Children's fantasy. When Marion gives Cat the Pinhoe Egg, all kinds of things come out about the countryside around Chrestomanci Castle.
This may actuaChildren's fantasy. When Marion gives Cat the Pinhoe Egg, all kinds of things come out about the countryside around Chrestomanci Castle.
This may actually be my favourite Chrestomanci ever. Top style DWJ, had me grinning delightedly the whole way through. I love Cat's character: the way he's not good at telling people things; the way he's so different to Chrestomanci....more
Wordless picture book. This is an urban fantasy version of the refugee experience, all in sepia colours with bowler hats and the most awesome little tWordless picture book. This is an urban fantasy version of the refugee experience, all in sepia colours with bowler hats and the most awesome little touches with not-quite-dog creatures and the statues of the city, and the wonderfully bizarre forms of transportation.
The fantasy form doesn't detract in any way from your belief in the refugee experience - the hugeness of setting out for an alien place, the crowded boat, the frustration of immigration officials and documents (none of the writing on signs or documents is in English, or any other recognisable language), and the heartbreakingness of the other bits of stories other new arrivals tell. All of them are real, although all are fantasy - small figures fleeing in streets as giants with gas masks thunder after them, black dragons coiling over cities, young soldiers in fantastical uniforms setting gaily off to war and coming back broken and grey.
I'd previously read Tan's The Lost Thing, which is a picture book with text, and loved it in its dorkish pointlessness and gadgetry and bottle cap collections. But this ... is amazing. In every way....more
YA fantasy. Harry and her family are gathered together for a New Zealand Christmas. In the attic, Harry is writing a torrid romance; in the house beloYA fantasy. Harry and her family are gathered together for a New Zealand Christmas. In the attic, Harry is writing a torrid romance; in the house below, there are secrets that could tear the bonds of love apart if they're confronted; while the house itself has an older secret. When three strange brothers appear, only Harry recognises their disturbing likeness to two of the characters in her romance.
Isn't she a marvellous writer? She really is. I don't love everything of hers I've read, and as a result I've not read that much of it, but when she hits something I like, it's just so very clever. The way it interweaves, the way it's never enough for something to be tricky in one way, it has to be tricky in three other ways as well.
Hers aren't worlds I can spend too much time in at a go. Her characters are just a bit too perceptive, and too subtle. Every word of dialogue - at least in this and in The Changeover, which are my favourites - has significance on at least three different levels, and all of the participants get it. That kind of subtlety wears me out after a while.
I feel as though I could branch off into all sorts of fascinating discussions about what it means that Harry's first love was for a man like Felix, but I haven't quite got my ideas together, so never mind....more
Children's fantasy. Rossamund, a boy with a girl's name, lives at Madame Opera's Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls. He wants to beChildren's fantasy. Rossamund, a boy with a girl's name, lives at Madame Opera's Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls. He wants to be a sailor, taking his chances on the toxic vinegar seas - but instead he's to be a lamplighter. First, however, he has to get to his post, which proves not nearly as easy as it ought to be.
This I liked rather a lot. I wasn't swept off my feet, but the world, the strange characters, the odd history, the archaic linguistic terms - they pleased me lots.
This also won the Export Success award at the Australian Publishers Association awards recently, which kind of warms the heart. I like that we can sell such a strange book overseas. And I continue to hold high hopes of what the Jim Henson company will do with it....more
Teen fiction. Katie has more or less the perfect life. Except that she tells more lies than she can keep track of, she has to walk past the graffiti oTeen fiction. Katie has more or less the perfect life. Except that she tells more lies than she can keep track of, she has to walk past the graffiti on the gym wall with her eyes averted, and Tommy Sullivan is back in town.
Um, yes. Meg Cabot book. Bright pink cover. Teen-lit of the teeniest lit. She is, however, the queen of her genre - nobody does it better. This isn't her best book, but it's not her worst either.
One thing I never stop finding refreshing in Cabot books is the blatant appreciative sexuality she allows her teenage-girl heroines....more
Classic children's fiction, of the "special girl who brightens the lives of those she comes into contact with" variety. Pat loves Silver Bush, where sClassic children's fiction, of the "special girl who brightens the lives of those she comes into contact with" variety. Pat loves Silver Bush, where she lives with her family, more than anything.
This was my favourite L. M. Montgomery for a while. It jarred on me more than I remembered, in this reread. I do like Pat - I know that she's an unpopular heroine - and I enjoyed this as a nostalgia trip. But it felt more self-consciously charming than I was quite comfortable with. "Dear little" as a prefix for a landscape element isn't something you can get away with more than three or four times in a book....more
Classic children's fantasy. Five children discover a Psammead, or sand fairy - a bizarre, foul-tempered little thing, pathologically frightened of watClassic children's fantasy. Five children discover a Psammead, or sand fairy - a bizarre, foul-tempered little thing, pathologically frightened of water - in the quarry near their home. He grants them a wish per day - but somehow the wishes always seem to go wrong.
I'd actually not read any E. Nesbit before. This was delightful, obviously. I almost didn't want the magic to come in, I was enjoying the non-magical intro so much.
I do love the way we worked through all the wishes that you know you would have made, that everybody can remember dreaming about. The strange, otherworldly attraction of gleaming piles of gold - the wistful thoughts of wings and pretending that you just need to get the right mindset and jump off your bed - the idea of being grown up. Etc. The relentlessness of wishes going wrong did start to peeve me after a bit (although I know it was inevitable for this style of story) and I wished that she'd put more page-space into the individual characters of the children (although I liked what we did get). But, you know: delightful....more
Adult comi-serious (seri-comic?) fantasy. Moist von Lipwig, con artist, show man and worker of postal miracles, is bored. He has a prestigious job, a Adult comi-serious (seri-comic?) fantasy. Moist von Lipwig, con artist, show man and worker of postal miracles, is bored. He has a prestigious job, a marvellous fiance, a public persona, and he's crawling up the walls - literally. The Patrician offers him a new position, with intrigue, the chance of sudden death, and a license to print money, in the Royal Mint.
It was a Moist von Lipwig book, so I was predisposed to like it. And it was fun, and I enjoyed the theorising on abstract currency and the surety of gold - I've always found that a vaguely fascinating subject.
Moist was different in this book, though, I thought. Far less sure of himself - not in his public persona, but in his internal monologues. In the early scenes in particular, he felt far more like, say, William da Worde than the Moist of Going Postal.
Cosmo may be one of the least attractive characters Pratchett's created, but the cuteness of his name with the Vetinari connection makes up for it. And the thing with Cosmo's ring, for all that there was an awful lot of preparation and foreshadowing for that one tiny scene, was kind of a cool moment.
I was disappointed by Moist's revelation about the golems obeying orders, though. Even after it came out, I kept waiting for the real, cleverer reason for a few paragraphs....more
This is quite a beautiful book, but it's not a reinterpretation or a remix or a subversion of a fairy tale - it is the fairy tale. (With the small twiThis is quite a beautiful book, but it's not a reinterpretation or a remix or a subversion of a fairy tale - it is the fairy tale. (With the small twist that Beauty is the plain one of her family, but since her beauty has nothing to do with the central progress of the tale, it's not terribly important.) It's very well done, especially in the way it lets you sympathise with the Beast, even though the POV is Beauty's.
My quibbles were in that it was less a retelling of the central tale, and more a retelling of a particular version - Mme. de Villenueve's one. Villeneuve wrote the first literary version, and it's not bad, but it was written for and in the style of the 18th century French court, meaning that the story was embroidered with approximately a hundred pages of description of Beauty's clothes, jewelry, entertainments, menagerie, gardens, the curtains in her bed chamber and the fireworks at her wedding. All the elegant details that the Parisian fairy tale writers were so into.
They're boring. McKinley didn't need them. She doesn't go as far as the original, but she definitely seems to have felt that the setting required the fairy tale castle to be fairy tale in all the common senses of the term, with magic and twinkling lights and, yes, lovingly described dresses. None of it has anything to do with the central story of a girl sacrificing herself to a beast out of filial love, and then growing to love him....more
YA urban fantasy. Clary sees a boy killed in a night club, and is pitched into a world of shadowhunters and downworlders, where she might fit in betteYA urban fantasy. Clary sees a boy killed in a night club, and is pitched into a world of shadowhunters and downworlders, where she might fit in better than she imagined.
I have slightly mixed feelings. In general I liked it - it wasn't laugh out loud funny, but the dialogue usually made me smile, and the world had a nice dark edge to it, while still being definitely a teen book. Got off to a slightly rocky start with an "As you know, Mr Demon" moment of exposition in the first couple of scenes, but I was lost inside the story within a couple of chapters. The characters were kind of cool, the world wasn't bad. I didn't find the shadowhunter organisation and backstory especially compelling, and I also wasn't sure why Clary's quest to save her mother seemed to coincide with the shadowhunters' quest, given that what they wanted to rescue, she wanted to barter to their enemy. There may have been a justification there that I missed, though.
The strangest part was the Star Wars echo to the plot. It must have been conscious, since Clare referenced Star Wars at one point, but ... well, there are some familiar plots you can borrow and reinterpret without raising an eyebrow, but that one's so damned iconic - it just seems an odd choice. Still, it left the characters in an interesting place, and I'm curious to see how she's going to have them deal with it....more
YA historical fantasy, set in Transylvania and Constantinople. Paula accompanies her merchant father to Constantinople in search of a valuable artifacYA historical fantasy, set in Transylvania and Constantinople. Paula accompanies her merchant father to Constantinople in search of a valuable artifact called Cybele's Secret. A cult, a pirate and the fair folk are also interested in the artifact, however, and Paula and two others are pulled into a life and death quest along a path mapped out by fey powers. This is a sequel - starring a younger sister - to Wildwood Dancing. As with the pattern of the Sevenwaters Books, while the first one had a fairy tale plot ('The Seven Dancing Princesses', aka 'The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces') this one's simply an adventure/romance.
I liked this, but didn't love it. The heroine should have been a departure from Marillier's usual - for the first time, she was focusing on a highly intelligent scholarly girl rather than a heroine whose intelligence is based on intuition. Paula didn't feel like a scholar, though. The way she thought, the way she acted to follow the clues she found - it didn't spell bookish type who loves a puzzle, to me, and being told over and over how much she likes books and puzzles wasn't convincing.
The romance was another of the kind Marillier's writing distressingly often these days, in which both parties recognise the awesomeness of the other fairly quickly, fall fairly quickly and uncomplicatedly in love, and then are kept apart only by external forces or by misunderstandings. Hate-at-first-sight is a cliche for a love story, but I DO like my romances, like any other kind of character relationships, to be more complicated and more conflicted; I like the interest in the relationship to come from within the relationship, for it to come about because putting these two people in a room together just automatically makes things interesting. Every pairing in the Sevenwaters books was fascinating and complicated and heartbreaking and real; I was invested to a ridiculous degree in every one. I haven't found that in Marillier's later books.
On a completely shallow note, this has a truly gorgeous cover, full of all sorts of sly references to the text....more
This is either YA or children's fantasy, but I can't really make up my mind which. Flora, called Segunda because there was another Flora, who was a goThis is either YA or children's fantasy, but I can't really make up my mind which. Flora, called Segunda because there was another Flora, who was a good deal more perfect but died, lives in Crackpot Hall, one of the four magickal Great Houses in the city. She struggles to keep the decrepit house from falling apart, to keep her messed up father from destroying the kitchen, and to write the speech for her Catorcena - her all-important fourteenth birthday, when she becomes legally an adult. Mostly, she wishes that she could tell her military mother that she doesn't want to be a soldier, and distracts herself with grand daydreams about her impossible future as an outlawed Ranger. Then she finds a pale, sickly boy far up in a lost room of the house, who promises to be the solution to rather a lot of problems. Maybe.
I'm in about sixteen different minds about this book. I'll start with the good stuff. This is a fantastically original world. A good part of the naming and folklore seems to be based on hispanic and native South American culture - the Catorcena, Flora Segunda, the Quetzal overlords, Lord Axacaya - but the surnames are something else again - Flora Fyrdraaca, Udo Landadon ov Sorrel. The Great Houses with their supernatural butlers are creepy and fantastic, and the way that magic works, with the Gramatica Words, is intricate and convincing.
The characters are also great. Flora is full of ideas, and can talk up an adventure like nothing, but she is wretched at stealth and quick thinking and most of the other things she adores about the idea of being a Ranger. Her best friend, Udo, is sartorially splendid and a little obsessed about it. Where Flora's idol is the great Ranger Nini Mo, Udo's is the legendary Dainty Pirate. At one point Flora casually mentions her pink and his red toenail polish. Valefor, the sickly boy Flora finds, is also rather marvellous, in an amoral, manipulative, secretive, sweet-talking sort of way.
The style is fun. There are dark elements - particularly Flora's father, who was tortured until he was broken, and now lives up in his tower, except when he comes down to be pathetic and crazy and destroy the kitchen - but they come in on the edges, and Flora's usually fairly convincing in her facade of not caring.
Despite all this, it took me a very long time to get into the book. This was pretty much purely due to two stylistic decisions, which consistently jolted me out of the book. One was the avoidance of contractions. "I am not going to", "I was not happy to see", "There is more than one way to" etc. It's a dialogue thing, but since the POV is chatty first person, it's all-pervasive. It gives the text a childish, awkward air. The second thing infantilised the text even more. This was diminutives for ordinary words. It wasn't just Flora using them; everybody used them. The worst was "sandwie" for sandwich.
The plot was also frustrating. Flora and Udo (and Valefor) have all sorts of adventures - real adventures, with life and death stakes - but they're all terribly circular. (view spoiler)[They never achieve anything, a lot of the things they believe turn out to have not really happened, some of the danger isn't real, and by the end of the book they haven't done anything. (hide spoiler)] Flora's grown up some, which is supposed to be the point I guess, but I was still frustrated.
Final verdict: I was glad I read it, and I think Wilce is a writer to watch. But there was too much frustration for it to be love....more
Children's modern fantasy. Mig, her mother and her brother Chris are gently connived into going to visit their great aunt Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ahChildren's modern fantasy. Mig, her mother and her brother Chris are gently connived into going to visit their great aunt Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) in a village by the sea, in which she rules with lace curtains and gentility. There's something wrong with the village, though. The men and women seem to be at war, the children all look like clones, and Mig and Chris' dad, who's supposed to be dead, seems to be driving around town.
I first read this one one before I was obsessed with Diana Wynne Jones, and thought was quite good but nothing startling. Rereading, I'm a bit in love with it.
It's not perfect. The ending, which I wanted to be the culmination of the personal struggle between Mig and Maria, is sort of stolen by the adults sweeping in and fixing things. But it's marvellous nonetheless. The characters are original and written at just enough of a slant to surprise you. The theme of the war of the sexes is fantastically explored....more
Adult fey urban fantasy. Eddi, a singer/electric guitarist living in Minneapolis, finds herself chosen by the Seelie Court for a job nobody would be eAdult fey urban fantasy. Eddi, a singer/electric guitarist living in Minneapolis, finds herself chosen by the Seelie Court for a job nobody would be especially keen on: the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, whose queens are resident in Minneapolis for reasons that are never quite addressed, are declaring a war for the city. They need a mortal to make the stakes mortal ones.
This is a classic of the genre. I read it immediately after Robin McKinley's Sunshine, which frustrated me to pieces, and my first reaction to this was: Oh thank god, yay. It has a lot of elements that are simply awesome. The Phouka is a really fantastic character, especially in his early scenes, and the descriptions of the fey folk themselves are lively and convincing and imaginative. Possibly the best thing about the book is the use of music, though. Eddi's band is central to the action and ultimately to the plot, and the most powerful scenes are the ones in which they're playing and Eddi's feeling the chords slide and wail around her. It's tricky to infuse a written work with a sense of music, the emotions and the sounds-as-images, so I have huge respect for the way Bull pulled it off.
But ultimately this book wasn't as successful as I wanted it to be. The main reason is, again, the main character. Everybody around her believes that Eddi has something special, she's electric and charismatic and no wonder the fey folk chose her. But Bull never really managed to convey that electricity and charisma. Eddi drives a good bit of the plot, she's not a passive presence, but she's simply not very compelling as a protagonist. Except when she's playing, and even then it's more that she lets us inside the dynamic of the band.
The other problem I had was with the stakes. I didn't really care about the outcome of the faerie war. The battle scenes didn't catch me up. At the end something happens to make this battle personal - one of the central characters is in danger. But ... I didn't care about that character either. They weren't introduced in an especially sympathetic way, and they were never developed enough to make up for it. What really drove the story wasn't the faery war, but the romance. The romance is resolved about two thirds of the way through, though, and after that ... well, I finished the book, and I enjoyed the descriptions and the little details of the world, but I wasn't invested much....more
Adult vampire urban fantasy. Sunshine lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world in which Others - vampires, weres, demons and angels - are acceptedAdult vampire urban fantasy. Sunshine lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world in which Others - vampires, weres, demons and angels - are accepted and everywhere. We don't see any angels, mind you. This one's all about the horror. Sunshine herself lives an ordinary life working in her step dad's cafe, until she does something stupid and gets herself captured by the 'darkest' of the Others: vampires. Seriously messed up psychopathic supervillains. Sunshine finds out a few things about herself, and forges an alliance with somebody she shouldn't even be able to look at, let alone develop feelings for.
I wanted to love this. It's a classic of the genre. It's an intricately thought-out world, and a lot of the ideas, especially about magic, are rather cool. But it is, for me, flawed in ways I can't get over. Principally, I had trouble with the POV. It's first person, and the style is fairly colloquial - we don't ever forget that it's Sunshine herself telling the story - but it's the most distant first person narrative I've ever read. Even after three hundred pages of first person story, I don't feel that I have a handle on Sunshine as a character. Her voice distances us from the action by diverging into random info-dumps about the world (which, yes, very complex and layered) and about her own backstory. At one point she grabs a steak knife and lunges out the door after a vampire, and then gives us a page and a half of information about the proper way to kill a vampire and basically how a steak knife won't cut it, before we finally get to the end of her lunge. And, OK, I accept that that info was relevant to the action, but it should have gone, oh, any time before the lunge.
She's also a somewhat unreliable narrator, which further distances us from the story. She doesn't lie, but she keeps secrets from the reader. She'll obsess about something for weeks, and even though we're with her for those weeks, we won't find out until weeks later, when she suddenly brings it up. I think this is a deliberate stylistic decision, and is supposed to reflect Sunshine's own mindset and the way she's trying to hide her own thoughts from herself and pretend amnesia that she doesn't feel. Still, it works against my involvement in the story. Case in point, I was actually musing about these things while reading the life-or-death climax, which shouldn't have been possible. But the truth is, I didn't care very much whether Sunshine and Con came out of the climax OK.
Two more things, quickly:
One is the villain, Bo. He's supposed to be a looming menace over the entire book, but we not only don't meet him until the last couple of scenes - The Lord of the Rings has a successful villain the heroes never meet, so that's not a deal-breaker - but we don't get any clear sense of his personality or presence before then either. He doesn't work as an antagonist. The Goddess of Pain is a better one, but she's not central to the plot, and is also introduced fairly late.
The other is the romance. Or, rather, the sex. There's this completely random, very graphic, not-quite sex scene in the middle of the book, that just made me tilt my head to the side and stare. There's growing feeling between the two central characters, which could be read as sexual tension, but then this sex scene, which is over in about a paragraph and a half, comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere and is never followed up on and I just kind of wonder if McKinley's editor asked her to make it sexier and this was what she came up with? It didn't add anything for me. It's too short to be hot, and too random to be powerful.
All that said, this book made me think, a lot, and that's the sign of an interesting book. And she does a mean aftermath, and a nice final scene, which I can appreciate....more
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