by Paul Park
During the summer, her good friend Andromeda goes away to Greece and thus she befriends a boy from her school called Peter. Peter is something of a loner and he only has one hand but she confides in him, and he in her, and a friendship is set.
Back at school after the summer, some mysterious new students arrive from Eastern Europe and one of them, Kevin Markasev, seems to know something of Miranda’s past. Despite her mistrust of him and his companions, her interest is piqued and one night, after a chance encounter between the three friends and these strangers, Miranda lets Markasev see her beloved book which he promptly hurls into a fire changing all of their lives forever.
They awake to find themselves in the ‘real’ world, our own having turned out to be an elaborate fantasy where Miranda has been hidden by her Aunt. This world is geographically very similar to our own, but set in a time resembling the 19th century. To add to the confusion, Peter has grown a huge new hand and now resembles a long-dead soldier and ally of Miranda’s Father and Andromeda has become a labrador.
No, really.
They make their way to a cottage where, apparently, the old woman and the man who live there, have been waiting all these years for Miranda – also known as the White Tyger – to take her to her Aunt who will guide her as she leads Roumania (note the spelling) out of the clutches of German power and into glory. They are subsequently waylaid by Balkan mercenaries who seek to deliver Miranda to the Baroness Nicola Ceaucescu, who, with that name, is clearly the baddie and along the way encounter blonde haired savages, cave paintings, the land of the dead, wooly mammoths and sundry magical moments.
It is hard to know where to begin with this book, it’s such a mess. It’s not that it’s badly written, because on the whole it’s not, but while it is filled with characters, places and events, overall, nothing much really happens.
There are endless pages of the Baroness Ceaucescu avoiding debt, the police and the Germans while dabbling in magic and murdering the odd person here and there. There are yet more pages of the ‘Elector of Ratisbon’, another Miranda-chaser, who is such a stereotype of a cartoon German that I expected him to polish his monocle any minute. In between these two are Miranda and co trudging aimlessly through snow-covered forests for some as-yet-undetermined destination while we get a blow-by-blow account everytime she take a pee.
While the lack of action is frustrating, the real irritant, for me, is how the point of view keeps changing away from our erstwhile heroine to Peter, to the dog, occasionally veering off to a Balkan or a savage or the Baroness then back to Miranda, which confuses the story as you’re not sure who you should be following. Also, it doesn’t help that none of the characters are particularly likeable. It’s not that they’re unlikeable, rather they’re just so dull that they do and say nothing to which you can relate, or be inspired by, and as a result you just lose interest, and more than once I found myself having to re-read sections because I’d drifted off mid-page.
Now you can argue that this changing POV is inventive storytelling, and judging by the back-cover blurb from the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley and Kim Stanley Robinson who all loved it, clearly any opinion is subjective. But I would argue that a solid foundation to route the readers interest would have made it so much easier before starting to bend the rules.
A Princess Of Roumania is published by Tor through Pan Macmillan and is available from Amazon