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Treasure Box | 
 enlarge | Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: HarperTorch
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $7.98 (100%)
New (31) Used (117) Collectible (9) from $0.01
Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 187949
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.2 x 1
ISBN: 006109398X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061093982
ASIN: 006109398X
Publication Date: October 1, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read -> Recycle -> Reuse!
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Product Description
Quentin Fears is a certifiable recluse, moving restlessly from town to town, investing the millions he's made as a software creator and always avoiding companionship. Until one night he meets his dream woman, Madeleine. Witty and beautiful, she is as uncomfortable with the world as he is.After a few whirlwind weeks of love, they marry.Perfectly happy, there is only one thing that mars their complete bliss -- Madeleine's strange, cantankerous family. And one more thing. There's an ancient family secret to which Madeleine holds the key. Soon Quentin realizes that only he can stop her from unleashing an ageless malevolence that will rule the world. But to do so, he must do the impossible -- step outside of himself and join the world he has always avoided. Quentin must learn to trust, to hope and to forgive. How he does it, while stabilizing a vengeful, volatile family, makes for an unsettling and poignant story that only acclaimed author Orson Scott Card could create.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 well crafted September 10, 2008
Like all of Card's books I have read (around 10), this one is very well crafted. The character development is full, with a richness that only he brings to a novel. The story is well written and strong. It never plods along, but moves quickly, though it doesn't rush.
 Good Read - good characters and nice way of tying everything together. July 9, 2008
Read it in 2 days. Picked it up and just kept going. Not science fiction like Ender's Game and not as good of a novel as Ender's, but still Card's wonderful style. The characters are well rounded and the story takes you in until you can't stop.
 Well-done movie treatment, so-so novel June 28, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The Good: The book moves along smartly. The story is interesting enough to keep you reading. It will no doubt make a smart movie script, if it hasn't already (I don't keep up as I should...)
The Bad:
The characters ring false. The entire story of Fears' rise to wealth feels contrived and unconvincing. I never felt that Card made an effort to get into the head of an unexpectedly rich computer geek; instead, it seemed that Card needed his character to be rich and gullible, and any set of circumstances that resulted in same would have done as well. One never sees how one development flows naturally from the combination of character and circumstance. When Mad and Tin embark on a program of cultivating politicians, we're simply told they embark on a program of cultivating politicians; we don't see the interaction, we're given no examples of how they exploit pet causes to enlist them, nothing at all to convince us that real people are influencing real people. We're presented with a plot sketch rather than a plot and asked to accept that Card has established Mad's bonafides as an ambitious and power-hungry manipulator.
This sets up a real problem with the book. When every development in the story feels forced and unnatural, then the sense of being manipulated and anticipated by Mad loses all impact. The party at which he met Mad was so unconvincing the first time around, that there is no head-slapping moment later in the book when it is revealed that it was a set-up. Card doesn't even bother naming the hostess, as important as she is to the story; she is the stereotypical grande dame, cleverly referred to in the book as 'the grande dame.' She isn't a person, she's a couple of lines of world-weary clever banter attached to a desultory description.
Which leads me to a problem I've encountered in Cards' books before: the Wunderkind. Without offering a spoiler, I can only say that the reader is presented with a character who is yet another preteen operating at the highest levels of adult sophistication, without prior development preparing the reader to accept it. Lapses into childish behavior that are clearly intended as jarring departures from sophistication fail, because the sophistication has been asserted rather than established.
All told, shallow character development and contrived plotting makes this feel more like a movie treatment than a novel to me. On the plus side, I'd go see the movie.
Surprisingly Good Horror Novel by SF Master April 25, 2007
Orson Scott Card's science fiction has always been characterized by strong character internalization and wonderment over the unknown (essentially a mystery element, but not in the who-dunnit sense). These virtues translate well into his forays into the horror field. There is an unsettling disquiet as to what is coming next that creates an erie, spookiness (no hack and slash gorefests here) that surprised me. I also think that the internalizations, as well as key elements of the plot, itself (sorry, don't want to give anything away by being more specific) suggest that one of the scariest things is for others to truly know what we are thinking about ourselves and others. A nice change of pace and a compelling read. Donald J. Bingle, Author of Forced Conversion.
 Brevity can be a good thing March 1, 2007
It was a little slow getting into, and the characters are completely unbelievable. But the storyline was still compelling, and by the time it reached its climax it had me on the edge of my seat, wondering what would happen next. I think I'm glad I listened to an abridged version, it kept the story very compact and engrossing - it was more of a really good short story than a decent novel, and it could have been pared down even further and still retained the ambiance and core tale.
The only thing that really bothered me was the very, very, very end. There was a paragraph or two at the end that was preachy and sappy and annoying. It could definitely been cut off, and detracted from an otherwise strong ending.
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