Subject: Edghill: The Sword of Maiden's Tears

From: [email-masked] (Christina Schulman)
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 18:17:35 GMT

_The Sword of Maiden's Tears_ by Rosemary Edghill is Yet Another Urban
Elf Story.  It sports an atrocious cover illustration and silly blurbs.
So why did I buy it?  Because I've heard--and this may be wildly
untrue--that Rosemary Edghill is a pseudonym for the same author who
wrote the clever, fast-paced sf Hellflower trilogy as Eluki bes Shahar.

Rohannon Melior, an elf of the House of Silver Silences, arrives in
New York City just as he regains the Sword of Maiden's Tears, and a
friendly native promptly mugs him and runs off with his sword.  Ruth
Marlowe, a librarian-in-training who's bored with her life, picks him
up, dusts him off, and takes him home.  Rohannon proceeds to enlist the
help of Ruth and her circle of friends in finding and recovering the
sword, which will transform any human who touches it into a slavering
cannibalistic monster.  Any habitual fantasy reader can probably fill
in the rest of the plot from here.

The premise is cliche, the plot drags, and the conclusion is depressing
and very unsatisfying.  But the writing is witty and peppered with
literary allusions, and the characterization of Ruth and her friends
is complex and intriguing.  The characters have lives and histories that
extend beyond the immediate story, and their interplay and banter are
what kept me reading along happily.

I hope the sequel will redeem the disappointing ending of this book.
And there will be a sequel; the characters say so on the last page.
(The caption "The First Book of The Twelve Treasures" on the title
page was sort of a giveaway, too.)

If you can stomach another Urban Elf book, I recommend _The Sword of
Maiden's Tears_.  If you can't, try the Hellflower trilogy.

          Sensible Ruth was out walking in the rain.  Today was
        her birthday, and Ruth was thirty.  Thirty.  All alone,
        and on the threshold of the rest of her entire life, which
        would be spent solitary, virginal, and depressed in some
        miniscule upstate New York library where the book was on
        view between the hours of three and three-fifteen every
        other Wednesday.
          Such a depressing future called for ice cream at the
        very least, and there was a Haagen-Dazs shop on Broadway.
 
%A   Edghill, Rosemary
%T   The Sword of Maiden's Tears
%I   Daw
%C   New York
%D   October 1994
%G   ISBN 0-88677-622-8
%P   284pp
%O   paperback, US$4.99
%S   The First Book of The Twelve Treasures

-- 
Christina Schulman    Presbyterian University Hospital   [email-masked]
"The heart has its raisins which the kumquat know not of, as the French
 don't say."   -- Rosemary Edghill