"'One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one's own beliefs and laugh at them,' observes ... Lyman Tower Sargent. Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind." (P. 28)

I love a book with a map and a cast of characters on the first pages! Really enjoying my first Guy Gavriel Kay book. Historical alternative/fantasy fiction.

Difficult, too often caught up in an "academics only" bubble, too intellectual for the likes of me... And yet the book is also a breathless ode to love, to becoming, to the messiness that is living. I am in awe of Nelson's fierceness and honesty.

I'm finding this book hard going, but every now and again there's a simple, beautiful truth there, buried beneath all the intellectual jargon.

This is a YA classic that I never read in my YA time (aeons ago). Now that my daughter read it in one day I had to try it, too. A dark book, a bit dated now, but still very good. I enjoyed the sense of otherworldliness and the menace of the old miller.