Guest Review - CASTLE WAITING

by Nicole Wagman, Counter Monkey Number 4


I've been suckered into another purchase at Comix Connection, and since misery--I mean good writing--loves company, I wanted to try and drag some of you along with me! We've had the "Castle Waiting" hardcover collection by Linda Medley in the store for a while, but while it always looked interesting I'd just never gotten around to looking through it before. I had a spare moment the other day and thought I'd flip through a few pages. Then I ended up reading those pages. Then I had to flip back to the beginning and read more. Then I had to take it home with me. Because it was just that wonderful. What's it like? Well, that's difficult to say... It's a medival time period piece, but while people have modern attitudes about many things, and speak in modern language (most of the time), the world itself is time-appropriate. So you can't really say it's modern, but you can't really say it's strictly medieval, either. The best analogy I can come up with is to call it a combination of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise and Neil Gaiman's Stardust. The book's a nice sized collection--the page size is comparable to a prose novel, and it's quite thick--but you'll finish it far too quickly. It's a very pretty book, too; it's the sort you can put proudly on your bookshelf next to your hardback classic collections. It's a very character-based story. There's no sex, swearing, or violence, but it's the type of story that an adult would be enthralled by as much as they were as a kid reading a "regular" fairy tale (and those are referenced quite a bit). It's the story of the castle, but more so the story of the people that end up making it their home, but there seems to be more to it than that. No way to know what that is yet... we're still meeting the people and enjoying their stories--which are quite good and nicely off-kilter. The castle's origin has the taste of epic to it--but for now, we're stuck waiting.


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