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Couldn't finish this. Boring and rambling with pretty unlikable characters. Just couldn't convince myself that I cared about what happened to any of them. ( )

A Princess of Roumania is the opening of a multi-volume fantasy work by Paul Park. It is an ambitious portal fantasy, with a protagonist who is a teenage girl--in our world, anyway. It postulates a reality of which ours is a disposable alternative. It's an interesting match for my recent viewing of the (commendable) first two seasons of the Amazon television series based on PKD's Man in the High Castle. In the world where Roumania and Germany struggle for supremacy in Europe, sorcery is possible (though illicit) and mastodons roam a barely-settled North America. The means of transition from one world to the other is a book, with considerable metafictional implication (again, compare The Man in the High Castle).

The heroine Miranda is named after the author's daughter, and the New England town where the story starts is a match for one in which the author has lived. I was alerted to these para-autobiographical elements by John Crowley's essay on Park's fantasy (included in the book Totalitopia), and it was this essay that led me to read the book in the first place. Miranda is reasonably sympathetic, but the strongest characterization in the book is for the villain (?) Baroness Ceaucescu. The omniscient narrator jumps around quite a lot, and the two main viewpoint threads are those for Miranda and the Baroness.

I liked this book very much, and while it would probably satisfy the YA fantasy market these days, it seemed like mature fare to me. It is, as I mentioned at the outset, only a beginning. Despite its considerable length, there is little resolution of the plot, although there are some deaths of principal characters and other crucial events. I expect to continue reading this work, borrowing the subsequent volumes from the public library in due course, while I hope to pass on my copy of the first one to a sympathetic reader.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2644747.html

I'm afraid that I gave up on this not quite half way through; it seemed to me a fairly standard portal fantasy, similar to say the Fionnavar Tapestry, with the difference that where I thought Kay took the established Arthurian mythos and did vaguely interesting things with it, Park didn't really do much with Romanian lore and if anything veered very close to stereotype territory in the portrayal of a lot of the characters. I've read many better examples of this sort of story, and so I moved on. ( )

For the first time in absolute ages, this is a book I couldn't finish - the author's writing style didn't work, as I found that the narrative style was overly obscure in its form and the storyline was needlessly complicated in many places. Characters, as teenagers go, were not credible in their decisions and thoughts, and the absence of time markers made it so that I didn't realise at first when there were shifts in places or characters placed in our current/alternate world. There are passages that I had to read a few times to realise what was meant by the author. If English is not my first language originally, I can still spot when a book tries to achieve some sort of literary recognition by pretenting to be more complicated than it really is - science fiction shouldn't have to pretend to be high literature, this book shouldn't either, especially if it includes a complicated narrative. In the end, I won't give the series a go, I am giving my copy away. ( )