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The Lizard Princess

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

“Complex and gripping. . . . Newcomers to Arcadia will be captivated by the rich history, while those familiar with it will find that Sophia's legend grants them a new perspective on the earlier tales." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[The Lizard Princess] encourages big-picture thinking. . . . The combination of a straightforward quest complicated by hindsight, with magic, science, and meditations on the building of myths and the role of stories, makes for a book not like much else out there. . . . Gorgeously written and complex." —New York Journal of Books

“This fantasy quest lends a hand toward making our contemporary world a little better."—Foreword Reviews

“The impressive The Lizard Princess continues Tod Davies' imaginative History of Arcadia series with her trademark brilliant storytelling."—Largehearted Boy

"Look inside this world and find wonder."—Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review

"Blending the magic of fairy tales with the great existential mysteries, Tod Davies leads us into a phantasmagorical world that resurrects the complex lore of times past with vibrant narrative energy."—Maria Tatar, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales

"Imaginative."—Jack Zipes, author of The Irresistible Fairy Tale

"Innovative form and spellbinding content . . . Stories, as Tod Davies's History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization's backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society."—Marvels & Tales

Bittersweet. Lush. Human. The Lizard Princess crosses mountains, oceans, deserts, and the Moon Itself to meet her fate and the fate of Arcadia on the Road of the Dead. Her reward is the Key that opens the door to the Domain of Life where wisdom trumps knowledge, as it should in all good tales about the world, whether Arcadia's, or our own.

Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, the first two books in The History of Arcadia series, as well as the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You've Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it's all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 5, 2015
      The complex and gripping third part of the History of Arcadia (after Lily the Silent) sends a teenage girl on a Campbellian hero’s journey. When Sophia, queen of Arcadia at the young age of 15, is turned into a half-lizard by her mother’s murderer, she flees on a quest to recover the lost Key. Sophia, narrating her coming-of-age story from the end of her life, recalls her emotional growth as well as her physical trials. She observes how belief affects perception when she encounters her half-brother, Joe, and identifies the effect of environment on physical and emotional health as she travels through the Dead Wood to Megalopolis’s False Moon. The duality of the fairy tale Arcadia and the sterile technology of Megalopolis is mirrored in Sophia’s physical duality as the Lizard Princess. The power of all types of love gives the journey its foundation, even providing a basis for Davies’s occasionally unsubtle antitechnology philosophy. Newcomers to Arcadia will be captivated by the rich history, while those familiar with it will find that Sophia’s legend grants them a new perspective on the earlier tales.

    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2015
      A philosophy lecture disguised as a fairy tale, this third series entry both recapitulates and reinterprets the previous titles (Snotty Saves the Day, 2011; Lily the Silent, 2012). A curse transforms Arcadian princess Sophy, barely 15, into the eponymous half-reptile. Desperate for a cure, she flees her bucolic realm for a decadelong quest, winding over mountains and through the ruins of technocratic Megalopolis to both moons. She encounters angels and centaurs and mermaids, tumbles into a passionate affair with her younger half brother, Joe, lights upon a quieter romance with a female enemy general, infiltrates the household of her diabolical grandmother Livia, and finally reunites with Joe after his death to conceive their child and retrieve the mystical Key that will at last enable her to reign as Queen Sophia. Yet this phantasmagoric journey, employing lush prose and stunning imagery, twisting backward and forward through time and across worlds, only serves as a framework for Sophy's endless, didactic ruminations about life, death, nature, power, love, and so forth. Despite Sophy's self-deprecating caveats, her gynocentric gnostic Platonism with a New Age varnish is presented as revealed truth, accepted by nearly every character except the most cartoonishly villainous. If handed to exactly the right reader at the right time, this has the potentially to be revelatory, even life-changing; but most will find it baffling, irritating, or deadly dull. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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