The Cabinet of Wonders.
Jul. 5th, 2010 11:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyRutkoski, Marie. The Cabinet of Wonders. New York: Farrar Strauss & Girroux, 2008.
What an excellent, excellent book!shveta_writes handed it to me last week and said, "I think you'll like it," and she was so right.
Petra Kronos lives a fairly ordinary life in the Bohemian village of Okno, despite the fact that one of her closest friends is an animate metal spider named Astrophil, until the day when her father, an artisan and clockmaker, returns home from Prague blinded: the prince of Bohemia, who commissioned Mikal Kronos to create the world's finest astronomical clock, blinded him so that he could never make another, and so that the prince himself could finish the last portion of the clock's construction. Naturally Petra won't take this lying down, so she concocts a plan to go to Prague, sneak into Salamander Castle, and get her father's eyes back. Along the way Petra meets many interesting and complicated people, including a countess whose skin produces acid when she's upset, a Roma boy who opens Petra's eyes to many things, including the concept of zero and the way the world works, and begins to learn things about herself that she had never even guessed.
The book is set at the tail end of the Renaissance in a world in which magic is real (John Dee, who is not a magician, makes a crucial cameo towards the end), and is utterly charming. I particularly liked the character of Neel, who is blunt about the fact that society forces him and his family to be thieves and then stigmatizes them for it, and who knows mathematics far better than Petra regardless of the fact that he doesn't read. Once again, there's something refreshing about these things simply being voiced and accepted in books without argument; among other things, it allows Rutkoski to get on with the story, in which Neel is as much responsible as Petra is for the eventual outcome.
I think almost everyone who visits Prague falls in love with the city; I certainly did, and Rutkoski did too, and her love for the city and Bohemia shines through on every page, though for my tastes I would not have minded even more of Prague. I did find it a little tiresome that Petra's mother is dead and that her and her father share unusual silver eyes, but these minor quibbles are balanced by the fact that Petra gives up dressing as a boy in favor of wearing skirts to accomplish her plans, which is weirdly conformist but also almost radical in the context of this sort of middle-grade book. I also liked Rutkoski's ability to introduce fairly complex concepts in ways that makes them easy to understand without reducing their complexity, such as zero, and that all the characters in the book share a believable human variance in their behavior--that, in other words, people aren't just as, or even what, they seem. I also really liked the ending, and I can't wait to read the next book, The Celestial Globe.
Interested? You should be! The first chapter of The Cabinet of Wonders is available to read here on Rutkoski's website.
What an excellent, excellent book!
shveta_writes handed it to me last week and said, "I think you'll like it," and she was so right. Petra Kronos lives a fairly ordinary life in the Bohemian village of Okno, despite the fact that one of her closest friends is an animate metal spider named Astrophil, until the day when her father, an artisan and clockmaker, returns home from Prague blinded: the prince of Bohemia, who commissioned Mikal Kronos to create the world's finest astronomical clock, blinded him so that he could never make another, and so that the prince himself could finish the last portion of the clock's construction. Naturally Petra won't take this lying down, so she concocts a plan to go to Prague, sneak into Salamander Castle, and get her father's eyes back. Along the way Petra meets many interesting and complicated people, including a countess whose skin produces acid when she's upset, a Roma boy who opens Petra's eyes to many things, including the concept of zero and the way the world works, and begins to learn things about herself that she had never even guessed.
The book is set at the tail end of the Renaissance in a world in which magic is real (John Dee, who is not a magician, makes a crucial cameo towards the end), and is utterly charming. I particularly liked the character of Neel, who is blunt about the fact that society forces him and his family to be thieves and then stigmatizes them for it, and who knows mathematics far better than Petra regardless of the fact that he doesn't read. Once again, there's something refreshing about these things simply being voiced and accepted in books without argument; among other things, it allows Rutkoski to get on with the story, in which Neel is as much responsible as Petra is for the eventual outcome.
I think almost everyone who visits Prague falls in love with the city; I certainly did, and Rutkoski did too, and her love for the city and Bohemia shines through on every page, though for my tastes I would not have minded even more of Prague. I did find it a little tiresome that Petra's mother is dead and that her and her father share unusual silver eyes, but these minor quibbles are balanced by the fact that Petra gives up dressing as a boy in favor of wearing skirts to accomplish her plans, which is weirdly conformist but also almost radical in the context of this sort of middle-grade book. I also liked Rutkoski's ability to introduce fairly complex concepts in ways that makes them easy to understand without reducing their complexity, such as zero, and that all the characters in the book share a believable human variance in their behavior--that, in other words, people aren't just as, or even what, they seem. I also really liked the ending, and I can't wait to read the next book, The Celestial Globe.
Interested? You should be! The first chapter of The Cabinet of Wonders is available to read here on Rutkoski's website.
