We think of Orson Scott Card as a science fiction writer, the most famous of his books being Ender’s Game.
Treasure Box, in contrast, is a witch and magic mystery novel. It plays in the early Internet days of about 1996 (the book was published in 1997). The hero is Quentin Fears (rhymes with pierce) who is a software mogul fashioned after Bill Gates (since in 1996, we didn’t know the Google guys yet, Yahoo! was just a startup, and Zuckerberg was just 12 years old).
Quentin loses his sister, five years his senior, when she was a teenager. He never quite gets over it. He grows up to be a computer programmer and through luck and circumstance becomes immensely successful. Like a lot of nerds, however, he is socially inept. Eventually he finds Madeleine, apparently by chance, and falls deeply in love with her. She is the perfect woman. Beautiful, extremely smart, superb in bed, a star on the social scene. They get married quickly and plan their lives together. Life is perfect for Quentin.
Whenever something is too good to be true, maybe it’s not true. When Madeleine takes Quentin to meet his her family in a small town along the Hudson north of New York City, odd things start happening.
Turn on the magic. Evil magic that is….
I read Treasure Box when it first came out and I remembered liking it. But I had completely forgotten everything about it. I just knew it was not a science fiction book. So I picked it up again now.
It starts slowly. The first 100 pages seem stilted, staged, perhaps not very interesting. Only later do all the events in the first part of the book become important and things get wrapped up nicely. Treasure Box is pure entertainment. Orson Scott Card plays with witchcraft, dark magic, illusion, and what those concepts would do in a modern world of cell phones, computers, air travel and modern lifestyles. It’s a quick read and a good page turner to wile away the hours perhaps during a long flight or sitting by the beach on vacation.
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