Reviews

Bizarre images and bawdy laughter galvanize this splendid English farce about a prodigious giantess and her explorer son in 17th-century London. Jordan fetches the first pineapple to the court of Charles II, while his mother, The Dog Woman, wreaks vengeance upon Puritans in a brothel. The plague; the flying princesses who defy laws of the courts and gravity; Jordan's travels to the floating city and the botanical wonders of the New World--the tale nips easily in and out of history and fantasy. The two characters eventually merge into the grievously polluted life of modern London. Metaphors abound with polemics on environmental concerns and politics of past and present. Not for the Jackie Collins set: readers need a background in surrealism to follow this story.-- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.

Reworked fairy tales, 17th-century England and present-day London are integrated in this eccentric, boundary-forsaking plunge through time and space. ``Graced with striking similes and poetic cadences, the author's prose is clean and strong,'' said PW , but its finer qualities are ``insufficient to redeem its overwrought artifice . . . and stridently dogmatic feminism.'' (Mar.)