The Tourmaline
Winter is the best time for reading. It’s cold and the clouds hang heavy, closing the world in to just the short prospect you can see out a frosted window: wind blowing through bare tree limbs, a forlorn bird feeder with an equally forlorn looking squirrel rooting around underneath. Gray upon gray.
What better to read on such a forlorn day than a good fantasy novel? What was a closed in world opens with new and unexpected horizons. Grayness is transformed into a palette of living color, perhaps with colors that are different from the ones we are accustomed to. Just think of the startling transition from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. For readers of fantasy the experience is the same; we are lifted up out of the Kansas of our doldrums and transported to an Emerald City of infinite possibilities.
Paul Park’s Princess of Roumania (reviewed June 2007) introduced readers to Miranda Popescu and her friends Peter and Andromeda. They inhabit a place and time that seems familiar but this turns out to be an illusion. Because Miranda is not, as she has been led to believe, an orphan adopted in Romania. She is the child of a deposed prince in Roumania, which is a very different country from the one we know today (Romania). Nor are Peter and Andromeda who they appear to be. They are all part of an intricate web of deception and intrigue that threatens to engulf them and wreak havoc in their homeland. At the end of book one, Miranda is transported back to her native country in order to reclaim her birthright.
The forces that are arrayed against her are formidable. Baroness Ceausescu, the widow of the man responsible for Prince Schenk von Shenck’s fall from power, has assumed the role of the White Tyger, a near mythical symbol of Roumania’s independence. The people of Roumania, though in the thrall of the Baroness’ enchantment, await the return of the real White Tyger, who is descended from the royal line of the Bracoveanu family and even, according to legend, Mary Magdalene herself.
There is also the Elector of Ratisbon who holds Miranda’s birth mother, Clara Bracoveanu, hostage. He seeks to forstall the return of the White Tyger to consolidate his country’s hold on her kingdom and in order to further his own political interests.
There is a vampire, of course, named Codreanu, as cold-blooded as Count Dracula (although no one in Roumania has heard of the latter), who Miranda faces after she is restored to her ancestral holdings, vanquishing him with the help of her Aunt Aegypta’s spirit. Miranda is betrayed by one of her father’s former allies but finds support from a race of monkey people, descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe who have been granted the right to inhabit the old growth forest which adjoin the Bracoveanu’s land. They hide her away and while she sleeps her spirit returns to the dream world of her childhood in Massachusetts, where her animal spirit, the tiger dispatches the worm which represents the Elector of Ratisbon. While she is in her trance, Peter rejoins her, himself transformed unto the great Pieter de Graz, who fought and subjugated the Hungarians alongside Miranda’s father, Prince Schenck von Schenck.
The stage is set for the confrontation between Miranda, who wears the bracelet of the White Tyger, and the Baroness Ceausescu, who has control of the country aand powers she derives from control of the Tourmaline, a jewel purported to have formed in the brain of Johanes Kepler.
Gypsies, vampires, monkey people, animal spirits, sorcery, wizardry, and a powerful stone. There’s a little of everything in this series. What keeps it down to earth, though, is Miranda. Far from her familiar Massachusetts she is rediscovering her real past and as she does so, she discovers things about herself. And as she approaches Bucharest, her powers are greater than she could ever have imagined. But in some ways, she’s the same. When she is finally reunited with Peter/Pieter she says with classic understatement, “You know, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, this princess business.”
This may be the best fantasy series since Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" (maybe even better). Book three of the series, The White Tyger, came out earlier this year. Book four, The Hidden World, is due out in April, ’08. Give those winter blahs the technicolor treatment and read a classic in the making.