The Seventh Bride

This tale is in the tradition of “the fractured fairy tale”–it has echoes of traditional stories (for example, “Bluebeard” and maybe “Rumpelstiltskin”) However, the reader does not have the “once-upon-a-time”, magical distance from the characters in the story as in a traditional tale, because the protagonists–especially the “seventh bride” and the previous brides too–are more real and fully developed individuals than in the classical tales. There is, moreover, an interesting mix of genres: a certain “realism”; fantasy; sci-fi (the clock and theories of time). Altogether a good read and an interesting experiment in combining many kinds of entertaining fiction!