Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Burroughs loved creating new words to evoke the strangeness of his fictional worlds. Some can barely be pronounced, but Raymond Todd delivers them easily. Likewise, the novel's dialogue is stiff and marked by the melodramatic conventions of the period, but Todd does the best job possible with it, humanizing it when he can, and declaiming in full oratorical fashion when it's called for. Todd's delivery is well paced, shifting cadence to follow Burroughs's shifts from war to philosophy. And THUVIA is full of adventure--telepathic warriors, giant apes, true love, and more. All of that said, this book will attract relatively few listeners, being fourth in a series and marked by some truly bad prose. G.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

April 1, 2003
This fourth novel of Burroughs's John Carter stories is one of the least imaginative in the series. Carthoris, the dashing son of the earthman Carter and his Martian wife, is in love with the beautiful princess Thuvia, who has been promised to another. When she is abducted by fierce green men, Carthoris is suspected of kidnapping her, and war seems imminent. Although he knows that Thuvia can never be his, Carthoris sets off to rescue her-with completely predictable results. The story seems less a sequel than a reworking of the themes in the first book, A Princess of Mars. Raymond Todd's narration is fine, but even Laurence Olivier would have trouble bringing the stilted dialog and cardboard characters to life. These tales are often fun, but they lack variety. For this reason, only A Princess of Mars may be necessary to satisfy demand.-Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA

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