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The Hidden World
The Hidden World
The Hidden World
Ebook421 pages6 hours

The Hidden World

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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The breathtaking climax to Paul Park's lyrical and mesmerizing series. "Park…should be knighted."--Entertainment Weekly

The Hidden World
is the concluding volume in Paul Park's remarkable tale of Roumania, a world that is both more real and yet also more mysterious and magical than our own.

After finding out that she is the lost princess of Roumania and the mythical White Tyger, Miranda's fate is still uncertain. The ghosts of her enemies cluster about her, the insane spirit of the Baroness takes possession of her body for a time, and demons released by her mother are abroad. And through it all her heart calls out to Peter, away with the army, whom she has come to love, and her best friend Andromeda, sworn to help her and protect her. There are no easy answers; it all looks impossible. Any hope may lie in the hidden world of spirits, where death is but an inconvenience.



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LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 3, 2009
ISBN9781466838918
The Hidden World

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Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Hidden World concludes Paul Park's incredibly ambitious quartet with all the suspense of a high-wire act. Breaking apart genre convention like this requires genuine courage, and it's a delight to report that he succeeds, and then some. Miranda is free from her imprisonment at the Baroness' hands, but the demons released into the world still roam free, and she's without her friends Peter and the man/woman/dog hybrid Andromeda. Can she - and her companions - resolve their fates, and the fate of Roumania?The novel preceding this one, The White Tyger was the darkest entry in the series to that point, and I was concerned that Park would have difficulty resolving such a malevolent, chaotic narrative. The Hidden World gets even darker for a while, but the steady pace of the book - both what's happening to the protagonists, and what's happening to their world - ensures that it moves towards catharsis and resolution. Once again, Park's greatest strengths lie in characterisation. Miranda, Peter and Sasha/Andromeda are wholly believable, sympathetic and likable. The journey has exacted terrible tolls on all three, and he isn't afraid to explicate that. There's no happily-ever-after, or even any smooth tie-ups to The Hidden World, really, and it's difficult to say if it ends any better than the entire series began for its protagonists and the beleaguered people of Roumania - which makes the satisfaction I felt at the end even more astonishing. Indeed, the ambition - and accomplishments - of this novel and the quartet as a whole place it so far outside the YA spectrum, it's sad to think that so many who might enjoy it will pigeonhole the series based on its precis and cover art. The books display a fecund imagination and world-building that both fantasy and YA novels desperately need. Roumania is more than just a canvas for the narrative; the struggles of the people and the ambiguity of _all_ political processes is ever clear. Governing by elites is a fraught, and perhaps somewhat inevitable business, and it has its price in this world. Underlying all this is the titular Hidden World, a Jungian spiritscape with animist creatures and a heavy, symbolic tone. Often, I find writers that generate these worlds in novels use them as an escape hatch for corners they've written themselves into. There's none of that here. The Hidden World is an internal landscape and such the problems of the external world are integral to its make up, and inescapable. Do I sound like I'm raving? Perhaps I am. It's so unusual in either of these genres to find something truly unique, and a writer with the capability to carry it off. The Roumania Quartet received raves from critics but was chronically overlooked by the public. These books will stand up to the test of time, however, and I recommend them without reservation to anyone who might have a passing interest in the genres, and even to some without.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the fourth and final book in Park's Roumanian series, easily the oddest series I've read to date. (Could be the oddest story as well but then I recalled Santa Steps Out by Robert Devereaux and for sheer oddness, that one's tough to beat.) There are three main characters in the Roumanian series: Miranda, Andromeda, and Peter. And their trajectory through these books is hard to summarize. Let's just say that the tale involves: an alternate world; conjurers; magical items (including a gun housing six demons, some of which get loose); possesion; a character that changes from female to dog to male to various combinations of the aforementioned; the titular spirit world; and a war between Roumania and Turkey. That said, I enjoyed the journey although at times I found it confusing. I'd recommend it to anyone bored with the same old thing. Also, lots of writerly types give this series high praise including Ursula K. LeGuin and Gene Wolfe.

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The Hidden World - Paul Park

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