A Thousand Perfect Things
A Victorian woman takes on magical beasts, ghosts, and the British Raj.
In this epic new work, the award-winning Kenyon creates an alternate 19th century with two warring continents on an alternate earth: the scientific Anglica (England) and magical Bharata (India). Emboldened by her grandfather's final whispered secret of a magical lotus, Tori Harding, a young Victorian woman and aspiring botanist, must journey to Bharata, with its magics, intrigues and ghosts, to claim her fate. There she will face a choice between two suitors and two irreconcilable realms.
In a magic-infused world of silver tigers, demon birds and enduring gods, as a great native mutiny sweeps up the continent, Tori will find the thing she most desires, less perfect than she had hoped and stranger than she could have dreamed.
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Kay Kenyon
Kay Kenyon is an American science fiction author. Her first novel, The Seeds of Time, was published in 1997.
More books by Kay Kenyon
Reviews and Comments
Nice and bit different novel about alternative fictional history between logical land of Angelica (England) and magical land of Bhatara (India). Story is quick paced, following mainly the one course of life of Tori Harding, a victorian woman who has dedicated her life to science, because her physical defect prevents her ever to marry. Her science filled life is turned upside down when her mentor, her own grandfather, is suddenly killed in weird circumstances leaving her with nothing in the man ruling field of science. To prove her worth as a serious scientist Tori decides to finish up her papa's work and find the mysterious magical flower he kept insisting excist in the continent of Bhatara. Logical Tori travels to this magical land and eventually grows to know more about this heretic, conquered land than she bargened for. A thousand perfect things is a story of a woman in a world of men and a story of perspective of looking at things. "In the panic of the moment, she blurted, "We didn't know that you hated us." "Am I to love my enemy?" He was taunting her with her own religion, teaching that even Anglics did not obey. Rising to his feet, he said, "You use love when it suits you. And guns when it does not." -quote from the book-