The Riddle-Master of Hed

The Riddle-Master of Hed is the first book in Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle of Stars trilogy. This is a magical, wonderful novel. McKillip's prose unfolds effortlessly, a simple, beautiful, straightforward style of writing that nonetheless contains great power and depth, like a strong current of water flowing beneath a gleaming, sparkling river of ice. McKillip's fantasy world unfolds organically; her text is not dense with detail, but rather lightly seasoned with adroitly placed specifics so that the world fills in around the edges and from the center as a reader travels further into it. The protagonist of the book, Morgon, land-heir of the realm of Hed, has a fate thrust upon him that he fights at first and then reluctantly endeavors to fulfill. In this way Morgon is typical of a thousand fantasy heroes who have gone before. But his fate, his quest, his journey unfolds in atypical fashion, at least as far as his adventures and journeys take him in this first book. There is magic in the world of Riddle-Master and it is portrayed by McKillip in an evocative fashion, lingering somewhere on the threshold between dream and awakening. In McKillips magic 'system', to understand a thing is to become that thing, and a practitioner can slide between waking and dreaming without great distinction between one state or the other. McKillip paints beautiful images in the mind's eye of a reader, not with super-dense hyper-realistic detail, but more like with the deft, provocative, strokes of an impressionist, leaving the mind's eye and the imagination to fill in the rest. The Riddle-Master of Hed ends on a great cliff-hanger, one that will propel this reader directly into the pages of the next book.