Keeper of Dreams

✍ Scribed by Orson Scott Card

• Publisher: Tor Books;Tom Doherty Associates
• Year: 2010;2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 418 KB
• Edition: 1st ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Multiple Hugo- and Nebula-winner Card offers short, revealing commentaries on these 22 compelling short stories, novelettes, and novellas, noting that short work has inspired some of his best and best-known long fiction. These short science fiction, fantasy and literary stories, along with a handful of Hatrack River tales (related to the Alvin Maker series) and four stories written by a Mormon, about Mormon culture, for Mormon readers, illustrate Card's fascination with complex child protagonists, touchingly portrayed in Inventing Lovers on the Phone; absorption with moral dilemmas, wrapped up in family love and tensions in Worthy to Be One of Us; and new views of old traditions, familiar and discomfiting in Homeless in Hell and Christmas at Helaman's House. Card intended several of the included stories, like the powerful In the Dragon's House, to open novels not yet written, but even on their own they provide significant examples of his perennial themes: morality, salvation and redemption. (Apr.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High SchoolThe prolific Card published one short story collection, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (Tor, 1990), which supposedly included all of the short fiction he was willing to share. But apparently there are now a lot more selections, as demonstrated by this hefty volume. This compilation, composed of science fiction, fantasy, literary tales, and Mormon stories contains no clunkers. There is some truly innovative and wonderful storytelling here. Card's ability to create believable characters that readers come to care about remains his strongest selling point. Sometimes those characters happen into other worlds, as in "Space Boy" and "Dust." Other times they stay firmly grounded in this one, yet their stories give a new and different perspective on life. Teens who enjoy Card's earlier work, who like short stories, or who are just looking for a new world to lose themselves in can't go wrong here. Standout stories include "Space Boy," "Homeless in Hell," "Inventing Lovers on the Phone," and "50 WPM." Short essays give the origins of the individual selections._Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI_
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