Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Named of the Dragon, by Susanna Kearsley

Finally, I read most of Susanna Kearsley's Named of the Dragon. Loved it too, but less than the others of hers that I've read: a B+.
The invitation to spend Christmas in Angle, on the Pembrokeshire coast, is one that Lyn Ravenshaw is only too happy to accept. To escape London and the pressures of her literary agency is temptation enough, but the prospect of meeting Booker Prize nominee James Swift - conveniently in search of an agent - is the deciding factor. On holiday she encounters the disturbing Elen Vaughan, recently widowed and with an eight-month-old son whose paternity is a subject for local gossip. Elen's baby arouses painful memories of Lyn's own dead child/ and strange, haunting dreams, in which a young woman in blue repeatedly tries to hand over her child to Lyn for safekeeping.

Who is the father of Elen's baby? What is the eerie, monstrous creature of Elen's dreams that tries to ensnare her son, and what makes her so sure that Lyn has been sent to protect him? As she begins to untangle the truth behind the stories, the secret she discovers leads Lyn to an encounter with the past that will change her life forever.

I still enjoyed the book like crazy, but I was more conscious of its flaws than with her other books. The ending was very anticlimatic and the supernatural elements were left hanging a bit too much.

Still, the atmosphere and the characters more than made up for it, and though I'm not to fond of Arthurian elements, I had lots of fun with these ones.