The Tower at Stony Wood

by Patricia A. McKillip

Ace, 2000, ISBN 0-441-00733-3

A book review by Elisabeth Carey

During his king's wedding feast, a knight is approached by a bard, and warned that the king is marrying a false queen, an imposter, and only the knight can rescue the real queen, and thus the kingdom. So off he goes, and has the usual adventures, and is brave and noble, and very decent, and eventually very confused, because he keeps meeting strange women who tell him strange things, and the information that ought to add up to tell him where the queen is and how to rescue her is contradictory in improbable ways. Eventually, he finds out that this is because all the most critical information he's been given is mostly lies, and the real purpose for his mission is very different from what he thinks it is. Page by page, I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but in the end I'm not sure there's anything there.

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