Nick the Lolt – Anthony M. Briggs, Jr.

I received this book from LibraryThing’s Member Giveaways in exchange for an honest review. And I am going to be honest.

There’s something not bad buried deep in this mess. However, the mess includes wildly eccentric similes, amazingly awkward sentences, a great many words that – with a nod to Inigo Montoya – don’t quite mean what the author thinks they mean, distractingly odd colloquialisms, dismayingly haphazard worldbuilding, irritatingly erratic punctuation … I normally would have made an unladylike sound of disgust and DNF’d this pretty quickly. But I was curious.

The storytelling is a muddle: it’s supposed to be a history sent by someone named Iggy to an unknown patron; she is sending the story in pieces (packets) because she must be on the move for some reason known to the two of them but not the reader. She mentions that she has narrowed down her subjects to five historical figures whose stories she will tell, therefore indicating a series of five books, I assume. The first is Nick, a sixteen-year-old art prodigy who will become “the Marsh King”, a figure of terror.

Okay, now, the art. My first impulse is to mutter mutinously: the folk in this book esteem art highly (that can’t be bad, right?) and hold competitions. But … the first competition described is a speed-painting relay race. I don’t even know what to think about that. Speed is one of the most highly praised abilities in an artist in this story – if you can’t knock off a still life in a couple of minutes, you’re nothing. I was trained by a man who painted trompe l’oiels into which he put a bare minimum of eighty hours, and he taught a class which spent a full semester on one painting. Speed-painting relay races hurt my brain.

Nick is estranged from his parents, famous artists themselves; if this rift is explained at all, I missed it. He’s in great need of psychological help – or help of some kind, at least, because he’s constantly talking to himself, or to voices no one else can hear, and he’s constantly being bullied and beaten up by other kids. (And in the book they’re never “other boys” or anything like that: they’re “kids”. There’s one of the intrusive colloquialisms I mentioned, others being “Awesome!” and the constant exclamations “Woa” [sic] and “Ya” [also, sic]. A man is never a man, but a “guy”; “could have” and “would have” and “might have”are often “could’ve” and “would’ve” and …you get it. I’m not talking about dialogue – this is the narrator’s voice.) The reason no one – kid or adult – likes him is that he apparently brings bad luck wherever he goes. Sometimes. Maybe. Is it his fault, really? If so, why? He gets the blame for broken brushes and accidents and attacks of nerves that happen in his vicinity, at least, although from his point of view there is no mention of trying to do any such thing, or even being aware of it.

And, see, there’s one of my problems with this thing. The story is being told, we are informed right off the bat, by Iggy. Yet within each packet – constituting what seems to be a random chunk of story (the chunks are not distinct sections of the story in any other way, just in the fact that they are divided by interruptions from Iggy) – there are moments from the characters’ points of view which would have to be pure conjecture, pure fiction, on Iggy’s part. The reader “hears” Nick’s thoughts – and his friends’, at times, and his enemies’, and random bystanders’. In other words, this is a fantasy novel which seems to have been written in the form of a omniscient-narrator historical novel presented as history … I think.

Despite all of this, I kept going. Skimming, for the most part, but going. The revelation of the setting did not improve – if anything, as more stray details were piled on, it became worse and worse, more and more muddy. I wanted to reach the end because this … kid (*twitch*) is supposed to become something terrible, and there are a few “had he but known” foreshadowing moments which indicate calamity to those around him. I have to give this tale this much: it’s a unique story. But it’s such a mish-mash of everyday YA bits (being bullied, and liking a girl, and thinking parents are disappointed, and having annoying younger siblings) and not-everyday but still mundane bits (painting contests, and a village in the middle of a forest/jungle, and exotic plants and animals like coconuts and marmosets and such, and a people who know what horses and soldiers are but have never seen any), along with a hefty dose of completely invented bits (plants that grow from their seeds in hours or minutes, and newly invented animals (what’s a badillo when it’s at home? I don’t know, but they talk about them a lot), and paintbrushes that change their shape on command, and so on)… It might make sense, after a huge amount of work was put into making it do so. As it stands, the mish-mash is just a mesh. Mess.

Again, there’s something there, like one of those strange seeds the main character keeps planting to grow strange plants (at lightning speed). It needs a disinterested party to sit down and dissect it and stitch it back together again, with all the plot and setting holes mended and the style and grammar errors and eccentricities tamed. This is one of the great shames of self-publishing: however much confidence he has in his own work, a writer is always going to be too close to it to be able to tell whether what he wants to say is what he’s actually saying. Or to see typos or other errors that spellcheck isn’t going to catch (“wooden statute” instead of “wooden statue”).
… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
I wrote most of the above as I was skimming along from about the 40% mark; I couldn’t make myself read it with any depth, but I was still willing to work through the whole thing and see what happened with the story. But then I hit about 66%, and this sentence:

“…his eyes narrowed and a small wave of veins sprouted through his muscles.”

And I raised the white flag. I just couldn’t continue after that. Up to that point I was giving a lot of benefits of a lot of doubts: most of the mistakes I was coming across were of the sort that are usually defended with “You know what I meant!” But this …? I have no idea. It’s incomprehensible – and kind of gross. And to be perfectly honest now I’m a little angry. I’m writing a book (who isn’t?). I would be beyond ashamed of myself if I allowed my manuscript out of my hands in even remotely the condition this one is in.

I would be ashamed to let a text message go out if it looked like most of this writing.

How dare anyone wanting to call themselves an author wrap up their brainchild with a title and a cover painting (which is not bad at all, sadly) and release it out into the world without troubling to have it read through by someone capable of an intelligent, unbiased opinion. I’m deeply irritated that I was guilted – that I let myself be guilted – into spending as much time on this thing as I have. I’m annoyed that this thing is yet another example of Why To Avoid Self-Published Authors – that’s not fair, because I know from some of my friends on Goodreads that there is some wonderful stuff being self-published. But (to wax Scarlett) as God is my witness, this has the general look of a last nail in a coffin. I am going to be so unbelievably careful about the self-published novels I let myself get sucked into from now on. I have literally thousands of books which have undergone editing and proofreading which I could be reading instead.

I read or skimmed to 60%, so I feel fully justified in both rating and reviewing this book. I was foreseeing a two star rating, the second one being a nod to the fact that the idea is unique and might have amounted to something. I can’t do it. I want back the time I spent trying to read it.

 

Heidi – Johanna Spyri

My two favorite aunts gave me Heidi when I was eight years old. I don’t know if it was Christmas or birthday; all I know is I have them to thank not only for this but for Anne of Green Gables (and my very favorite stuffed bear Snowball), bless their names forever. As with Anne, I read Heidi over and over (and over), and followed up with some of the sequels from the library, and loved it dearly; unlike with Anne, though, I haven’t read Heidi in many years. The Goodreads Kindred Spirits group chose it as their “Akin to Anne” group read for last June, and I fully intended to join in then, but in the end it took being faced on December 30 with a Challenge shortcoming of two books for me to pick up what surely had to be a quick read so as to meet my goal. (It worked.)

I was a little worried. Childhood memories are fragile. It doesn’t take much to stain a current opinion, leaching backward to taint what was so beloved. But, I’m happy to say, Heidi came through it just about unscathed.

Peter didn’t, but I’ll come to that.

The story: Heidi is an orphan at six, and lives with her aunt until said aunt gets a job and decides that the girl’s grandfather is just going to have to serve his time looking after the child, no matter how alarming his reputation is. Just about everyone Aunt Dete meets exclaims in horror at the idea of leaving the poor child with the old man, the Alm-Uncle; he hates everyone, and makes no secret of it. She’s doomed. Dete is not an admirable character, but I will say for her that she is tough: she ploughs on despite the exclamations of horror and barely even gives the Alm-Uncle a chance to say no before she vanishes, leaving grandfather and granddaughter together.

And it’s fine. It’s better than fine. Heidi flourishes, with her grandfather providing quiet but loving support and the goats and Peter providing entertainment, and her own active nature keeping her constantly occupied. And Grandfather flourishes a bit himself, softening and expanding a bit. And when that aunt of hers pops up again a couple of years later and sweeps Heidi away with her again to dump her on a wealthy household that needs a companion for wheelchair-bound Klara, Heidi’s small following on the mountain suffers her loss.

It was startling how much I remembered. I, who have trouble remembering details from a book I read last month, remembered the white rolls, and the kittens, and what happened to the wheelchair; I remembered the hayloft beds (maybe because I wanted one so badly when I was little) and the wonderful goats’ milk and the other bed behind the stove. And it was all still very, very sweet.

Except for Peter. I was taken aback by what a nasty piece of work he had the potential to be. I remember loving Peter. Perhaps that was because of the other books, but here – here he is selfish and lazy and greedy, and a little stupid. He shakes his fists at the interloper on Heidi’s time, and then there’s the wheelchair incident; he did damage. He was a little scary. If he hadn’t had the fear of capture put into him, and hadn’t had the Alm-Uncle’s influence curbing his behavior, it seems like he might have ended up a serious problem.

Heidi is a type of little heroine which I tend to doubt is written much anymore. Everything impacts her personally, from the grandmother’s blindness to the tribulations of the goats. She’s a simple, entirely selfless child with no desire to be anything else. She’s not clever, per se; she can learn and learn quickly when she wants to, but she’d rather be out romping with the goats than reading. Which, now that I think of it, very likely has a good deal to do with her decline in Frankfort with Klara: she went from having hours of exercise in the fresh air, along with a simple diet (very simple – I was a little shocked at the amount of bread and butter and cheese and milk, and the paucity of meat and green vegetables) to almost no exercise and three meals a day of rich food (with more processed flour, at that). No wonder the child felt poorly. It wasn’t just homesickness and worry over the elderly folk on the mountain.

The rest of the cast of characters were very satisfying. Peter’s mother and grandmother were drawn as simple, grateful folk; I’ve been trying to remember what it was that I read in which the poor characters continually refused gifts, even of things they needed desperately, because they could not accept “charity”; Peter’s family had no such compunctions, and the gifts they received did what they were supposed to do: they gave joy to the recipients and the givers. I loved the doctor and Klara’s grandmother – they were beautifully drawn. I wanted to smack Klara’s father a bit, or at least to find out what was so very important in his business life that he had to abandon his daughter to the servants and the so aptly-named Frau Rottenmeier for months on end. The French maid was surprisingly bitchy (though I can’t help but wonder if some of her comments weren’t effectively translated; they were delivered as cutting remarks, but read like cryptic non sequiturs). The butler, Sebastian, was a love. And, last but not least, I enjoyed watching the grandfather show a bit more depth and three-dimensionality by the end of the book.

The affection I have for the book remains intact. I love it when that happens.

Related articles

• Do Childhood Books Shape Us? (lauragraceweldon.com)

 

 

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

I’m not sure what to say about The Hunger Games. I didn’t really want to read it. Wasn’t interested, and had no plans to look into it further: just because I don’t much like children doesn’t mean I want to read about them killing each other. And I cordially dislike dystopian novels. If I’d known before buying it that it was set in the present tense I’d never have gotten it.

Then my sister mentioned she was reading The Hunger Games, and it was amazing. She was surprised I hadn’t planned to get into it. Huh, I thought. Then a very good friend told me she was reading it, and it was amazing, and I realized if two such very different ladies whose opinions I trust were loving it so much, I had to at least try it.

I bought a bundle of the trilogy on an Amazon special for the Kindle. When I opened the first page and saw the present tense, I sighed, but kept going. And very shortly I was incredibly grateful that I’d bought the bundle – if I had had to wait in between books either to buy the next or, horrifying thought, till the next was published, I think I would have expired from suspense. This way I was able to devour The Hunger Games and dive straight into Catching Fire immediately. (This is, I think, one reason the reviews have been so hard to write – I flew through them all so quickly that I was left reeling and with no clear division from one book to the next.) (This review, btw, kind of assumes a basic knowledge of the story; I don’t recap it.)

Amazing? I could exhaust the thesaurus looking for words to describe how much. I’m going to have to stop saying I hate books written in the present tense, after this trilogy and The Help. It’s always struck me as an affectation, a gimmick – but in this trilogy it pushed the urgency of the narrative. . And the first-person aspect was masterfully handled. In a story this big it cannot have been easy fitting all of the necessary exposition into the point of view of Katniss – and there was never a moment, in all three books, when I was thrown off by wondering what was going on elsewhere or how or why something happened. That the movie showed other points of view was fine; it suited the media. That Ms. Collins was able to accomplish it impresses me deeply.

Characterization was beautiful. Katniss is sixteen, and has been keeping her family – her mother and little sister – alive for five years, since her father was killed in one of the coal mines their District 12 is known for. After the explosion, her mother shut down, and it was either use what her father taught her about the bow and snare, or starve. She doesn’t make friends easily, and isn’t happy about that, but is unapologetic; she has much bigger things to worry about than whether people like her. Until, of course, whether or not people like her could mean the difference between living and dying. This is where the wisdom of the first-person narrative comes in: we are privy to her discomfort in the social settings in which Peeta handles himself so well, and we are also with her as she makes the choices that show her to be the person Cinna saw: fiercely loyal, protective, and selfless. It never occurs to her to think of her own needs when someone else needs her; she goes from looking after her family – and half of her neighborhood, really – to looking after Rue, to looking after Peeta, to … Catching Fire.

Still, even with the maturity her great responsibility has brought her, she is sixteen, and not entirely sure how she feels about her hunting buddy, Gale. He’s a little older, and does know how he feels, and she is still adjusting when the calamity of the Reaping strikes. The effect that Haymitch’s plans to help her and Peeta win attention from sponsors will have on Gale is never far from her mind – but the odds not ever being in their favor, the concern has to be set aside. Gale is strong, and capable, and responsible – and he has a wild, rebellious streak that frightens her.

The development of Peeta in her eyes is wonderfully skilful. He evolves from the boy with the heroic aura – the one who saved her life and her family all those years ago, at his own expense – to a young man with a personality, a sense of humor, great gifts and great spirit. His sense of humor kept taking me by surprise. He tromps through the woods like a herd of cattle, and can paint himself into a tree trunk, and will risk his life and his on-air reputation to ally with the Careers purely in order to help her, and he loves her. Katniss is used to looking after others; for someone else to look after her, takes her off guard.

I have seen interpretations of this book, and this trilogy, that made my eyes go wide (Peeta as a Christ figure because he spent three days in a cave and gave Katniss bread? Really?), but I’m in Tolkien’s camp: I cordially dislike allegory in all its forms. It can be useful as added depth to a story – but if allegory is the primary intent to a story it will probably not be a success for me. As a commentary, I find it powerful: it’s not so far-fetched a future for a nation (planet) gripped by thoroughly staged “reality” shows in which contestants’ personal or professional lives are in others’ hands. Every time Ryan Seacrest, while I was still able to tolerate American Idol, said something like “Who will survive tonight?” I found myself flinching. In interviews Ms. Collins has said that the idea began to germinate as she flipped back and forth between coverage of the Gulf War and reality television, and … it shows. Even more than the not-impossible idea of a totalitarian rule following a global ecological disaster, this terrifies me: to go from the pseudo arena of something like Survivor or one of the other immersion shows to the Hunger Games just doesn’t feel like a very big jump. Given the very clever governmental one-two punch of “We can never allow another uprising” – which is literally true, as the population cannot tolerate the losses that would come with another war and still remain viable.

And that’s another indication of a tremendous story: it can be interpreted any one of a dozen ways, or simply accepted as a tremendous story.

Related articles

• A Literature Snob Reads the Hunger Games. And Likes It. (jamesroom.org)
• The Hunger Games Trilogy: New Era of Science Fiction (thetruthshouldbefree.wordpress.com)

 

 

A Soldier’s Secret – Marissa Moss

What it says on the tin: this is the story of a young woman who ran away from her life, and created a new one wearing trousers. Her life as a girl was intolerable, so she reinvented herself as a man, and when the Civil War came along she, or rather he, enlisted in a spirit of determined patriotism, and became the best soldier in his unit – and a nurse, devoted to his patients, and postmaster (which I never really realized was so dangerous) and attaché and Union spy. And in two years of service to the Union (almost) no one ever even suspected Frank Thompson was actually a girl named Sarah.

I’m not sure what this book is, exactly. (Besides received from Netgalley – thank you to them and the publisher.) It’s based on historic fact, which could make it historical fiction. Moreover, it’s based on the life of a real individual, so maybe it could be called a fictional biography – but no, it’s in the first person, so maybe a fictional memoir. Except that the individual in question, a woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds, wrote a memoir of her own in 1864, so it’s a little odd to have a novelized version.

I read this with the understanding that it was based on a true story, and the notes following the book emphasize this:

Although more than four hundred women are known to have dressed as men to fight in the Civil War, most of them were joining husbands, brothers, fathers, or fiancés. They had someone to help with their disguise and share the burden of their secret. Sarah Emma Edmonds was the only one known to have lived as a man before enlisting.

(I’ll come back to the extraordinary fact of that number, four hundred + women.)

But immediately after stressing the truth of the story, the author reveals that a major event at the end of the book was a complete fabrication, almost exactly the opposite of what really happened. The end of the story is not how the story ended. So, while “the bones of the story are all true”, this event at the end “seemed like something that should have happened, and the advantage of fiction is that you can choose the shape of the story”.

Yes, but – this isn’t fiction. Not really. It’s fictionalized. And I have a problem with the change that was made. Problems. For one, I don’t see making a change this big at the end of the story of a woman few have heard of as any more acceptable than, say, changing the end of a certain evening in April 1864 to have John Wilkes Booth miss his shot, or than saying that eventually Thomas Jefferson freed and married Sally Hemings. Or to have Henry VIII say “You know, that Catherine is actually rather nice. I believe I’ll go back to her and be a good husband.” If a writer takes on the task of writing about a life, about an individual’s existence, to make a change just because it feels like what should have happened is, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest. It breaks faith with the subject of the writing.

The other side of it is that now I have doubts about everything else in the book. There are some highly improbable events in the story, and the story as a whole is improbable, and I went along with all of it because, I was assured, it was all based on history. But. If that last really quite large happening never happened, I’m inclined to doubt the rest, however much the author assures me it’s faithful. There was so much luck running through it – sheer dumb luck that kept Sarah/Frank from major injury in battle, not to mention from discovery – that it became a little hard to swallow; s/he glided through the War like the Maryest of Sues, able to do absolutely anything they set her to: she was a crack shot, a born rider, a gentle and patient nurse with an iron nerve, a natural spy, a daring messenger, and no more concerned about killing the enemy than the next man. So to speak. Very shortly she had everyone thinking Frank was the best fellow ever, and in the two years she fought only completely coverable glitches occurred, and – as I said, almost no one ever even entertaining a suspicion that Frank wasn’t what he seemed to be in two years of sleeping and eating and everything else in close quarters with no real privacy. Only the “but she really existed!” thing kept me going. Once there was a hole knocked in that, all bets were off.

The point is played up that all the names in the book are true to life, that Sarah Emma Edmonds/Frank

Image of Sarah Emma Edmundson (or Sarah Edmonds) as “Frank Thompson” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thompson did indeed serve in the same unit with Damon Stewart (hmm) and Jerome Robbins (!) and so on. But I wish the real names had not been used. I feel like this would have been a more honest novel – more honest as a novel – if the heroine had been named Jane Doe calling herself Joe Schmoe, and bunked with a lad named John Doe and fell in love with Richard Roe. Or something. My understanding is that Sarah’s experience served as the backbone of the book, and the plot was filled in with bits and pieces and shreds and patches from other tales of others of the four hundred women. If this had been straightforwardly presented as a composite portrait, leaning heavily on Sarah but not trying to revivify Sarah, I feel it would have been a much better book – a cleaner book, in a way.

Another way to keep it honest would have been to simply tell Sarah’s story without messing about with facts.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t preen about how factual the story is and then say “well except for this bit here which I just didn’t like the historical reality of”.

Finally, and this is purely a personal reaction, I find it very sad that Frank’s way of proving his masculinity was to tell dirty stories and spit and scratch and fart.

Related articles

• 5 Infamous Female Spies (mentalfloss.com)
• Spies at Work (slipintosomethingvictorian.wordpress.com)

 

A Great and Terrible Beauty – Libba Bray

Wherefore: it was on Mount TBR, and I was waiting for my new Kindle
What: trade paperback
What else: present tense and first person

It was there, I was there, I picked it up and started reading it. And almost didn’t stop even when my eyelids were growing heavier and heavier in the wee hours. On the first page, I noted the use of present tense, flipped back a hundred pages or so (it’s a real book) and saw that it wasn’t just for that section, shrugged, and kept going. It fits. I could learn to really like the present tense, I guess; here it suits the narrative, a young woman’s thought processes as she navigates her completely changed world; it brings immediacy. (I’d better get used to it – this was at least the third book I’ve picked up this year, and another right after it.)

Reviews for this are all over the place – even more, I think, than is usual. One complaint I see quite a bit down there is that Gemma Doyle, Our Heroine, is not remotely a proper Victorian young lady. Well, no. She’s not. She’s sixteen, and believe me when I say from personal experience that sixteen sucks. Libba Bray says in the Q&A at the end of the book that, as I interpreted it, utter accuracy to the thought and speech patterns of the era were not the most important thing to her; the basic truth of the constrictions of the time period were. So – would Victorian maidens have sounded like these girls? Probably not. But do they sound like genuine girls, wounded and afraid and fighting their way through all the obstacles thrown up in front of them by an unfair universe? Yes.

We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.

Gemma has been brought up to the age of sixteen in India, where her father is serving. She is in fact turning sixteen on the day the first chapter describes, and she’s not happy. She wants to go to England. She is tired of India, and longs for the homeland she’s never known, and her mother’s constant refusal to let her go home to school frustrate her into temper tantrums. As her mother walks with her and her maid to the home of a friend, where Gemma has cake and very dull conversation to look forward to, the argument crops up as usual, and – as is becoming usual for her – Gemma says some rather unforgivable things and storms off. Then things become weird. She finds herself lost, and in the confusion of the marketplace is beset by a terrible vision of a man being killed, of her mother taking her own life. And the vision turns out to be true.

Next thing she knows, Gemma is getting her wish, and is off to school in England. And to continue the theme of “be careful what you wish for”, it’s dreadful. The school is a huge, forbidding fortress, imposing on the outside and gloomy inside; the other girls range from the “in crowd” of evil pretties and their hangers on to Gemma’s roommate, the scholarship student Ann, whose standing is not helped by her stutter. It’s about the worst possible scenario of a boarding school barring physical mistreatment. Being new would have been hard on anyone in that situation. Being new and fresh to the country and still guilt-ridden and mourning her mother and still trying to figure out what’s happening to her, along with never being possessed of the best social skills – this is Gemma’s plight. It isn’t pretty.

Remarkably, and partly through blackmail, she does wind up finding a circle of friends, of a sort. These are not, quite, the friends most young adult novels give their heroines. These are not the girlfriends with whom you’d make popcorn and watch chick flicks. These are the girlfriends who start up a vicious game of Truth or Dare which results in tears and possibly arrests.

But that’s why they’re there, these girls, in that school: no one wants them at home. They’re in the way, and little enough is expected from them that any benefit they can gain from this dismal school will be to the good. Ann will be a companion or a governess. Lovely Felicity and Pippa will marry rather well – their looks will ensure that, and if they can pretend to draw and speak French so much the better. And Gemma? No one really ponders Gemma’s future. She’s slotted away for the time being, so that her brother can continue with his life as best he can while quietly dealing with their opium-addicted father, and what happens after will happen.

“Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were – damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn’t true. This is a ghost story, remember? A tragedy. … They were misled. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn’t be different for them, because they weren’t special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can’t be.” Felicity’s voice goes feathery thin. “There, now. Isn’t that the scariest story you’ve ever heard?”

All of this makes the vein of magic that runs through the story all the more alluring. It gives access to another world which is everything they could ever want. Arrogant in their confidence that they know what they’re doing, and desperate for a way to carry the wonder over into their miserable lives, they ignore all the warnings they’ve received. And of course the consequences are dire.

I liked it. The writing engaged me – I guess I’m over the present-tense phobia – and while I have no warm and fuzzy feelings about any of the characters I do appreciate the way they’re drawn, and the mythical pseudo-Victorian world they inhabit. The theme is easy to sympathize with: There’s got to be something better than this.

But… Hold on. To quote Robert Sean Leonard as Neil Perry, “Oh my.” I hadn’t quite caught the really really strong parallels to a certain film before this very moment (see spoiler below). Oh dear. This changes things, a little…

Dead Poets Society: Set in boarding school in which there is no one of the opposite gender, at all (though boys illicitly meet with girls at parties and such). Main characters Neil and Todd, part of larger loose group. Parents of main characters cold and not exactly caring. Inspiring and provocative English teacher Mr. Keating who quotes poetry and encourages free thought. Students leave school grounds at night for secret club meetings – reviving a defunct club they’ve learned about. Neil defies parents and acts in a play, and has a moment of triumph, but it is short and he ultimately is punished with the threat of a military academy. Kills himself. Keating winds up the scapegoat blamed for the death and leaves the school in disgrace.

G&TB: Set in boarding school in which there is no one of the opposite gender, at all (though at least one girl meets with a boy in the woods). Main characters Gemma, Pippa, and Felicity, part of larger loose group. Parents of main characters cold and not exactly caring (or dead). Inspiring and provocative drawing teacher Miss Moore who quotes poetry and encourages free thought. Students leave school grounds at night for secret club meetings – reviving a defunct club they’ve learned about. Gemma defies just about everyone and does things with her magic; and Pippa defies her parents and tries to wriggle out of an odious engagement, and has a moment of triumph – but it is short and she is ultimately punished by having the wedding date moved up. Kills herself by insisting on remaining in magic world. Moore winds up the scapegoat blamed for the death and leaves the school in disgrace.

Um. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Related articles

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Dust Girl – Sarah Zettel

This was very nearly a one-sitting book (from Netgalley, thank you). I wandered off from what I was already reading, dipped into a couple of other stories, and realized with a kind of guilty start that I’d had Dust Girl for quite a while and needed to see if I wanted to commit to it. Three hours later I was 80% of the way through it and had to turn off the light because of my stupid job. Note: As usual, the Kindle galley was a bit funky – erratic indentations and line breaks, and randomly placed pagination and whatnot – but not nearly as bad as some.

I’m thisclose to giving it five stars. I think I was put off as long as I was because of the introduction, featuring incredibly creepy voices and magic-by-angry-piano – which combined with the creepy, creepy face on the cover to give the wrong impression of the book. It’s not a horror novel. There are some absolutely horripilating things in it – the Hoppers were some of the … creepiest (note to self: need new word) characters I’ve read in a while, and as for the Sheriff … yeah. Creepy.

But the primary genre is not horror: it is, in fact, a fairy tale of sorts, in keeping with the name of the projected series: The American Fairy Trilogy. By which I mean not an adaptation of a classic, but something new and different and fresh which fits with a click into the classic mold. It makes use of the classic tropes of faery in much the same way Emma Bull did in [book:War for the Oaks], revealing how the Seelie and Unseelie Courts rub up against and coexist with the mundane world, but this take on the relationship is beautifully unique.

I think part of this was the only real drawback to the book, and that may have been more my own expectations rather than the storytelling: I still don’t know what makes one Court Seelie while the other is Un. Not to spoil anything, but there didn’t seem to be much to choose between them. Still, that might be explored in the rest of the trilogy. And the fae who are encountered in the course of this book are excellent characters – they’re slippery, shifting shape and surroundings and the truth as suits their whim, until nothing – not their words nor their actions nor even their surroundings – can be trusted. Oh, and they can create zombies.

There was one other place that gave me pause, now that I think of it: as the book description says, Callie’s mother goes missing in a dust storm – which, by the way, was one of the scariest things I’ve read in a while. But Callie fetches back up in the house, having rescued a strange and mysterious man who can’t seem to hold a shape, and loses all track of her mother … and hares off on a kind of half-cocked search with no solid reason for her destination. I wouldn’t have wanted to read page after page about her moping or panicking, but she seemed to accept the new bizarreness in her world as well as the disappearance of her mother with more aplomb than I might expect from anyone.

The setting is different – the Dust Bowl, 1930′s Kansas to start out – and well-drawn. I love that this is placed in the 30′s in the Midwest, which seems an under-utilized time and place, and is well-suited to the action. Jack Hollander fits right in as the young man Callie encounters before setting off on her search, with whom she forms the kind of quick bond that does tend to happen when two people help each other survive a horrific experience. That he and Callie do not immediately fall in Teenage Love is both refreshing and believable. That Callie has the intelligence to keep in mind that, like everyone else in her world after her mother disappears, his motives are not transparent and her trust has to be carefully placed – this is even more refreshing and welcome. Callie is not a cuddly protagonist, but she is sharp and self-sufficient and good company for a few hours’ reading.

 

Shadowfell – Juliet Marillier

Not what I expected, this. I’ve read little Marillier in the past, so I was going in almost blind. Shadowfell was provided to me by the publisher through Netgalley – thanks to them.

Neryn, fifteen, is traveling with her father. They have no real destination, not really; their goal is more survival than any other objective, though the name Shadowfell has been whispered. The background of Neryn’s story and of her world is sketched in gradually, until it becomes clear: the land is under a new and brutal regime which is making a concerted effort to harness magic-users when possible, and when that is not possible to stamp it out with a brutality that borders on parody. One talent the hunters look for signs of is the ability to see and communicate with the Good Folk, basically the fae of all shapes, size, and constitutions – and Neryn can see them. It was, partly, for this ability that her grandmother was horribly killed in front of her – and that her village and much of its population was destroyed around her; Neryn must hide the skill at all costs.

When she is horrifically betrayed by her father, she is left on her own at the mercy of a complete stranger who stepped in to save her life. Why he – Flint – acts for her she doesn’t know; whether she can trust him or not she doesn’t know, and opts for not. But their paths keep crossing as she makes for the only place that seems like it might be a haven: Shadowfell.

This is a book that is largely about the journey, so short attention spans need not apply. Neryn has a long way to go, on foot, with few provisions, in the cold, dodging the king’s Enforcers (who are as warm and cuddly as they sound: they’re the ones who search for those with uncanny gifts and mete out punishment) and, at times, the Good Folk (whose intentions toward her are as difficult to fathom at times as Flint’s).

And that’s one of the drawbacks to the book. It’s sensible that Neryn is cautious believing anyone has her best interests at heart; she’s had a horrible short life, and the only way she sees for that life to go on longer is to go it alone. Except that several times along the way she would have died without aid. Reading about her feelings toward Flint is like watching a tennis game – back and forth, back and forth between doubt-filled loathing and grateful acquiescence with shades of something more. And back. And forth. The poor girl must be almost as exhausted by the emotional whiplash as she is by the miles and miles of walking. I was.

The journey is a necessary one for Neryn and the reader, but the payoff isn’t necessarily enough, for her or for me. I might feel differently in the context of reading it with the second book in the series – which I very likely will read. On the whole, beautiful language – some very beautiful; some great minor characters, and main characters who will hopefully develop into fully fleshed-out people. I had been torn between four and five stars; on letting this marinate for a while I’m afraid it’s gone down to three. Good – but not enough.

 

Fairest – Gail Carson Levine

My Kindle freezes = I read an actual book. I have a small mountain of Read-Soon books by my bed, so when communication failed with my device I pulled this off the stack.

Aza, the first-person character, is different from everyone around her. As an infant she was abandoned in an inn, and adopted by the innkeepers who have loved her as their own. But there is no getting around the fact that she is ugly in a land that prizes beauty only slightly less than they value song. Song Aza has – her voice is the loveliest in her village. Beauty she does not, to the extent that strangers stare at her and whisper to each other behind their hands: she is too wide, and too tall, and too large overall, and her coloring is wrong, and so on; whether a disinterested party would see her as outright ugly or merely different from those around her is a question that crossed my mind.

I love fairy tale adaptations and fairy tale-esque stories. While this has assorted elements of classic tales – the magic mirror, the handsome prince and the good king with the wicked queen, the common girl raised to great heights, etc. – it is itself, unique. With she added a little later strong overtones of Snow White. Which apparently this really is an adaptation of. Despite the book title and the mirror, I didn’t see it till three-quarters of the way in.

It took a minute to get used to the singing; for everyone to sing random sentences, all the time, was just too odd at first. But, as with a good musical, after a little while it began to seem a shame that everyone doesn’t sing more often. It’s notable that the only person up to no good in this book is the one who doesn’t sing.

The names and created language of the book took more getting used to: vowel sound-consonant-vowel sound, rinse and repeat for additional syllables, from the prince’s dog to the main character; it added up to something I found to more resemble baby talk than a language, but I’m hardly an expert. And then, smack in the middle of it all, the castle cook: Frying Pan. (Who irritatingly always spoke of herself in the third person.) That was bizarre.

Queen (Snow White) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Overall, it was sweet and insubstantial but a little off somehow. Aza seems to drift along with events like a wood chip in the current, easily led and not prone to doing much to make her life or her position better until it’s almost too late. The king is a nice fellow, and beloved – that’s pleasant. Ivi, his queen, is not nice; she starts out vain and stupid and utterly self-centered, and never changes. Prince Izori must be a nice fellow – he has a dog who loves him – and Aza falls thoroughly in love with him in record time. That little romance (it’s surely not a spoiler to say there’s a bit of romance there?) is not entirely believable; Levine just doesn’t sell it. Or I wasn’t buying. I liked Aza’s family more than I did her, and I liked djaaM the gnome as well. The gnomes were a bit of all right. I did like that one of the reasons the ogres were as dangerous as they were was their skill as sirens. I loved some of the songs – but I hated the ones in the invented language. I wish there had been more to love; I had expected there to be.

But … the cover is utterly lovely.

Related articles

• The Evolution of Snow White (racialicious.com)
• Story Therapy and the Recycling of Fairy Tales (millennialfolklore.wordpress.com)

 

Wilde’s Fire – Krystal Wade

Wilde’s Fire by Krystal Wade

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Pretty sure this (from Netgalley) is a DNF. I feel I should give it another shot, but I’m not optimistic. I’ve learned not to immediately recoil when a book is in the present tense, but four extraordinary books (The Help and The Hunger Games Trilogy) don’t make it less than gimmicky when not done well. Also, not done well = amateurish, unfortunately. Everyone in this book has already annoyed me deeply (if you have something to say, just say it, I beg you), and main character Kate worst of all.

“I have something I need to tell you!”
Interruption.
“Later.”
Kate shrugs.
Repeat ad nauseam.

And – seriously? This driving-aged girl’s mother allows a boy to sleep overnight in her bed? I don’t care how many degrees of Best Friend he is – I had to read that three times before I believed it.

Yeah, you know what … I have a few dozen other Netgalley books I need to get to. DNF it is.

View all my reviews

Related articles

• Wilde’s Fire (Darkness Falls #1) by Krystal Wade (thebookhookup.com)

 

Dark Remains – Sean McMahon

I won a copy of this book through LibraryThing’s Member Giveaways. I always feel badly about not being able to heap praise on one of these. I enjoyed the beginning… It’s a powerful idea – two young children left on their own in 1842 London, their comfortable early life contrasting hideously with being reduced to prayer and scavenging to get by on the filthy, terrifying waterfront.

Unfortunately, I first got angry at the adult characters, and then at the writer, and then just became baffled, and it all went downhill from there.

The children – Maggie, 13, and her little brother, ten-year-old Thomas – are alone in the world because their father, a Chartist activist, was caught, convicted, and transported, and their mother was broken by the stress of it and died. At the beginning of the book the kids decide they should try to locate Mr. Turner, mentioned in their father’s letters as someone who could help the family. Why did their mother never go to him? Pride? Regardless, it’s now find this gentleman or turn to a life of crime, or die, and the two set off into the mean streets of London.

The streets aren’t the only things that are mean: the children are trapped by a group of very young thieves straight out of Oliver Twist and no matter how hard they try can’t seem to escape them; though they have nothing themselves, it’s their own selves which have the potential to be valuable to the group, as Maggie can participate in a seduction-robbery of some rich drunken toff. Finally, though, they find the old gentleman, only to see him kidnapped by scoundrels and end up right back with the street gang … after which they and one of the gang, Jack, are taken up by a sweet little old lady and the story goes from Oliver Twist to Hansel and Gretel.

Honestly, it was kind of a mess.

The beginning, as I said, had some hope in it. It was a good depiction of the vicious circle of homelessness: you have no place to wash and nothing clean to wear, so “decent” folk, including the police, automatically assume the worst of you and want nothing but to be shut of you, and so you and your clothes become dirtier and more ragged, and any opportunity for anything better slips further and further away. But before long I was just utterly confused as to what story this was trying to tell. The story from Maggie’s point of view is intercut with her dreams in the present tense – effectively nightmarish – and also bits and pieces the reader could not otherwise know from assorted letters, articles, and other papers from other sources. A good idea – but unfortunately a bit scattershot in execution.

The middle of the book, as I mentioned, takes a wild fairy tale turn as the kids are scooped up by a Countess who promises to give them everything they could possibly imagine and then some, but who just might not be as benevolent as she seems. It was a bizarre turn for the story to take, and almost trivialized by being a detour, popping up a good ways in and wrapped up tidily well before the end in a muted climax that featured a strange sort of deus-ex-machina.

I very quickly lost patience with the children’s father, Thomas Power. You’ve got a cause and a fire in your belly and you’re willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good? Dandy. Go for it – unless you have a fragile wife and two young children who, if they lose you, will be reduced to abject penury. All I could think every time the narrative cut in one of the father’s letters was How dare you? How dare you put yourself into a position in which you abandon your family to almost certain death? How could you? Whether it was thoughtlessness, overconfidence in himself and his wife and Turner, or blind zeal, the end result was his wife’s grim and bitter death and the deep suffering of his children, and there was no amount of yay-he’s-a-hero-for-the-Cause that was going to alleviate that. And, really, I don’t know much more about the Chartists (or being prisoner in Van Diemen’s land) than I did before I read the book.

The reason the children’s mother earned my anger is something of a spoiler, so we’ll just take it as read. It’s the least of my problems with the book. It could be argued that the fact that I was angry with the characters means they were real enough to spark an emotion in me; it could also be argued that they were written as idiots and it was their thoughtless stupidity that made me angry. Which – well, actually, that means they do in fact have a lot in common with a lot of real people, so – go them.

It was the writing, both in its rambliness and its grim and bitter need for editing, which made me a bit angry with the writer. I was annoyed with the weird left turn into lurid sensationalism; I was much more annoyed that the children quite simply did not speak like children. On the death of their mother:

Maggie (13 years old): “She had the churchyard cough and suffered terribly for a while. We were thrown out of our lodgings because the sewing work she brought home didn’t amount to much, and we couldn’t pay the rent. I tried to help, but I think she got so very tired with the illness, and she couldn’t keep up with the work. We then found shelter in an old fisherman’s hut down by the river, but her cough grew worse. She was miserable and full of despair. She hated how her life had turned out and hated that we were forced to take up begging…”

~~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

Thomas (10 years old): “Right after she died, I used to think I saw her face everywhere. Every woman of her age seemed to have her face. … I used to see her face around the market, pushing barrows, scavenging around the waterside, even walking the streets in fancy clothes. I’d stop and stare at all these ladies. But after a few seconds of staring, I knew it couldn’t be her – and the real face of the woman I was looking at would appear once more.”

These are not the words of children, even well-brought-up Victorian children. Now and then there was a childish grammatical error or something of the sort, but largely the kids never sounded like kids. The dialogue of the urchin Jake, who had had no education whatsoever and was (I think) supposed to be a proper little Cockney brat, differed very little in the main from the examples above, though now and then there was a text-stopping insertion like “take a butchers” – from zero to full-on Cockney and back again in a sentence, which brought me to a screeching halt every time as I tried to adjust. Everyone – from the French Countess to Cockney Jack to Blake to Mr. Turner – sounded pretty much the same, except for occasional dropped-in stereotypical words.

Did I mention the two main kids were well-brought-up Victorian children? Does the line (spoken by Maggie) “There might be blood, guys” sound Victorian? “Guys”?? Really?

Most of all, though, because it should have been the easiest thing to fix, I was annoyed with the slipshod spelling, grammar, and punctuation:

- “Say what you want, Gentlemen” (why the capital?)
- “Like outlaws they laid low” (what is a low, and where did they lay it?)
- “Eventually, however, he came to heal.” (Should, in case it isn’t clear, be “came to heel” – not even getting into the connotations of the phrase)
- “the dinning room” (*flinch*)
- “those hated, London streets” (why the comma?)
- “Maggie wondered around the empty house” (yes, it should be “wandered”: not the same word)
- and my favorite: “‘What about, Jack?’” (which wasn’t a query to Jack about what he might be referring to, but was supposed to be a query about him: “What about Jack?”)

Say what you want, Gentlemen, about nit-picking, but truly, really, honestly – commas are important. In that last example the comma creates a completely different sentence from what was intended. “You know what I mean” just doesn’t cut it when this is something people are expected to pay money for – there’s really no excuse for it. I just found an old review of mine, and I’m recycling a line from it: when there are as many nits as this, it’s hard not to pick them.

No, wait – my favorite erratum might have actually been this, from one of Maggie’s nightmares: “Then up bobs a decapitated leg to the surface”. How, exactly, do you decapitate a leg? I think I actually gave a little cry of dismay at that one.

There were plenty of places where I found the choice of words questionable, such as:
- Referring to two men who just viciously beat up an apparently nice old man as “the younger gentlemen” (Is “gentlemen” really appropriate here?)
- “It informed them that their package of hope was lost” (– Er?)
- “Marie … thrust him into her arms to comfort him” (can you thrust someone into your own arms?)

And there was one place where I just sat and laughed for a second. The Countess requires of the children a promise that they won’t go to the folly. “How would we go about getting over there?” asks young Thomas. She tells him, in detail. Guess what happens.

A quick internet search doesn’t turn up any record of the emotional story of Marie Antoinette and Jacques (which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or wasn’t said to have happened). The other major historical character besides Marie Antoinette (with whom she was bizarrely yoked as a pair of heroines for the Countess) is real, but her background is never made explicit in the story; I don’t know if the reader is just supposed to know, or is intended to go searching. Author’s notes at the end of the book might have been added value here. It needed something. With a lot of work and a lot of cleaning up and a clearer focus, this could be good – there were places that weren’t bad, like the genuinely creepy nightmares.

I think that with some strong guidance and – do I really need to say a masterful editor? – this could have been a fine book. As it is, I, sadly, have a bit of regret for the time I spent on it.