Sharon Spencer's novel "Dance of the Ariadnes" tackles the complexities of modern relationships by juxtaposing the lives and desires of two creative women, a Slavic actress, Divna, and a confused American artist, Miranda with the cycle of Greek myths involving Ariadne, Dionysus, Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus. Divna has yet to recover from her tempestuous yet now semi-defunct relationship with ex-husband Gypsy folk singer, Dionysios. Miranda, living and painting on Korchula, a small island off the coast of Yugoslavia is confused by the emotions and passions generated from a recent love affair with Dionysios whom she does not know by name, but thinks is a primitive islander.
The two women who are otherwise strangers, meet in Iraklion near King Minos' fabled labyrintine palace; symbolically they dance together on what they think is the dancing-floor of Minos' daughter, Ariadne, and bond as only two women can. As dual faces of the mortal woman turned goddess, they unravel and analyze their snaggled feelings regarding Dioynysios. Simultaneously, they form klews containing the threads of their own existence which enable and enpower them to wind through the Labyrinth of their future lives.
Throughout the novel, the women change faces. Miranda is always Ariadne, at once abandoned by Theseus and thus captivated and immortalized by the god Dionysus (the symphonic and colorful gypsy wedding).
Earthy Divna also personifies Ariadne; but it is she who abandons, she who is most generous with her love and understanding of the passions of the others around her. She toys with love; her boy-toys are numerous, yet, she is also imprisoned by Dionysus--she has his children and carries yet another child. Towards the end of the novel, she becomes Phaedra, Ariadne's sister and wife of Theseus. As in the myth, she becomes irrationally enamoured by Gerard--Hippolytus, Theseus son by the Amazon Antiope, but the association has no happy ending,Phaedra/Divna/Ariadne emerges from the experience (an intense water sequence reminiscient of the 'white bull' death of Hippolytus) still carrying her child and her memories.
The flow of the novel is quick and light. The reader senses the passion of both women in the erotic dream, reverie and reality sequences which never bore. The novel always intrigues and teases; the reader is curious about both women and the man that touches both their lives. Spenser succeeds admirably in creating a sense of the unknown and mythical that needs not be explained only savored and enjoyed. Would love to discuss this novel with someone who has read some of Spencer's other works or had the privledge of hearing her lecture.

It seems this book was put together in a hurry. Lots of authors contributing to the portions they may understand or use. They don't mention who wrote what but as the reader moves from chapter to chapter, the language and writing style changes dramatically.

I would not recommend this book to others.

To be fair, this is not an easy subject. However, they give a short chapter on XPath, and then thrust you into XSLT. That would not be bad IF, during their weak XSLT explanations they would also explain the XPath in their examples. Not only are the explanations weak, but the writing style of the authors is not clear and intuitive. Don't get me wrong, they do explain them, but not clearly.

I have been reading Wrox books for several years now, I have always learned a lot from them, but I have to say this is the absolute worst Wrox book I have ever read. I would suggest finding a different book.

Sorry Wrox, I normally very much enjoy your books.

I'm a developer currently working on a large-scale multi-platform project, which uses XML and XSL extensively.
The book seems to cover all aspects of XSL in great depth, with plenty of code to illustrate how to apply the techniques the authors introduce.
As a programmer used to more traditional procedural languages, I hadn't realised the paradigm shift that working with XSL entails, but this book has kick-started my enthusiasm for XSL, and has shown me what it can really do. The stylesheets I'm writing now are going down very well at work, and one in particular completes its transformation almost 50 times quicker than the code we had previously (no exageration)!

I'd have to disagree with one of the previous reviewers who says it is concerned solely with MSXML!! Although it does cover this technology in one chapter, this isn't a surprise as the book tries cover all aspects of the XSL field. Most of the book is concerned with platform-agnostic tools and techniques, based on the current W3C standards. We use a lot of java in my company, especially as servlets, and this book was pretty indispensible when I was trying to get my stylesheet to work in tandem with servlets and JSP. The one gripe I have is that the book is rather skimpy on Formatting Objects, and if that's your thing you might be disappointed.
Nevertheless, I'd recommend this book to anyone seriously working with XSL, and although it's not a book for novices, it's an excellent reference that you'll keep coming back to.

Seriosly poor quality. Utter tripe. Awfully written (a bit like their songs) mediocre photography. I hate Bush, but now i want them dead. God awful. Ergh! Sickening.

Unless you're one of those fans who insist on owning EVERY Bush item that goes on the market, I wouldn't recommend this book. I've looked through it all of twice in the MONTHS I've had it, and both times I found myself utterly disgusted that I had paid for such an item! The book itself is extremely small! The words are small and often hard to read do to poor page layout, most of the pictures are small and blurry, and I found several cases where the author listed wrong information about the members of the band. If you're looking for a good Bush book, I recommend the ones by Peter Black.