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The Indigo Pheasant

(Longing for Yount #2)

Daniel A. Rabuzzi (Goodreads Author)

3.77 · Rating details · 22 ratings · 11 reviews

London 1817. Maggie Collins, born into slavery in Maryland, whose mathematical genius and strength of mind can match those of a goddess, must build the world's most powerful and sophisticated machine—to free the lost land of Yount from the fallen angel Strix Tender Wurm. Sally, of the merchant house McDoon, who displayed her own powers in challenging the Wurm and finding Y ...more

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Paperback, 280 pages

Published August 15th 2012 by ChiTeen (first published January 1st 2012)

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Dec 14, 2018 Michèle rated it really liked it

Shelves: adventure, fantastic-fantasy

On dirait que j'ai lu une trilogie qui a été réduite à deux livres, car la résolution arrive assez vite pour notre groupe héroïque. Il y aurait plus à dire mais j'ai vraiment pas de temps! ...more

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Feb 17, 2016 Sue Bridgwater rated it really liked it

REVIEW; D a n i e l A. R a b u z z i; The Choir-boats and The Indigo Pheasant- ‘Longing for Yount’.
The Indigo Pheasant is the sequel to The Choir Boats; Rabuzzi describes this on his website as ‘my two-part fantasy series.’ However, it seems to me that a loophole has been left for further stories, of which more below.
It’s hard to summarise these two long and crowded novels briefly; in essence, they are set in a world that seems at first to be ours, but which turns out to be only one of ‘all the REVIEW; D a n i e l A. R a b u z z i; The Choir-boats and The Indigo Pheasant- ‘Longing for Yount’.
The Indigo Pheasant is the sequel to The Choir Boats; Rabuzzi describes this on his website as ‘my two-part fantasy series.’ However, it seems to me that a loophole has been left for further stories, of which more below.
It’s hard to summarise these two long and crowded novels briefly; in essence, they are set in a world that seems at first to be ours, but which turns out to be only one of ‘all the multitudes of worlds.’ (Indigo Pheasant, 208) However, the descriptions of locations in London in the early 19th century are so vivid that I can recognise some of the features that are still visible, such as ‘Bromley Hall on the leafy River Lea just north of Blackwall’, sadly now on an urban motorway and not looking happy about it. (Although the ‘Eagle and Child’ was never in Hoxton Square, I think!)

Many clues, from the beginning of the first novel onward, make it clear that this is not our London: characters from Austen, Dickens, and other writers appear; saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church have chapels in England; magic lurks beneath the surfaces of things. And above all, this Otherworld has an Otherworld of its own, Yount, a lost continent that was wrenched away from somewhere in the Southern Ocean generations ago, and which still calls to those who can hear it. This is the source of the ‘longing’ that motivates the plot and characters of the two-part tale; in the first story an assemblage of the main characters makes it to Yount, by singing their boats there, only to find war and destruction raging. ‘The Indigo Pheasant’ is the name of the ship whose construction dominates the second tale, and for which a special choir is assembled to sing it back to Yount, rescue people left behind and break the enchantment that keeps Yount from the rest of the world.

So what goes on and who does it? One of the problems I find with both novels is that there is a list of characters so long that trying to explicate them in a shortish review would simply result in list-making. And between the volumes, I feel some of the characters change rather abruptly, so that goodies become baddies and vice versa, possibly as a result of there being so many of them.

For Rabuzzi delights in abundance and is besotted with words. The books are full of lists; of terms mathematical and scientific, of foodstuffs and clothing, of legal terms, musical terms, commercial terms and boatbuilding terms. This is partly beguiling and partly irritating. Preparing for this review, I looked up many of the unfamiliar terms, and found that indeed a lot of them were genuine; some were references to gaming and popular culture; some I think were private references. An apposite quotation came my way while I was engaged in this task:

One of the books I dream of but will never write is a history of private jokes in the novel, a guide to all those concealed birthdays and vendettas. The book would be gigantic, and also an exercise in proving its own irrelevance – for in the end the only true way to read a novel is to dismiss the question of provenance: fiction is its own oddly impervious reality. There would be chapters on embedded quotations, or the names of friends....
Adam Thirlwell; ‘Javier Marías – welcome to the funhouse.’
This is what the Yount novels are like; so full of stuff that it’s distracting, or so I found it. On top of all the lists and the appearance of other authorss characters, there are abundant allusions; the Other-London world is called ‘the middle-earth;’ a character given to exclamations once says ‘Beruthiel’s cats!’ Communications are sent by ‘ansible-telegraph.’ Rabuzzi’s exuberant delight in all this stuff is very engaging, but the clutter of things happening and being referred to tend to hold up the plot. I suppose most readers might accept the vocabulary without feeling the urge to look everything up, but if you can’t then you have a heavy task on. Here is a relatively gentle example from page 84; ‘“The pattern the pheasant bestrides,” said Maggie to herself. “The tractix, the evolute of the catenary, the harmony of the nsibidi. Where I will pilot-sing the choral-boat!”’

Contrast this with the telling and simple phrase on page 179: ‘a temerity of dragons’.
On a more positive tack, I did enjoy reading both books, and shall recall some of the characters with delight: the sleeping Goddess and the God who has gone off to play the Blues in 1920s New York; Sally who lost everything and James who lost himself; Jambres the Cretched man and Maggie – who are last seen descending a stairway from Goddess’s garden to that same New York, hopefully a sign of a future tale. I’ll have my dictionary open. –Sue Bridgwater, 2013
http://www.fartheryount.com/Index.html for more from Rabuzzi.
...more

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Feb 02, 2014 Craig Laurance rated it liked it

The Indigo Pheasant is the second and final volume of the visionary fantasy Longing for Yount sequence. It’s a very different book than the preceding volume, mostly because it much more an alternate or ‘hidden’ history novel than the relatively straight forward portal fantasy of The Choir Boats. The book takes place in the London of 1817, and concerns the aftermath of the trip to the otherworldly Yount. The main narrative thrust concerns the building of a new ‘choir boat,’ the titular Indigo Phe The Indigo Pheasant is the second and final volume of the visionary fantasy Longing for Yount sequence. It’s a very different book than the preceding volume, mostly because it much more an alternate or ‘hidden’ history novel than the relatively straight forward portal fantasy of The Choir Boats. The book takes place in the London of 1817, and concerns the aftermath of the trip to the otherworldly Yount. The main narrative thrust concerns the building of a new ‘choir boat,’ the titular Indigo Pheasant.

It’s a whirling kaleidoscopic narrative, that includes excerpts of letters and other documents, in addition to more traditional third-person exposition. First, the bad news: it doesn’t always come together and there are significant pacing issues. Several subplots pop up that are given the short shift. It’s a mash-up of several types of fiction at once. Romantic melodrama, financial woes, and metaphysical dark fantasy all vie for attention. It’s overstuffed, multilayered and confusing. Mood whiplash abounds, as it moves from a a romantically tragic, Thomas Hardy-like subplot (think Tess of the D’ubervilles) to a postcolonial revisionist treatise on the treatment of women and minorities (think A.S. Byatt or John Fowles) to a pseudo-religious allegory, a la C.S. Lewis. It’s an ambitious, high-wire act of a novel.

The ex-charwoman Maggie is the novel’s focal point; she’s an African-American mathematical genius who finds her way in the fold of the McDoon family, the stars of the previous novel. She is, in fact, a distant relative. Maggie is a headstrong woman who faces her problems head-on, whether they be racism, sexism or facing the Big Bad—the fallen angel Strix. Whenever Maggie is ‘onscreen,’ the novel comes alive. The same goes for the appearance of Strix, who shape-changes into a demonic owl. The fallen angel, in the way of most incarnations of the Devil, gets the best lines. At one point, he says to Maggie:

“No one has heard of you, except in a backhanded way; they view you (to the extent they see you at all) as a freak, a ‘Calibanna’ who has learned a few tricks for the parlour.”

Unfortunately, the adventures of the rest of the McDoon, particularly the heroine Sally, tend to be overshadowed. Sally, who was stronger in ‘The Choir Boats,’ becomes mired in tragedy, and becomes a second fiddle to Maggie, as do the rest of the rather large cast.

Rabuzzi’s language is evocative, but at times, overwhelms with its erudition and gives way to full-on purple passages:

“Luminescent shadows piled—oozed—into Sally’s attic-room. Grey dimmed to rust- and umber-mottled colors of the cricket’s carapace, with an under-tint of jade, forming and reforming in the corners of the chamber.”

This kind of exalted, high style language works during the scenes of sorcery, which are chilling. Elsewhere, it is overly fussy and stalls the narrative pace. This is a book for word-lovers; Rabuzzi seasons his sentences with swarms of underused and obscure words. But to other readers, the word choice becomes confusing and over-decorous.

At its best, The Indigo Pheasant and the Longing for Yount sequence is one of the most original fantasies in recent years. The magic system--based on mathematics and music theory, is a marvel of an invention. The feminist subtext is infused throughout, from the ‘real’ world scenes to the trippy Gnostic/ Blakean cosmology that under grids the narrative. ...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Lorina Stephens rated it liked it

Daniel a. Rabuzzi concludes (or does he?) the story of Yount in The Indigo Pheasant.

Overall this is a well-crafted, highly intelligent tale, drawing upon Biblical and literary sources (so many literary sources!) Yet throughout there is a distance between story and reader, perhaps because Rabuzzi chooses to narrate his story more from an impersonal third person, rather than a tightly focused, character-driven third person, which renders the tale more as a story to be read aloud to someone, than a ...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Lianne rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, fantasy

I received a copy of this novel from the publishers in exchange for an honest review.

The Indigo Pheasant continues the story of Yount that started with The Choir Boats. Because most of the characters are already established, the story moves at a far steadier pace this time around. I found this novel to be a little darker than the first one, particularly the character journey that Sally was on. Although the pacing was better and the story was tighter, I still had problems connecting with the char ...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Pat rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

So many marvelous aspects to this book. Since the basic premise and settings were established in The Choir Boats, I was able to concentrate on the characters and language. I was pleased to see Maggie come into her own as she was a favorite character in the first book, but I also enjoyed the mix of secondary characters. Daniel A. Rabuzzi charmed me with his dreamy writing style, full of literary references (I'm sure I missed as many as I caught). The vocabulary also pleased me, even though many u ...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Diana Kolpak rated it liked it

A satisfying conclusion to the series, although I found that it suffered from a surfeit of superflous description compared to "Longing for Yount" that detracted from the action. I loved the fact that Maggie became the main character, but felt that Sally, who drove the action in the first book, was given short shrift in that she became virtually invisible even though she was going through great trauma. Still, a worthy read. ...more

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Jan 02, 2014 Neon Books rated it really liked it

The Indigo Pheasant is the second book in the Longing For Yount sequence by Daniel Rabuzzi (published by ChiZine Publications). The story picks up a short time after where The Choir Boats – reviewed here – left off. The setting is 19th Century London, but the capital is not quite as we know it. The Yount books take place in an alternate world severed from our own many years ago.

Full review at http://www.neonmagazine.co.uk/?p=2318. ...more

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Sep 07, 2012 K.E. rated it it was ok

My full review of Longing for Yount #1 and #2 is on The Crow's Caw http://thecrowscaw.com/2012/10/05/dou...
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Nov 26, 2014 Karl marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: chizine_own

This is copy 23 of 150 signed numbered copies.

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About Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Daniel A. Rabuzzi

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Daniel A. Rabuzzi's debut fantasy novel, The Choir Boats, was included on January Magazine's "Best Books of 2009" Children/Young Adult list. The Indigo Pheasant, Volume 2 of Longing for Yount (and the series conclusion), comes out in September 2012.

Reviewer John Ottinger says:

"The Choir Boats is Gulliver's Travels crossed with The Golden Compass and a dollop of Pride and Prejudice. Rabuzzi has a t ...more