The Tourmaline - Tapa blanda

Praise for "The Tourmaline" ""The Tourmaline" should be absolutely stunning. The characters, slightly-out-of-synch-with-our-world setting and twisting plot show great imagination." - "BookLog" "In this second book of his open-ended fantasy series, Paul Park succeeds in the impossible: He truly gets us to believe that our Earth is a crude fiction in comparison to his invention .All this impact thanks to Park's fecund imagination and elegant prose (both qualities reminiscent of Gene Wolf's oeuvre)." - "SciFi.com" "Captivating. . .few readers will find fault with his enchanting characters and compelling story line." --"Booklist" "Equal parts disconcerting, fascinating and indecipherable." --"Kirkus" "The striking world first revealed in "A Princess of Roumania" here becomes both more fantastic and more real at once. It's a magical alternative Europe that exists simply as itself, as in the very best novels---vivid, intense, exuberant, gritty, full of life." --Kim Stanley Robinson "Paul Park's "The Tourmaline" continues "A Princess of Roumania"'s breathless ride through reality and time, faster and even more furiously than before. The plot is enthralling, the prose is graceful and clear, the themes important and intelligently handled." -Delia Sherman "Park fortifies his beautiful and baleful Roumanian milieu with deft characterization and a clever ear for Balkan-spiced dialogue a shade shy of realism, while drawing on mythic resonances. . . . His long Roumanian rhapsody resembles the ambiguous gem of its titles that holds the power to ignite love--it both glows coming-of-age- green and empurples with the passions for power." -"Publishers Weekly" "Park accomplishes in "The Tourmaline" one of fantasy's finest and most incisive political novels." --"Locus""

Teenager Miranda Popescu is at the fulcrum of a deadly political and diplomatic battle between conjurers in an alternate fantasy world where "Roumania" is a leading European power. Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world. An American couple adopted and raised her in their quiet Massachusetts college town, but she had been translated by magic back to her own world, and is at large, five years in the future.The mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany are her enemies. This is the story of how Miranda - separated from her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda who have been left behind in the forests of an alternate America - begins to grow into her own personality. And how Peter and Andromeda are shockingly changed in the process of making their way to Roumania to find Miranda again at the end of this book.