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Crystal Sage
Two housecleaners discover that their client, a musicologist working on her masters thesis, has been transformed into a guitar thanks to her interference with an ancient Celtic power, and seek the help of Brian Amadan, a mysterious elven lord, to help restore her before it is too late. Original.
272 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 1999
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About the author
Kara Dalkey
44 books90 followersKara Mia Dalkey is an American author of young adult fiction and historical fantasy. She was born in Los Angeles and has lived in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Colorado, and Seattle. Much of her fiction is set in the Heian period of Japan.
She was married to author John Barnes; they divorced in 2001. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship and of the Scribblies. She is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Marketing in Los Angeles.
She is also a musician and has gigged extensively on electric bass (which she plays left-handed) and harmony vocals, with such bands as Runestone, the Albany Free Traders, and Nate Bucklin and the Ensemble (in Minnesota) and Relic and Voodoo Blue (in Seattle.) At different times she has also played drums, banjo and acoustic guitar. She is a songwriter, but her total output is low, and consequently no CD or other album is presently in the works.
She was married to author John Barnes; they divorced in 2001. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship and of the Scribblies. She is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Marketing in Los Angeles.
She is also a musician and has gigged extensively on electric bass (which she plays left-handed) and harmony vocals, with such bands as Runestone, the Albany Free Traders, and Nate Bucklin and the Ensemble (in Minnesota) and Relic and Voodoo Blue (in Seattle.) At different times she has also played drums, banjo and acoustic guitar. She is a songwriter, but her total output is low, and consequently no CD or other album is presently in the works.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 23, 2015
My brother tells a story about going to a McDonald’s and being waited on by (of all things!) a sullen teenaged girl. He noted her nametag, and asked if it was pronounced sah-GAY? And she snarled back that it was “Sage”. My brother doesn’t accept attitude any better than I do, so when he left he said “Have a good one, Saggy”. Therefore all throughout the reading of this book - and the writing of this review - I intentionally mispronounced the title "Crystal Saggy". And I always will.
The first Kara Dalkey I read, I believe, was The Nightingale, in the Terri Windling Fairy Tale series. I loved it, and, as I always do when I love a book, put the author on my List and have sought out her books. The problem is … Well, I’ve discovered that my taste as a teenager often … not to put too fine a point on it, it sometimes sucked. I loved Sword of Shannara as a kid; I tried to read it a couple of years ago, and it offended me so deeply I threw it across the room. I’m not saying that the situation with Kara Dalkey is the same, but … I need to read The Nightingale again soon, to see if it’s held up. I’m starting to think that if it has it’s an anomaly among her books, because I’m realizing that I’ve hated every other book of hers I’ve read...
Crystal ... Sage centers around a woman named Joan Dark, whose parents were apparently idiots to name her thus, and whose ancestry may or may not include that other Joan. Saint Joan is brought up now and then, but the mentions bring absolutely nothing to the story, and have nothing to do with anything, so really the only point to even including any discussion of Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’Arc – which … never mind) seemed to be making the parents morons (which the father’s cameo appearance bears up) and muddying the waters.
Non-saintly Joan's family ranch has been sold by her parents (perfectly happily and willingly, I must add), and she trudges through the entire book being bitter about it; she is now self-employed cleaning houses, and has an apprentice … waitaminnit. An apprentice house cleaner? But … Okay. Never mind. The apprentice is Miriam, is as flaky and New Age as they come, not that that’s a cliché or anything. Given that Joan is hard-headed and realistic, they butt heads – sometimes, it seemed, for pages at a time. If you edited out all the sniping between these two, you’d have a novella. As in the joke about a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it would be a start.
Their first job of the book is at the apartment of a friend of Joan’s, who is not home – or so it seems. Long story short, she’s there, she’s just been turned into a guitar by an evil elf. Yup, I know. The reasoning for this, such as it is, is that there is a song called the Lay of Amadan which was gifted to a long-ago ancestor of the guitar (Gillian) by the Sidhe, and another later ancestor turned it into a summoning device, and now Gillian has rediscovered it and used it and ticked off the big guy it’s named after, and, in a semi-related story the elves are planning to take over the world through landscaping. The Indians are helping (sorry, Amerinds – isn’t that as insulting as just plain “Indian”? It’s short for American Indian, which – they aren’t, Indian I mean, and isn’t that the whole point of using “Native American”?), only not all of them, and in fact we only ever see one, and others are fighting the Sidhe (sort of), and in fact not all of the elves are going for global domination, but the ones who aren’t don’t much like Joan (does anyone?), but they don’t have much choice … Oh dear.
I've said elsewhere that I’m not usually a huge critic of plot, but even I have my limits. This was a bloody awful silly mess. We are never told … much of anything, really. And much of what we are told goes nowhere. The Chekhov quote about not bringing a loaded gun in if you’re not going to use it? Not heeded. There were all sorts of guns lying about unused by the end of this. Why was Joan such a good singer? No reason, really. Why was such a point made about their little town being not as peaceful as they thought? No reason, really. What was the connection between the Lay of Amadan and the plot to take over the world? Besides Amadan, who has nothing whatever to do with music in the book, nothing. Why did so much of the important stuff happen off-stage? Why was so much other important stuff, or stuff that might have been interesting, glossed over? ‘Cause. I didn’t much care for this book as I read it, I’m not sure why I finished it, and the more I think about it as I’m writing this the more my dislike grows.
I also said earlier that my main concerns with a book are writing and characterization. Oh, as usual, dear. (<- Gratuitous Buffy quote.) The latter: Joan … It's just not enjoyable when a character is consistently abrasive, and also prone to snap judgments: she dismisses people around her as "Euro trash" and "Rockies jocks", etc. She's derided by her sidekick as being anthropocentric – i.e., regarding humans as the central and most important feature of the universe – and she is, but that's not her biggest detriment, although her attitude toward anything otherworldly is so stolid it's a little hilarious. She's also pedestrian, unimaginative, and narrow-minded, and did I mention surly and abrasive? She doesn't think much of her partner, for the most part; she doesn't think much of the old friend she's doing all of this for, and in fact drags her feet most unattractively when she has to take some time off her work to do so; she feels betrayed by her parents because they sold THEIR land and after decades of back-breaking work are now off enjoying themselves with the money. She calls an old friend in the police department for help, and is abrupt with him. She ticks off every one of the "Others" who try to help … in short, gosh, who can figure why she's single? Miriam… is annoying. Dim-wittedly flightily New Age, and conscientiously anti- anthropocentric… 'Nuff said. The Bad Guy, Amadan, is one of the least Bad Bad Guys I've seen recently; none of the characters were much more than two-dimensional, but he barely made it past one. Even Miriam points out midway through that maybe Gillian did something to deserve being turned into a guitar. (Unwittingly, she did.) And Gillian … we never meet Gillian pre-guitar; we're never even given that much of an indication that Joan was much of a friend, no reminiscences, no frantic worry, certainly no tears. Given the disruption to their lives chasing after Amadan involves, and, as it turns out, the danger, I would think it would have been wise for the author to build a closer bond between them. Instead, it's as if she's being asked to help someone she barely knows, and can barely get past her resentment of having been asked. In the end, Gillian turns out to have been not entirely worth the effort – so (again) what was the point?
As for the writing … if one more character, or the narrator, had used the phrase "woo-woo", this book might well have gone the way of Sword of Shannara (BANG into the wall). The writing wasn’t actively bad … except where it was. “‘Does he mean it or was he just pulling our legs to get us out of his hair?’” Really? Written and spoken with a straight face? The paragraph in which Miriam (lord, is it Miriam or Marian? I think I’ve called her both in this review – and the measure of how little I cared for the book is that I’m not bothering to check) tells Joan that they’re up against the Sidhe is one of the most annoying attempts at Laurel and Hardy-esque humor I’ve seen in quite some time. So – the writing wasn’t actively bad; just periodically bad.
I don’t know. There’s just an unpleasant feel to the whole thing, the white hats as unpleasant in various ways as the black. The wolf-boy or whatever he was supposed to be – coyote? Were-canine? Pooka? Who knows? Joan never really questions what he is, which is pretty funny, until perhaps the point that he pees on her carpet, and maybe not even then. Cain, that was his name – and he was pure irritation. His dialogue doesn’t bear repeating. The man running the magic shop Marian frequents fired a boy who helped her and Joan, and was an out-and-out bitch even while he was himself helping them. Nice. (In fact, everyone except that poor schlub of a cop seems to be helping the two girls simply because they don’t have a choice, because they don’t want Amadan to win, not because they want the two girls to survive.) Again, Gillian is an idiot, and Joan and Marian don’t trust each other half the time and snipe at each other for other reasons during the half they do sort of trust each other. Their priorities alternate between being skewed and being blurred, and in the end it’s not really clear what they were fighting for, whether they’ve won or not, and whether they should have won.
It’s a disappointment. I remember really looking forward to The Curse of Sagamore and being shocked at how little I enjoyed it; I don’t think I had the same high expectations here, but I did expect better.
The first Kara Dalkey I read, I believe, was The Nightingale, in the Terri Windling Fairy Tale series. I loved it, and, as I always do when I love a book, put the author on my List and have sought out her books. The problem is … Well, I’ve discovered that my taste as a teenager often … not to put too fine a point on it, it sometimes sucked. I loved Sword of Shannara as a kid; I tried to read it a couple of years ago, and it offended me so deeply I threw it across the room. I’m not saying that the situation with Kara Dalkey is the same, but … I need to read The Nightingale again soon, to see if it’s held up. I’m starting to think that if it has it’s an anomaly among her books, because I’m realizing that I’ve hated every other book of hers I’ve read...
Crystal ... Sage centers around a woman named Joan Dark, whose parents were apparently idiots to name her thus, and whose ancestry may or may not include that other Joan. Saint Joan is brought up now and then, but the mentions bring absolutely nothing to the story, and have nothing to do with anything, so really the only point to even including any discussion of Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’Arc – which … never mind) seemed to be making the parents morons (which the father’s cameo appearance bears up) and muddying the waters.
Non-saintly Joan's family ranch has been sold by her parents (perfectly happily and willingly, I must add), and she trudges through the entire book being bitter about it; she is now self-employed cleaning houses, and has an apprentice … waitaminnit. An apprentice house cleaner? But … Okay. Never mind. The apprentice is Miriam, is as flaky and New Age as they come, not that that’s a cliché or anything. Given that Joan is hard-headed and realistic, they butt heads – sometimes, it seemed, for pages at a time. If you edited out all the sniping between these two, you’d have a novella. As in the joke about a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it would be a start.
Their first job of the book is at the apartment of a friend of Joan’s, who is not home – or so it seems. Long story short, she’s there, she’s just been turned into a guitar by an evil elf. Yup, I know. The reasoning for this, such as it is, is that there is a song called the Lay of Amadan which was gifted to a long-ago ancestor of the guitar (Gillian) by the Sidhe, and another later ancestor turned it into a summoning device, and now Gillian has rediscovered it and used it and ticked off the big guy it’s named after, and, in a semi-related story the elves are planning to take over the world through landscaping. The Indians are helping (sorry, Amerinds – isn’t that as insulting as just plain “Indian”? It’s short for American Indian, which – they aren’t, Indian I mean, and isn’t that the whole point of using “Native American”?), only not all of them, and in fact we only ever see one, and others are fighting the Sidhe (sort of), and in fact not all of the elves are going for global domination, but the ones who aren’t don’t much like Joan (does anyone?), but they don’t have much choice … Oh dear.
I've said elsewhere that I’m not usually a huge critic of plot, but even I have my limits. This was a bloody awful silly mess. We are never told … much of anything, really. And much of what we are told goes nowhere. The Chekhov quote about not bringing a loaded gun in if you’re not going to use it? Not heeded. There were all sorts of guns lying about unused by the end of this. Why was Joan such a good singer? No reason, really. Why was such a point made about their little town being not as peaceful as they thought? No reason, really. What was the connection between the Lay of Amadan and the plot to take over the world? Besides Amadan, who has nothing whatever to do with music in the book, nothing. Why did so much of the important stuff happen off-stage? Why was so much other important stuff, or stuff that might have been interesting, glossed over? ‘Cause. I didn’t much care for this book as I read it, I’m not sure why I finished it, and the more I think about it as I’m writing this the more my dislike grows.
I also said earlier that my main concerns with a book are writing and characterization. Oh, as usual, dear. (<- Gratuitous Buffy quote.) The latter: Joan … It's just not enjoyable when a character is consistently abrasive, and also prone to snap judgments: she dismisses people around her as "Euro trash" and "Rockies jocks", etc. She's derided by her sidekick as being anthropocentric – i.e., regarding humans as the central and most important feature of the universe – and she is, but that's not her biggest detriment, although her attitude toward anything otherworldly is so stolid it's a little hilarious. She's also pedestrian, unimaginative, and narrow-minded, and did I mention surly and abrasive? She doesn't think much of her partner, for the most part; she doesn't think much of the old friend she's doing all of this for, and in fact drags her feet most unattractively when she has to take some time off her work to do so; she feels betrayed by her parents because they sold THEIR land and after decades of back-breaking work are now off enjoying themselves with the money. She calls an old friend in the police department for help, and is abrupt with him. She ticks off every one of the "Others" who try to help … in short, gosh, who can figure why she's single? Miriam… is annoying. Dim-wittedly flightily New Age, and conscientiously anti- anthropocentric… 'Nuff said. The Bad Guy, Amadan, is one of the least Bad Bad Guys I've seen recently; none of the characters were much more than two-dimensional, but he barely made it past one. Even Miriam points out midway through that maybe Gillian did something to deserve being turned into a guitar. (Unwittingly, she did.) And Gillian … we never meet Gillian pre-guitar; we're never even given that much of an indication that Joan was much of a friend, no reminiscences, no frantic worry, certainly no tears. Given the disruption to their lives chasing after Amadan involves, and, as it turns out, the danger, I would think it would have been wise for the author to build a closer bond between them. Instead, it's as if she's being asked to help someone she barely knows, and can barely get past her resentment of having been asked. In the end, Gillian turns out to have been not entirely worth the effort – so (again) what was the point?
As for the writing … if one more character, or the narrator, had used the phrase "woo-woo", this book might well have gone the way of Sword of Shannara (BANG into the wall). The writing wasn’t actively bad … except where it was. “‘Does he mean it or was he just pulling our legs to get us out of his hair?’” Really? Written and spoken with a straight face? The paragraph in which Miriam (lord, is it Miriam or Marian? I think I’ve called her both in this review – and the measure of how little I cared for the book is that I’m not bothering to check) tells Joan that they’re up against the Sidhe is one of the most annoying attempts at Laurel and Hardy-esque humor I’ve seen in quite some time. So – the writing wasn’t actively bad; just periodically bad.
I don’t know. There’s just an unpleasant feel to the whole thing, the white hats as unpleasant in various ways as the black. The wolf-boy or whatever he was supposed to be – coyote? Were-canine? Pooka? Who knows? Joan never really questions what he is, which is pretty funny, until perhaps the point that he pees on her carpet, and maybe not even then. Cain, that was his name – and he was pure irritation. His dialogue doesn’t bear repeating. The man running the magic shop Marian frequents fired a boy who helped her and Joan, and was an out-and-out bitch even while he was himself helping them. Nice. (In fact, everyone except that poor schlub of a cop seems to be helping the two girls simply because they don’t have a choice, because they don’t want Amadan to win, not because they want the two girls to survive.) Again, Gillian is an idiot, and Joan and Marian don’t trust each other half the time and snipe at each other for other reasons during the half they do sort of trust each other. Their priorities alternate between being skewed and being blurred, and in the end it’s not really clear what they were fighting for, whether they’ve won or not, and whether they should have won.
It’s a disappointment. I remember really looking forward to The Curse of Sagamore and being shocked at how little I enjoyed it; I don’t think I had the same high expectations here, but I did expect better.
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January 8, 2022Even though I really like the idea behind this I cannot recomend it. This was a bit of a mess and boring at times.
January 3, 2014
Setting fantasy in modern times really seems strange; restrains the writer from a lot of what fantasy should mean, if you ask me. But, even with this problem, I did like it. Well written, nice enough story and quite well built characters. Got to more or less hate Joan, like Miriam, try to understand Gillian and, believe it or not, didn't get to dislike Amadan.
Good enough overall, but, as I said, fantasy set in modern times isn't really my thing.
Good enough overall, but, as I said, fantasy set in modern times isn't really my thing.
October 18, 2025
I bought this book kind of like on a whim feeling like I'd like it and in a way I did..but in another I didn't. I think realistically I want to give it 2.5 stars. I will not use spoilers below.
There was some neat story building but then the characters were just constantly being opposites and that nearly never relents. I liked Miriam and Joan for the most part but there were times they both were annoying and especially so when they had unbelievable reactions to the paranormal. Cain's appearance is rather awkwardly handled but he is an interesting character but done wrong. Amadan is a cool character and I couldn't stop seeing him in my head as the actor Julian Sands from "The Warlock" but of course not as evil. Anyways...it's okay.
There was some neat story building but then the characters were just constantly being opposites and that nearly never relents. I liked Miriam and Joan for the most part but there were times they both were annoying and especially so when they had unbelievable reactions to the paranormal. Cain's appearance is rather awkwardly handled but he is an interesting character but done wrong. Amadan is a cool character and I couldn't stop seeing him in my head as the actor Julian Sands from "The Warlock" but of course not as evil. Anyways...it's okay.
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