Satanic Mill

Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: I first picked up 'The Satanic Mill' when I was in Primary School. Now, seven years later, the book popped back into my head and I remembered how much I had loved it when I first read it all those years ago. So I bought a copy, and read it - and despite an ice-age of seven years, I still loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Hypnotising, hauting...
Review: I first read this book very very many years ago, in French, as a young boy. Since then I have re-read this book at least 15 times. There is something indescribable about this book, that draws me back to it even if I already know the story by heart, and even if I am not a child anymore. As I read it, I feel carried away to that time, I feel I am in the mill with them, I feel I have the same powers they do... that is how well written this book is. I think what I enjoy the most is the camaraderie that exists between the book's characters... This book teaches great lessons on trust, friendship, and self-confidence. In all my years of reading, I still have not found a book to compare to it... or that can compare with the feeling I have when reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best--and scariest--books I read as a child.
Review: I read this years ago, as a child and in Russian, and I still remember the feeling of genuine dread (and triumph) this story inspired. Even as I think of it now, I feel the hair rise on the back of my neck. The evil in the book does not chase after you--it waits for you to come to it, and invariably, you do. In that sense, the title THE SATANIC MILL is unfortunate--you expect the mill to be Satanic; in Russian translation, the book was called simply KRABAT (the main character's name), and you did not quite know what to expect.

The story begins as a young boy named Krabat, somewhere around present-day Eastern parts of Germany, falls asleep wandering, and dreams of ravens crowing. Their message is for him to go to the mill some miles away, to sign up as an apprentice. Which he does, of course, and soon learns that it is no regular mill. (Nor is it quite Satanic, actually--for it is not Satan who runs it). He may stay, or he may go; if he goes, he will learn magic from the Miller himself. Of course, he stays--and becomes one of the apprentices, who turn, at their Master's command, into black ravens. All peachy so far--until the cleverest (and the kindest) of all the apprentices dies an unnatural death--but not before having made his own coffin and dug his own grave.

In the (happy) end, of course, Krabat will have to choose between love and good and fairness--and magic. Between being a regular boy and a powerful Miller himself; but such a choice will not come to him easily--and he will have to fight for his life, and that of his love.

My favorite characters in the book were the idiot Yuro and the Great Pumphut, who gives the Miller a run for his money. The story is very creepy (or I think it would be for a 13-14 year old; I know it was for me), poignant and beautiful.