characters.

This book is no more than a self-indulgence for readers who enjoyed the
first two Crystal Singer books, but it's also no less -- and there's
nothing wrong with self-indulgence.  A good ultra-light read.

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

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