SOURCE: A review of The Innkeeper's Song, in New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1993, p. 74.

In the following favorable review, Jonas discusses The Innkeeper's Song, asserting that in Beagle's hands "even the most timeworn material shines again."

As Webster's Third New International Dictionary confirms, the word "fantasy" has a long and honorable lineage. Its ancestry can be traced back to the Greek phantazein, "to make visible, present to the mind," which is derived from phaos, the Greek word for light, and akin to the Sanskrit bhati, "it shines." Sadly, most books marketed today under the label of fantasy do a disservice to this proud etymology. Instead of fresh wonders made visible, fantasy as a commercial genre has come to mean endlessly recycled adventures of sword-wielding heroes and spell-casting wizards, recounted in a pseudopoetic prose as dreary and predictable as the characters and settings. This makes the achievement of...