Praise for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
“Rich and regal.”
—New York Times
“Before Daenerys was Mother of Dragons, Sybel commanded beasts of all kinds. McKillip offers up a powerful character full of passion, determination, obsession, and love.”
—A. C. Wise, author of The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories
“I admit it: I have been seduced by Patricia A McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld . . . gorgeous, lyrical prose.”
—Guardian
“With its elegant language and lovingly rendered heroine, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld has won the love of readers young and old alike — it’s a book that feels richer with every rereading.”
—Reedsy, The 60 Best Fantasy Books of All Time
“Like the [Lord of the] Rings trilogy or the Earthsea books . . . This magical moonlit fantasy has dignity and romance, heart-stopping suspense, adventure, richness of concept and language and—perhaps rarest of all in romantic fantasy—a sly sense of humor.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is what great literature looks like: bold, self-incisive, powerfully feminist without drawing attention to anything but the prose, the characters, and the story.”
—Usman T. Malik, author of The Pauper Prince and The Eucalyptus Jinn
“This is my favorite book of all time. If I had to pick a desert island book, it would be this one.”
—Gail Carriger, New York Times bestselling author of the Parasol Protectorate
“Rich and lyric prose.”
—Bruce Coville, author of the Dragon Chronicles
“A truly great, concentrated, thoughtful, vicious, exalted fantasy, and everyone should read it.”
—Max Gladstone, author of the Hugo Award-winning Craft Sequence series
“A stunning masterpiece of fantasy. 10/10 stars.”
—Fantasy Cafe
“Gorgeous, evocative, and fragile.”
—Kirkus
“An extraordinary book, and McKillip deserves all the praise she received for creating such a masterful, brave, intricately crafted universe. 10/10 stars.”
—Starburst
“Intimate, gorgeous, quiet and deep, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld remains as resonant as ever.”
—Tor.com
“Wise and deep and lucid and crisp.”
—Antick Musings
“Fear, hope, love, hatred, and all that makes us human assume magical forms in McKillip's characteristically gorgeous prose.”
—E. Lily Yu, author of “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”
“In some ways, it feels more like a dream than like a novel, more like a spell cast over the reader than like prose. It is delicious and wise—a true classic.”
—Susan Fletcher, author of Dragon’s Milk and Shadow Spinner
“More than 40 years after it was first published, McKillip’s World Fantasy Award-winner is unquestionably a classic of the genre, and it reads as timelessly as ever in this new print and ebook edition.”
—Barnes & Noble, Week’s New Sci-Fi & Fantasy spotlight
“Soaring prose, lyrics to songs our hearts have forgotten they knew how to sing.”
—Seattle Review of Books
“A remarkable work of literature.”
—The Royal Library
“Whether you read this magical weaving as a straight fantasy or look deeper and call it allegory, I guarantee you will fall under its spell.”
—Fresh Fiction
“McKillip’s strange, enchanting stand-alone fantasy The Forgotten Beasts of Eld has been reissued...the writing is simply beautiful.”
—Washington Post
“A magical reading experience.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Full of magic, wonder and fantastic creatures.”
—Speculative Herald
“This exquisitely written story has something for almost every reader: adventure, romance and a resonant mythology that reveals powerful truths about human nature.”
—Amazon
“It feels ageless, eternal, light and perfect like a star.”
—SF Site
“The best fantasy novel of the year and perhaps of the decade.
—Locus
“Patricia McKillip weaves an incredibly rich, poetic, wise and mystical story, holding her readers spellbound.”
—St. Louis Dispatch-Post
"5/5 stars. This is one of those books that can’t come with enough high recommendation.”
—Seattle Review of Books
2017-07-04
Reissue of McKillip's 1974 fantasy tale of lost innocence; widely praised, sometimes extravagantly so, it won the 1975 World Fantasy Award.White-haired, black-eyed wizard Sybel lives alone on Eld Mountain with a collection of magical, sentient beasts—the Boar Cyrin, the Lyon Gules, the Falcon Ter, and so on—with whom she can converse telepathically. She and her forebears magically summoned the creatures, though her heart's desire to call the great white bird Liralen remains unfulfilled. Her bubble bursts when Coren of Sirle arrives claiming vague kinship and bearing a newborn baby, the son of his slain brother. Coren's family is locked in an existential struggle with Drede, King of Eldwold, for control of the kingdom to which baby Tamlorn is heir. Reluctantly she accepts charge of the child and begins to experience the emotions she hitherto has never needed. Both Drede and Coren, it turns out, covet her beauty and her power, but Sybel refuses to take sides. Years pass. Tam, it emerges, is actually Drede's son, so she returns him to the king. But then Drede makes a fatal mistake, leaving Sybel burning for a revenge that threatens to subvert her capacity for love. All this echoes many fantasy ideas without borrowing overmuch from any one, and it never turns derivative. The narrative is perfectly articulated, with a timeless quality accentuated by McKillip's trademark crystal-filigree prose and undercurrents of subtle humor. On this level, then, it totally succeeds. But does it withstand closer inspection, as a great fantasy must? Well, Drede and Coren, while sympathetic and appealing (when they're not being perverse or unpredictable), are two-dimensional—the animals have more personality. More crucially, Sybel remains incapable of introspection, unable to grasp that what she does to others is no different than what others do, or attempt to do, to her. The magic, too, is troublesome: it breeds true despite a human admixture in every generation and comes without agency, effort, learning, or downside. Like much of McKillip's work: gorgeous, evocative, and fragile.
