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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Smith, Stephanie A

Tagged: Author.

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(1959-    ) US writer whose first novels, the Snow-Eyes sequence – Snow-Eyes (1985) and The Boy Who Was Thrown Away (1987) – are fantasy; Other Nature (1995) is sf. In Snow-Eyes, a young girl (Amarra) is taken from home to enter into a complex relationship with a goddess; similarly, in The Boy Who Was Thrown Away a young boy (Amant) is deprived of a normal childhood and must learn to control his ability as a Shapeshifter while undergoing slavery, varieties of loss, the solace of an animal Companion, and lessons in Music. He is mothered eventually by Amarra, and as a trained singer rescues his cousin from a bargain with Death, for she must die during each day, living only at night and only in the Underworld. His rescue of her constitutes a direct fantasia on the Orpheus myth. The venue is almost – but not quite – a Land-of-Fable version of the Celtic-Fantasy landscape. The telling is supple and undogmatic, with unexpected turns. [JC]

Other work: Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1995), nonfiction.

Stephanie Ann Smith

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