Product Description

This is a tale of the events of Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows", seen from the viewpoint of the ferrets, stoats and weasels of the wild wood.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #841938 in Books
• Published on: 1993-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Winding Circle Temple has four new residents--Sandry, Tris, Briar and Deja-- and they couldn't be more different. One is of noble birth and one is a street urchin, brought up to a life of thievery. One is a trader and one a merchant girl, two cultures traditionally at war with each other. What they have in common is that they all possess a strong and wonderful power. These powers will unite them--and when disaster strikes it is the weaving of the magic that will keep them all alive. This is the first title in a new fantasy quartet by the author of the Song of the Lioness quartet. --Philippa Reece

From the Author
A new venture
After writing two quartets set in Tortall (The Song of the Lioness and The Immortals), I wanted a change--not just in background, but of mind and point of view. I love tales of the Arabic world and the Silk Roads, and wanted to try something where all kinds of cultures met and mixed. I wanted to try a group hero, as so many books these days are doing. Also, for years I had been turning an image over in my mind: that of my mother and sister on winter nights, watching television and crocheting or knitting so fast that heaps of new cloth grew in their laps over the course of a few hours. It seemed to me that there was a kind of magic in needlework. I had tried writing about that before, in THE WOMAN WHO RIDES LIKE A MAN and in a short story, "Plain Magic," which was published by Oxford University Press in 1985, but I wanted to try again. I had also made an artist friend who, in the course of a long and productive lifetime, has done smithing, needlepoint, glass-blowing, architecture, weaving, landscaping, carpentry, and pottery-making: he made me wonder what kind of magic might be worked through other crafts.

From this out-and-out stew of ideas came the Circle 4: Sandry, Tris, Daja and Briar. Needlework had been the first craft to get me thinking, and what better person to make four such wildly different people into friends, even a kind of family, than the one who could spin? It is Sandry who gets the thief and the law-abiding merchant to talk, or the Trader and mere land-dwellers to be friendly. Without her, these four might never have united. With her, by the end of her book, they are *forced* to live and work together, and for their sake I'm glad of it. These four go through trials that would break any one of them alone, but together they are hard to best.

Customer Reviews

Starts slow but gets better, a lot better
Overall, I found this book to be great. As with most series starting Tamora Pierce books, it plunges you into a complex fantasy setting which will confuse some readers and possibly make them put the book down. This happened to me when I first read this book, I put it down after about 50 pages. Later I found myself wondering what happened in the end. I started reading again and the book became a lot better, it gripped me right until the last page. I founf the Sandry character to be very uninteresting and very much the extreme good girl of the lot, but I found the other characters to be better developed and be a lot more interesting.

In the end I was satisfied with this book and I will buy the next in the series

I loved this book another winner from Tamora Pierce
The first in another excellent quartet of novels. Older children and adults a like will love this book. Four young people (Tris, Sandry, Briar and Daja) are rescued from various horrible fates by a great mage who discovers they all possess unusual kinds of magic. The story follows the children lives as they are taken to live at winding circle temple and details their struggles to learn how to control their unique gifts and on the four mages becoming friends against cultural and class boundaries. The book culminates in an exciting adventure which forces them to work together and use their different magical gifts as one or die. The characters are fresh and lively, the plot is light and interesting and I would heartily recommend it to anyone.

Recommended...
Merry meet all... This is a good story with plenty of variety and action, while exploring the relationship between good well thought-out characters. A very good read, and I am now off hunting for the rest of the series.
It's also as well researched as any fantasy book I have ever seen aimed at a young adult audience. If you wanted it, it's an excellent primer on spinning wool and managing bonsai trees, although I might not be too keen to encourage readers to follow Daja's example with the hot metal!