![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fookin' fairies!
Feb. 24th, 2011 10:21 pmAnd I mean that in the best way possible, by which I mean I am referring to Laini Taylor's Faeries of Dreamdark. They are the best fookin' fairies. Ever. They would probably say "fookin'" too, if they were not in a YA series, as they have awesome accents. As it is, they mostly say "skiving."
I read Dreamdark: Blackbringer when it was first published in 2007. I wrote a brief review that was mostly incoherent squeeing about how it was so much better than anything by Holly Black, reigning queen of bringing Faerie back, which is saying something, considering that I basically want to be Holly Black when I grow up. Laini Taylor's husband, Jim DiBartolo, left a nice comment on my review, because at the time there were like two reviews of this book on the whole Internet, I discovered Dreamdark that early.
So what the hell took me so long to get around to reading Dreamdark: Silksinger? Had I gotten my fill of Faerie through Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, or through writing my own story about fairies that I will totally totally finish one day? No! It cannot be that, for I can never get my fill of fairies, which I suppose also begs the question of why I'm a few books behind on Marr's series too.
There is no satisfactory answer. Mostly I was just really broke for a long time, and also I'm kind of stupid about buying books. I sometimes get so distracted buying the ones in front of my face that I forget to buy the ones I want specifically off the Internet.
At any rate, Blackbringer, if I recall correctly, was about a badass fairy named Magpie Windwitch, who fights demons that have escaped from their bottles (usually let out by stupid humans who think they're genies or something stupid), hangs out with some awesome crows with awesome Scottish accents, and eventually has to save the world from the Blackbringer, a thingy that wants to basically devour the world. Magpie also becomes a Djinn's champion, because in this universe, the Djinn wove the tapestry of the world, and have I mentioned it's been freakin' ages since I've read a story with a proper scary fucking DJINN in it?
That's all I can say on that right now; I really need to give Blackbringer a reread.
The sequel, Silksinger, is primarily about three badass fairies: Magpie is still one of them. The other one is Hirik Mothmage, a member of the infamous Mothmage clan, who supposedly did something Very Very Very Bad several thousand years ago (you will have to read to find out what!) and have been exiled from faerie civilization because everyone hates them that fucking much. (Being a Mothmage is like having your last name be "Hitler", basically.) Hirik is bent on becoming a Djinn's champion like Magpie, and clearing his family's name by exposing that they were framed. The third main character is Whisper Silksinger, the last remaining member of the Silksinger clan, a family of "scamperer" fairies (their wings aren't big enough for them to fly) whose special power is the ability to control fiber via singing. This mostly means they make beautiful, extremely expensive flying carpets of silk. (It also means that Whisper never needs to comb her hair, since she can sing the knots out.) The Silksingers are the keepers of the Azazel, one of the Djinn that wove the tapestry of the world. Like all the Djinn except the one whom Magpie became the champion of in the last book, this Djinn is asleep, collapsed into a single ember. Whisper is trying to guard him and get him to his temple at Nazneen so she can wake him up; at the same time, Hirik is trying to find him so he can become his champion, Magpie is trying to find him because she is trying to find and wake all the Djinn, and a ridiculously old evil fairy known through most of the book just as "Master" is trying to marshal an army of devils so that he can become immortal and take over the world and all that supervillain stuff.
This plot is sort of secondary to the totally awesome worldbuilding and character development. The Scottish crows are still ten kinds of adorable and awesome, and Taylor does a really good job of conjuring up a really wide variety of devils out of bits and pieces of mythological and biological oddities. There are scary ones with poisonous tails and tarantula legs, and there harmless slave devils ("snags") that are basically rubbery bits of loser in hermit crab shells. Other characters are winds, or hobgoblins, or scavenger imps, and the hobs and faeries ride dragonflies instead of horses. Somehow, none of this is ever cheesy. Humans, when they are around, are seen as more of a destructive force of nature than as characters, like tornadoes or the woolly mammoths in the Thursday Next books. Magic is also frequently performed through the writing or envisioning of glyphs, which I think is a pretty awesome way to do it. Overall, the books perfectly strike that elusive balance between originality and mythology that makes for really good fantasy--you recognize, at least in part, almost all of the tropes--we've all seen the words djinn, faerie, imp, hobgoblin, and devil before, and we've got a basic idea of what they mean; we're all familiar with the ideas of writing magic, singing magic, and weaving/string/cloth-based magic; we've all heard of winds being personified--but Taylor manages to do something new and fresh with each one of them: the djinn made the world; the faeries are the most civilized creatures ever on the planet; devils are trapped in bottles so they don't wreak havoc in the afterlife and only humans can release them. Also: firedrakes.
I recommend this series HIGHLY to anyone who likes faeries, fantasy, epic things, YA adventure stories with well-developed female leads, very modern stories with strong backgrounds in mythological nerdery, and/or Gaelic-flavored accents.
In other news: I promised Nightwish videos with this bookblog!
"Nemo," because I don't feel like looking for a Nightwish song specifically about fairies (I am sure they have lots though!) and this one's been stuck in my head lately.
I read Dreamdark: Blackbringer when it was first published in 2007. I wrote a brief review that was mostly incoherent squeeing about how it was so much better than anything by Holly Black, reigning queen of bringing Faerie back, which is saying something, considering that I basically want to be Holly Black when I grow up. Laini Taylor's husband, Jim DiBartolo, left a nice comment on my review, because at the time there were like two reviews of this book on the whole Internet, I discovered Dreamdark that early.
So what the hell took me so long to get around to reading Dreamdark: Silksinger? Had I gotten my fill of Faerie through Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series, or through writing my own story about fairies that I will totally totally finish one day? No! It cannot be that, for I can never get my fill of fairies, which I suppose also begs the question of why I'm a few books behind on Marr's series too.
There is no satisfactory answer. Mostly I was just really broke for a long time, and also I'm kind of stupid about buying books. I sometimes get so distracted buying the ones in front of my face that I forget to buy the ones I want specifically off the Internet.
At any rate, Blackbringer, if I recall correctly, was about a badass fairy named Magpie Windwitch, who fights demons that have escaped from their bottles (usually let out by stupid humans who think they're genies or something stupid), hangs out with some awesome crows with awesome Scottish accents, and eventually has to save the world from the Blackbringer, a thingy that wants to basically devour the world. Magpie also becomes a Djinn's champion, because in this universe, the Djinn wove the tapestry of the world, and have I mentioned it's been freakin' ages since I've read a story with a proper scary fucking DJINN in it?
That's all I can say on that right now; I really need to give Blackbringer a reread.
The sequel, Silksinger, is primarily about three badass fairies: Magpie is still one of them. The other one is Hirik Mothmage, a member of the infamous Mothmage clan, who supposedly did something Very Very Very Bad several thousand years ago (you will have to read to find out what!) and have been exiled from faerie civilization because everyone hates them that fucking much. (Being a Mothmage is like having your last name be "Hitler", basically.) Hirik is bent on becoming a Djinn's champion like Magpie, and clearing his family's name by exposing that they were framed. The third main character is Whisper Silksinger, the last remaining member of the Silksinger clan, a family of "scamperer" fairies (their wings aren't big enough for them to fly) whose special power is the ability to control fiber via singing. This mostly means they make beautiful, extremely expensive flying carpets of silk. (It also means that Whisper never needs to comb her hair, since she can sing the knots out.) The Silksingers are the keepers of the Azazel, one of the Djinn that wove the tapestry of the world. Like all the Djinn except the one whom Magpie became the champion of in the last book, this Djinn is asleep, collapsed into a single ember. Whisper is trying to guard him and get him to his temple at Nazneen so she can wake him up; at the same time, Hirik is trying to find him so he can become his champion, Magpie is trying to find him because she is trying to find and wake all the Djinn, and a ridiculously old evil fairy known through most of the book just as "Master" is trying to marshal an army of devils so that he can become immortal and take over the world and all that supervillain stuff.
This plot is sort of secondary to the totally awesome worldbuilding and character development. The Scottish crows are still ten kinds of adorable and awesome, and Taylor does a really good job of conjuring up a really wide variety of devils out of bits and pieces of mythological and biological oddities. There are scary ones with poisonous tails and tarantula legs, and there harmless slave devils ("snags") that are basically rubbery bits of loser in hermit crab shells. Other characters are winds, or hobgoblins, or scavenger imps, and the hobs and faeries ride dragonflies instead of horses. Somehow, none of this is ever cheesy. Humans, when they are around, are seen as more of a destructive force of nature than as characters, like tornadoes or the woolly mammoths in the Thursday Next books. Magic is also frequently performed through the writing or envisioning of glyphs, which I think is a pretty awesome way to do it. Overall, the books perfectly strike that elusive balance between originality and mythology that makes for really good fantasy--you recognize, at least in part, almost all of the tropes--we've all seen the words djinn, faerie, imp, hobgoblin, and devil before, and we've got a basic idea of what they mean; we're all familiar with the ideas of writing magic, singing magic, and weaving/string/cloth-based magic; we've all heard of winds being personified--but Taylor manages to do something new and fresh with each one of them: the djinn made the world; the faeries are the most civilized creatures ever on the planet; devils are trapped in bottles so they don't wreak havoc in the afterlife and only humans can release them. Also: firedrakes.
I recommend this series HIGHLY to anyone who likes faeries, fantasy, epic things, YA adventure stories with well-developed female leads, very modern stories with strong backgrounds in mythological nerdery, and/or Gaelic-flavored accents.
In other news: I promised Nightwish videos with this bookblog!
"Nemo," because I don't feel like looking for a Nightwish song specifically about fairies (I am sure they have lots though!) and this one's been stuck in my head lately.
