A posi-tute-ly delightful and terrifying sequel

Considering how much I loved, loved, loved Libba Bray's The Diviners, I'm kind of appalled with myself that I apparently missed the publication of the sequel, Lair of Dreams. But something brought it to my attention again recently, so I made sure I'd snagged a copy as an ebook to read on the plane up to Nova Scotia last weekend. (BTW, I went to Nova Scotia last week!)

 

The book did not disappoint. Clocking it at around 600 pages, it's a big fat Gothic doorstopper of a YA fantasy, full of 1920s New York goodness, and also a fair amount of 1920s New York badness. The cast of characters is pretty big, with all our old favorites still around--Evie, Theta, Mabel, Henry, Memphis, Jericho, Sam Lloyd--and a couple of interesting new folks who pop up, the most prominent of which is Ling Chan, a mixed-race teen girl from Chinatown, who can walk in dreams. Ling Chan is cranky and brusque and loves science and can summon and talk to the dead in her dreams, and she has infantile paralysis in her legs, which she suspects might be some kind of divine punishment for her pride in her dreamwalking ability. She becomes friends with Henry, who it turns out is also a dreamwalker, and they meet and become friends in dreams before meeting in real life when things start to get weird.

 

The main plotline in the book involves a sleeping sickness that is spreading mysteriously across the city, first striking a bunch of subway laborers who had discovered and opened an abandoned subway station with a single train car in it, which nobody had known was there. If you guessed that this train car was haunted and the laborers let the ghost out by disturbing it, you are also familiar with the basics of how Gothics work, congrats! But that doesn't make it any less exciting, because all kinds of terrifying stuff has to happen for all the disparate characters to come together to figure out who the ghost is and how they are spreading the sleeping sickness and how to stop it, and meanwhile people are also disappearing and turning into ghastly toothy monsters in the subway (don't read this book if you're going to have to take a subway at night in the next year or two), and the authorities and a whole bunch of the populace are blaming the sleeping sickness on the Chinese immigrant community. Unsurprisingly, things get pretty racist, up to and including a Klan march, because the 1920s were terrible and oh god it's the 1920s all over again, isn't it.

 

So the fun mostly comic relief-y plotline going on through all of this is that Evie is now famous on the radio for doing object reading, and so she now lives in fancy hotels and throws parties until she gets kicked out and has to move into the next fancy hotel, and at some point during all this she ends up fake engaged to Sam for PR purposes, on condition that she help him learn more about the old government project that his mother used to be involved in--the one Evie's uncle Will, who runs the museum, was also part of. The bits with Sam and Evie and their ludicrous fake romance are freaking hilarious, involving creating loud diversions in post offices and all sorts of other nonsense. The stuff they find out about the government project is pretty dark, possibly even darker than the dream-eating ghosts in the subways, because it gets all mixed up with the eugenics movement. 

 

One of the things I like best about the book is the amount of American history that Libba Bray works into it--and she doesn't try to make it flattering. Between the two books, the series so far discusses eugenics, the Klan, the Sacco and Venzetti trial, spiritualism, the Second Great Awakening, polio, Chinese exclusion, sex trafficking, segregation, domestic abuse, and the Civil War. There's also a stealth mention of radium tonic, my new favorite terrifying historical detail, and a brief but highly plot-relevant cameo by Dr. Carl Jung. And there's Jake Marlowe, Charming Scientist Businessman Inventor Dude, a vehicle by which Libba Bray provides Pointed Commentary on the links between American exceptionalism, capitalism, the modernist approach to science, and the aforementioned eugenics movement. 

 

One minor disappointment I had was that I wanted to see more of Mabel's new anarchist buddy that she met at the end of the first book, but he is gone for most of this one, but then he shows up right at the end, and at the end there's also a mention of Sacco and Venzetti's impending execution that has me hopeful that the third book will involve many more anarchists. Also solve the mystery of whatever creepy swelling of magic is being brought forth by the man in the stovepipe hat, who I haven't mentioned yet in this review but he keeps popping up in the background, in paintings and in people's memories and dreams and things. Another mysterious motif that keeps popping up throughout the book is a logo of an eye with a lighting bolt under it. And a third ongoing motif is a bunch of dudes named after Founding Fathers who are apparently just driving around the country murdering young Diviners or people suspected of being Diviners. Look, it's really hard to fit all the cool stuff into a review because it's a really long book and it is just jam-packed with STUFF. Like, it could probably have been cut down at least 100 pages if you wanted to ruin Bray's descriptive style, but then it wouldn't be very Gothic, and it'd still be 500 pages long, and that's a lot of subplots and historical tidbits.

 

Anyway, it is almost October, and this is a good October book, so if you liked the first one I recommend the sequel highly, and if you haven't read the first one, that is a good October book too!

Welsh-inspired childhood whimsy

 Okay, so, sometime a year or two ago maybe, I reread Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three for a book club that I then ended up not attending. But to do so I had bought the entire box set of the Chronicles of Prydain on Kindle, so then I had them on Kindle to read on vacation. 

 

First thing: These books are squarely for small children and I am too old for them. They were charming and delightful but also I kept being surprised at how fast stuff happened, like, oh, they completed the quest and we're at the end of the book already? It's possible I also read too much grimdark stuff and these are not grimdark at all; they are fun and adventurous and whimsical and heroic and all that stuff.

 

So The Black Cauldron involves a quest to go destroy a magical cauldron that Arawn, the Dark Lord chappy in the series, keeps using to make zombie soldiers. So our hero, Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper to the enchanter Dallben (and his oracular pig), teams up with a whole bunch of other people, some of whom are known from the last book and some of whom are new, to go steal the cauldron. But when they get there, it is ALREADY STOLEN, and the group has been split up into at least three different groups, and Taran and his buddies (and a jerky dude who's with them) have to decide what to do next. What they decide is basically to go into the swamp and find three goofy-ass witches who are rumored to know somethin about the whereabouts of the cauldron, which of course they do because it's theirs and they're the ones who stole it. There's riddles and bargaining and feats of strategy and all that good fantasy-adventure stuff that has to happen for Taran and company to acquire and destroy the cauldron instead of being turned into toads. All in all, it's a good time. Taran is young and annoying but the annoying bit is OK because he's quite young indeed. Princess Eilionwy is the best because she always calls the dudes out on their shit (and they give her a lot of shit because she's the only girl in like the entire series) and is secretly a very powerful enchantress. Most of the adults are all tall and noble and generally Aragorn-like, which is fine but probably would be more interesting on-screen. Unfortunately there's never been movie adaptations of the whole thing (there was one bad one in 1985 I guess?), although Disney apparently has plans to take a stab at it and so we'll see if it turns out to do the series justice or not. 

 

The best bit of this book by miles is the three absurd witches who live in the swamp and want to turn everyone into toads; they're very obviously based on the Three Fates/the Norns/etc. but they remind me the most of the witches from Hocus Pocus. 

The daughter of the House of Llyr

This is dumb, but: I can't remember if I ever read The Castle of Llyr when I was wee! I distinctly remember reading The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, and The High King, but the two other books in the series I have no memory of even their titles. They may not have been in stock at my library? Or I may have just forgotten because it was a really, really long time ago. 

 

Anyway, The Castle of Llyr was extra delightful because it was practically all about Princess Eilonwy and her magical heritage. She gets sent off to learn how to be a proper court lady in a cute little island kingdom called Mona, which features a good-natured but chronically hapless Crown Prince whom Eilonwy is obviously intended to be married off to, an arrangement that Eilonwy has Opinions about and Taran has Feelings about. But there turns out to be more important things to worry about than whether or not Eilonwy has washed her hair, because Queen Achren, the evil enchantress that had held Eilonwy hostage way back in the first book, is skulking around looking to re-kidnap Eilonwy (with the help of an evil Royal Steward, because apparently Royal Stewards are always evil) and use Eilonwy's heritage as a daughter of the House of Llyr--a lineage of extremely powerful enchantresses--to expand her own powers. Taran, the hapless Crown Prince of Mona, the bard Fflewddur Fflam, a disguised Prince Gwydion, and the chimplike creature Gurgi (who is basically like a cross between Gollum and a teddy bear? Gurgi's like, hairy non-evil Gollum) have to get into scrapes and have other adventuresome hijinks to save Eilonwy, who is doing a fairly good job of saving herself at the other end of things, but doesn't know very much about her magical heritage. These hijinks bring the adventurers into contact with such creatures as a mountain cat larger than a horse, a giant who used to be a small whiny dude who made himself a potion that turned him into a large whiny dude, and the Crown Prince of Mona, since he keeps getting lost and then they have to find him again. Then we learn a whole bunch of stuff about the House of Llyr, all of which is really cool, and then of course it all gets destroyed, which is a huge bummer. But at least Achren loses all her powers forever and has to go be a scullery maid at Caer Dallben, where she can learn to do some honest work like a real human. This book series has a pretty strong pro-labor ethos, and especially stresses the value of "humble," peaceful work like farming over combat. But of course the combat is sometimes necessary and usually the better story.

 

TL;DR More Eilonwy all the time please!