Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
September 3rd 2006 04:55
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
Daughter of the Forest is the first novel of Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters trilogy. Marillier is an Australian author, born in New Zealand and is passionately interested in Celtic traditions and Daughter of The Forest includes and builds upon the Celtic just as Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s fantasy novels draw from the Scottish.
Lord Colum is the liege lord of Sevenwaters, an Irish stronghold under threat from the Britons across the sea. He is widowed and has seven children, six boys and one daughter. The six boys are all talented in one way or the other but the daughter Sorcha is a healer and all of them share a strong fraternal bond. Sorcha’s idyllic childhood is disturbed when a young Briton is captured and tortured for information. Sorcha gives in to the plan of her brother Finbar and helps the solider to escape and heal.
But their world is shattered forever when Lord Colum brings home a new wife Lady Oonagh, a Medea archetype, who is bent on acquiring power over the family. After a bit of resistance from the children, she quickly turns the brothers into swans. Sorcha alone escapes from her spell and according to the guardians of the forest, the spell can be reversed only by Sorcha, after a gruelling task of weaving six shirts from a thorny plant and not talking to anyone till she completes the task. Sorcha starts on the daunting task but there are obstacles all along the way. She has to escape the prying eyes of lady Oonagh, she is raped and tortured and when she tries to escape, she quickly falls into the hands of a group of British men.
The novel starts like a dream and quickly turns into a morally challenging fable when Sorcha and Finbar help the British prisoner escape because we are never sure of Finbar’s motives and I have not figured out whether to like him or detest him. But, the novel’s turn into the fabulous when the brothers are turned into swans, is sudden and jarring. The labours of Sorcha and the subsequent developments put it squarely within the traditional romance where the operative plot is driven based on the inability of the lovers to communicate their love to each other. The dialogue is somewhat off-key and the action lame but Marillier’s biggest strength is in her narrative. She possesses a unique, entrancing voice and a spirituality rooted in the nature which make the reading her novel a highly pleasurable task. All in all, an impressive first novel and a great fantasy.
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