The Iron Ring

Why, after the failure of The Arkadians, would I read another book by Lloyd Alexander?  First of all, I am trying to go through the "A" section at my local library.  Second of all, authors can write good books and bad books: I loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, but I consider The Idiot one of the worst books I have ever read.  The Iron Ring acted similarly.  While The Arkadians was a miserable failure, The Iron Ring was quite good.  The only major flaw was that it had enough characters for a book twice its size, which made those characters a little hard to keep track of at times.  Most of the characters, however, were very different from each other, which made it much less painful than the average too-many-characters book.  The story was quite interesting.  I enjoyed the ending and the nature of Jaya came as a surprise for me.  The entire premise, in fact, mesmerized me from the start.  Though many of the main characters seem to have values that are western as compared to the implied rest of the book's populace, it seems to do this less than most other books.  Tamar only starts to dislike the caste system near the end.  This quirky novel fascinates and compels, and anybody who picks it up will certainly want to follow it through to the end.