Castles Made of Sand - Gwyneth Jones

Whoosh!

I've been waiting for this book since I finished its predecessor (Bold as Love) for the first time last September. I think I probably read Bold as Love about five times. I'm an immersive reader when I find a world I like, and when I find characters I love, and this matched on both counts.

Castles Made of Sand is a weirder and darker novel, more explicitly fantasy (magic works) while at the same time being rooted in the wider world around newly-isolated England (clinics in Finland where brain surgery can remove a person's memories, and a United States full of, well, Americans).

Those who enjoyed the first novel for the setting, and merely tolerated the weirdo hippie protagonists, will probably hate Castles Made of Sand. Those who fell for Sage, Ax and Fiorinda will find themselves fascinated and appalled and unwilling to stop reading.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who didn't read the first novel: I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it carries straight on from the last page of Bold as Love. But it's a very different book: almost claustrophobic in places, marvellously evocative and mockingly referential in others.

...Featuring, among other things:

• a 21st-century Glass Castle
  
• two of the last hundred Bengal tigers (and an intriguing moral dilemma)
  
• a very Guineverian scene at Westminster for Fiorinda
  
• and a working definition of Rock'n'Roll Culture which includes Polly Harvey as Virginia Woolf.

Oh, and apropos of my previous discussion about The Fairy Queen:

"Hey, where did you get to the other night, Fio?"
"I think she knows a bank where the wild thyme blows," decided Verlaine. "And she met there with Oberon and Robin Goodfellow --"
"You know, Sage would make a *great* Puck!"
(Castles Made of Sand, p 131)