the shining company by rosemary sutcliff

(author's note, bibliography of Chinese folk tales) Detailed, jewel-toned illustrations and spot art reminiscent of Chinese painting highlight key scenes and themes and serve as the focus of an overall exquisite design.Ī worthy companion to Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2009). Lin artfully wraps her hero’s story in alternating layers of Chinese folklore, providing rich cultural context. Realizing there’s a connection between Madame Chang’s stories and the missing moon, Rendi assumes the hero’s mantle, transforming himself from a selfish, self-focused boy into a thoughtful young man who learns the meaning of home, harmony and forgiveness. She challenges him to contribute his own stories, in which he gradually reveals his identity as son of a wealthy magistrate. When mysterious Madame Chang arrives at the inn, her storytelling transports Rendi. He wonders about the innkeeper’s son who’s disappeared and about peculiar old Mr.

The innkeeper’s bossy daughter irritates Rendi.

Bad-tempered and insolent, Rendi hates Clear Sky, but he has no way of leaving the sad village where every night the sky moans and the moon has vanished. When a troubled runaway arrives in an isolated Chinese village where the moon has disappeared, he initiates a quest to find the missing orb and resolve his past.Įscaping from home in a merchant’s cart, Rendi’s abandoned in the Village of Clear Sky, where the innkeeper hires him as chore boy. Her many memorable portraits include the well-meaning king, unable to extricate himself from a cruel dilemma (he was 'not Artos') Cynan, traumatized hero-survivor and the bard, who reluctantly escapes the suicidal last stand in order to bear witness. Her lucid, precise language echoes the long ago ('mind' for 'remember') without a hint of obscurity or the falsely quaint. In gracefully cadenced prose, never marred by sensationalism or false heroism, she re-creates the horrors of hand-to-hand combat and vividly evokes the rivalries and loyalties of men whose joys and hopes she makes kin to our own. With subtle dexterity, she reveals and builds character through action and shapes exquisite, dramatic vignettes that are intrinsic to the story's web of tragic irony. She combines impeccable research with extraordinary imaginative power-mingling recorded fact with logically extended details of what might have happened.

Sutcliff is at her superlative best here. One of the few survivors was Aneirin, a harper whose epic about the mission's heroes is 'the earliest surviving North British poem.' Prosper, shieldbearer (squire) to one of the company and one of the few fictional characters among the historical figures here, narrates his own involvement in the tragic venture from the healing distance of a time years later, when he is in Constantinople. 600, King Mynyddog gathered 300 warriors for a year's training in what is now Edinburgh, then sent them to fight the Anglo-Saxon settlers to the south.

The shining company by rosemary sutcliff