When the waitress Lioness (again with the melodrama) appears, it’s clear she has the spring of magic behind her, but it takes almost a third of the book to move it along to the inevitable. It’s one of the reasons he excels at shorter stories/novellas which seem to force him to be more concise. I loved it, from the rickety staircase by Abe’s house playing picnic table/bathroom for the raccoons to the local diner.

The setting is beautiful with a love for the northwest and the ocean. “She also understood just as clearly that she had no business on Puget Sound even in the Yandells’ rowboat, let alone in a skin soap-bubble, and that her fancy of drifting silently over bright shadow, in and out of time and dream, leaving no trail, was one of the dangerous ones, the ones that took people with them when they left.

My only hesitation would be what seemed to be a sudden appearance of Joanna’s restless spirit.

I had the sense of each as a relatively complete personality, struggling with hope, deflecting with humor, living with longing. (See what I mean?) Aside from the tendency to speak like half-baked Shakespeare, the characters feel real and multi-dimensional. Would that we have more true moments like those, however. Alas that the dialogue doesn’t always follow Abe the professor and his long-time lover Joanna talk mostly like people at a Renaissance Faire, aping something that seems almost archaic in structure and naked emotion, but completely unsuitable for daily dialogue. It should be clear that as always, the emotion of the book is true. It was the moon’s midnight smile, shadows shaping a grimace across endless emptiness. The smile chilled Joanna, not because it was evil or mocking to the contrary, it was almost heartbreaking in its remoteness, its unhuman attempt at a human signal. It is possible I might appreciate it more as I grow even older. It’s funny though, because in many ways it feels similar, with Summerlong representing the perspective of a much older author-more sadness, more solitude, less playful. When reading Summerlong, I heard echoes from Folk of the Air, and of the two, I wholeheartedly prefer Folk. I love his short stories, and the novel The Folk of the Air remains my first–and possibly favorite–experience with urban fantasy (1986–take that, Ms. His strength, in other words, is not consistently in plotting. It is not that I love everything he writes as much as I adore his word-smithing and his ability to evoke emotion. Beagle has long been one of my favorite authors.

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle