

But she was always on the lookout for good causes to espouse, and once she had thrown in her lot with the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and with the aims of secular feminism in general, she became to many women - and to many men as well, especially homosexuals - not just a beacon of light, more a flaming torch. Monica Furlong, who has died of cancer aged 72, would have achieved distinction through her writings alone. Also, if you're a children's fantasy kind of person, you could do worse than checking out Juniper if you're looking for something short to break up your TBR list.Obituary from The Guardian, Friday January 17 2003 I don't have any life lessons with which to end this post, other than a) sometimes rereading childhood favorites can reap great rewards (although sometimes they're better left in the past), and b) libraries rock. Can't find Juniper online at a reasonable price? The library has it for free! And I just put the sequel, Wise Child, on hold today. Ultimately, this journey made me SO grateful for the public library system, upon which I cannot heap enough praise. Powell's doesn't have any, and the cheapest I saw new copies going for on a certain large online retailer was close to $60. In fact, it seems like new copies of Juniper are pretty rare these days.

Sadly, the answer was (not so surprisingly) no. (This effect is much like the character Euny in that regard.) When I got to the end I was so engaged that I wished for an author's note shedding light on parts of the story. Rereading Juniper was a deliciously enjoyable experience, so much so that when I finished I immediately jumped online to see whether it was still in print (and whether I could recommend it to the new fantasy readers I encounter every day on the job). But there is a certain quality to the prose that I can't describe other than to say that it gets under your skin and lingers - that below the straightforward surface there is a layer of complexity that I appreciate more today than I perhaps realized as a child. Yes, the court politics run on a fairly standard king system. But I didn't mind picking it back up again, especially in the context of research.Īnd (to get to the point), I was so glad that I did. I remembered reading it more than once, but it had never become one of my constants in the same way Ella Enchanted did, for example. Indeed, when I got the suggestion on Twitter, I didn't remember much one way or the other about the book. First published in the early 1990s, Juniper has the hallmarks of many children's fantasy novels published around that time - there is a distinct good matched against a distinct evil, a straightforward plot with few detours, a certain clarity of focus leading to a conclusion that many readers of more recent fantasy may see as predictable.
