What do You think about The Dubious Hills (1995)?
This is a very peculiar book. The Dubious Hills are a place deliberately set aside from the rest of the fantasy world they are part of by a great spell performed by wizards long ago. There is no traffic to speak of in and out and weird rules govern the workings of the inhabitants' lives. For one, each area of human knowledge can only be the province of one adult at a time, and for another, even though magic is very useful to their simple way of life, it is only possessed by very young children. All the spells in the book, by the way, are quotations from English poets, mostly Romantics, which is a nice touch. The main character is an adolescent girl whose area of knowledge is pain. She is struggling to raise her small siblings after the disappearance of her parents, and her confusion about life is easily sympathized with. Then there start to be scary rumors of werewolves plaguing the village, and that some member of their community is in league with them. But scariest of all is what the children of the village are capable of getting up to, if no one can guide them otherwise. The ending is a complete surprise.
—Ruby Hollyberry
I think I understood it this time!The Dubious Hills are a place in which there is no doubt; a wizard or wizards, sometime in the past, seem to have decided that doubt is what leads to conflict which leads to people getting killed. Avoiding doubt means that people have to absolutely Know whatever it is they know, and thus knowledge is divided into different functional groups and parcelled out amongst the members of a community. The heroine of the book, Arry, Knows pain; she feels it when other people are experiencing it and helpfully tells them what to do in order to feel better, whether it's drinking some tea or going and talking to her uncle who Knows medicine. The community works, and works well; people rely upon their own knowledge for a small slice of the world, and trust everyone else to keep them straight on the other slices. Arry's life isn't perfect -- her parents disappeared a while back, leaving her to raise her two younger siblings without either knowledge or life experience to guide her -- but she's content enough.Then, of course, things change. In some ways there wouldn't be a novel otherwise. But the changes, the challenges, aren't why I liked the book, although they were interesting and unexpected; I like the ordinariness of it, the details of life in an unusual functional community, and I liked Arry a lot. A lot of the book is about thought and knowledge, experience and doubt, what it means to trust another person and what to do when that trust may be misplaced. It's a very talky book, a very thinky book, and not one to read in a hurry; I suggest a warm chair, a nice cup of tea, and a long afternoon to think about the ramifications of the cosmology Dean has set up.I think I actually like this one more than Juniper, Gentian & Rosemary, although that may be because the ending of JG&R continues to dismay me.
—Cera
Beyond question, one of the strangest fantasy novels I've ever read that was still good. In the Dubious Hills, everyone has one specialty of knowledge -- and no one knows anything outside his or her speciality. For example, if your speciality is plantlife, then you know without being taught and with absolute certainty about the properties and uses of plants. But having that kind of inborn certainty about one thing makes you unsure of everything else. So you are aware that fire will burn you if you touch it, because the person who knows has explained this to you, but you don't feel you really know it. The slow pacing in this reminds me of a drawing-room novel. There's a lot of visiting and discussing with other characters as the heroine, Arry, tries to solve the mystery of her parents' disappearance. If you need quick action (or any action), give it a miss, but if you like a lot of conversation between sensible people -- oh man I am making this sound duller than it is, sorry -- then give it a try."According to Halver, today was the first day of May in the four-hundredth year since doubt descended. According to Wim, it was the second hour after dawn. But since dawn in its wandering way moved about, back and forth over the same small span of hours like a child looking for a dropped button, some of the leisured scholars at Heathwill Library (according to Mally they were leisured, according to Halver they were scholars, according to Sune there was indeed a structure called Heathwill Library) had named all the hours of the day from their own heads without regard to the shifting of the sun."
—Kris Larson
