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Read Greenmantle (1998)

Greenmantle (1998)

Online Book

Genre
Rating
3.98 of 5 Votes: 4
Your rating
ISBN
0312865104 (ISBN13: 9780312865108)
Language
English
Publisher
orb books

Greenmantle (1998) - Plot & Excerpts

I enjoyed it overall but I did not expect it to be practically half mafia story, half deep woodland story as the book cover and info on the back does not hint at the mafia involvement whatsoever. If I had picked the book up in a shop I may have read the first couple of pages and been put off by the beginning mafia scenes and not purchased it so I am glad I bought it offline and was not put off when I persevered with it thinking it was probably just setting a scene and the woodland scenes would soon occur, which is portrayed by the beautiful cover (which thankfully happens) . That said it worked well and it even got my pulse racing in some scenes, I came to enjoy the mafia scenes. The chapters involving Ali and Mally were the highlights for me as was any mention of what they call in this book greenmantle, also know as the greenman/cernunnos/pan etc. :)Some lines I remember from the book I enjoyed reading are:‘All roads lead to the same end. So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it.’ ‘Some things can’t be explained, some shouldn’t be and some lose their heart when they are.’ ‘It wasn’t the magic of the mystery that was important or the finding of it, but the quest itself.’ ‘He has always been a reflection of what one brings to him.’ ‘It’s important to know what a person was, but it’s more important to know what they are now.’ ‘Talking is not everything Ali, sometimes just being together is enough.’“Thank God, you’re okay,” she murmured into Ali’s ear. “Let’s thank ourselves,” Ali said. “We’re the ones that did it.”AND I need to make a cloak like this one, it sounds lovely: ‘She could see that the cloak now appeared to be made of hundreds of pieces of cloth in the shapes of leaves, all sewn together.’I would like to read some more stories by Charles De Lint in the future

Greenmantle (I think) is one of the better novels to come from de Lint. It is certainly a faster paced story and slightly less dreamy compared to his other works. I found it to me more 'real' and gritty which gave it an air of believability to it as well. It contains all the subtleties that have to do with the pagan influence that de Lint draws from while maintaining his well developed characters.A great read for anyone how is interested in exploring the fantastic worlds that are woven between our own as only de Lint cant present them.Plot ***Spoilers***Frankie Treasure wins the Wintario lottery, packs up her daughter, Alice ("Ali"), and moves into the home where she grew up, after renovating it, even though her deceased father made her childhood there miserable. Everything seems good, for a while. Unfortunately, Frankie's ex-husband, Earl, hears about Frankie's good fortune. Earl has developed into a first-class thug, with mob connections, and he decides that he can kidnap his daughter and get the lottery money from his ex-wife. Karl can then use it to finance a big-time drug deal. Meanwhile, Tony Valenti, a fratellanza (Mafia) hit-man, ends up on the wrong side of an internal power struggle in his Family, and goes into hiding, one block away from the old/new home of Frankie and Ali Treasure. What none of them knows is that, not far away, back in the woods, there is a hidden village of people who reject the modern world and modern religions, in favor of a worship of nature and the Horned God of the Forest.

What do You think about Greenmantle (1998)?

This is a fun novel that had excellent pacing. It reads like a television show, with viewpoints switching between characters just as their individual story has reached a sort of climax in order to evoke suspense for when their story picks back up again. The things I didn't like about they book are explained by it being written a while ago when the elements in it weren't so overused. The main character is a fourteen year old girl who's a bookworm who longs for adventure and is brave...like every protagonist in every book about a child now. And it really hits you over the head with it's feminist message. The message itself that women should be independent of men and that there's no real significant difference aside from the physical makeup of their body is talked about, but then in the action the women in the novel are still damsels in distress while mafia people have cowboy shootouts around them. Once the 14 year old is rescued by a weird magic girl who keeps stealing people's shit, so there's that. And I liked the similarities displayed between Christ and Paganism, particularly the mystery religion about Pan, but to me its arguments didn't really seem that interesting because this was written 20 or so years ago when I think they were pretty new. And as a Christian I kind of felt weird that the main villains of the book were evil ghost monks who try to kill Pan(or greenmantle or whatever) and forcibly convert the teenage girl to their religion. But that's just my bias, it didn't really detract from the story itself, and the scene was really dramatic so I liked it. THanks Ms. Williams for recommending this author to me.
—Alex Long

Meh. A bunch of different characters like a former mafia hitman, a divorced wife and her bright daughter, a bunch of neopagan villagers, and a mysterious wild girl all live in the wilds of Canada. They all are touched by a gigantic stag as the past of several of them come to a violent head.It starts out well, but then drags on. I'm sure for the time the neo-paganism was groundbreaking, but it feels really tired and cliche here, especially the typical "Christianity is bad m'kay" vibe. I'm not against the idea of functioning paganism in fantasy, but a good book doesn't greenwash it: it acknowledges that the deity itself is not perfect. A good example in modern film is Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, with the wolf-goddess Moro. She is wild, pagan, capricious, but tender and long-lived. This just felt very one-sided a book to me, especially when they revealed the dogs chasing the stag.The plot is okay, but after awhile I was just wishing they'd get to the resolution. The pagan aspect was straightforwards and displayed early, so it's just a lot of waiting for Earl vs Tony or what have you. Surprisingly I found myself differing from the reviewers here, and I would have loved it just being a story about Tony, Frankie, and Ali discovering a wild pagan god in their forest. The rest of the characters or subplots honestly felt redundant, and those characters to me were the only ones that mattered. The neopagan village especially was a dumb idea, as it robbed a lot of the mystery of the book. I'll still try later books, but this one isn't really selling me on the author.
—D.M. Dutcher

I chose Greenmantle solely because I read that it was a good start to reading anything by de Lint. His style of Urban Fantasy is unique because it combines both the aspects of traditional fiction with aspects of fantasy. This undoubtedly gets many true Fantasy aficionados upset that his work should be considered Fantasy at all but I now tend to disagree with these beliefs since reading this novel.Greenmantle on the whole is just a simple, yet good, story. There's nothing in the way of true discussion upon society or politics. His development of friendship between adults and children was very good I thought and his style of writing is very peaceful and easy to follow. This novel is easily just as accessible for teenagers as it is for adults and I would recommend this novel to anyone looking for a good novel to read. It is especially adequate for those who dislike reading true Fantasy novels because of their inherent 'far out' nature but who still wish to read a novel with a bit of the mystic and mysterious.
—Brian Darvell

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