John Crowley's classic novel of family, faerie, architecture, and, yes, lust, is a truly remarkable novel. While it has fairies in it, it is not a fantasy novel. While it chronicles the decline of a great family, this is no Buddenbrooks. While it gives the reader a hasty history of Beaux-Arts architecture, there is no dust on this prose. And even though this tale is sometimes one of lust, this book hasn't a trace of sleaze. This book manages to tell a story about a family close to the faerie world and still be, more than anything else, a *human* drama. What Ursula K. Le Guin says is true, "Persons who enter this book are advised that they will leave it a different size than when they came in."