bloodygranuaile

 It's been a little while since The Darkest Part of the Forest came out. I bought it when Holly Black did an event at Brookline Booksmith with Sarah Rees Brennan (to whom the book is dedicated), but I only got around to actually reading it when I was in Maine last week. This is what happens when I decide to be a responsible adult and read more nonfiction instead of YA fantasy all the time. But I've recently realized that I really can't be giving up my YA fantasy too much, because being alone in my head with only my head and things that have happened in reality is bad for my mental health.

In the latest in Mark Does Stuff readalongs, Mark has apparently decided to read my entire childhood all at the same time, so, while going through all of Tamora Pierce’s stuff on his regular schedule and, now, starting the Enchanted Forest Chronicles on YouTube, he did Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted as a Double Feature.

Ella Enchanted is a loose retelling of Cinderella, in which Ella of Frell was given a “gift” at birth by a well-intentioned but incredibly blockheaded fairy named Lucinda. The “gift” is obedience—meaning that Ella is literally, physically incapable of not obeying orders. If, unlike Lucinda, you take a half a second to think about this, the implications are completely terrible—people can force Ella to do all sorts of unpleasant and even dangerous things and have pretty much endless capacity to take advantage of her.

Rereading this book—and particularly being able to follow along with Mark’s perspective, who, as usual, had never heard of this book before and was going into it completely unspoiled—the main thing that struck me was how freakin’ dark this book is. Not only does Ella’s mother die in the beginning, in tragic fairy tale fashion, but Ella’s father is creepy, Olive is teeth-achingly, relentlessly grasping and weird, Hattie is basically Chris Christie in a wig, Dame Olga is syrupy and insincere, and talking to Lucinda is like getting into an Internet argument with libertarians. The five of them don’t have an ounce of self-awareness between them, which gives me headaches. The implications of Ella’s curse are explored pretty thoroughly (with the notable exception of sexual violence, because this is a children’s book), resulting in Ella having to give up her most treasured possessions and her money up to the last penny, having to cut off her only friend at finishing school, becoming a scullery maid, being prevented from talking to Prince Char, not being able to tell anybody what’s happening to her or why, and almost getting eaten by ogres. While Ella is clever and resourceful enough to escape from some of these scrapes—she doesn’t actually get eaten by the ogres, after all—it’s made quite clear that the curse is relentlessly and debilitatingly capable of fucking up her life, no matter how personally awesome she is. And Ella’s pretty personally awesome—she’s proactive, rebellious, clever, good with languages, fun-loving, and fairly compassionate, although not for people who are acting abusively (which I am okay with; I think understanding is great and all but sometimes it’s acceptable to not focus on what wounded bunnies the poor poor bullies are. I am also sometimes more okay than a lot of other progressives I know with hitting back where it hurts over hitting where the problems is, which is a fancy way of saying that I have zero qualms about Ella stealing Hattie’s wig even though there is nothing wrong with wearing a wig).

The first three-quarters of the book have very little to do with the original Cinderella tale, and follow Ella as she recovers from her mother’s death, tries to deal with her weird mercenary father, gets sent off to finishing school with Hattie and Olive, escapes from finishing school in order to intercept Lucinda at a giant’s wedding and ask her to take her “gift” back, hunts ogres with Prince Char and his knights, and slides down stair rails at the royal palace. It’s only after Ella’s father, financially ruined through his own con artistry, marries Dame Olga and immediately faffs off on a trading mission that Ella is ordered to serve as a scullery maid, against her father’s express wishes, and prevented from seeing Prince Char. Prince Char is a thoroughly delightful love interest and a perfect complement for Ella, he takes his responsibilities as a future leader extremely seriously, and Ella brings out his latent sense of humor. The letters they write each other while he is in Ayortha and Ella is suffering as a scullery maid under Dame Olga will basically spoil you for romance with real humans forever (heartfelt text messages just ain’t the same). Char has his own characterization and backstory and doesn’t so much save Ella as serve as a sort of catalyst for Ella being able to save herself (and the prince and the kingdom, while she’s at it).

I had forgotten that the curse-breaking scene is actually kind of weird; I tend to visualize books in my head like movies, and the final battle (that’s basically what it is) is all in Ella’s head, so I spent a lot of it imagining how strange it must look to everyone else around that Ella’s just, like, having a fit, is what it sounds like. Also I kind of wanted more on-page smackdown of Hattie once the curse was broken, because Hattie is terrible.

I had forgotten that LUCINDA LEARNS TO GIVE GOOD GIFTS AT THE END. LARGELY MEANING THAT THEY ARE PHYSICAL OBJECTS THAT ONE CAN DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO USE. So that was a pleasant surprise.

The major theme in the story is the importance of free will and consent, which I think makes it a super valuable book for young persons, but it’s also a good solid fantasy tale of a girl trying to break a dangerous curse and being awesome. I guess I would definitely recommend it for children, but would only recommend it for adults with a warning that it’s very upsetting. There are some ways in which I think children are able to “handle” much heavier stuff in their books than adults, and this book engages a lot of those, apparently? Idunno, all of us who had read it as kids were like “Yeah this is a great fairy tale book, I loved it to bits” and all those who were just coming to it as adults were like “THIS IS MASSIVELY UPSETTING HOW DID YOU SURVIVE CHILDHOOD” so make of that what you will.

Malinda Lo is one of those authors that I found through other authors on social media, where she said all sorts of smart things about diversity and YA and social justice and I was like, this lady sounds cool, maybe her books are cool too! So that is why I bought a copy of Huntress.
Huntress takes place in what is largely a familiar sort of pseudo-medieval fantasy land, but with strong Asian influences. For example, the ruling and most humanoid sort of fairies in the fairy realm are known as the Xi… pronounced “Shee”, the same way that the terms for Celtic faeries  “Sidhe” or sometimes “Seelie” are pronounced, except it’s spelled “Xi”, which is exactly how that syllable is typically transliterated from Chinese. I am a language dork and I think this is SUPER COOL.
The premise of the story is that nature has mysteriously gotten all out of balance, with the sun not rising and the crops failing and it being sort of a dreary chilly temperature regardless of what time of year it is, when the human king receives an invitation from the long-unheard-from fairy queen. Hoping the invitation has something to do with the changed climate, the King, in conjunction with the Academy of Sages, which is the awesome all-female (I think) magic school that also seems to have a sort of monastic/nunnery thing going on, kick off a fantasy/adventure quest plot. The questers in this plot include three guards (one of whom is a badass lady guard named Shae), the crown prince Con, and our dual protagonists, Kaede and Taisin. Taisin is the most magically gifted student at the Academy, and she’s been having visions of Kaede getting into a rowboat on an icy beach. Kaede is pretty much the least magically gifted student at the Academy; she has instead been spending her time doing gardening and learning knife throwing and basically doing every awesome non-magical thing she can find to do until she becomes badass. The two girls have to figure out how to combine their very different strengths into order to save the world, and also they fall in love. (Con and badass lady guard Shae also fall in love and they are super cute.)
I’m trying not to describe this book using words like “standard” or anything like that because it makes it sound unimaginative, and it’s not really. But… in a number of ways, it’s one particular type of story: a fantasy-adventure-romance in which teenage intrepid heroes come of age and save the world and fall in love; it’s a genre/story outline/thing that is basically my favorite and it works very well and it can be reimagined and retold a million times without getting old, when it’s filled up with different characters and different worlds and different threats and plot twists and stuff. And it’s a pretty enjoyable, entertaining, solid example of that kind of story, maybe not the most twisty in terms of blindsiding plot twists that I’ve ever read (I have read some books that totally turn the plot inside out every couple chapters), but it’s a very good example of this particular type of story. And this is a type of story that never, ever seems to have gay protagonists. It’s more and more common to be able to find gay protagonists these days—but it seems to stay strictly in literary fiction, contemporary realistic sort of stuff, and almost every story with gay protagonists I’ve ever read has been a story primarily about being gay. This is why I rarely read fiction with gay protagonists, because I really have a low tolerance for reading more than a few books that are primarily about romance or sexuality per year. Fantasy and science fiction, particularly YA SF/F, seems to be getting better at having more secondary characters who are LGBT, even viewpoint characters in books as long as they’re fairly ensemble-cast-y stories, but it still seems like there are stories about gay people being gay, and then there are stories about straight people saving the world from magic curses/evil overlords/invading aliens (sometimes with their gay friends in tow). Huntress might be the first book I’ve ever read that is just straight up about lesbians saving the world from dark magic. And I think that is pretty cool! I would love to see a LOT more books like this, books about saving the world and about solving crimes and about fighting aliens and about discovering long-lost treasure or whatever, where the main romantic subplot isn’t het. (For now, though… there are apparently a few other Malinda Lo books I haven’t read yet! And there is Welcome to Night Vale.) Anyway, Taisin and Kaede’s romance is believable and touching, and even though they don’t end up together at the end due to the monastic element of Taisin’s chosen career, neither of them dies or becomes evil or any of those terrible tropes.
I do think this book could have used some tighter editing; there were a couple of instances of word conflation (“disinterested” for “uninterested”; “free reign”), and there were several instances of mid-scene POV switches, which I always find jarring even though I’ve seen it in a number of novels now. I also found the scene where they were attacked by wolves slightly jarring—while I’m aware that “wolves are bad and they attack people because that’s just what they do” is a common fantasy tropes, my own particular reading history means that I’ve read very, very few books that have actually used that trope at is, whereas I’ve read several books that take more favorable and complex views of wolves. And since this is a book that does a lot to deliberately stay out of other old tropes and takes a much more thoughtful view of a lot of “default” issues in fantasy books—the “Huntress” does a lot of thinking about the moral implications of killing anyone or anything, even for the right reasons; violence is never treated as Awesome Happy Glorious Time even when it’s clearly needed—I was much more surprised than I would have been otherwise that the wolf attack thing was just played straight.
Overall, though, I did like it a lot, and I will probably be picking up Malinda Lo’s other stuff in the future, and if you like YA adventure fantasy things and are not a bigot douchebag, then I would certainly recommend Huntress. It has Action! Romance! Magic! Fairies! And a bonus unicorn near the end!

I reread Tithe, just like I said I was going to! I'm surprisingly proud of myself for this, which just goes to show how much my head has gone to pieces after reading Les Mis.

I still don't think this series is as good as the Curse Workers series, but this is just because I think the Curse Workers series is one of the most brilliant things in YA fantasy. Tithe is extremely good, and I'm pretty sure that some of my earlier negative response to it was that Kaye's life is so utterly different from my own at that age and her personality is so different from mine that I had a hard time relating to her. Now that I'm slightly better at not reading books through the lens of It's All About Me (unless the character actually is a pale upper-middle-class bookish brunette, because there are specific things that are almost always done with that particular archetype...), I like it a lot better.

I also forgot that I actually really like Roiben as a character. He's a knight with a lot of pain and violence in his past and he's pretty grim a lot of the time but he doesn't really fit into the Tough Guy on the Outside/Wounded Bunny on the Inside jackass archetype that infests so much romance. He's just a dude trying to be the best person he can be even though his will essentially belongs to crazy people, and he resents the fuck out of it.

I don't know if I remembered them from last time or if they were just really easy, but I guessed all the riddles pretty quickly. :( I tend to feel this means they are easy riddles, because I'm pretty sure I actually kind of suck at riddles! But maybe I'm getting better.

This here be the end of my utterly disjointed thinky-thoughts on this series.

So, when you were kids, did any of you read any of the Color Fairy Book anthologies, edited by Andrew Lang, and supposedly also his wife but she didn't get any credit because Victorians?

This week I finished rereading The Orange Fairy Book and it was just as charming, pat, and ridiculous as I remembered. While the tales are rather cleaned up (at least three versions of Cinderella and none of them have people cutting bits of their feet off), they are still a lot of fun, and the illustrations are gorgeous. There are dozens of tales in each book, even though the books aren't very long, because some of the selections are so short.

The most impressive thing about this series is how global its reach it; The Orange Fairy Book features tales from all sorts of cultures instead of just the usual French, English and German ones that US kids tend to hear about--this edition features several Berber fairy stories and ends with a handful of charming Lapp tales about ogres. The stories all have citations at the ends, so you can get a sense of where the Langs did their research--some are from anthologies of specific culture's myths; others are culled from anthropology journals or acquired by direct interview.

Since there are so many unconnected stories in this volume I find I have little else to say about the book as a whole, except that it has left me with a newfound appreciation for Finnish ogre stories. SO AWESOME.

In continuation of my attempt to finally get around to reading the ARC's my mother picked up for me at a book fair in 2007 (because when I'm off the job, what I really want to be doing is reading unproofed copies of things!), I read Tara Bray Smith's Betwixt.  

Betwixt... um... fits its title, I think. The word "betwixt" is a perfectly serviceable adjective, although at this point in the evolution of the English language, the only reason to use it instead of saying "between" is to add extra atmosphere, and your chances of successfully adding extra atmosphere instead of just sounding cheesy and insufferable are highly dependent on doing everything else exactly right. So, Betwixt basically has all the ingredients of a Holly Black novel, but they are a bit... mashed together, kind of. It's definitely a "people who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like" kind of book, because the plot and characterization aren't quite strong or original enough to hook someone who isn't already just like "I like teenagers and fairies and angst and unnecessarily dark things; I will take them intravenously if possible." There's a bunch of pseudosciencey stuff for people who like their fantasy pseudoscienced up (it is heavy on the pseudo. The whole second half of the book is basically Viv being like "ENERGY, ALSO GENETICS, ALSO ENERGY. COSMIC ENERGY. DID I SAY ENERGY ALREADY? AND DON'T FORGET GENETICS. COSMIC ENERGY GENETICS") I really wanted to hear more about the rest of the way the whole fae thing on Earth worked in this book (like the linna or limma or whatever other training the guides are supposed to help them learn) and less about cosmic universe energy (with extra genetics). The characterization is a little off, particularly the character of Moth--he is introduced as basically being a big creepy slimeball which is why it is surprising and annoying to the other characters that he is their fae mentor thingy; however, after about halfway through the book he completely stops being a big creepy slimeball, and when he becomes a viewpoint character his viewpoint does not have any sleazy thoughts at all, nor does it address his history of hitting on underage girls at all, even when he is being ruminatory about his past. 

I found the story engaging enough while I was reading it, but I wasn't very happy with the ending. I don't think this book is a series yet but they basically leave it wide open for a Part II, because otherwise it is just one of those annoying books that has no ending because it just doesn't, and that is deep and realistic, SO THERE. Like, you don't have to wrap everything up with a bow like an 18th century romance, but Nix is like stuck in an ocean somewhere in an alternate dimension; there is a lot more story there. 

I also basically wanted this story to be better because it's relatively rare to have a story where two of the three main characters are people of color and it's not like A Multiculturalism Story. Nix is Inuit and his family has dealt with a lot of shit because of that, but his magic powers have approximately nothing to do with mystical Native American spirituality nature stuff at all, which is kind of rare in any book containing both magic and Native Americans. Ondine is black and gets the same treatment other YA main characters get of being described in pointlessly flowery terms (she has "cinnamon" skin and there are a few mentions of braided/treated hair) instead of explicitly identified by race, at least until the end where all sorts of lineage and genetics stuff becomes important. 

Nix' particular type of magic is that he is a "ringer," because all magic systems have funny lexicons, which frankly is one of my favorite parts of reading fantasy. However, "Ringer" is also a term for hugely nerdy LotR fans, so I kept laughing at it.

What's sad is I think this could have been a really, REALLY good fantasy book if Smith had had a much tougher editor. There's a great story in there, it's just told a bit... amateurishly. The issues are all ones of pacing, tone, continuity, and exposition, and those can all be fixed without needing to cook up a substantially different story. 

Oh God, I needed this book so badly.

This is one of those books in a little trend in the YA fantasy world of writing fairy stories that draw on the old fairy myths--the ones where fairy courts are actually powerful and dangerous, and where fairies are the size of people and have glamour magic and weather control. None of this Tinkerbell shit.

This is a trend I like a lot.

Also, there's a blurb from Tamora Pierce on the back cover, and Tamora Pierce is my favorite writer of fantasy adventure stories with kick-ass heroines, liek EVAR, so I knew that, at the very least, this would be a nice antidote to all this Twilight shit that's been invading my brain lately. And it was, even more than I imagined--where the Twilight Saga is all about being magically destined to fall in luv with people, Wicked Lovely maintains that even in the face of all sorts of destiny and fate shit, and being magically transformed into a fairy just because some obsessive fairy king thinks you're the Summer Queen and "once you've been chosen you can't be unchosen" and "THERE ARE RULES!!!" and blah blah blah, your reactions, choices, and opinions on things are all up to you. It is inevitable that Aislinn becomes the Summer Queen, but she manages to do it on her own terms anyway, which includes having only a friendly and professional relationship with the Summer King, because she'll be damned if she gives up her mortal boyfriend who's actually nice and supportive and things for that bossy douchewagon Keenan just because she's fated to be his Queen. She decides its her *job*. She pays attention to detail and displays "outside-the-box thinking," as well as determination (I think of this as "love smarter, not harder," and it tends to be the biggest factor in whether or not I support a romance (It's also something I should learn myself one of these days, but that's another story)).

It felt like Bella choosing Jacob, or something. It said that if the supernatural wants to pick up modern human chicks, it needs to deal with the century the humans are living in, and being a bajillion years old is no excuse. It said that being supportive is more important than having shiny magic powers. It said that fate can go fuck itself. It was SO REFRESHING.

Beira is also a great villianess, of the archetype EBIL ICE QUEEN BWA HA HA. She is not only ebil, but also quirky and obnoxious. You just have to love a villian who inspires both fear, via killing people and animals and making you painfully cold all the time, and also annoyance, because she dresses up as a fifties housewife when you come to visit and you KNOW SHE'S REALLY EVIL WOULD SHE STOP PRETENDING TO BE NICE PLZ. AND THOSE PEARLS LOOK STUPID.

My favorite character would still have to be Donia, the Summer King's last guess at who the Summer Queen was, now transformed into the Winter Girl. She's complicated, because she used to be human and is now a fairy; used to love the Summer King and now still does but also hates him 'cos this whole mess is his fault; and is aligned with Winter and in the Winter Queen's thrall but her preferred loyalties are still with the Summer Court. Her job is to convince Keenan's girlfriends to not take the test to see if they're the Summer Queen, although if they do, they take her role as the Winter Girl and she is freed from the cold curse business and gets to be a regular faery. So she is all sorts of conflicted. She's also genuinely kind of nice and awesome.

I feel so much better now.