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Deerskin, Robin McKinley (1993) K

September 1, 2010 in Book, Novels by kakaner | 2 comments

Date Read: 09.01.2010
Book From: Dearest Emera
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

(Shamelessly stolen from Emera’s review– if it ain’t broke, why rewrite it?)
Princess Lissla Lissar lives quietly and invisibly in the shadows of her father and mother, who are worshiped by the people, and whose love for each other is all-consuming. When Lissar’s mother mysteriously wastes away, she forces her husband to swear that he will not remarry unless he finds a woman as beautiful as she was. This promise comes back to haunt the kingdom when Lissar, becoming a woman herself, attracts her father’s attention for the first time. Driven from the kingdom by an unendurable ordeal, Lissar escapes with her only friend, her dog Ash, and struggles to survive and reclaim her sense of self.

Review

The beginning of Deerskin was eye opening. As I started reading McKinley, who I haven’t picked up since Sunshine several years ago, I realized there was so much to her writing and storybuilding that I had not been able to fully appreciate before. Deerskin began with a delicate yet urgent account of Lissar’s childhood leading up to her escape from the kingdom. In my opinion, the gem of the novel was here– the elegant and insightful conveyance of the uncrossable distance that can form between a child and her parents, and the stunningly eerie account of the relationship between Lissar and her father. It has certainly been done before– stories in which royal children are neglected emotionally by the majesties– but none have devoted the same care as McKinley did here. The brilliance was the realization that something so little as lack of acknowledgment combined with an initial reverence for one’s parents can slowly ferment for years until it is replaced by fear. Here, I thought the execution was splendid and something that served to set this retelling apart from others.

Next, I apprehensively followed Lissar as she fled her kingdom and sought a bitter refuge in the wilderness, waiting to be impressed by Lissar’s independence, resourcefulness, and elegance in the face of hardships (as is to be expected of fairy-tale-retelling-heroines). This was the case, more or less, but as the story progressed, I was assaulted with pages of visions, repetitive daily monotony, more suffering than one reader can handle, ellipsis abuse e10, and a blind race to the resolution.

And may I interject here, did the climax really happen?  [not-really-spoiler-alert] Did she really honestly just pour forth a fountain of blood from her vagina, leaving a stain in the wood that was to be studied and used as an oracle for generations thereafter? I entirely understand what McKinley was striving for, and yes even though Deerskin is regarded as the Moonwoman, there are other ways to tie together “moon” and “woman” and “dark” and “fantasy”. I would expect a male author to commit such a transgression.

To be fair, I could chalk up my dissatisfaction with the second half to the fact that I simply have much more in common with a shy, black-haired, independent, voracious reader of a child than a lady who traipses through winterlands with a large dog in tow. Despite everything, Deerskin was still one of the most exciting fantasy novels I’ve read in a long time, and it is a dark fantasy novel that places great care in maintaining and exploring the different forms of love in all relationships.

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Deerskin (1993)   [E]

Robin McKinley

Princess Lissla Lissar lives quietly and invisibly in the shadows of her father and mother, who are worshiped by the people, and whose love for each other is all-consuming. When Lissar’s mother mysteriously wastes away, she forces her husband to swear that he will not remarry unless he finds a woman as beautiful as she was. This promise comes back to haunt the kingdom when Lissar, becoming a woman herself, attracts her father’s attention for the first time. Driven from the kingdom by an unendurable ordeal, Lissar escapes with her only friend, her dog Ash, and struggles to survive and reclaim her sense of self.

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The Last Unicorn comic #2, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

August 16, 2010 in Book, Graphic novels & comics by Emera | 1 comment

Date read: 8.13.10
Book from: Personal collection, via Conlan Press
Reviewer: Emera

This here’s the manticore. Man’s head, lion’s body, tail of a scorpion. Captured at midnight, eating werewolves to sweeten its breath…

The Last Unicorn comic adaptation #2 (review for #1) arrived at my door last week, and despite being exhausted I had to squeeze it in before falling asleep that night, in part because this is the issue that I can’t help but think of as “Meet Schmendrick;” and what self-respecting fan could resist the tawdry horrors of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival? In this issue, the unicorn wakes to find herself imprisoned in a two-bit witch’s menagerie of illusory monsters, and her best chances for escape lie with a well-meaning but inept magician named Schmendrick.

This time, I got Frank Stockton’s alternate cover art:

The Last Unicorn #2While I love his graphic approach, and particularly liked his cover variant for the first issue, it irks me that his unicorn tends to look kind of witless, and on principle I have trouble condoning the idea of a unicorn having “the hair of a Hollywood starlet.” Also, I really, really loved the de Liz/Dillon cover design for this issue. But life goes on, and Mommy Fortuna’s hand looks awesome here.

Basically, everything that I liked about the first issue I liked just as much, if not more, here: atmospheric color choices, expressive human characters, effective panel layouts, and pretty much pitch-perfect adaptation of the text. Very occasionally I was still bothered by coloring choices, but I found the use of textures much less obtrusive in this issue than in the first, and particularly effective in conveying the murk and grime of Mommy Fortuna’s carnival. There were also a couple of mostly-wordless compressions of action and narration that made me go YESSS, that could not have been done in any medium other than comics.

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Not a re-read, but close enough

August 1, 2010 in Book porn, News & Curiosities by Emera | No comments

Re-reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in its entirety is one of those things that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but that looks increasingly unlikely to happen soon as the summer winds to a close. (nooooo….)

Luckily, Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus) provides an alternative, in his Sandman Meditations over at heady comic-book blog Gestalt Mash. In each installment, Cheney provides commentary on one issue as he reads through the series for the first time; two installments are out so far. (A similar read-through essay series is also being offered for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, with the added twist of commentary being provided by one new and one re-reader.) Graphic novels are not his expertise, but his background in film studies is obvious, as he pays close attention to details of shape, composition, color, and the flow of panels.

These won’t do much for anyone who hasn’t already read the series, or isn’t in the process of doing so, but they’re a fascinating, if largely technical way to revisit it.

- E

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Neil Gaiman
Sandman, 10 (and maybe 5) years later

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The Last Unicorn comic #1, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E

August 1, 2010 in Book, Graphic novels & comics by Emera | 4 comments

Date read: 7.26.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

This will be possibly one of the world’s least impartial reviews, in that my love affair with The Last Unicorn started when I was about six, when I first saw the animated movie adaptation, then proceeded to sort-of forget about it in such a way that it became a native feature of my mental landscape. For a really, really long time, I thought it was actually a really amazing, really sad dream that I had once had. For all that it’s typically praised as “whimsical” and “charming,” it’s also a story that’s profoundly concerned with mortality, sacrifice, and loss of wonder and innocence, all of which was both troubling and stirring to me as a child. Attached to my dream/memory of it was both a great yearning for the film’s melancholy, twilight-shaded beauty, and a certain sense of haunted anxiety.

Like many other fans, I didn’t rediscover the movie till years later, after which I proceeded to re-watch it an egregious number of times, attempt (unsuccessfully) to foist it on friends, and finally, very belatedly discover that it was based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel. Said novel, read at twelve or thirteen, went on to become part of what I think of as my core canon; I’m often hard-pressed to find the words to explain how much it means to me.

Given all this, I was a bit leery but mostly excited to see the news this spring that IDW would be releasing a six-part comic adaptation of the novel, under Beagle’s supervision, adapted by comics writer Peter B. Gillis,with art by wife-and-husband team Renae De Liz (pencils) and Ray Dillon (ink and color). Being the sucker I am, I immediately sprung for the signed preorders (hey, signed and inscribed copies ship for free, so it’s like I saved money… right?) available via Conlan Press, Beagle’s affiliated publisher. Recently I got around to sitting down with the first installment. A blow-by-blow review follows, with quotes here and there from the original novel – which, for those who have not encountered it in one form or another, is the story of a unicorn who learns one day that she is the last of her kind in the world, and leaves her wood in order to seek out her imprisoned kin.

The Last Unicorn: Issue #1First reaction: augh @ awkward author/title placement for a composition that was obviously supposed to have a vertically centered title. Also a little disappointed that De Liz’s unicorn looks pretty distinctly horsey, when Beagle is very strong in his insistence that unicorns look not-much like horses:

She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in a dancing mockery. Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight.

That aside, it is a pretty gorgeous cover, and one I’d rather like to see as a poster.

My personal preference artwise would have been for a more old-fashioned illustrative style (think Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, Michael Kaluta), but maybe that’s too obvious and literal, anyway. And any time I start feeling too picky, I flip back to the first page:

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The Arcanum, by Thomas Wheeler (2004) E

July 27, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | 1 comment

Date read: 7.26.10
Book from: Borrowed from a cousin
Reviewer: Emera

Incomplete read – one of those books that you start to get a bad feeling about as soon as you notice the back-cover blurbs are all by third-rate authors and obscure newspapers. The Arcanum is a supernatural thriller that attempts to gather together Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, renowned voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau (who died 38 years before the book is set, but oh well), and H. P. Lovecraft on the trail of some mystery involving the Cthulhu mythos. Blah blah blah, all been done before.

I skimmed about three chapters, and it reads like mediocre fanfiction or The Da Vinci Code, full of dun dun DUN chapter breaks and phrases like “carnal treasures” and “In a swirl of a black topcoat he was gone.” It does make a lot of sense if you consider that Wheeler is primarily a screenwriter, not a novelist.

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Thomas Wheeler

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Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) E

July 20, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 7.17.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up… and some of its people, too – including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion; and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Un Lun Dun is basically Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere meets The Phantom Tollbooth, and owes debts – some playfully acknowledged in the text itself – to many other classics of children’s and fantasy literature, including A Wrinkle in Time and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a cleverly crafted and delightful book: Miéville lets loose yet again with his famously phantasmagorical imagination, filling out his alternate London with topsy-turvy architecture (houses constructed of obsolete technology, a ghost town whose buildings constantly flicker through various historical incarnations, a web-cocooned “Webminster Abbey”), a lovingly detailed bestiary, and a vast arsenal of puns (some of my favorites: UnLondon’s sister cities include Parisn’t and Lost Angeles).  All of these are complemented by Miéville’s appropriately inky, energetic illustrations. For fans of his adult fiction, there are also plenty of touches of eerie, deeply unsettling dark fantasy, some of which could have come straight out the New Crobuzon books – I couldn’t help feeling that the Black Windows of Webminster Abbey might be lesser cousins of Bas-Lag’s Weavers. With his usual anti-authoritarianism, Miéville also takes a good amount of pleasure in dismantling and inverting the tropes of the fantasy quest, so that we get a very unintended heroine who quite literally refuses to go by the rules of the (talking) book.

For all its delights, though, Un Lun Dun somehow failed to really surprise and engage me. It felt a bit like a themepark ride: there’s plenty to see, but it all goes by rather quickly, and you’re not sure how much it really meant to you at the end of it all. The characters are all likable enough, including the quick-thinking, occasionally snarky heroine, but few are really memorable enough to be lovable, and I had about the same feeling about the book as a whole. Its pleasures lie more in its ingenuity and dazzling wordplay than in any real emotional connection. I also had a little difficulty with the writing style, which is heavy on short, bluntly declarative sentences. And though I appreciated the plot’s pro-environmental, pro-literacy bent, the messages were shoehorned in a little awkwardly and obviously.

So, like Kakaner, I’m going to have to make a conditional recommendation for this one: try it out if you’re a big Miéville fan, are looking for pure entertainment, or have a younger reader of strong constitution to share it with. I would have loved this so much more had I read it when I was about twelve – too much younger and I think certain scenes might have kept me from sleeping at night, though I would have read them with relish anyway.

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China Miéville
Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

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The Innkeeper’s Song, by Peter S. Beagle (1993) E

July 12, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 5.7.10 (or thereabouts)
Book from: University library
Reviewer: Emera

After witnessing the resurrection of his dead love from a riverbed, a village boy sets off in wild pursuit of the cloaked women in whose company she now rides. One is a sailor-swordswoman-storyteller; the other, a soldier-nun on the lam from her convent. Under the roof of one inn in a distant land, all of these stories interweave with those of a varied cast of characters, including a fox who’s not always a fox, a stable-boy dreaming of adventure, and a cantankerous innkeep.

Alas. I’m a Peter Beagle fangirl to the end, primarily on the basis of The Last Unicorn, but The Innkeeper’s Song was a dud for me. Wondrously imaginative concepts, compelling characters – but only in summary. In execution, the rapid multi-character narration distracts from the action, and while Beagle does an impressive job of differentiating the various voices, I found most of them – and I really hate to say this – unbearably irritating, with “folky” or “lilting” speech patterns that came off as stilted and artificial.

About the same sentiment applied to the plotting. While there are moments of incredible emotional intensity and sublime, twilit weirdness, they were by far outnumbered by the points at which I had to put the book down and say “REALLY? Did that really just happen?” (Also – for one of the most awkward and unearned sex scenes I have ever had the displeasure of wincing through – “was it really just described in those terms?”) Considering my reaction more carefully, it’s not so much that the events (most of them) were that outrageous. Rather, the theatrically affected narration somehow resulted in my having the sense half the time that I had no idea what the characters were doing, or why (and not in the good, pleasurably mystifying kind of way). Even worse, I didn’t really care, despite all the potentially awesome setpieces, like a showdown between Nyateneri (the soldier-nun) and a pair of ninjas assassins in the inn’s bathhouse. The only sequence that I wholeheartedly enjoyed was the second-to-last chapter, in which one of the characters undertakes a nightmarishly intense descent into death – as in many of Beagle’s works, mortality is a chief concern of The Innkeeper’s Song.

Unfortunately, the novel’s stagy, borderline sententious quality undercuts the obvious care with which it’s crafted. Under all the bluster, I could still dimly glimpse all of the things that I normally associate with Beagle’s works, the bittersweetness and the playful lyricism and the dusky, mysterious feel. Here, they just left me all the more bummed that I didn’t actually enjoy the book.

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Peter S. Beagle

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Changes, by Jim Butcher (2010) E

July 6, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 6.13.10
Book from: Library
Reviewer: Emera

Ah, with the beginning of every summer comes the shutting-off of my brain for approximately 24 hours, as I devour the newest installment of my beloved narcotic of choice, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. Changes, as the twelfth book and approximate halfway point of the series (…I am simultaneously disturbed and awed to realize that I have, in fact, read all twelve), is, well, a game-changer. Butcher, who’s already infamous for his gleeful sadism towards his characters, ups the stakes tenfold in this book, and packs it with even more explosions, evil twists, and shocking revelations than usual.

On the first page of the book and in one stupendously awful phone call, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, finds out from ex-girlfriend Susan Rodriguez that not only do they have a daughter whom he was never told about, but that she’s been captured by the vampires of the Red Court. Behind the kidnapping is Duchess Arianna Ortega, who’s out for revenge for Harry’s role in the death of her husband. With the wizards’ White Council both unwilling and unable to help him, Harry has few allies at his side and little time to accomplish a seemingly impossible rescue. Harry finds himself forced to weigh his love for his daughter against his principles, and may have to go further than ever before in sacrificing his beliefs for the sake of power.

Multitudinous OMGWUT moments aside, I actually didn’t enjoy Changes as much as most of the preceding books. Butcher is so heavy-handed in writing emotional distress that I was irritated pretty much as soon as I heard the novel’s premise and realized that Harry’s emotional state for most of the book would be Righteous Fury of Wrath and Righteousness. I love Harry as a protagonist, and generally find the improbable extent to which he holds to his principles endearing and actually pretty admirable, but reading Harry in continual high dudgeon for close to 500 pages just gets excruciatingly repetitive, even with my brain mostly turned off.

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The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce (1985) E

June 25, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | 2 comments

Date Read: 6.10.09 (fourth[?] reread)
Book From: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Caribou is a dreamer of dreams, a solitary figure isolated from her tribe ever since the death of her father. One day her sister-in-law comes to her, bearing a strange golden child whom she begs Cari to conceal and raise. At first unwilling, Cari is nevertheless struck by the child’s beauty and takes him in, naming him Reindeer – for as she reluctantly comes to realize, he is a trangl, one who can take the form of both human and stag. Though she longs to keep him by her side, his blood will always call him to run with the wild deer that course the land. As the years pass, stirring spirits and strange upheavals in the mountains and hot springs send the tribespeople to Cari’s door for advice. From Reindeer, she learns that the world is being remade, and that if she is to save her people, she and Reindeer must guide them over the Burning Plains to the safety of the lands that lie beyond the Pole, where only the wild deer have run before.

Of all the authors I’ve read, I’ve most deeply identified with the work of Meredith Ann Pierce, for the longest period of time. I first read her books when I was eight or nine, and though there were many literary loves before then, and have been many, many more since, I always think of Pierce’s books – particularly her Darkangel Trilogy – as The Milestones. She’s most often written tales about strange, wise girls who become strange, wise women, fall in love with transfigured or supernatural lovers, and have adventures in worlds of beautifully realized mythology. Mythology, because her books often read to me like myths from alien planets: her images and language have a timeless, jewel-like purity to them, coupled with deliciously archaic diction and – this might be the part that most gets me – a deep, deep sense of yearning that encompasses both human and immortal desires.

This was the first time I’ve re-read one of her books in about eight years, and since a lot has changed in that time, this doesn’t have quite as immediate an emotional impact on me as it used to. I used to get a lot of vicarious rage and anguish on Cari’s behalf. The older me is both slightly more phlegmatic (though really not that much less romantic), and slightly savvier: this time around, I was a little squicked at Cari having a relationship with her foster child, despite Pierce’s care in emphasizing his inhuman nature and unfamilial relationship with Cari.

Regardless, I was still deeply affected by the wondrous and joyful imagery: gambling trollwives, rivers of silver caribou running, a sledge with belled harness and golden runners, firelords with lava-seamed palms… And while the younger me fumed (again on Cari’s behalf) when she read the inconclusive ending, the older me was pleasantly surprised to recognize its maturity and realism. This will continue to be a story, and a world, that I treasure, and that I suspect will still surprise me every time I re-enter it.

Meredith Ann Pierce’s works will very likely appeal to fans of Patricia McKillip and Robin McKinley; I’ve never entirely understood why she hasn’t become more well-known and widely read. Not that I’m biased or anything.

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Meredith Ann Pierce

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“The Confessions of Prince Charming,” by Kelly Barnhill (2009) E

May 20, 2010 in Book, Short stories by Emera | No comments

Date Read:4.4.10
Read from: Fantasy Magazine
Reviewer: Emera

If I wasn’t such a sap, I wouldn’t be sent on these damn errands, but some mother is sobbing for some lost daughter and a father gritting his teeth and saying “half my kingdom” and the mama saying “please” through tears and snot, and I want to say “yeah sure, lady, everybody’s missing someone”, but instead I gallop away because they expect it, and let the rain worm its way into my boots.

Kelly Barnhill’s “The Confessions of Prince Charming“ is the story that got me started on a cruise through most of her Web-published work. I’d never heard of her before, but “Confessions” ended up being the first short story I’d read in a long while to actually surprise me with how much I enjoyed it. (Which perhaps says that I should spend less time wading through mediocrity on the Internet and just read things that people have already told me are good, but then sometimes I do find excellence in mild obscurity, and it makes me happy…)

The title made me wary since it’s been done so many times before, but Barnhill paints a Prince Charming who’s painfully believable: a secretive little boy with mommy issues grows up into a flippant, self-absorbed, regret-eaten man who’s always reaching and never attaining; his moments of tenderness and introspection serve to highlight all the hurt oozing up through the cracks. He’s backed by a cast of equally wounded and intriguing cameo characters, including a witchy divorcée Rapunzel and a lovelorn wolf. There’s a moment of homoeroticism that came off to me as random and unearned – too many Issues in one small place (bet you thought you’d never see me say that, Kakaner) – but apart from that, I loved it. And lest it sound like it’s just a big Freudian sob-story, there are numerous  moments of luminous description, as per usual for the author, and the traditional elements that she weaves together are playfully reimagined. Also, it’s pretty funny – Barnhill does levity and gravity equally well.

Go to:
Kelly Barnhill
“Princess,” “Homecoming”
Tales of madness and depravity

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