Miranda Popescu is a teen with a past that weighs heavily on her. She was adopted as a toddler—by the well-meaning Stanley and Rachel—from a Romanian orphanage during the chaotic post-Communist years. Raised in a bucolic Massachusetts college town (which happens to resemble the author's own residence of North Adams), she has grown up unsure of her identity and destiny. But a few choice tokens of her foreign past, including a mysterious book, seem to hint at a role larger than her daily grind of schoolwork and fantasy reading.

Luckily, Miranda has a good friend in the person of a another teen named Andromeda. But this summer Andromeda is abroad, and Miranda takes up with a mysterious local boy named Peter Gross, who is an outcast from the cliques of high school, mostly due to his physical disability: He lacks his right hand and some of his arm. As the summer progresses, Miranda confides her troubles and dreams and fears to Peter. When Adromeda returns and the school year begins, Miranda's life seems tolerable and stable, thanks to these two buddies.

But then some foreign students arrive, among them a weird Ukrainian boy named Kevin Markasev. And oily Markasev seems to know things about Miranda's past. She finally entrusts the stranger with her beloved, essential book. Markasev promptly burns it in a bonfire. This literally causes the end of the world.

Miranda, along with a bizarrely transformed Andromeda and Peter, awake in the New England of another dimension, where the universe is arranged in pre-Copernican ways, where all humans host "animal spirits" inside them, where doppelgangers can be conjured out of the air, where the British refugees of their drowned island nation have come to fill the role of Red Indians in a frontier America.

And where Miranda Popescu is the white tyger, the lost princess of the ancient, archaic land of Roumania. Now, marooned in Massachusetts primeval where mammoths roam, Miranda and her young friends must also battle the machinations of two distant foes: Nicola Ceaucescu, the baroness whose totem is the red pig; and the elector of Ratisbon, a German sorcerer determined to quash Roumania's ascendency.

Awaking from a dream world

Author of some of the finest SF of the '80s and '90s, Paul Park has been away from our scene for too long. (His two more-recent historical novels on the life and resurrection of Jesus, while superb, never catered to the hard-core genre audience.) Those who have missed the engaging estrangements of such marvelous books as The Starbridge Trilogy (1987-1991) will welcome this new novel with open arms. Newer readers, reared on Rowling and Pullman and C.S. Lewis, will naturally be drawn to it as well.

Park conflates several subgenres here in a dazzlingly productive fashion. First off, we have elements of the well-defined YA fantasy, found mainly in the choice of adolescent protagonists and the motifs of a quest waged in opposition to staunch villains. (Yet the book remains overall an adult fantasy for the more mature.) Second, we enjoy the ingenious Ruritanian atmosphere that surrounds the country of Roumania and its neighbors. Echoes of Avram Davidson's Esterhazy adventures resonate. Thirdly, the Borgesian/gnostic conceit of a world—our world—summoned into being as a false creation due to the magical ideational density of a book provides strong conceptual underpinnings to the action. Lastly, as an alternate-historical playground, the novel allows Park to devilishly rewrite the events of the past 2,000 years or more. (Christianity is a minor religion in Roumania, where churches to Cleopatra abound.)

Park juggles or fuses all these elements with a sure hand, producing a uniquely organic book whose closest kissing cousins are probably Gene Wolfe's The Knight and The Wizard (both 2004).

A lot of the strength of this book—the first of three or perhaps even four, according to the advance publicity—lies in the sensitive, keen-edged depiction of Miranda and her pals. Park abandons any adherence to the quintessential modernist approach of protagonist-POV-delimited narrative in favor of a more old-fashioned authorial omniscience that allows him to dip into the mind of anyone he chooses. In fact, Nicola Ceaucescu receives as much attention and empathy from Park as Miranda does. (Nicola thinks of herself not as a bad girl but as an "artist.") We might in fact have a case here of the fictional antagonist fruitfully pulling the reins from the author's hands and galloping off in directions neither the writer nor his readers can predict.

The book closes with Miranda separated from her friends, but with access to some new powers. Whether they will be enough to cope with a whole world arrayed against her remains to be seen.