No Earthly Sunne

by Margaret Ball

Book Overview

Long ago, wicked Kit Arundel had been spirited away by the Queen of Faeries because of his musical masque, leaving his lover Eleanor bereft, and now, Ellen Ainsley flies to England as the spheres of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671876333
• ISBN13: 9780671876333
• Release Date: November 1994
• Publisher: Baen Books
• Length: 343 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Good story, but the songs are the best part!

"No Earthly Sunne" is really a good book. One of the best parts about it is the combination of songs with the plot. I found that I was looking forward to the next song.You may recognize the songs from other places, as I did, but mostly they're beautiful poetry that touches your heart.The most amazing part of the book is the end, no not the end of the story, the end of the book in which Margaret Ball tells the reader about the songs and where they actually came from. It's kind of a compendium of all the songs.If you're looking for some great imagery of Diana with a lot of mythological background attatched, this is your best bet, in the songs.

A really good book

This book has a rather slow beginning, but picks up soon after. And is it worth reading! The storyline is great, the people are believeble, and the fantasy aspect is neatly woven in. A worthwille read!

Dead Forms and New Technology

Ball uses the vanished form of the masque as Kit Arundel's vehicle for combining the spheres of mortal world and Faerie. Borrowing verse from masters such as Ben Jonson and Campion, she recreates a lavish court spectacle including singing, dances, speeches, and allegory. The court masque was a demonstration of princes and courtiers, who played the chief parts. It praised the order and glory of an earthly reign by alluding to heavenly ones such as those of Jove and the Golden Age. The precision of the steps and verse was supposed to suggest harmony to the audience, who would later join in the dancing. Ball's choice of the masque as a mathematically exact form which brings the worlds together is appropriate. Modern Ellen Ainsley is confused by memories of her past life as Eleanor Guilford, an Elizabethan woman engaged to the man known as Wicked Kit Arundel. Taking these memories as signs of madness, Ellen moves away from the music which brings them on and towards her career as a computer programmer, little realizing that the mathematical precision of both music and computer projections provides a gate to Faerie. Ball interleaves episodes of Eleanor's life with Ellen's confusion, the faerie emissary's commissions from his queen, and Kit's attempts to follow Ellen's voice back to the real world. The characters mix practical disbelief with their magic. The writing is calm, not lofty, and the humor of certain situations is not forgotten, as when Kit finds himself at a Renaissance Faire in Texas or compared favorably to his own antique portrait. Those passages which necessarily contain Elizabethan dialogue are not overdone. Ellen's use of her laptop to convince a fey man about the relation of the real world to Faerie is particularly interesting in its suggestion, which is indeed that of the whole book, that modern science is not so far from the alchemical experiments of Elizabethans. The plot works well to convey this suggestion and to relate forgotten ideas to their modern equivalents and descendents.