Book | The Black Letters

The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau (2003) E

Date read: 1.26.10
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

“The city of Ember was made for us long ago by the Builders. It is the only light in the dark world. Beyond Ember, the darkness goes on forever in all directions.”

At the age of twelve, every child in Ember is assigned a job. Curious, bright-spirited Lina Mayfleet longs to be a messenger, but is instead assigned to dreary, dirty work in the underground Pipeworks. Doon Harrow, her classmate, is convinced that the sporadic blackouts of the great lamps of Ember – the only lights in a world of immeasurable darkness – forebode worse troubles for the city. He longs to investigate the enormous generator in the Pipeworks that provides the city with all of its power, so when he receives the job of messenger, he and Lina eagerly swap their assignments. As the blackouts increase in frequency and fear spreads among Ember’s citizens, Lina soon comes to share Doon’s suspicions that Ember is a dying city. Together the two embark on a search to uncover Ember’s origins, and to find a way to lead their people to the bright city that Lina is sure exists somewhere in the Unknown Regions beyond Ember.

I didn’t enjoy The City of Ember nearly as much as I thought I would, for all that it’s a rather endearing book. The characters and setting are warmly evoked, with detailed and frequently beautiful descriptions, and of course the concept is fantastic to begin with – Ember is one of those fictional realms you wish you could visit, and more often than not end up carrying around with you in your head after reading. (I imagined it looking like a less anarchic version of the city in the film La Cité des Enfants Perdus/The City of Lost Children, and would pay a large amount of imaginary money to run along its streets and peer into its shops.)

Continue reading The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau (2003) E

The Woman in the Wall, by Patrice Kindl (1998) E

Date read: 3.22.06
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

book-kindl-woman

Rendered nearly invisible by her painful shyness, Anna is the middle girl of three sisters living with their mother in a rambling Victorian home. At seven years old, terrified by the impending threat of school, she retreats into passageways and secret rooms of her own construction, and lives within the walls of her home for the next seven and a half years. Anna is content to hide away as a sort of household ghost, nearly forgotten by even her family, until her own growth as a woman renders her “invisibility” no longer possible. A stray love note pushed through the walls of her refuge appeals to her developing emotions, and the time approaches for Anna to once more venture into the outside world.

I randomly spotted The Woman in the Wall on Kakaner’s bookshelf at some point around when we first began exchanging reading material on a regular basis, and the premise deeply appealed to me since I’m a. sorta shy and b. obsessed with secret nooks and passageways, to the point that a home-within-a-home sounds right up my alley. Even outside of my particular quirks, the concept is an emotionally powerful and imaginatively appealing one.

Unfortunately, Kindl’s writing isn’t up to the task. Although the book aims for a wistful, playful mix of Gothic fairy tale and magical realism, it increasingly dissolves into a weepy, unconvincing pastiche, with the narration lurching between “artsy,” “quirky” whimsy and banal adolescent histrionics. Too much pretension (or, more charitably, ambition), not enough substance. Though Anna’s story could have been a moving modern fairy tale about escapism and self-isolation, The Woman in the Wall more often seems clumsy, superficial, and implausible.

Go to:
Patrice Kindl

“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2008) E

Date read: 8?.09
Read from: Clarkesworld #20
Reviewer: Emera

I had previously mentioned “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” as being one of my favorite short stories read in 2009, yet had never gotten around to posting a review.

I don’t want to spoil a single bit of it, so I’ll just say that it’s like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell except with Antarctican cartography (yes, duh – seriously, I refuse to reveal any of it, please just go read it if you’ve got the chance), and that it’s funny, delightfully imagined, and ravishingly beautiful. I rather wish it had won the 2009 World Fantasy Award that it was nominated for, but clearly that’s not up to me. So instead I’ll just flail about it here.

Go to:
Catherynne M. Valente
“Urchins, While Swimming,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2006) [E]

“Lover and long-legged girl”

Maxine Kumin reads “Looking Back in My Eighty-first Year” (via Poems Out Loud)

I got to hear Maxine Kumin read this past autumn, and enjoyed the clarity and directness of her language – qualities particularly appreciated during a reading, I’m not gonna lie.

I’ve been zigzagging through her Selected Poems, 1960-1990 since then, and have enjoyed just about every one of her gardening poems and horse poems in particular, though her intensely meditative voice makes her personal poems generally excellent. Still underwhelmed on the political poems front.

To get back to the link at hand, “Looking Back in My Eighty-first Year” moves me to the point of being inarticulate about it, so I’m just posting the link and leaving it at that. Hope some of you will enjoy.

– E

“Half Flight,” by Shweta Narayan (2008) E

Date read: 1.7.09
Read from: The Journal of Mythic Arts
Reviewer: Emera

More fairy tales, finally! I’m backed up on reviews to the point of – well, I’m always backed up on reviews, but I’m feeling particularly guilty about not getting to reviews of all the nifty short stories, fairy-tale-inspired and otherwise, that I’ve been reading this winter.

Shweta Narayan’s “Half Flight” is an odd little retelling of one of my absolute favorite fairy tales, also featuring a brief cameo by a visitor from one of my absolute favorite folk tales. (Glancing at her website bio, we share an interest in liminal characters – “shapeshifters and halfbreeds,” as she puts it – so there you go.) I hate to describe something as “odd” because it seems like a cop-out, but “Half Flight” is, somehow and pleasingly, a little off-kilter. I think it might in fact come from that little folkloric intrusion, although again, intrusion is the wrong word. The meeting of the two strands of story feels organic and intuitive, and enrichens both of the characters in question, as well as the particular psychological narrative that Narayan pursues. When I reached that bit, I almost skimmed over it, did a double-take, read it again more closely, and then thought, “of course.”

Although her imagery could use sharpening and intensifying, since the language occasionally falls flat, the tale as a whole succeeds in being thoughtful and tender without excessive sentimentality. The last line did raise my hackles a little; last-line clunkers are terribly hard to avoid when you’re going for “tender.” Regardless, Narayan is successful in conveying an unsettling desperation and psychological fragility under the measured, dispassionate narration, and I was deeply satisfied by the new sense that her telling brings to the archetypes and narratives that it plays with.

Go to:
Shweta Narayan
“An Old-Fashioned Unicorn’s Guide to Courtship,” by Sarah Rees Brennan (2008) [E]
Winter is for fairy tales

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (1938) E

Date read: 2.8.09
Read from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

Young, unworldly, and hopelessly shy, our nameless narrator finds herself swept off of her feet by the widowed and much older Maxim DeWinter while working as the companion of a wealthy American woman on the French Riviera. Maxim takes her away to his estate in England, Manderley, where the soon-disenheartened narrator learns that her lot is to live in the shadow of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife. Rebecca was glamorous, flamboyant, the consummate wife and hostess; Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, is fiercely devoted to her memory, and regards Maxim’s second wife as an interloper and a poor replacement. Between Mrs. Danvers’ cruel manipulations and Maxim’s moody secrecy – which the narrator fears is a sign that he still loves Rebecca – the narrator finds herself without allies in Manderley, and is driven both to uncover the truth of of what happened to Rebecca, and to come into her own as a woman.

Hmm, awkward summary. Anyway, I read this following Isaac Marion’s The Inside, and together they ended up being a one-two punch of delicious, delicious suspense. I couldn’t read Rebecca in anything less than 100-page chunks – addictive to the max, it is.

Continue reading Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (1938) E

Violent Cases, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (1987) E

Date read: 2.20.09
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

Neil Gaiman - Violent Cases

In Violent Cases, an adult narrator evokes a confused patchwork of childhood memories, from his uneasy relationship with his father to the half-comprehended gangster stories of an osteopath who claims to have treated Al Capone.

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s first collaboration? Too cool! McKean’s art can be hit-or-miss for me, but here, I loved it. It has a scratchy, sketchy, flickering quality, like a very old slide show being flicked by, or an old film, and the black inkwork is just barely shaded with beautiful shades of sepia and ghostly blue. Add in the splintering, tilting panels and the narrator’s suggestively spare commentary, and you have an incredibly evocative, ominous story about the insidiousness of violence – physical violence, imagined violence, the violence we do to ourselves in letting ourselves forget the ways in which we were hurt and damaged – and the ways that memories reach out to one another inside of our heads, and make strange but right connections.

Continue reading Violent Cases, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (1987) E

In the Company of the Courtesan, by Sarah Dunant (2006) K

Date Read: 12.14.06
Book From: Boston Public Library
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Bucino is a dwarf who serves one of the most beautiful and successful courtesans in Rome. However, the war forces them to flee to the courtesan’s birthplace, Venice, where she is forced to build her career and reputation again out of nothing.

Review

In a much tighter and well-written second novel, Sarah Dunant takes us through the intriguing and dazzling world of the courtesan. The plot is basic yet appropriately ambitious, the simple voyage of a determined woman who manages to rebuild her life through hard work and large helpings of wit. The linearity of the story made room for a lot of other elements to shine through, particularly character development. It is apparent that this book was well-researched, and Dunant’s comfort with the subject matter allowed her to weave a fresh story with historically educational tidbits. Sometimes there were couple page long descriptions of courtesan techniques and how-to’s for wooing men, and they were terribly fun and interesting. Despite the very controlled approach to the novel overall, Dunant definitely took some liberties towards the end and added some flair and drama to the story. However, the novel as a whole was very effective and engaging, a relatively easy read for any historical fiction fan.

Go to:

Sarah Dunant

The Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku (1994) E

Date read: 12.27.09
Book from: Personal collection, via Vertical, Inc.
Reviewer: Emera

Translated 2009 by Alexander O. Smith & Elye J. Alexander. Original title Ubume no Natsu.

“Concerning the Ubume –
Of all the tales told, that of the ubume is the most confounding. It is said that when a woman who is with child passes away, her attachment to the babe takes physical form. She appears then as an apparition, drenched in blood from the waist down, and crying like a bird, saying “wobaryo, wobaryo.” Presented with stories of people transforming into such creatures after they die, how can we truly believe in Hell? It is beyond understanding.
Report on One Hundred Stories
Yamaoka Motosyoshi, Junkyo 3 (1686)”

In the classic mode of the genteel ghost story, a man visits his friend, and shares with him a strange tale: the daughter of a distinguished family of medical practitioners has been pregnant for twenty-one months without giving birth – a pregnancy that was discovered soon after her husband inexplicably disappeared from a sealed room. Scandalous! Throw in Japanese folklore, Gothic dread, and way too much pop psychology, and you have The Summer of the Ubume.

Continue reading The Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku (1994) E

Nurk, by Ursula Vernon (2008) E

Date read: 2.18.09
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Nurk, a timid but sensible shrew, one day receives an urgent letter addressed to his famous grandmother Surka, the warrior, pirate queen, and general adventurer. Unfortunately, no one has seen Surka for seasons, and so Nurk packs Surka’s diary and some clean socks into his trusty snailboat, and heads off in search of adventure for the first time in his life. Dragonfly royalty in distress, perilous climes, and strange beasts aplenty await him.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ursula Vernon for years now, both of her vibrant, wildly imaginative artwork – she created the cover and interior illustrations for Nurk, of course – and of her equally weird and hilarious life and writing, as seen in her blog.

Nurk is her first mainstream published book, and is par for the Vernon course, combining a deeply practical, deeply likable hero (à la the protagonist of her long-running webcomic Digger, in which grandmother Surka is a character) with earthy wit, tooth-shattering cuteness, quick pacing, and occasional jolts of very enjoyable, very deeply creepy imagery. As a sampler: unripe salmon growing on trees; silent, voracious, cow-sized caterpillars…

Though for an adult reader, the plot is rather unmemorable (predictable twists, there-and-back-again structure), the individual elements are sufficiently weird and entertaining to make it worth the read. I do wish I knew some young persons of an age to be suitably gifted with it. Well, in a couple of years some of my cousins will be thereabouts, and in the meantime, it’s a quick, fun, slightly twisted adventure for readers of any age.

Go to:
Ursula Vernon