Scan barcode
cimorene1558's review against another edition
3.0
In no way comperable to the Secret Country Trilogy (although it takes place in the same world), but not a bad high fantasy novel, worth reading once, anyway.
Update October 2017: Just read this, and I find it very hard to believe I read the whole thing two years ago, I remember the beginning, but nothing else. It's a very interesting premise, the Dubious Hills, but still not a great book.
Update October 2017: Just read this, and I find it very hard to believe I read the whole thing two years ago, I remember the beginning, but nothing else. It's a very interesting premise, the Dubious Hills, but still not a great book.
snowmaiden's review against another edition
4.0
This is a really, really weird book. Since it's the only one I've read by Pamela Dean, I can't tell how much of the weirdness is her writing style and how much comes from the peculiarities of these particular characters. I'm not sure exactly what happened or how I feel about it, but I was entranced all the while.
sophiahelix's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting concept, though I still had a lot of questions about how the world setup worked. Dean's writing often doesn't work for me, sadly, and I felt a bit of that here -- dialogue and diction is somewhat choppy, and the characters mysterious in a way that becomes opaque. I think it's the style of fantasy writing that was popular in the '90s that I don't care so much for, very poetic but often making me wish the author would explain things better, instead of drawing pretty and ambiguous strokes.
shawnmcburnie's review against another edition
5.0
I see this as, first and foremost, a book about unintended consequences of efforts at solving major problems - in this case, war.
What if your knowledge was constrained in such a way as to make you dependent, beyond your control, upon other members of your community, and they upon you? How would that change the way you lived, the way you thought?
Pamela Dean explores this through a deeply enchanted rural community adjoining her 'Hidden Land.' Prior fans will find her particular strengths on display, and will gain some context from prior worldbuilding, but the book stands well on its own.
I appreciated the implicit recognition in this book of children as their own individuals, with their own pastimes and priorities. In my experience that is a rare gift in fiction where the protagonist is not also a child. I also - as usual in Pamela Dean's writing - greatly enjoyed her technique of adding an additional resonance, or shock of recognition, to the spellcraft in the story. Spells and charms are made of quotes from old ballads, Shakespeare, and occasionally fairy tales. The concept of magic as a thing one intrinsically recognizes has a substantial appeal for me, and Dean's method is the best I've seen for consistently evoking this.
The ending is satisfying, in that it resolves the major tensions of the story without untidy loose ends, but it leaves a number of open questions to consider, both within the context of the story and in the world at large.
What if your knowledge was constrained in such a way as to make you dependent, beyond your control, upon other members of your community, and they upon you? How would that change the way you lived, the way you thought?
Pamela Dean explores this through a deeply enchanted rural community adjoining her 'Hidden Land.' Prior fans will find her particular strengths on display, and will gain some context from prior worldbuilding, but the book stands well on its own.
I appreciated the implicit recognition in this book of children as their own individuals, with their own pastimes and priorities. In my experience that is a rare gift in fiction where the protagonist is not also a child. I also - as usual in Pamela Dean's writing - greatly enjoyed her technique of adding an additional resonance, or shock of recognition, to the spellcraft in the story. Spells and charms are made of quotes from old ballads, Shakespeare, and occasionally fairy tales. The concept of magic as a thing one intrinsically recognizes has a substantial appeal for me, and Dean's method is the best I've seen for consistently evoking this.
The ending is satisfying, in that it resolves the major tensions of the story without untidy loose ends, but it leaves a number of open questions to consider, both within the context of the story and in the world at large.
manwithanagenda's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
The bookshelves of young fantasy are overcrowded, with increasingly fierce competition, but 'The Secret Country' deserves a far better place than it currently has. I remember when I last reread the trilogy, the name "The Dubious Hills" cracked me up. It was such a deliberate naming and went along with Dean's mythology so well. Little did I know she had written a companion book to the series about the place and that the two of them even have a sequel being crowd-funded and hopefully will be published soon.
'The Dubious Hills' takes some getting used to. Early on in the book Dean subjects the reader to a barrage of an inner-monologue that made little sense to me until later. The Dubious Hills area is under a centuries-old spell that was intended to prevent war. The results of the spell is to remove doubt and divide knowledge amongst the inhabitants. There is only one person who knows how to fix people or objects, one person who can teach, one person to identify plants, and so on. Nothing is certain to an individual unless it is their own Knowledge and everything else must be attributed to the individual who, after all, knows. There is magic, but unless you are the person whose Knowledge is magic your ability is lost sometime before you reach puberty and attain your Knowledge.
Arry is Physici, the individual who knows pain. At 14 she has been left in charge of her two younger siblings after the disappearance of her parents. Life is simple, requiring a great deal of bartering and trips to consult neighbors about everything. Tea is consumed, cats are abundant and if the situation isn't perfect it is at least peaceful. Complications arrive in the form of wolves who don't act the way they are Known to act. With some debate it falls on Arry to figure out the threat to their community and she comes to understand new forms of hurt along the way.
"That's all very good, Myles, but what the hell did you think of the book?"
I liked it. It was different and a well thought out 'if, then' kind of book. It makes me think of Diana Wynne Jones on Ritalin. English pastoral fantasy without the need for messy chaos. Arry and the other villagers walk back and forth across the hills, ask questions, give, lend and borrow necessities from one another and plant the crops, and lots of other details that could be seen as meaningless - but they're not! There's purpose to everything here, though, and The Dubious Hills circles around to an inevitable conclusion.
The Secret 'Trilogy'
Next: 'Going North' --- Coming soon?!
Previous: 'The Whim of the Dragon'
'The Dubious Hills' takes some getting used to. Early on in the book Dean subjects the reader to a barrage of an inner-monologue that made little sense to me until later. The Dubious Hills area is under a centuries-old spell that was intended to prevent war. The results of the spell is to remove doubt and divide knowledge amongst the inhabitants. There is only one person who knows how to fix people or objects, one person who can teach, one person to identify plants, and so on. Nothing is certain to an individual unless it is their own Knowledge and everything else must be attributed to the individual who, after all, knows. There is magic, but unless you are the person whose Knowledge is magic your ability is lost sometime before you reach puberty and attain your Knowledge.
Arry is Physici, the individual who knows pain. At 14 she has been left in charge of her two younger siblings after the disappearance of her parents. Life is simple, requiring a great deal of bartering and trips to consult neighbors about everything. Tea is consumed, cats are abundant and if the situation isn't perfect it is at least peaceful. Complications arrive in the form of wolves who don't act the way they are Known to act. With some debate it falls on Arry to figure out the threat to their community and she comes to understand new forms of hurt along the way.
"That's all very good, Myles, but what the hell did you think of the book?"
I liked it. It was different and a well thought out 'if, then' kind of book. It makes me think of Diana Wynne Jones on Ritalin. English pastoral fantasy without the need for messy chaos. Arry and the other villagers walk back and forth across the hills, ask questions, give, lend and borrow necessities from one another and plant the crops, and lots of other details that could be seen as meaningless - but they're not! There's purpose to everything here, though, and The Dubious Hills circles around to an inevitable conclusion.
The Secret 'Trilogy'
Next: 'Going North' --- Coming soon?!
Previous: 'The Whim of the Dragon'
kristi_asleep_dreaming's review against another edition
5.0
What a wonderful, deep, thoughtful book. Very odd fantasy. What a strange line, between knowing and memory and doubt... I don't think I quite grasped it on my first reading, not until after. This was my third reading.
I think most writers telling a tale of this sort would have made escape from the spell the goal, and thus Halver hero, not villian. I'm still not sure. But the society wasn't a bad one, the people not unhappy, mostly, even if they couldn't know it. I suppose the key is the end, with Oonan's "It's not the certain knowledge, the right knowledge, that did us harm, if harm was being done to us. It was refusing to step outside it." And so they didn't know that a mother leaving might cause pain in her children. Until she read about all the cruel mothers.
I wonder about the wizards. It says they set up the society to eliminate war, murder, and yet no hint as to why that particular setup would achieve that goal. Perhaps just that no one had the knowledge of killing? Or perhaps the loss of certainty... If they thought war was rooted in certainties, leading to fanaticisms.
I think most writers telling a tale of this sort would have made escape from the spell the goal, and thus Halver hero, not villian. I'm still not sure. But the society wasn't a bad one, the people not unhappy, mostly, even if they couldn't know it. I suppose the key is the end, with Oonan's "It's not the certain knowledge, the right knowledge, that did us harm, if harm was being done to us. It was refusing to step outside it." And so they didn't know that a mother leaving might cause pain in her children. Until she read about all the cruel mothers.
I wonder about the wizards. It says they set up the society to eliminate war, murder, and yet no hint as to why that particular setup would achieve that goal. Perhaps just that no one had the knowledge of killing? Or perhaps the loss of certainty... If they thought war was rooted in certainties, leading to fanaticisms.
daedalactic's review
challenging
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
sophiahelix's review
3.0
Interesting concept, though I still had a lot of questions about how the world setup worked. Dean's writing often doesn't work for me, sadly, and I felt a bit of that here -- dialogue and diction is somewhat choppy, and the characters mysterious in a way that becomes opaque. I think it's the style of fantasy writing that was popular in the '90s that I don't care so much for, very poetic but often making me wish the author would explain things better, instead of drawing pretty and ambiguous strokes.
More...