![]() ![]() There’s a dragon, but it might be any really threatening mundane animal–its effects are near-identical to those of a series of human conflicts over Iseult of the White Hands/territory. The dwarf’s star-gazing could be a kind of Hild-like careful processing. ![]() There’s some magic here, but of a constrained variety. It picks up a little on the feeling of some patches of Malory, and slightly anticipates Ishiguro’s Buried Giant. Tristan and Iseult is a blue-gray sort of story, cold and sparsely populated, shot through and sometimes illuminated by the strange copper-blood-purple red of Iseult’s often-referenced hair. ![]() This, along with the story’s unalleviated central concerns–doomed, unhappy love and sad, crunching betrayals that ruin male-male relationships and lives, also makes it hard to think of this as a children’s book. You don’t get a sense of it from the characters or their doomed love, from the world or moments in the text, or in the relationship it’s trying to stage with its readers. ![]() That may be related to how uninterested this novel is in charm as an affect. ![]()
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