Books 26, 27, 34: The Secret Country Trilogy

So, reading City of Bones got me thinking about some old drama I read about on the internets back in my younger days concerning miss Cassandra Clare/Claire. It seems that she plagiarized - and not just a line or two, but whole pages verbatim - from Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy. She also pulled lines from Buffy and other popular TV shows, but those were supposed to be a bit more obvious; no one picked up on the Pamela Dean rip-off for quite a while, I believe.

Anyway, I liked the Draco Trilogy so much, I figured I should probably give these a go:





They were pretty good, especially if you like fantasy in the vein of children getting magically transported to another land, like the Narnia books. The children in these books are transported to a land of their own invention, or so they thought - it was their favorite game of make-believe come to life. They are thrust into roles of princes and princesses in a game that has already begun, and they must deal with the consequences of their scripted actions. It's a pretty good series, and would probably have absolutely thrilled me when I was younger. As it is, I intend to hold onto these books for my children someday, or a rainy day when I want to escape.

One word of caution - the characters speak ridiculously old-fashioned, with lots of thees and thous. It was a little hard to follow conversations at first, and when I say at first I mean for the first two books I was lost. Worth the effort in the end, though.