The Golden Grove

by Nancy Kress

A haunting green island. A stand of trees known as the Golden Grove. In the moonlit darkness, the webs gleam faintly, stirring in the warm night breeze. Arachne and the women sit at their looms around the Grove, weaving tapestries from the silk of the golden spiders, tapestries of life and time, clarity and light, the pattern of their world...

But the Grove is dying.

The spiders are sick--their offspring disfigured, their webs malformed. The mysterious aura is waning, the peace and harmony fading. Shadow falls over Island, strange ships are seen on the horizon, and Arachne fears that the pattern is about to change...forever.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Nancy Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress is the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Rachel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual novel about a small, isolated island in fantasy Greece which contains a grove of silk-weaving spiders, and something remarkable at its heart. Beautifully written, psychologically penetrating, emotionally devastating.

This novel gets quite grim, and contains child harm. I was also bothered by how the narrative voice also seems to blame the heroine, Ariadne, far more than her husband for a situation in which he seems equally at fault. On the other hand, it absolutely taps into the sense of wonder and beauty that some of my favorite writers do, even if (somewhat) in order to deconstruct it later. It’s a memorable, compelling book, though maybe one more to admire than to love.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read many of Kress' works, but this is a relatively early one, published almost 10 years before her popular Beggars in Spain series. It's very different from what I'm used to, rather like a fairy tale for adults. I struggled with whether to call it science fiction or fantasy, and ended up deciding it's fantasy. But the major difference between this and her later (science-fiction) works is that this seems to be primarily a story told for the sake of telling a story. That makes it fascinating to compare with her later works, and to notice how much better she got as an author over time. What I love most in Kress' works that are essentially absent here, are the moral dilemmas that the reader is forced to struggle with as the characters do.

As a story, this is quite good. The reader accompanies the protagonist Arachne on an emotional roller-coaster ride as the things that have defined her role in the world all begin to change. But Kress' ability to tell a good story, while essential, is not what has made the mature writer one of my favorite authors.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very boring book. Nothing very interesting happened. A girl is sad her sister died.... where's the meat of the story?