Solstice Wood by Patricia A. McKillip

From the Publisher

The World Fantasy Award-winning author's foray into the modern world-now in paperback.

No stranger to the realms of myth and magic, World Fantasy Award-winning author Patricia A. McKillip presents her first contemporary fantasy in many years-a tale of the tangled lives mere mortals lead, when they turn their eyes from the beauty and mystery that lie just outside of the everyday...

When bookstore owner Sylvia Lynn returns to her childhood home in upstate New York, she meets the Fiber Guild-a group of local women who meet to knit, embroider, and sew-and learns why her grandmother watches her so closely. A primitive power exists in the forest, a force the Fiber Guild seeks to bind in its stitches and weavings. And Sylvia is no stranger to the woods

Publishers Weekly

World Fantasy Award-winner McKillip revisits the setting of her masterful novel Winter Rose (1996) in this compelling contemporary fantasy. Summoned home for her grandfather's funeral, Sylvia Lynn arrives with the intention of leaving as soon as possible. Once there, however, she feels the treacherous pull of the old house, the shadowy forest around it and the otherworldly beings who live there. Sylvia's grandmother introduces her to the Fiber Guild, women who meet once a month to sew the magical barriers that protect Lynn Hall from the fay, "a cold, loveless, dangerous people." But the hall's protective magic has weakened, leaving Sylvia-both mortal and faery herself-vulnerable as "the bridge across the boundaries" between the two worlds. Can generations of mistrust and long-hoarded secrets yield to a truce, let alone a new understanding and even trust between faery and human? Though McKillip has traded her usual lyrical style for a sparser approach, she doesn't stint on characterization, mood or mystery in this multilayered tale. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

When her grandfather dies, bookstore owner Sylvia Lynn reluctantly returns to the small town of her childhood. Brought once more into the radius of her powerful grandmother and the rambling house known as Lynn Hall, Sylvia confronts the ghosts of her past and the possibility that she may not be entirely human-and that her future may involve a group of women who guard the openings between the worlds. With the same gentle elegance that she uses to craft her fairy tale fantasies, McKillip (Od Magic) infuses the present-day world with the elements of myths and the elusiveness of the supernatural. A superb addition to most collections, this should appeal to both adult and YA fantasy fans. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A contemporary revisit to Lynn Hall (Winter Rose, 1996), the huge, decaying mansion surrounded by thick woods where the boundaries between our world and the magical Otherworld grow thin. Out west, when bookstore owner Sylvia Lynn learns from her tough, resolute grandmother, "Gram," that grandfather Liam is dead, she's curiously reluctant to return east, unwilling to stir painful memories-especially of her mysterious, unknown father, who vanished when she was a girl. At Lynn Hall, the clan has gathered around Gram; disheveled cousin Tyler; star-gazing great-uncle Hurley; Owen Avery, the hereditary protector of the hall, whose secret lover, Rue, is a fay; Owen's daughter Dorian, whose boyfriend Leith is half-fay himself. Gram introduces Sylvia to the Fiber Guild, ostensibly a sewing circle, in actuality a coven whose magic stitches keep the passages to the Otherworld closed, because the Others are evil, beguiling humans only to betray them. Conversely, though, the Guild's stitches confine the Others in a dank, gloomy, thorny prison. With Sylvia set to inherit Lynn Hall, the Fairy Queen decides it's time to try to communicate. She snatches Liam into the Otherworld, leaving a twiggy changeling that, at first, only Sylvia recognizes. Leith agrees to help Sylvia find the way into the Otherworld, where she will try to find Liam-and perhaps discover the father she never knew. As always, McKillip writes sparely, with elegance and precision, and this time disguises her usual insufficiency of plot behind an annoying and disconcerting succession of first-person narrators.

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