Month: October 2006

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Friesner, Esther M.: Druid’s Blood

Thanks to Mely’s discussion of Esther M. Friesner’s works, I checked Druid’s Blood out of the library. This was an agreeable way to pass a couple of hours, though I’ve no strong urge to seek out the rest of Friesner’s work.

Druid’s Blood is an alternate history of the “let’s have fun with historical characters” type rather than the “let’s rigorously work out the implications of a divergence” type. That is, in a world where Britain’s rulers are Druids chosen by winning magical battles for the throne and where a magical shieldwall encircles Britain, it defies probability that the same monarchs should have sat on the throne, and that Wellington, Kitchener, Byron, Lovelace, and Wilde should exist, let alone be pretty much as they were in history (except for the oh-so-minor fact of not all being alive at the same time). It is also a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, narrated by the Watson-equivalent, “Weston,” except for a short prologue, which reveals that the Holmes-equivalent is actually an actor who made himself over into the character depicted in a few short stories published in the Strand. (Which is kind of interesting, though less is made of this than I thought might’ve been.)

Like most (all?) interesting Holmes pastiches, the focus is someone other than Holmes, namely Weston, who finds himself caught up in a plot against Queen Victoria and the foundations of organized British magic. My impression of the plot—and again, this may be the fatigue talking—is that it’s less a coherent thing than an excuse for playing with various historical figures. However, the development of Weston is done nicely and keeps the book from falling apart.

There is an unfortunately stereotypical portrayal of a non-British deity in the book. I can somewhat rationalize the portrayal as being consistent with the character who invoked the deity, but I’m not sure that’s supported by the text, and regardless I found it irksome.

Finally, Friesner has a reputation for writing humorous novels, but I can’t say if this was funny, because I’m deficient at spotting humor in novels (you have no idea how many jokes I missed in the Aubrey-Maturin novels before I started listening to the audiobooks). I remember being amused on a couple of occasions, but my general impression is that this isn’t a farce, for whatever that’s worth.

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November, Sharyn, ed., Firebirds

I have a tentative thesis after reading Firebirds, an anthology edited by Sharyn November that’s made up of original fantasy and science fiction and meant for a YA audience: one of the main failure modes of short fiction is didacticism. That is, when a short story doesn’t work, my reaction tends to be “Oh look, A Message” or, less often, “oh look, a story where nothing happens.” I don’t know if YA stories are more prone to didacticism than others, but a number of the stories in Firebirds that didn’t quite work for me also seemed to have A Message. To be clear, the existence of the didacticism isn’t usually why the stories don’t work for me; it’s that the characters, plot, or prose didn’t grab me enough to outweigh the didacticism.

I don’t have much to say about the stories that weren’t bad, but didn’t grab me, and also seemed to have something of A Message, so I’ll just list them with brief descriptions:

  • “Cotillion,” by Delia Sherman, is a “Tam Lin” variant set in late 1960s New York City.
  • “Mariposa,” by Nancy Springer. “‘I’ve lost my soul?’ . . . The doctor nodded. ‘I think so. Probably in early adolesence. It happens more commonly than you might think.'”
  • “Medusa,” by Michael Cadnun, is pretty much what the title says.
  • “Chasing the Wind,” by Elizabeth E. Wein, is set in 1950 Africa with no apparent sf or fantasy content.
  • “Remember Me,” by Nancy Farmer, is a changeling story.
  • “Flotsam,” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, is about various people who are lost—between worlds, in grief—and help each other become found.

Laurel Winter’s “The Flying Woman” doesn’t have quite as explicit a message as the stories above, but something about its tone failed to grab me. Then there are two odd, dark stories, which have compelling images though I don’t exactly like them, Lloyd Alexander’s “Max Mondrosch” and Garth Nix’s “Hope Chest.”

Diana Wynne Jones’ “Little Dot” is a cat story. If you don’t like cats, it will have no appeal for you whatsoever; and even to me, it feels more like an excuse to tell cute cat anecdotes than an actual story. In contrast, Sherwood Smith’s “Beauty” is an actual story, one I rather like, but I suspect that its effectiveness is limited to those who’ve read Crown Duel. (Chad’s reaction is consistent with this suspicion.)

Then we have two feminist retellings of fairy tales, “The Fall of Ys” by Meredith Ann Pierce and “The Lady of the Ice Garden” by Kara Dalkey, both of which effectively evoke the mythic feel of the original tales even as they rewrite them.

Finally, my three favorite stories in the collection. I’ve already written about Emma Bull and Charles Vess’s “The Black Fox” in talking about Vess’s collection Book of Ballads, so I’ll steal what I wrote there:

This is actually a recent (1974) ballad by Graham Pratt, based on a fragment of a Yorkshire folktale; it tells of a fox hunt that’s not finding any foxes, until someone injudiciously remarks that they’d chase the Devil himself if he appeared. Out pops a black fox, and the chase is on. I like this one because in its sixteen pages, it has vivid characters, humor, sense of wonder, and an interesting little twist on the ballad. To my mind it’s the most satisfactory as a standalone story; the tension with the ballad is a bonus.

Megan Whalen Turner’s “The Baby in the Night Deposit Box” also has a good bit of humor. Someone takes a small-town bank’s new slogan, “Your treasure will be safe with us,” quite seriously, and leaves the baby of the title in the bank’s custody. The tone is perfectly charming and makes me smile every time I think of it.

The tone of Patricia A. McKillip’s “Byndley” is perfectly elegant—well, almost. It’s the tale of a wizard who stole something from the Queen of Faerie and now is trying to return it. It’s a really gorgeous story, vivid and dreamlike at once, and it’s probably only me who thinks that the last two lines of dialogue clunk inexplicably. Regardless, it’s very much worth reading.

By my standards, that’s a pretty good batting average for a collection. I have the next one, Firebirds Rising, in the to-be-read bookcase and look forward to it.

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Palin, Michael: Full Circle (audio)

In Full Circle, Michael Palin goes around the Pacific counter-clockwise for a BBC documentary and book. NetFlix doesn’t have the documentary, so I just listened to Palin read the book (as with his others, you can read the full text online).

I enjoyed this, but it doesn’t really lend itself to booklogging [*]. About my only comment is that I’m glad that the odds are vanishingly small that I will ever be famous, because that means I won’t have to learn how to deal with things like this:

I’m on my way to meet Mayumi Nobetsu, a girl from Tokyo whom I’ve exchanged letters with for more than twenty years without ever meeting. She first wrote to me in 1974 when, to everyone’s surprise, Monty Python briefly reared its head on Japanese television. The handwriting and spelling of her first letter were immaculate, the grammar ambitious. ‘I am fourteen years old Japanese girl,’ it had begun. She kept writing to me, sending protestations of love and valuable information on the erratic affair between Monty Python and the Japanese public. Now in her thirties, she is managing a hotel.

 . . . I have had a lurking worry that she may have got the wrong Python, but she opens the locket around her neck and there is a picture of me as a thirty-one-year-old Sir Galahad in The Holy Grail.

[*] Or maybe it’s just that I was really exhausted all the time I was listening to it. I keep finding text in the online book that I’d swear I’d never heard, even though I’m sure it was there: I must have just briefly zoned out for that paragraph.

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Pierce, Tamora: (206) Street Magic (audio)

Full Cast Audio has, for some reason, skipped over the fifth of Tamora Pierce’s Circle-universe books in its audio adaptations of the series and gone straight to the sixth, Street Magic. The actor who played Briar in the first three books, Spencer Murphy, is back, which is wonderful because his portrayal is Briar, period, end of discussion. The voice given to Evvy, the other principal character, makes sense for the character, but I find it difficult to listen to. Apparently Evvy is the first-person narrator of the forthcoming Melting Stones, which will appear first as an audiobook; as much as I like Full Cast Audio’s productions, I may need to wait on the text version of this story.

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Site feed note

I’ve switched the feeds for this site to be full-text, and apologize for the resulting flood of old posts (though there are some new ones, too). In Bloglines (and I hope other newsreaders), there’s now also a “leave a comment” link and a “read more” link for spoiler-cut posts. These don’t seem to come through on the LJ syndicated feed, unfortunately, so you’ll still just have to click on the link at the top of the post to read the full post or comments.

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (11) The Nine Tailors

Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors is almost infinitely re-readable and got me through some tough times over the last few weeks. It is an unusual combination of precision and otherworldliness that results in remarkably human characters, gorgeous prose, and haunting descriptions. Like Murder Must Advertise, it’s Peter very much out of his usual habitat, but even more so: not in a city, not among witty feverishly-intellectual striving copywriters, but in a small town where life is slower (but not simpler). The Nine Tailors is notable to me for its humanity, the roundedness of its characters; which are set against impersonal forces like the weather and the bells of the title.

Practically everything else that I can think to say about this theme and structure is a spoiler, so I’ll just pass on to a few small things I noted on this re-read. First, a minor criticism: though it’s taken me I-don’t-know-how-many readings to notice, Potty Peake doesn’t quite—I nearly wrote “ring true to me.” I’m not sure his speech patterns are psychologically plausible, and wonder if he’s based on observation or is a rare descent into stereotype.

(However, I will forgive far more than Potty for the exchange of telegrams late in the book, which manage to be beautifully characteristic without a single instance of punctuation.)

For all that Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey are both called Mary Sues, there’s only one time that I’ve heard the author speaking through a character, when Peter is talking to fifteen-year-old Hilary Thorpe after an unidentified corpse has been found in her mother’s grave:

“You see, I’m wondering just exactly how the—the——”

“How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you’d be wondering that. I’ve been wondering, to. Uncle doesn’t think it’s nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you’re once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That’s not the right word, though.”

“Less personal?”

“Yes; that’s what I mean. You begin to imagine how it all happened, and gradually it gets to feel more like something you’ve made up.”

“H’m!” said Wimsey. “If that’s the way your mind works, you’ll be a writer one day.”

“Do you think so? How funny! That’s what I want to be. But why?”

“Because you have the creative imagination, which works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself. You’re lucky.”

“Do you really think so?” Hilary looked excited.

“Yes—but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won’t understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they’ll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless. They’ll be quite wrong both times—but they won’t ever know it, and you won’t know it at first, and it’ll worry you.”

“But that’s just what the girls say at school. How did you know? . . . Though they’re all idiots—mostly, that is.”

“Most people are,” said Wimsey, gravely, “but it isn’t kind to tell them so. I expect you do tell them so. Have a heart; they can’t help it.”

(I can’t help but think of Hilary as a stand-in for the daughter Peter and Harriet never had—and why not, I ask? But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

What is it about Peter and improbable things with water? I mean, the swim he takes at a certain point is very symbolic and all, but when I’m reading slowly and actually visualizing things, I just can’t believe it.

Finally, I should note that Chad read this at my urging a while ago, and found one part of the mystery so obvious that it ruined his enjoyment of the book. I am unable to comment on this, because as previously noted, I don’t try and work mystery solutions out while I’m reading, and I no longer remember how I felt when I first read this book. Even if I had found it obvious, I might have been willing to forgive it for the sake of the book’s structure, but I’ll never know.

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Pratchett, Terry: (35) Wintersmith

Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book, Wintersmith, is the third Tiffany Aching book and something I’ve been slavering after since 2004, when I heard him read from it at Noreascon. He ended his reading an evil cliffhanger; I think he’d intended to read another section, but decided against it when the audience burst into applause at the aforementioned cliffhanger.

Probably very few books could live up to two years of eager anticipation. Wintersmith is a very enjoyable book. But I find odd a few things about its structure; not necessarily bad, just odd.

Tiffany Aching joins a dance that’s not meant for her and inadvertently fascinates the Wintersmith, who wasn’t exactly the personification of winter until this interesting human catches his attention . . .

It’s not easy, when a season has a crush on you.

Okay, the structural oddities, in no particular order.

  • The book is in something of two parts, the Wintersmith plot and the further education of the young witches Tiffany got to know in the prior book. In a general sense, they relate, in that Tiffany becoming a better witch helps her deal with the Wintersmith; but the connection is much less prominent than the witching stuff was to the hiver plot of the last book, and the resolution of the Wintersmith plot seems a bit simple. Fitting, but not quite the thing to wait a whole book on. I really like the witching stuff, mind, but it doesn’t quite seem to cohere with the rest.
  • The evil cliffhanger is from quite late in the story chronologically, but is chapter one of the book. I’m not quite sure what it’s doing there. There’s nothing actually wrong with it being there, but it’s a bit odd. What I actively, though mildly, dislike, is the narrative comment after the evil cliffhanger, which sets up an unfulfilled expectation.
  • There’s a subplot with Roland, who Tiffany rescued from Fairie in the first book. I like this subplot very much (possibly my favorite line in the book is the comment Rob Anyway makes about sandwiches), but it comes in late and feels a little unbalanced thereby.

I like the book, I do. It just puzzles me.

Pratchett has said in the past that there may be a total of four Tiffany Aching books. There feels like there’s more story to be told about Tiffany to me (in the same way that there felt like there wasn’t more story to be told about Granny Weatherwax after Carpe Jugulum, and since then she’s appeared only as a supporting character). I have no knowledge about Pratchett’s present intentions, but I hope there’s another; there are some interesting possibilities opened up by this book.

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Christie, Agatha: Mystery of the Blue Train, The

Library book sales are a good thing. I picked up The Mystery of the Blue Train, by Agatha Christie, at our library’s bag sale last month, and then just days later discovered that the radio play version of it cast someone other than John Moffatt as Poirot. Words are insufficent to describe just how wrong the actor was, so we’ll just move right on to the book itself, which I picked up after I turned the radio play off to protect my poor innocent brain.

(I am, I should note, just a little sleep-deprived.)

Anyway. A sensible woman has just inherited a lot of money unexpectedly and decided to go to France. She meets an arrogant, unhappy rich woman who’s threatening to divorce her husband. When the rich woman is strangled, the sensible woman finds herself helping Poirot solve the mystery, with some unconvincing romance along the way.

I immediately suspected the correct person when listening to the radio play, but didn’t work out, when reading the book, how that suspicion translated to the solution. Of course, the solution strikes me as pretty far-fetched, but I just don’t have time to work out mystery solutions in books, because I’m reading fast enough to occupy all of my conscious mind.

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (02) The Grand Tour (re-read)

I re-read Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s The Grand Tour because the third book, The Mislaid Magician, is out but I didn’t have enough functioning brain cells to read anything new and didn’t remember anything that happened in this book.

My initial reaction was that the plot wasn’t very surprising; now I just think there wasn’t that much of it. Since we’re getting one set of events told two different ways instead of two sets separated in place, as in the first book, this makes sense, but I still regret it. Also, Cecilia gets kind of short shrift, since she’s only writing a narrative for evidentiary purposes while Kate is keeping a diary: we get to know a lot less about her.

Finally, I have a shameful confession to make: I am incapable of remembering which name goes with which major male character. In the first book, I didn’t have to remember: one was with Kate, one was with Cecy, and the two didn’t appear together. But now they’re all traveling together, and every time they show up I have to stop and remember which of them is married to Kate or to Cecy. “James” and “Thomas” don’t look alike as words, so I really don’t understand what my problem is.

Still a fun book, but I admit I have somewhat high hopes of the third, which is apparently a return to a letter format.

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Lackey, Mercedes: (04) Aerie

I snuck Mercedes Lackey’s conclusion to her series about dragons, Aerie, in little bits over lunch over the last couple of weeks. It has to go back to the library, so I’m sneaking out a little more time to write it up.

This book is a somewhat odd and unfortunate hard left turn in the series, introducing two additional viewpoint characters—one we’d met before, and one who appears to have been created just so we can use her eyes during the big climax—and a new threat. Okay, technically the threat is re-introduced, but since it was only mentioned during book one of this four book series, it felt like it was being introduced fresh here. The book also goes highly myffic [*] at the end, which is a jarring departure from the previous concrete things like training dragons and creating a new society.

[*] TM Nanny Ogg. “With extra myff.”

Speaking of which, I’m inclined to think that if an author is going to wholesale import ancient Eyptian deities into her otherworld fantasy novel, she should either change the names completely or keep them the same. Changing one letter is just silly, and leads to decidedly mixed images: “Siris” for “Osiris” looks at first glance like the Dog Star has been spelled wrong, and “Iris” for “Isis” brings up Greek mythology instead.

All that and a sad lack of training neep. Oh well, at least I got it from the library.

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