Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book has several problems, the worst one being that I found that the tone was much too sympathetic towards pedophiles. In chapter 32 a leading character tells a story about a five-year-old girl named Nymph who is being sexually mistreated by her father and her brother. This girl, in her confusion, seduces an adult man who she encounters. The seduction is described over 10 pages and becomes pornographically explicit at times. The story is presented in the context that the adult man (whose name is Mad) should not be condemned because he only did what the child asked him to do. In chapter 37 the same character tells a story about an old woman who happens to have a one-way mirror in the wall between a darkened room in her house and a shed built onto the outside of the house. One day two children, a boy and a girl approx. 9-10 years old, wander into the shed and eventually take off their clothes and try playing man and wife, without much success. The old lady is watching through the one-way mirror, and after the children leave she places a tube of lubricant in the shed. When the children come back next day they find this lubricant and use it and their playing is more successful. The old woman, who is watching again, finds this satisfying. At the end of the paperback edition that I read there is an 8-page "Author's Note". (I believe this note is shorter or missing in some other editions.) In this "Author's Note" Piers Anthony tries to justify the stories of sexual activities between children and adults and the sympathetic slant towards the adults in the stories. In fact, he shoots himself in the foot: "The games five year old Nymph played with Mad where a joy to her at the time, but it was nevertheless abuse by our society's definition (not necessarily that of other societies) ..." "One of the included stories was written by Santiago Hernandez, in prison for pedophilia." "On another occasion she (an innocent five-year-old girl) is left at home with a kindly uncle. He is very attentive and gives her what she likes best: candy. He plays a game with her, but cautions her that it must be secret or they won't be able to play it again. It involves tickling in funny places ... She loves it; no one else treats her like this. She looks eagerly forward to future visits with Uncle, and to the sharing of more secrets." Now it's certainly true that the sexual abuse of children is a problem that exists, and pretending that it doesn't exist won't make it go away. But why make the pedophiles look sympathetic and why try to claim that (some of) the victims are not really victims? I simply can't understand how these pedophile-friendly sections of this book got past the editor. Just out of curiosity, and to check that I wasn't completely off base, I did a Google search for '"piers anthony" pedophilia'. This resulted in quite a few interesting hits, many of which referred directly to this book. The most shocking web reference I found was a message board where pedophiles hang out and exchange messages concerning their sexual preferences. (I had no idea that such a message board existed.) Here were several messages about how good the books of Piers Anthony are. So despite Piers Anthony's claim that he is not sympathetic towards pedophiles, the pedophiles certainly think that Piers Anthony is sympathetic towards them. Neglecting the pedophile-friendly problem, what about the rest of the book? Well, until I hit chapter 32 I was preparing to give this book only two stars because I found that none of the characters are believable. They all do strange things and are driven by strange motives, and none of them act like normal human beings. There is a lot of allegorical story telling in the book, and at one point I wondered if that explained the strange behavior of the characters. In other words, the entire book was perhaps intended to be an allegorical story instead of story about real people. In that case the allegorical messages, other than the suggestion that pedophiles aren't necessarily bad, went over my head. Not recommended. Rennie Petersen