Author: Emera

A few things Gaiman, one thing not

Neil Gaiman will be writing the script for an English-language film adaptation of Journey to the West. This sounds like it should be very fun, indeed. There might also be some Guillermo del Toro in the mix, hurrah.

At first when I read the news I also thought that this might be the project that Gaiman’s been alluding to during his extended travels in China these past couple years, but I suspect that there’s still something else (or maybe several somethings else) to come out of that.

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The Gneil has also revealed that a film adaptation of American Gods is underway, helmed by a director with “many, many Oscars.” I must admit that the idea of an American Gods movie seems to me only slightly less disastrous than a Sandman movie, but I’ll keep mum till more details are out.

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The winner of the 2010 Tiptree Award, for sff that explores and challenges ideas of gender, has been announced! I also recognize lots of titles on the short- and longlists as books that I Really Should Be Reading…

– E

Go to:

Neil Gaiman

http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a311009/neil-gaiman-confirms-american-gods-film.html

Another sad farewell

Diana Wynne Jones has passed away at the age of 76. I had had no idea that she was ill. Apparently, at least as late as last summer she was still working on two books, which makes me think yet again how much I love authors as people, how much I admire their devotion to their creations and their readers.

While her books weren’t a big part of my childhood, apart from a brief love affair with The Dark Lord of Derkholm, I very much wish they had been – a later read of Howl’s Moving Castle had me cursing myself for not having read it when I was a bit younger. And regardless, I’ve always had a strong sense of her presence and influence in the worlds of fantasy and children’s literature, of her warmth and irreverence.

Good-bye, Diana.

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Part of what had me so shocked when Brian Jacques passed away was my longstanding impression that Redwall, as a world and as a series, could go on forever. For better or for worse, in the case of the series – to me the books began to seem unbearably repetitive somewhere around Taggerung. But regardless of the quality of the later books, and regardless of the criticisms of moral black-and-whiteness and so on, there was so much good in Redwall. And my impression always included my image of Jacques himself – the mousethief, loving, mischievous, honorable, stubbornly old-fashioned – as part of that good, that heartening sense of solidity, comradeship, and simple joy. I mean, come on, he was a bearded, twinkly-eyed former sailor. He started telling the Redwall stories to children at a school for the blind when he was working as a milkman. Repeat what I said above about loving authors as people.

Andy of Anagnorisis shares her remembrances of growing up with Redwall, and meeting Brian Jacques, in a beautiful memorial post here. And – eulalia!!!

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This is perhaps a morbid thought, but all of this is making me want to hunt down the addresses of my most favorite children’s authors and send them letters to tell them how much they mean to me, while I still can.

Talking to Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede (1985) E

Date read: 3.5.11
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Words from the master (and by master, I mean Cimorene):

“Being upset is no excuse. If you’re going to be rude, do it for a reason and get something from it.”

I was down for the count with a stomach virus two weekends ago, which seemed an excellent excuse to loll around in bed with Talking to Dragons. I have nothing in the way of intelligent commentary, except to say that this series never stops being as clever and sharp and all-around excellent as I remembered it being. The combination in this book of Daystar being a hyperpolite semi-wuss (saved from true wussiness by his sensibleness and competence) and Shiara being as rude as possible to everyone they meet is particularly winning. Also, I didn’t at all remember that happening between Morwen and Telemain, so that ended up being a very pleasant surprise.

Cover-flap summary:

Daystar has never seen his mother, Cimorene, actually perform magic. Nor has he ever known her to enter the Enchanted Forest in all the years they have lived on its edge. That is not until a wizard shows up at their cottage shortly after Daystar’s sixteenth birthday. Much to Daystar’s surprise, Cimorene melts the unsavory fellow. And the following day, she comes out of the Enchanted Forest carrying a sword. With that and little else, she sends him off into adventure. Daystar doesn’t know why he’s tromping through the Forest fighting wizards and monsters, but others seem to know. Accompanied by a quick-tempered firewitch, Daystar stumbles upon a number of characters from his mother’s past: Morwen the witch, Telemain the magician, and Kazul the king of dragons.

Go to:
Patricia C. Wrede: bio and works reviewed
Dealing With Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede (1990) E

Daystar has never seen his mother, Cimorene, actually perform magic. Nor has he ever known her to enter the Enchanted Forest in all the years they have lived on its edge. That is not until a wizard shows up at their cottage shortly after Daystar’s sixteenth birthday. Much to Daystar’s surprise, Cimorene melts the unsavory fellow. And the following day, she comes out of the Enchanted Forest carrying a sword. With that and little else, she sends him off into adventure.

Three appreciations for comics on the web

Two very short, one very long. (The comics themselves, I mean.)

(Considering everything else going on in the world in these past weeks, it seems unreal that I can sit down to write a blog post about comics.)

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His Face All Red was Emily Carroll‘s comic offering for this past Halloween, and is one of my favorite works in any medium, ever.

…EVER.

From the first panel onwards, the comic’s atmosphere is one of unspoken strangeness and menace, backed by Carroll’s psychologically acute storytelling. (I always love the simple humanity of Carroll’s characters, whether narrated or purely illustrated; here she creates as much sympathy and pity for her downtrodden, haunted protagonist as she does trepidation.) Add in the fact that the wickedly clever layout turns the physical act of reading a webcomic – every stretch of scrolling, every click to the next page – against the viewer, and the suspense and anxiety build to unbearable levels. The last, horribly silent pages had me unnerved to the point of physical discomfort.

I’ve also been trying to find the time to catch up on Carroll’s more recent comics work: a mythical love story for Valentine’s Day, and a series of dream journal-snippets – many of them just as eerie as His Face All Red, from the looks of it.

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Ryan Andrews’ Nothing is Forgotten hit me in much the same place that Studio Ghibli films do. With the same sweet, thoughtful gravity, and edged with that frisson of the inexplicable, the comic offers a glimpse at the life of a grieving boy, and an odd encounter he has in the woods.

Every wordless, monochrome panel – just ink and soft-grained, digitally applied textures – is so beautifully composed that you could frame it. They’re perfect compressions of action and emotion, light and shadow. This one in particular had me tearing up. (It’s an emotional “spoiler,” so don’t click till you’ve read the whole comic.) Like Carroll, Andrews also turns the process of scrolling into a means to establish pacing and mood.

I originally found the comic via Andrews’ blog post detailing his artistic process, which really gives you an appreciation for the care put into each panel.

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Finally, Digger, Ursula Vernon‘s epic yarn of a no-nonsense wombat transported by an errant tunnel to a land of territorial hyenas, oracular slugs, and veiled warriors in the service of a talking statue of Ganesh, concluded this Thursday after a run of over 4 years.  I’d been reading since sometime in 2008, and I did NOT see that coming. Raise a glass! I’ll miss having Digger to cheer up my Tuesdays and Thursdays.

– E

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi (2009) E

Date read: 1.10.11
Book from: University library
Reviewer: Emera

Snow White meets haunted-house melodrama meets quasi-vampire story with a decided hint of “Carmilla,” by the author of The Icarus Girl? Count me in. White is for Witching is the story of a family, and a house, distorted by the loss of a mother and a hidden history of trauma, xenophobia, and insanity. Miranda Silver blames herself for her mother’s death, and struggles with pica, a disorder that compels her to eat chalk and plastic. (I thought it might well be a pun on the “consumptive” heroine, in addition to hinting at Miri’s eventual realization of even worse appetites, and reflecting the novel’s motifs of misdirected desire and destruction from the inside out.) Her twin brother Eliot and bottled-up father Luc are too paralyzed by their own obsessions and griefs to do more than watch Miri on her slow course to destruction. In short, every character is an emotional closed circuit, furiously retracing the same neuroses without outlet or resolution. This includes, of course, the possessive and apparently sentient house, which has born witness to several generations of tortured Silver women.

For the first half of the book, I read with mostly detached fascination. Everyone is so icily clever and dysfunctional that I couldn’t really care about them, and as in The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi’s prose sometimes verges on mannered. Paragraphs drift into prose-poetic fragments, and overlapping phrases signal transitions between narrating characters; I found the latter a particularly heavy-handed stylistic device. Similarly, many of the haunted-house tableaux – Miri’s waking dreams of streets lined with “pale people,” for example – are presented with an arranged, glassy nightmarishness, an alienating hyper-aestheticization. What saved the book for me from feeling (if you’ll forgive the pun) too lifeless was Oyeyemi’s dense layering of Gothic and folkloric tropes.

Continue reading White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi (2009) E

Chalice, by Robin McKinley (2008) E

Date read: 1.2.11
Book from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

“The story I tell over and over and over and over is Beauty and the Beast.  It all comes from there.  There are variations on the theme–and it’s inside out or upside down sometimes–but the communication gap between one living being and another is pretty much the ground line.  And usually the gap-bridger is love.”

– from Robin McKinley’s blog (this post)

Mirasol, formerly a beekeeper, has become the Chalice of her demesne, charged with binding and unifying both its inhabitants and its restive magical energies. Unfortunately, her demesne is unsettled by the violent deaths of its last Master and Chalice. The arrival of the new Master only promises more strife. Previously banished by his brother, the last Master, to the priesthood of fire, he returns more than a little inhuman, terrifying to his own people and perhaps unable to command the land’s magic as he should.

The feeling that struck me as I was reading Chalice was that I was reading Sunshine again – which makes perfect sense, given McKinley’s above reflection. Chalice plays on that dynamic, and many more of her trademarks: fearful and inexperienced but pragmatic, good-hearted protagonists; magic that’s as often inconvenient and frightening as it is wondrous. (Mirasol, when receiving omens of her impending Chalicehood, spends most of her time cleaning up after the overflowing milk and honey that result.)

More than any of McKinley’s other books that I can recall (except maybe Rose Daughter), Chalice has an elusive, vignette-ish quality to it.  It feels as if we only spend a brief time with the characters and world before the curtain drops on the scene again. Mirasol’s world is rich with tradition and history – there are numerous mentions of a not-so-distant barbaric past, and Mirasol’s fellow Circle members have evocative, little-explained titles like “Talisman” and “Sunbrightener” – but we’re only privy to what detail Mirasol’s own experiences reveal. This guardedness lends the setting a pleasantly mysterious feel.

On the other hand, I was not so much a fan of the intense internality that controls most of the book. The vast majority of it happens inside of Mirasol’s head, with dialogue and action indirectly reported, and flashbacks and occasionally repetitive exposition occupying much of the first half of the novel. So while I was deeply intrigued by the setting and circumstances,  I felt a little stifled and not immediately involved. I was also put off by the flatness of the political conflict that eventually tests both Chalice and Master. I realize that for McKinley it’s always more about how her protagonists overcome difficulties, rather than what in particular they’re overcoming, but it can start to seem a little silly when all the villains are either greedy Overlords or mincing sycophants.

Overall, though, I was happy to sit back and enjoy the ride, just soaking up the odd, earthy details of Mirasol’s life, the rituals that she concocts and carries out, and the few characters with whom she interacts. Also, the love story is very sweet. Throughout, McKinley wields crisp, vivid language that particularly helps to crystallize Mirasol’s experiences of magic. Chalice is not a must-read if you’re not already a big McKinley fan, but it is beautiful and ultimately satisfying, if on the slower side.

Go to:
Robin McKinley: bio and works reviewed
Beauty (1976), review by Emera
Deerskin (1993), review by Emera
Deerskin (1993), review by Kakaner

Picture Book Report comes to an end

I was too scatterbrained to link to this while it was running, but I recently saw the sad news that Picture Book Report, a blog bringing together 15 extremely talented illustrators to create an “extended love-song to books,” is retiring after one year of operation.

Check out the blog for varied illustrations and associated commentary on classic and, more importantly, beloved works from Where the Red Fern Grows, to Sabriel, to Brave New World (the latter done by one of my absolute favorite illustrators, Emily Carroll).

– E

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin (2009) E

Date read: 12.16.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is as much a joy to hold (literally – it’s the nicest size for a hardback) and look at as it is to read:

The insides are just as beautiful, with colored text and chapter headers, and more of Grace Lin’s ornate, exuberant, full-color illustrations scattered throughout, complementing her detailed, lively prose.

The story follows the adventures of Minli, a young girl who leaves her home in the shadow of the Fruitless Mountain to seek out the Old Man in the Moon, and learn from him how to change her family’s unhappy fortune. On the way, she helps and is helped by a varied cast of characters with cleverly interwoven stories to tell, including a talking goldfish with ambitions, a flightless dragon, and an orphan boy who lives with a water buffalo.

Minli is sort of generically plucky and lovable, and occasionally the story’s sweetness borders on sappiness, but it’s all so clearly coming from a place of genuine caring that I can’t really complain. Lin’s attention to the grief of Minli’s parents after her disappearance is particularly striking and moving. Among children’s books, I can’t remember reading another Hero’s Journey that also gave page time to those left behind. Watching her parents (her mother in particular) come to their own realizations about their relationships with Minli, and then witnessing the family’s eventual reunion – again, just genuinely sweet, loving, and ultimately joyful.

All in all, I felt like I was being given a hug and a bowl of hot soup in book form. (It doesn’t hurt that Lin clearly enjoys describing details of food as much as she does fantastical scenes of red-silk bridges and monkey-infested peach groves.)

As always with really good YA, I wish I knew younger persons I could gift this to. Older readers looking for more books set in mythical China would do very well indeed to look up Barry Hughart’s rumbustious, madcap adventure-fantasy-mystery-everything-awesome series, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, beginning with Bridge of Birds.

Go to:
Grace Lin: bio and works reviewed

Congratulations to this year’s Nebula nominees!

Click to see the list

And I have read… exactly none of the things on the list, sigh, though there are familiar names and familiar “I want to read this! when I have time! in my next life!” titles a-plenty.

Kakaner and I have both been mostly swamped with work these days, if it’s not evident from our spotty activity. Hope all is well out there.

– E

[inserts self] I will go give my self a well-deserved stab in the eye for not having read any of these either… how dare I call me a SFF fan!

-K

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