“… or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country.

Dear Reader,
A great deal is happening in London this Season. To begin with, there’s the wizard who tried to poison Kate at the Royal College – she must have mistaken Kate for the Mysterious Marquis (which is curious, as they look nothing alike). There’s also the man who seems to be spying on Cecelia, though he’s not doing a very good job of it – so just what are his intentions?
Then there’s the strange spell that has made our friend Dorothea the toast of the town. Could it possibly have something to do with the charm-bag under Oliver’s bed? (Speaking of Oliver, how long can we make excuses for him? Ever since he was turned into a tree, he hasn’t bothered to tell anyone where he is.)
Clearly, magic is a deadly and dangerous business. And we might be in fear for our lives . . .  if only we weren’t having so much fun!
Love, Cecy and Kate”

A mightily charming epistolary romp through magical Regency England, and a long overdue read for me. Sorcery and Cecelia is fast-paced and stuffed full of clever gambits, sardonic conversation, and plenty of historical slang and detail to please period buffs – the girls spend as much time outwitting fussy aunts and navigating delicate social constraints as they do uncovering wizardly misdeeds. Also, there are jokes about Byron.

My one disappointment is that the book doesn’t make much room for character development beyond what’s necessary to move the plot along. Between that and the lack of detailed physical description I had trouble telling the girls, and their respective love interests, apart – everyone is witty, quirky, and dark-haired. I must also confess to fantasy-nerdly hankering for more detail about the magical system and the greater role of wizards (they seem to have curiously little influence on society) – but seeing as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell also exists, I can hardly complain that that itch has gone unscratched.

In any case, S & C is a great divertissement: playful and vivid, with a lovable (if homogeneous) cast. Common sense says I shouldn’t (too much work to do these days!), but I’m already scheming about finding the sequel…

Go to:
Patricia C. Wrede: bio and works reviewed
Caroline Stevermer: bio and works reviewed
The Thirteenth Child, by Patricia C. Wrede, review by Kakaner
Dealing With Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, review by Emera
Talking to Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, review by Emera

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Post tags: fantasy, historical fantasy, humor, young adult

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“It’s the Chinese Year of the Dog! When Pacy’s mom tells her that this is a good year for friends, family, and ‘finding herself,’ Pacy begins searching right away. As the year goes on, she struggles to find her talent, deals with disappointment, makes a new best friend, and discovers just why the year of the dog is a lucky one for her after all.”

Another hug in book form from Grace Lin. This is her first novel, aimed for a slightly younger reader than Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (review) is. Lin’s writing, though sometimes clunky, has a straightforward warmth and cheerfulness that I continue to find irresistible. The dialogue had me laughing surprisingly often, especially the exchanges between Pacy (Lin’s fictionalized younger self) and her parents and older sister. And as in WtMMM, Lin interlaces the main narrative with tender, funny stories shared by Pacy’s friends and family, and copious, loving descriptions of food and food-centric imagery. (”The days disappeared like dumplings on a plate,” Pacy narrates at one point.)

Pacy’s life isn’t a dramatic one, but there are all sorts of little confusions and upsets to be navigated, both as a young girl tasked with “finding herself,” and more specifically as a first-gen Taiwanese-American who speaks neither Mandarin nor Taiwanese: sorting out holiday traditions, being called a twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) by other Asian-Americans, feeling alternately too Asian or too American to fit in a given context. Lin calls The Year of the Dog “the book I would have liked to have when I was little.” As a Chinese-American who regularly feels guilt over barely being able to speak Mandarin, I appreciated it just as much now, especially since I’ve been thinking pretty often this summer about cultural identity and immigrant assimilation.

There were also plenty of silly (but mortifying at the time) moments that I identified with and loved seeing in Pacy’s story. Possibly my favorite “OH MY GOD MY CHILDHOOD” moment:

Everyone in our neighborhood hung up Christmas lights all over their houses and trees. We tried to get Dad to do the same. Dad hung the lights, but he didn’t spend too much time doing it. Without putting on his coat or boots, he ran outside and threw them on a bush.

“Brr,” he said, stomping the snow from his bedroom slippers, “it’s cold out there.”

So, of course, while everyone else’s lights were in nice arches and evenly spaced all over their trees and bushes, our lights looked like a blob with lightbulbs flashing frantically for help.

“It looks more natural this way,” Dad said when we complained.

There is one weird point of unaddressed conflict: Pacy’s best friend at the start of the book is a white girl named Becky. When a new Taiwanese-American girl arrives at Pacy’s school, they quickly become best friends instead, but we never learn how Becky feels about it (resentful, confused, unfairly excluded?), or whether Pacy feels any confusion or guilt over it herself. I was nonplussed to see that fly under the narrative radar; Lin seems to have decided to elide any potential tension there.

Go to:
Grace Lin: bio and works reviewed
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin (2009): review by Emera

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Post tags: children, illustrated

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For Durzo Blint, assassination is an art – and he is the city’s most accomplished artist.

For Azoth, survival is precarious. Something you never take for granted. As a guild rat, he’s grown up in the slums, and learned to judge people quickly – and to take risks. Risks like apprenticing himself to Durzo Blint.

But to be accepted, Azoth must turn his back on his old life and embrace a new identity and name. As Kylar Stern, he must learn to navigate the assassins’ world of dangerous politics and strange magics – and cultivate a flair for death.

Wall-to-wall epic darque fantasy cheesefest, aww yeah. This came to me in a booky care package from my cousin, along with its sequels in the Night Angel trilogy. I would probably have enjoyed the whole thing when I was about twelve (I say that without – okay, with only a little bit of judgment; I welcome strategic doses of darque cheese in my life), but being shorter on reading time these days, I just skimmed the first volume for flavor.

Moody antihero with traumatic past and an even more traumatized yet brave love interest, check. Nomenclature liberally peppered with apostrophes and accent marks, check. Hard-bitten mentor, training montages, sadistic antagonists, and sundry scenes of carnage interleaved with swells of sentimental glurge, check. (I couldn’t get this particular glurge-bit out of my head after stumbling upon a bedroom scene: “Curve yielded to curve with the sweetness that inspired art.”)

The clumsy sentimentality and generally cliché-packed prose are what set me skimming after only a page or three, but on the plus side, the earnestness wasn’t entirely unappealing, there’s at least one non-white protagonist, and the female characters were written with sensitivity and fair doses of badassery. I’d still stick to Robin Hobb for my epic-assassin-y needs, though.

Go to:
Brent Weeks: bio and works reviewed
Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb (1995): review by Emera

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Post tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, high fantasy

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This is one of my most treasured finds from Readercon, picked up from the fantastic Somewhere in Time Books: Tanith Lee’s 1988 limited-edition novella, with illustrations by Tom Canty. From the title and pastel cover I expected a tale of genteel swashbuckling, possibly YA; should have remembered that Lee never goes in for gentility. Elegance, yes – Lee is manically elegant – but never gentility.

Madame Two Swords starts in a familiar place for Lee: a sensitive, fearful, recently orphaned young woman in an early 20th-century alternate France is treated cruelly by both circumstances and humanity; her only spiritual sustainment comes from a book of poetry discovered in a secondhand shop:

“The blue cloth binding was quite pristine under its dust. It was a slender book, without lettering. I opened it out of curiosity.”

“The book was my talisman. Other girls wore crosses or medallions.”

The narrator is unemployed and evicted, and finds herself in dire straits, chased from one end of the socioeconomic spectrum to the other: too middle-class for hard labor, too unskilled to be a seamstress, too unwilling to accede to customers’ advances to be a waitress in the seedier cafés. At the extremity of her despair – enter Madame Two Swords, a black-eyed old woman of terrifying intensity, in whose museum-like house the narrator comes to some strange realizations.

In this France, the Revolution was sparked by the poet-demagogue Lucien de Ceppays in the city of Troies. This Revolution culminated in the execution of the original revolutionaries, including de Ceppays, by the fickle mob, and the occupation of France by a fearful British monarchy. Inhabitants now speak “Frenish” as often as French, and labor in a depressed economy overseen by a puppet government. The narrator’s talisman-book is, of course, a volume of de Ceppays’ work, and contains besides a haunting watercolor portrait of him. The story quickly sees her devotion to his image and memory moving beyond girlish fantasy.

The final supernatural twist, when it comes, is powerful in effect, in large part because of the supreme delicacy with which Lee constructs the fleeting image central to the revelation. There’s an also-delicate but definite touch of gender-bending, which I wish I could discuss in more detail without being spoilery, but suffice it to say that I liked how Lee addressed its implications, a lot. This is a story that makes use of deeply Gothic-Romantic tropes (duh, Tanith Lee) yet resists being just romantic; it’s fierce and intelligent and ultimately insists on the dignity of all of its characters.

And so my love affair with Tanith Lee continues! If you like Revolutionary France and cross-lingual puns and intelligent Gothic fantasy, if you love Tanith Lee and beautiful books, you might consider treating yourself to a copy of Madame Two Swords…

Two more photos (can’t help showing it off!) under the cut:
(...)
Read the rest of Madame Two Swords, by Tanith Lee (1988) E

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Post tags: alternate history, book art, class, fantasy, gender, gothic, historical fantasy, photos

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Thirteenth Child is set against the backdrop of an alternate universe that reads like turn of the 18th century America with magic– a relatively developed and civilized East Coast and people applying for settlements and moving out West to pioneer the land. Magic is the center of life in this world, with universities and courses of study primarily focused on magical history and practice, and each settlement’s survival depends on a trained magician to protect it from the mysterious magical wilderness. Francine, known as Eff, is born into a large family of magicians as the thirteenth daughter, which according to Avrupan magic is highly unlucky and those around her believe that she has only potential for great evil. A combination of the escalating bullying and hatred directed toward Eff and the lure of a fresh beginning at a new teaching post for her father prompts the Rothmer family to move out West, away from some of the more established institutions of thought and ingrained prejudices, to a frontier that introduces Eff to new magics and the dangers of fringe settlements.

I would say Thirteenth Child was a pleasant read in that it was not very challenging or engaging but had enough shiny objects scattered throughout to keep me mildly interested for the duration. I’d chalk part of it up to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles in that it set the bar very, very high, and unfortunately, Thirteenth Child fell short in every way. Cimorene and co were simply more interesting, being a rambunctious crew with simmering love plots and a great deal of magical talent and flourish, and they traipsed around a world full of dragons, magic carpets, towers, princesses– you name it. Granted, Thirteenth Child was simply not aiming for the same effect because it had a very calm setting and a story centered on family and childhood, but the characters and plot felt muted and dampened, as if striving for that same level of excitement and exploration but being unexpectedly held back by an ill-chosen pairing of heroine and setting.

(...)
Read the rest of Thirteenth Child, by Patricia Wrede (2009) K

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Post tags: children, fantasy

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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 awesome 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

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Post tags: dragons, fantasy, high fantasy, humor, series:enchanted forest chronicles, young adult

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“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

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Post tags: fantasy, high fantasy, photos, romance

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Summary

A massive 50 km-long metal cylinder (later named Rama) is hurtling towards earth at an awesome speed. The discovery stirs the world into motion, culminating in the launch of a select few for an exploration mission. The chosen members immediately leave Earth to begin their assignment, finding their way into the cylinder with relative ease and explore the object, trying to understand it’s function and characteristics…

Review

…and as far as the summary is concerned, that’s about it! It’s Clarke, and although I’m no expert– having only read Childhood’s End before– I get the sense that he dives into telling a story by making a beeline for a particular concept or vision but really doesn’t take the time to look elsewhere. There was a solid, but rather pat, exposition (granted it was the 22nd century, but is it *really* that easy to pull together a space exploration team with so little international bickering??) followed by the introduction of a few uninteresting members of the team, and then it was onward with the science! This was pretty hard sci-fi, especially for 1972– if you’re looking for intergalactic cross-species love affairs and all the politics of a space epic, this is not the book for you. It read like a very self-indulgent exploration of a fantasy world/sci-fi concept that Clarke was just dying to bring to life.

So yes, the novel’s sole focus was the exploration, description, and documentation of Rama. And Rama was beautiful. I’d first compare my reading experience to that of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey– serene, epic, silent, intensely futuristic, a sense of overwhelming vastness, and very reminiscent of Journey to the Center of the Earth with respect to the concept of an enclosed yet self-sufficient world. What strikes you as you wander through Rama is the almost sinister quiet of the place, and how it instills within you this fear that each new discovery is going to be the unveiling of some awesome Truth, or at least some mighty power that would set you at ease with simply knowing. Every part of the world was full of implication (Why were there houses with no doors, and objects frozen inside? Why were there fearsomely fast and lethal robots that roamed like animals? Why was there a synthetically generated electric thunderstorm? Why was there a world in this cylinder in the first place?) and scientific content that I was so mentally tired every couple of pages… I literally had to stop and take breaks to gather my thoughts and to work on visualizing a new part of Rama. The foreignness of it all was terribly uncomfortable yet incredibly exciting.

I could go into more detail about Rama, such as giving dimensions, painting a map, or describing each location, but Rendezvous with Rama was more of a powerful visionary experience for me (and that’s what Wikipedia is for!) This book was an immediate winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards upon it’s publication, and rightly so.

Go To:

Arthur C. Clarke: bio and works reviewed

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Post tags: awards, hugo, nebula, sci-fi

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Penguin Ink editions, when will you stop being awesome? Cover art by Thomas Ott.

Shirley Jackson is the queen of opening lines:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was the capstone in my mini Jackson-marathon of January; for some reason I’ve decided to review it first. It was her last novel, and contains almost all the Jackson trademarks: persecutory villagers, a haunted (not literally, in this case) house, thinly veiled wickedness and brutality, a split psyche, embodied here in sisters light and dark. Jonathan Lethem’s excellent introduction in the Penguin Ink edition situates these usefully in Jackson’s own life as the formerly shy wife of a university professor isolated in small-town New England, and in her sad decline as she succumbed to agoraphobia in her later years.

Merricat Blackwood. Oh, Merricat. She’s a typical Jackson heroine in that she’s determinedly childish and presexual; it’s hard not to read her relationship with the Blackwood house (like that other great Jackson house, Hill House) as an attempt to return to the womb. I also had a hard time remembering that she’s supposed to be 18, and not 12 or 13. A capricious, spiteful witch-child, she delights in hiding, in secrecy, in burying and nailing charms around the family estate, repeatedly drawing lines of protection around her and Constance and the house. (When interloping cousin Charles appears, Merricat hates him almost more for resembling her and Constance’s father than for his obvious mercenary aims; she strenuously rejects any masculine influence from their domain.) Her black cat Jonas follows her everywhere, and they “talk” to each other fluently. She loves thinking about the deaths of others: of her family, scandalously and mysteriously poisoned six years ago; of the villagers who hate them and blame fearful, fragile Constance for the murder. Above all, she’s monstrously selfish, a sort of funnel constantly drawing off Constance’s maternal attentions and lovingly described cooking.

Like any good trickster character, she’s both hateful and seductive. I couldn’t not identify with her flighty witchery – a good chunk of my childhood in a nutshell – all the while that I was increasingly repulsed by her emotional stranglehold on Constance. The violence in the book crescendoes shortly before the end, but the ugliness goes on from there, quietly, as Merricat proceeds to get exactly what she wants; it left me feeling more disturbed by a book than I have for a long while. At the same time, I couldn’t help remembering how much fun Merricat was, her wicked humor and her mocking embrace of dysfunction. Lethem’s introduction highlights Jackson’s talent for slyly “instill[ing] a sense of collusion in her readers,” reflecting “the strange fluidity of guilt as it passes from one person to another.” You can’t get much better at that than Merricat Blackwood.

Go to:
Shirley Jackson: bio and works reviewed

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Post tags: black humor, class, gender, gothic, psychological horror

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The Bell at Sealey Head contains the most outright sexual passage I can recall reading in any of Patricia McKillip’s work. Tellingly, it’s also a tongue-in-cheek commentary on bibliomania:

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more. Judd knew that about himself: just the sight of Ridley Dow’s books unpacked and stacked in corners, on the desk and dresser, made him discontent and greedy. Here he was; there they were. Why were he and they not together somewhere private, they falling gently open under his fingers, he exploring their mysteries, they luring him, enthralling him, captivating him with every turn of phrase, every revealing page?”

A-hem.

McKillip was possibly my most protracted love affair during my high school reading. Though I’ve grown away from her work a bit since then (particularly since I wasn’t much taken with her last two novels), reading The Bell at Sealey Head was a pleasant return. It’s a bit like Georgette Heyer meets Ombria in Shadow. Much of the novel concerns itself with gentle comedy and small dramas of courtship, set in the titular seaside town “at the edge of the known world.” But the underlying mystery that drives the plot concerns a ghostly bell that rings at sundown, and a strange world of knights and ritual occasionally glimpsed through the doors of a decaying manor.

McKillip occasionally writes overwhelmingly large, hectic casts, but here the slow pace and loose plot give the characters room to breathe. I found most of them endearing, if not all terribly memorable as individuals. There’s a book-obsessed innkeeper’s son (Judd); a merchant’s daughter being courted by a cloddish squire, but who would much rather write novels; an itinerant scholar with a keen interest in the history of the phantom bell; a maid who has befriended the princess who lives in the manor’s past; and so on.

As in The Tower at Stony Wood, there’s a strong feminist thematic, with a particularly pointed attack being made on the conventions of the courtly romance: the princess is made to constantly fulfill fractured, meaningless rituals in service of the faceless knights who ride in and out of the castle, with the expectation of eventually being married off to one of them purely for the purposes of bearing another child to carry out the rituals. (Spoiler: We eventually learn that she has literally been imprisoned in images out of a storybook.) Several of the other female characters are quietly rebellious, and seek self-determination or otherwise subvert social expectations. One of the most interesting, though least-seen characters is a woman of wealth who is forced to conceal her intelligence and private desires by perfecting a mask of exquisite boredom and frivolity.

All in all, a sweet, thoughtful, and frequently witty read. Not as urgent or eerie as my favorites of McKillip’s works, but as usual, it’s full of memorable, otherworldly imagery, rich and occasionally glinting with menace. It also has some awesome lifestyle inspiration, in the form of an herbalist who runs around barefoot and lives in a book-filled, garden-surrounded house built in and around a hollow tree trunk. Excuse me while I radiate envy/aspiration…

—

P.S. Happy 2011, all!

Go to:
Patricia A. McKillip: bio and works reviewed

© Emera for The Black Letters, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fantasy, feminism, high fantasy, humor, romance

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