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Mirrorscape (2009)

by Mike Wilks(Favorite Author)

3.26 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1606840088 (ISBN13: 9781606840085)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

EgmontUSA

review 1: Mirrorscape tells the story of a young boy who travels to a fantastic city to study with a prestigious artist. What makes this book immediately stand out is that in this world a person’s social status is determined entirely by colour: the rich can afford to buy and wear many colours, while the poor are only legally permitted access to brown. Being caught with a colour without the proper legal documents is a crime. It’s essentially a delightfully unusual tax system or a strange system of royalty licensing. Despite having established such a unique premise, the book spends most of its length exploring much more derivative elements. The plot depicts a number of young apprentices attending a fantastic school run by a kooky old man, which treads much too closely to “Harry ... morePotter” to be interesting. Additionally the main character soon discovers he can literally jump into paintings, which is an incredibly tired and unoriginal plot device. Nonetheless, because the author is a practising artist, his descriptions of what it is like to literally be inside an artwork are incredibly authentic and evocative: I immediately sensed the difference between being inside a simple charcoal sketch compared to a moody oil painting. However, the story then degenerates into an endless dragging action sequence where characters chase each other through artworks and fight with monsters they have painted. The book overall is too long, but this section in particular needed to be trimmed substantially to keep my attention. The characters also endeavour to bring down the colour-as-status system (ostensibly to restore equality) which is actually a bit of a shame, because it is the only unique aspect of this book and deserved to be explored further.
review 2: Insgesamt ein sehr schön geschriebenes und sehr fantasievolles Buch... Es liest sich äußerst flüssig und hat mehrere spannende Höhepunkte...Langweile kommt keine auf... das Ende allerdings hat mich enttäuscht.... Es ist irgendwie lieblos schnellschnell dahingeschrieben.Als ob dem Autor nicht mehr einfallen wollte.... Dennoch lohnt es sich zu lesen denn es hat eine sehr liebenswerte Botschaft ! less

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