Many people know Diane Duane from her Young Wizards series (So You Want to be a Wizard, et al), now in its eighth book or so. I love those books; I especially love the third one, with its ’state-of-the-art’ early Apple computer. She’s also written a few books for adults; some are set in the same universe as the Young Wizards books, three form most of a quartet, and others are standalones. She’s also written quite a few Star Trek novels, and even an episode or two. However, sometime around 1990 or 1991, she wrote a novel that she describes as “Alpine fantasy” — the first in an epic trilogy using Swiss folk tales, of all things. The book had a strange publishing history; you can read about it on the website. Eventually she self-published it, and the print-on-demand version did so well that she released the ebook version for free. I read the first chapter of this back in 1994 or 1995, when she had it on her website. At the time my internet connection was text-only; I think I even saved the first chapter somewhere as a .txt file. Sometime last year I discovered that she’d released the whole book, and I was excited. Finally, this week, I’ve gotten around to reading it.

Mariarta is the daughter of the mistral (mayor) of her tiny mountain town; it’s around 1300 C.E., and they are in the area which will become Switzerland. She speaks Romansch, but is being forced to learn Daoitsche (’Deutsche’, or German) and does not like it. Sometime around age fifteen or sixteen, she starts hearing voices on the wind; after looking in a scholar’s book and seeing a picture of Artemis with a bow, she gains a compulsion to learn how to shoot. She does learn; around that time, political rustlings start. The country has been overtaken by the Austrians sometime before she was born, and the bailiffs and governors have been raising the taxes precipitously and unfairly. Mariarta’s ability to hear voices on the wind and her odd ability to shoot perfectly with no practice start taking over her life, and she must find a way to save the towns and the people she loves, as well as retain her own sanity.

This is an amazing and unique book. It’s definitely epic fantasy, and also intended as a trilogy, but this volume does stand alone. I did not feel unsatisfied at the end, although there were definitely some threads hanging. I can’t imagine that there have been very many books written in English using Swiss folk tales, since the only one I’d heard of in the entire batch was William Tell. Yes, that William Tell, of Schiller and Rossini fame, is a character in this book, and he’s quite awesome. Duane manages to blend together folk tales, history, and things she made up whole-cloth into a seamless whole, and make it all interesting.

Mariarta is a lovely third-person narrator; she is not perfect, but she felt real to me, and I wish Duane would write the future volumes. I would love to read more set in Mariarta’s world, as well as hear more of her voice. Other characters, such as her parents and her father’s friend Theo, were well-described and certainly intriguing. Duane does a very good job at keeping her cast down to a minimum of people with the same name (there are at least two Werners and two Walters) and keeping each character distinct; I didn’t even regret the lack of a cast list at the beginning. Some novels need them; while I would have liked a map, there is apparently a Google Earth downloadble file providing that service. (See the website for more information.)

I don’t prefer epic fantasy as a rule, but I do love historical fantasy, and this novel satisfies on both grounds. Thanks to my lack of knowledge about Swiss history (hey, I’m only one-eighth Swiss), I have no historical quibbles at all. Duane thoughtfully includes an afterword highlighting some of her own historical elisions, but I read it more out of interest than to confirm anything I suspected. I did, however, quibble slightly at a white wedding dress being included, since most of Europe didn’t wear white at their weddings until after Queen Victoria, but a little research shows that peasants in the 1300s certainly could have worn white. White symbolizing purity has been around quite a bit longer than the British monarchy.

As people have noted (including Duane herself) on the website, this book doesn’t exactly fit into any standard categories. While it is basically historical fantasy with a strong folklore element, historical fantasy seems to be a bit out of style at the moment. Historical fantasy set in 1300s Switzerland has no precedent that I can think of, and it’s, of course, hard to sell a story so completely unusual. Despite all that, it’s still Diane Duane, and it’s still quite wonderful. It most likely isn’t intended for children, but YAs should enjoy it, if they like history and historical fantasy. If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you can guess that I’m going to award this book 5/5 stars, and recommend it to anyone. Perhaps if it gets enough unique downloads, we can convince her to write the second and third volumes!