Tag: fantasy

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

Date Read: 3.31.07
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Deeba and Zanna begin to experience strange phenomena until suddenly, one day, they find themselves in the alternate universe of Unlondon. Here they find that Unlondon has been waiting for a long time for Zanna, the “Shwazzy,” to fight the evil Smog, an evil cloud of pollution. However, things are not what they seem when events contradict the prophecies and Deeba is forced to fight the Smog on her own.

Review

I MISS BEING 12.

I have a feeling that if I read this while in middle school, I would have deemed Un Lun Dun The Best Book Evar. The book is incredibly reminiscent of Phantom Tollbooth, chock full of strange realizations of imagination, each a quirky interpretation of something we find in our reality. There’s not much to say plot-wise… the bulk of content was simply the adventure and development of Unlondon and numerous characters, a delightful afternoon romp for the appreciative reader.

As I organized my thoughts for this review, I remembered the China Miéville event I attended at which I saw him speak about Un Lun Dun and the entire YA genre with vivid boyish excitement, and the memory is coloring my opinions of Un Lun Dun with much fondness. I crushed hard on the fact that so much of the humor and wit in Un Lun Dun was derived from references and puns concerning books. Some pun examples, though not necessarily book-related, are the Black Window, Unbrellas, and Bookaneers! But most of the circumstantial humor was centered around books, and made me suspect that Un Lun Dun was really a huge elaborate scheme to write a book to promote the message: “BOOKS ARE TEH SH*T!” and it made me extremely happy.

Unfortunately, I actually don’t consider Un Lun Dun a must-read. But if you’re a die hard Miéville fan, definitely check it out. The main character is very likeable, and it is an insanely easy read with maximum 4-page chapters. To top it all off, you get to see Miéville‘s very own original illustrations. There’s nothing better (or sometimes worse) than observing an author treading new ground, and Mieville does so quite expertly. There is indeed a deep understanding of the YA psyche and which elements excite the imagination.

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

The Faery Reel, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (2004) E

Date read: 3.23.08
Read from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

The Faery Reel is a collection of “tales from the twilight realm” by 25 notable authors of fantasy, including Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Holly Black, Tanith Lee, Gregory Maguire, and Patricia McKillip.

I picked this out not actually expecting to be all that impressed, since Datlow/Windling collections aren’t always uniformly strong, despite their typically high-powered author selection. But here, at least, my expectations were far surpassed; this is a remarkably beautiful, moving, and varied collection. I found only two or three stories less than strongly written, and they still had concepts that were fun or clever or fresh – which is saying a lot when you’re going for a topic as well-worn as fairy stories. (As a note, authors in the collection keep to the spelling convention of faerie = race, Faery = place, so I’ll follow that convention below.)

Continue reading The Faery Reel, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (2004) E

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova (2005) E

Date read: 12.30.07
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

In The Historian, the titular scholar reminisces about the quest that she, her father, and her father’s mentor pursued several decades ago. All three became determined to discover the origins, deeds, and whereabouts of the true Dracula, the now-immortal Romanian warlord Vlad Tepes.

It should probably be evident to anyone following this blog for a certain length of time that I have a huge vampire problem, which very often leads me to read things that, well, aren’t really worth the time. This includes The Historian. I discovered only after the fact of attempting to read it that it has been sarcastically and very appropriately dubbed “The Dracula Code.” (Although to Kostova’s credit [?], she began writing it 10 years before Dan Brown began work on his ticket to fame.) The formula is indeed the same: flimsy historical detective work pursued among various scenic European locations, wedded to page after page of cheap cliffhangers achieved by conveniently dicing the narrative into chunks digestible enough for the attention-span-impaired.

Likewise, the “startling” or “creative” revelations she makes about the Dracula myth are only startling or creative if you don’t know all of them already, which I inevitably did. However, I do have to assume that people who pursue more useful hobbies than endlessly reading vampire mythology might still find the book an amusingly presented tour through various bits of folklore and theory. Overall, though, Kostova’s writing is pretty limp and insubstantial, if not quite on the level of a Dan Brown novel. I ended up ploughing through a total of 70ish pages out of a sense of obligation (having unfortunately purchased the novel), glanced at the ~600 left, and said “screw it.” Add Kostova to the list of presumably smart people (she’s a Yale graduate) who can’t actually write novels.

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Elizabeth Kostova

The Music of Razors, by Cameron Rogers (2007) E

Date read: 10.29.08
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

In 19th-century Boston, a brilliant medical student falls in with a group of young spiritualists, only to see his hopes and plans go terribly awry as a result of their experimentations. A century and a half later, he walks the earth weary and immortal, wielding instruments made from the bones of a murdered angel, and seeking to discharge the task that he took upon himself at the height of his despair. Finally seeing a candidate worthy of becoming his successor, he enters the dreams of a boy named Walter. The young and frightened Walter learns that all he needs to do to banish his bad dreams is tell the monster in his closet to go away – only to learn too late that it was the monster who stood between him and a force banished from the universe at the beginning of time.

If the above summary sounds complicated, it doesn’t even begin to represent the full breadth of the mythology of The Music of Razors. This is a universe big enough for fallen angels, closet monsters, and a clockwork ballerina to coexist over several centuries and in the same 300 pages. The novel’s pace and complexity are undeniably demanding, especially in the beginning chapters, but the reward is that every time the page is turned, you uncover a new secret of this strange mythology, and your mind constantly stretches to keep up with the narrative’s wicked twists and hinted truths. All of these elements are convincingly and for the most part satisfyingly intertwined, and the ending of the novel delivers a volley of heavy emotional punches before leaving the reader with that perfect combination of feeling fulfilled, yet still wanting more.

I do think that the pacing could have used some stretching and breathing space to improve coherence, allow the reader more time with the characters’ emotions, and reduce the ending’s frenzied, overexplosive feel. However, from what I understand of the novel’s publishing history, there were constraints placed on its length. The first, Australian publication, released in 2001, was even shorter. Significantly more material was added to the American release, but from the sounds of it, Rogers would have liked even more.

Rogers’ writing is briskly dark, his brief sentences filled with a subtle, glancing menace, capable of both brutality and a wistful, fairy-tale loveliness. He seems to write with a grim kind of exhilaration, as aware of the emotional and spiritual weight of the story and its characters as he is of the breathtaking leaps of imagination employed in fully animating it.

This is a novel that offers immediate, visceral pleasure and sorrow, as well as food for later thought – in particular, Rogers has fascinating things to say about the role of our fears in shaping our selves. The panoply of fantastical elements also means that there is something here for all tastes, from historical fantasy to horror. All in all, I highly recommend The Music of Razors. Even if flawed, this is one of the most memorable fantasy novels I have read in recent years, and I know that many of its denizens will be staying with me for the rest of my life. Fans of Neil Gaiman and Caitlín R. Kiernan will likely enjoy this book.

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Cameron Rogers
Cameron Rogers interview with Tabula Rasa

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16, ed. Stephen Jones (2005) E

Date read: 8.3.09
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

I picked this and #15 up at a used book sale, partly out of a fit of pique that I couldn’t find anything else to my taste – even though I didn’t know anything about the actual quality of the anthology series. Luckily, every story in this was well written and solidly above average, which is more than can be said for most of the anthologies I’ve read in my life.

To begin with the best, my absolute favorites, in no particular order:

  • Kelly Link’s feverish, extremely unnerving “Stone Animals” (come on, even the title is creepy). Young couple with poor communication and two small children, including a sleepwalking daughter, moves into a new house where all is not quite well – classic set-up for horror, and Link plays it gleefully. I imagined her whooping maniacally while writing the story, truth be told.
  • Lisa Tuttle’s “My Death,” the story of a recently widowed writer who travels in search of new inspiration, and becomes strangely entangled in the legacy of an early 20th-century painter and his muse. This builds slowly, but goes places that are increasingly strange and tap into very primitive, raw forces. The ending was completely unpredictable and bewildering in the best way possible. Masterfully executed, all in all.
  • Michael Marshall Smith’s supremely atmospheric and ever-so-delicately frightening “This Is Now.” Describing it would ruin it, so I won’t. This gave me the most chills-down-the-spine read, yet the fear is so deliciously subtle and evanescent.

Continue reading The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16, ed. Stephen Jones (2005) E

Alabaster, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2006) E

Date read: 8.31.09
Read from: Personal collection, via Subterranean Press
Reviewer: Emera

Alabaster collects five works of Kiernan’s short fiction, all centered on her character Dancy Flammarion, first introduced in her novel Threshold. (Note that I’d never read any of Kiernan’s work before this, so this collection clearly stands well on its own, both as introduction to Dancy as a character and to Kiernan’s work in general.) Dancy is an orphaned, albino girl who seeks out and kills monsters on the command of a terrifying angel. Each of the stories records her encounter with one of the monsters that the angel sends her to find, and peels back a layer of Dancy’s past and psyche, to reveal how deeply damaged and used she is.

To say that Dancy is a tragic character doesn’t even come close. Each of the monsters she meets, though technically monstrous so far as it comes to killing people in horrible ways and so on, is far more self-aware than is Dancy – and thus, in a certain sense, more fully human. Likewise, they can see her situation far more clearly than she ever does. Ultimately, what the stories show the reader is that Dancy is a monster of another kind: a crippled soul who will never truly understand who she is, what she does, or why she does it, and will never be loved by another being, human or otherwise. I would like to think that she’s not irredeemable, but at least within these stories, she’s hopelessly lost and severed from humanity, and sustained only by her faith in an angel that the reader soon realizes has no interest in her as an individual and is, of course, yet another kind of monster in an endless and highly relative bestiary.

Continue reading Alabaster, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2006) E

The Shape-Changer’s Wife, by Sharon Shinn (1995) E

Date read: 1.6.06
Read from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

Always hungry for new knowledge, the magician Aubrey leaves his master to become the apprentice of the famed and reclusive shape-changer Glyrenden. Surrounded by a forest in Glyrenden’s decaying mansion, with only two eccentric servants for company, Aubrey becomes increasingly mesmerized by Glyrenden’s aloof and otherworldly wife, Lilith.

I read The Shape-Changer’s Wife at about the time that I began to be bored with standard fantasy, as evidenced by the fact that when I got it out of the library, I lost interest as soon as I looked at the cover. I read it anyway, just because it was relatively short and I liked the title, but overall it got a big shrug from me. I think it’s a combination of the aforementioned boredom, the book being Sharon Shinn’s first, and the fact that her prose is generally very… unassuming, as I’ve gathered from the others of her books that I’ve read (namely, the Samaria series, which I must admit to having enjoyed a good deal nonetheless). Granted, I prefer reliable writing over poorly attempted style, but Shinn’s writing is so straightforward and so devoid of stylistic interest that it leaves no impression on me afterwards. Add in the fact that I guessed Lilith’s “secret” 20 or so pages in, and a few annoying clichés and illogicalities, and there wasn’t much to be read. Still some nice details and scenes, but not enough to make this a memorable novel.

On a separate note, the [Profession/Status/etc.]’s [Wife/Sister/Daughter] titling convention/cliché has been amusingly documented by Isaac Marion here.

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Sharon Shinn
Archangel, by Sharon Shinn (1997) [E]
The Alleluia Files, by Sharon Shinn (1999) [E]

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (1988) E

Date read: 1.24.06
Read from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

A young shepherd boy in Andalusia dreams of finding treasure among the Great Pyramids, and, determined to follow his dream, makes his way towards Egypt. As he travels, he encounters (among others) a gypsy, a king, a thief, an Englishman, and finally, an alchemist, each of whom aids him in his journey towards understanding of his “Personal Legend—” the dream that, in being accomplished, helps to nourish the universe itself.

As I put it when I originally reviewed this book: this is a very, very sweet book. Normally I hesitate to read “inspirational” books, and I did occasionally find it difficult to take The Alchemist seriously, particularly because the author kept on repeating several “key phrases” throughout the book, such that they eventually took on the feeling of spiritual buzzwords.

However, The Alchemist is so peaceful and simply told, with its spare, folkloric language, that it’s a pleasure to read by itself – it leaves you with a comforting afterglow, so to speak. To my surprise, I also found myself liking the nameless main character a good deal in the end, despite the story largely being allegorical, and the characters hence representative rather than specific. I can see why this is such a popular book, and has become a chief inspiration to a number of my acquaintances, including the friend who encouraged me to read it to begin with. It’s very gently encouraging, and espouses a luminously optimistic view of the universe and the place of individual humans within it. This would be useful to those who might feel they’ve been faltering in following their passions, I think.

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Paulo Coelho

King Rat, by China Miéville (1998) E

Date read: 10.10.08
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

The day after stumbling drunk into his father’s flat, Saul Garamond wakes to find that he is the chief suspect in his father’s killing – which occurred as he slept one room over. Sprung from jail by a raggedly pompous, sinuously sinister figure who calls himself King Rat and claims that Saul’s mother was herself a rat, Saul uncovers the truth of his father’s death, and of his strange heritage in the sewers of London.

So this was an “eh” sort of read. Very Miéville (twisty, dark, and Urban with a capitual u, and an umlaut for good measure), and  good for a first novel, but still obviously a first novel – it’s clear why he didn’t make it big until Perdido Street Station. I found the book intriguing, but not compelling: I was convinced of its mythology and milieu, but not terribly interested, and it simply didn’t have the heft and engrossing sense of reality that the Bas-Lag books do. Add in a general sketchiness as far as character development goes, and the result was that that I imagined Miéville sitting down one day and telling himself that he wanted to write a novel about the Pied Piper legend…. WITH DRUM ‘N’ BASS. And of course a good helping of Socialism. So: too many pet elements without enough connective tissue for them to hang together comfortably. I did like the ambiguity of the King Rat character, though, and found him a memorable figure.

For the record, those interested in other Pied Piper retellings might try looking up Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the first story, “Paid Piper,” in Tanith Lee’s collection Red as Blood. The former is very polished and amusing, and the latter is very weird. There’s also a not-so-great one with a silly twist ending in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s Snow White, Blood Red (from their retold fairy tale anthology series), whose not-so-greatness is manifest in the fact that I can’t remember the author, although the title was something along the lines of “A Sound, As of Angels.” Hmm.

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China Miéville
Looking for Jake (2005) K
The City & The City (2009) K

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E

Date read: 8.27.09
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Henry DeTamble travels, involuntarily, in time; Clare Abshire is the woman who has loved him since she was 6 years old, and he, displaced in time – but in his own timeline already married to her – introduces himself to her in a meadow. The Time Traveler’s Wife charts the the convoluted course of their love, and all the hazards, vagaries, joy, and anguish that Henry’s strange condition brings into their lives.

Kakaner has been begging me to read this for years. This August I finally gave her the satisfaction of receiving a barrage of emails from me exclaiming over the book as I plowed through it in a handful of days. I was absolutely sucked in, and despite her warning that she’d found the first 100 pages of the book slow going, the first half-ish of the book was actually my favorite. I loved the slow back-and-forth as Clare works her way through life to her first meeting with in-time Henry – I found the scenes of her childhood and young adulthood (and the interspersed glimpses of Henry’s childhood and his first, innocently bedazzled experiences of time travel) beautiful and singularly lush, and I loved feeling so connected with Clare as a character, so immersed in her experience of growing up, and feeling as intensely as she does the anxiety and excitement of each impending encounter with Henry. (Sucker for young love, right here.)

Continue reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E