- Paperback: 392 pages
- Publisher: Swimming Kangaroo Books; paperback / softback edition (21 Sep 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1934041424
- ISBN-13: 978-1934041420
- Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 22.9 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,211,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Silk Palace
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More About the Author
Product Description
Interzone
Imagine Raymond Feists's Riftwars crossed with Stephen Baxter's love of vast timescales.
Richard Jones (Charlotte, NC)
This is a book that I could not put down. I had to know what happened next.
Inside This Book
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
A while back, I reviewed Lightening Days by Colin Harvey and really enjoyed his work. The story was original and the writing kept me transfixed. So when I saw that Harvey had written another book, even though it was a slightly different genre than his other book, I happily agreed to review The Silk Palace.
The Silk Palace follows Bluestocking. Her job is to translate an ancient scroll. Not an easy task, especially since deception and intrigue surrounds her and everyone in the palace.
Bluestocking also has her own secrets. Although trained as a linguist, she isn't a lady as everyone seems to think. She was raised in a convent.
For me, The Silk Palace was good but not great. Something was a little off. I felt that the author spent too much time on Blue's affair with the servant girl and not enough on the actual prophecy.
The Silk Palace follows Bluestocking. Her job is to translate an ancient scroll. Not an easy task, especially since deception and intrigue surrounds her and everyone in the palace.
Bluestocking also has her own secrets. Although trained as a linguist, she isn't a lady as everyone seems to think. She was raised in a convent.
For me, The Silk Palace was good but not great. Something was a little off. I felt that the author spent too much time on Blue's affair with the servant girl and not enough on the actual prophecy.
Format:Paperback
Colin Harvey is an author to watch. With his next or possibly the novel after I expect him pick up a major publisher. Not that this product is published badly, it has an excellent cover and the production quality of the pages is there for all to see.
The Silk Palace is fantasy with attitude, it's dark, disturbing and yet retains all those elements which make fantasy readers come back for more. It's engaging protagonist Bluestocking, innocently drifts into political intrigue, magical religious machinations and fear, and in a world where 'Gods walk amongst men', she eventually meets and battles with the vilest of demi-gods. It's pacy, interesting stuff with hooks a-plenty. Highly recommended.
The Silk Palace is fantasy with attitude, it's dark, disturbing and yet retains all those elements which make fantasy readers come back for more. It's engaging protagonist Bluestocking, innocently drifts into political intrigue, magical religious machinations and fear, and in a world where 'Gods walk amongst men', she eventually meets and battles with the vilest of demi-gods. It's pacy, interesting stuff with hooks a-plenty. Highly recommended.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love
11 Sep 2008
Format:Paperback
Ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love--The Silk Palace has it all. The two younger daughters of the king of Whiterock are to be married to neighboring kingdoms: one to Prince Casimiripian (Cas) of the Karnaki Empire, and one to an Emir of the Western Alliance. Cas has under his care the linguist Bluestocking, who has been invited to Whiterock to study and translate some ancient scrolls whose meanings have been lost through both intentional and temporal obfusaction.
Bluestocking has a dirty secret that's slipped to us early on, which adds a measure of fear to her day to day existence and gives others a few extra hooks to dig into her as she finds herself more and more wrapped in conflicting threads. We're shown, towards the beginning, what would happen to Bluestocking if she were caught out--public maiming and dismemberment; followed by a slow, lingering death. And by the end, the truth _is_ made known.
Sadly, I found The Silk Palace very hard to get into--it was as if a great expository chunk had been chopped from the beginning and flung back into the flow of things without proper adjustment for what a fresh reader would understand. The characters' familiarities with each other (and lack thereof) were difficult to understand from how they acted until we were given relevant flashbacks/memories.
The writing was competent, for the most part, though I felt it over-told some things, re-told some things too often, and fell into cliche occasionally. For all the wandering about, I never really felt an understanding of the city or the people in it--or the context of it all, including armies laying siege. And while it's traditional for everything to fall on the shoulders of one character, I found there to be too many threads that disappeared as soon as they weren't being looked at--for the scope of the piece, I felt the world was under-represented.
And while the "ancient evil" storyline is given a reasonably complex context, it still felt somewhat generic in execution; the characters tell us a fair bit about themselves, but emote no real depth. Any differentiation from stereotypes was largely due to plot, rather than the plot feeling driven by character.
Still, if "ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love" pull you in, you'll probably appreciate the book.
Bluestocking has a dirty secret that's slipped to us early on, which adds a measure of fear to her day to day existence and gives others a few extra hooks to dig into her as she finds herself more and more wrapped in conflicting threads. We're shown, towards the beginning, what would happen to Bluestocking if she were caught out--public maiming and dismemberment; followed by a slow, lingering death. And by the end, the truth _is_ made known.
Sadly, I found The Silk Palace very hard to get into--it was as if a great expository chunk had been chopped from the beginning and flung back into the flow of things without proper adjustment for what a fresh reader would understand. The characters' familiarities with each other (and lack thereof) were difficult to understand from how they acted until we were given relevant flashbacks/memories.
The writing was competent, for the most part, though I felt it over-told some things, re-told some things too often, and fell into cliche occasionally. For all the wandering about, I never really felt an understanding of the city or the people in it--or the context of it all, including armies laying siege. And while it's traditional for everything to fall on the shoulders of one character, I found there to be too many threads that disappeared as soon as they weren't being looked at--for the scope of the piece, I felt the world was under-represented.
And while the "ancient evil" storyline is given a reasonably complex context, it still felt somewhat generic in execution; the characters tell us a fair bit about themselves, but emote no real depth. Any differentiation from stereotypes was largely due to plot, rather than the plot feeling driven by character.
Still, if "ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love" pull you in, you'll probably appreciate the book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
The young woman must now evade her doom and set things right
7 May 2008
Format:Paperback
Pranks mean different things to different people - the prankster may mean no harm or offense, and do it for the fun of it - but the prankee may react much more differently than intended - and it may be a danger to the prankster's life. "The Silk Palace" is a tale of this, in a unique, rich, yet realistic and believable fantasy world excellently written by veteran novelist Colin Harvey. The young woman must now evade her doom and set things right, making "The Silk Palace" highly recommended to community library science fiction & fantasy collections.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A most-excellent fantasy
4 April 2008
Format:Paperback
The Silk Palace by Colin Harvey is the story of a scholar named Bluestockings who has come to a city perched high on a massive white rock between two empires. The only way in or out is by a controlled hot air balloon ride-or being lowered in a potato sack. Bluestocking is a resourceful if somewhat naive young woman who gets caught up in the politics of the Silk Palace. She befriends one princess but makes enemies of the other two. The translation that she is working on turns out to be much more difficult than she expected-and much more important.
Colin Harvey has created a world of magic where your status depends on your name; and your name is given to you by a sacred gem through an incorruptible order of priests. Slaves have one-syllable names while the nobility get true jawbreakers. (Harvey takes pity on his readers and has the nobility granting permission for their intimates to use pet names.) Changing one's name is punishable by death for the family of the offender and torture of the offender themselves. We are given a glimpse of a society in which the layers of society are fixed and immutable.
The characters that Harvey creates for the story are believable and likable. Even the villains are complex and human. The actions follow logically from the nature of the people in the story. Just one warning - some scenes are quite graphic, though not unnecessarily so. This book grew on me as I read it. I began thinking that it was an interesting premise, but as the plot progressed I was pulled more and more into the lives of the people in this world. I finished the story wanting to learn more about the people and their lives.
Armchair Interviews says: This was a sleeper, but the story is very pleasantly surprising.
Colin Harvey has created a world of magic where your status depends on your name; and your name is given to you by a sacred gem through an incorruptible order of priests. Slaves have one-syllable names while the nobility get true jawbreakers. (Harvey takes pity on his readers and has the nobility granting permission for their intimates to use pet names.) Changing one's name is punishable by death for the family of the offender and torture of the offender themselves. We are given a glimpse of a society in which the layers of society are fixed and immutable.
The characters that Harvey creates for the story are believable and likable. Even the villains are complex and human. The actions follow logically from the nature of the people in the story. Just one warning - some scenes are quite graphic, though not unnecessarily so. This book grew on me as I read it. I began thinking that it was an interesting premise, but as the plot progressed I was pulled more and more into the lives of the people in this world. I finished the story wanting to learn more about the people and their lives.
Armchair Interviews says: This was a sleeper, but the story is very pleasantly surprising.
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