The Dreaming Jewels - Softcover

Sturgeon, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881843512 ISBN 13: 9780881843514

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1988

Synopsis

A jewel-eyed jack-in-the-box holds a mysterious key to the future of a young boy who runs away from home and hides away in a traveling freak show

About this title

Review:

Eight-year-old Horty Bluett is mocked by his classmates and abused by his adoptive parents until the day his father severs three of his fingers. He runs away, taking only a gem-eyed doll he calls Junky, and joins a carnival. Finding acceptance at last, Horty never dreams that Junky is more than a toy, nor does he realize that a threat far greater than his cruel father inhabits the carnival and has been searching for Horty longer than he has been alive.

Though less well-known than Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) is even more important to the development of literary and humanistic science fiction. He received the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award. The Dreaming Jewels (1950) was his first novel. --Cynthia Ward

From the Back Cover:

In The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon, winner of the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, renders the multiple wounds of loneliness, fear, and persecution with uncanny precision. Eight-year-old Horty Bluett has never known love. His adoptive parents are violent; his classmates are cruel. So, when his stepfather slams Horty's hand in a door, severing three fingers, Horty runs away from home taking only his beloved doll, Junky, and joins the carnival.

Performing alongside the fire-eaters, snakemen, and "little people", Horty is accepted. But he is not safe. For among the freaks is a man who knows that Junky is not a normal doll and that Horty is not a normal boy -- and he knows why Horty's fingers have mysteriously grown back. Using this knowledge he will threaten not only the life of the boy, but the lives of the outcasts who provided the boy with a place to call home. Vividly drawn, expertly plotted, The Dreaming Jewels is a Sturgeon masterpiece.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0881843512
• ISBN 13: 9780881843514
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180