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published 1996, Baen Fantasy
This is actually a collection of short stories that are all somehow linked to a poem called "Lammas Night" by Mercedes Lackey. It starts to get a bit repetitive after the first few stories, but a few quirks and twists make some of the stories gems among the stones.
The poem "Lammas Night" tells the story of a wandering woman wizard who settles in a small village. She is given the house of the village's last wizard, who died under mysterious circumstance. As time goes by, she finds herself courted by a spirit lover: the ghost of the dead wizard. He offers two spells to her, one which will banish his spirit, and one which will bring him back to life. Both must be performed on Lammas Night. The poem ends before she decides on her course of action.
The stories that are really successful here are the ones that break from the plot of the poem in some way.
I was particularly impressed by the stories "Miranda" by Ru Emerson, which uses characters from Shakespeare's "Tempest"; "The Captive Song" by Josepha Sherman, which has an entirely unexpected but very believable ending; and "Lady of the Rock" by Diana L. Paxson, which places the fantasy story in our world and uses Irish legend to propel the plot and fantasy elements.
My absolute favorite was "A Wanderer of Wizard-Kind" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, whose only connection with the poem is the wandering wizard. In this story, the wizard (a man in this version) meets a woman in the wild who makes her living by selling the piglets her pig gives birth to. What she does to him, and what he does to her and her pig, is an entertaining, witty, and well-thought-out story.
The remainder of the stories stay almost too true to the original poem; there's only so many ways to say one thing before it gets boring. The book was worth reading for the few really good stories, however.
Review by Catherine George
Reviewed December 30, 1997
ISBN 0671877135
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