bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with children's

Today in the wonderful world of “Mark Reads My Entire Childhood,” somebody commissioned Mark to read the first chapter of Patricia C. Wrede’s classic work of fairy tale deconstruction and metahumor, Dealing with Dragons. This first chapter is entitled In Which Cimorene Refuses to be Proper and has a Conversation with a Frog. I have eerily distinct memories of the first time I ever heard this, on audiobook in Pam’s car when we were in second grade. It turned out to be one of those Changed My Life moments because I have literally never stopped being wildly in love with this book.

It turns out that I am not the only person following Mark as he reads Tamora Pierce’s all-the-things and Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted that turned out to be a big The Enchanted Forest Chronicles fan, and next thing I knew, the entire book was commissioned. Mark Reads community, you are truly magical.

So, Dealing with Dragons, the first book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles quartet, follows the adventures of Princess Cimorene, youngest princess of Linderwall, as she runs away to volunteer to be princess for a dragon in order to escape an arranged marriage to a golden-haired twit named Prince Therandil. Princess Cimorene is one of my favorite protagonists of all time, a rebellious, “improper” princess who doesn’t fall into that sort of “I’m so feisty and sassy, I do what I want!” kind of ham-handed rebelliousness that people who don’t understand feminism or characterization always seem to write when they’re assigned to write Strong Female Characters. Dealing with Dragons has strong elements of a comedy of manners (I’ve heard it called a fantasy of manners) and Cimorene’s characterization more resembles a Jane Austen heroine or my forever homegirl Flora Poste from Cold Comfort Farm. Cimorene has a strong practical streak and tries to keep things sensible and tidy; she’s domestically competent and the thing she hates about princessing is how little useful work it involves, not that it’s coded feminine—for Cimorene, cooking, cleaning, organizing, and other domestic and administrative work is just as much an escape from the uselessness of princessing as fencing, Latin, and magic lessons.

Cimorene is hired by a dry-witted, thoroughly awesome lady dragon named Kazul, and has a grand old time getting the caves in order, sorting treasure, organizing the dragon’s library, and all sorts of cool stuff. Obstacles soon crop up, though—first in the form of a bunch of irritating knights who try to rescue her, then her even more irritating fiancé Therandil who tries to rescue her and will not be dissuaded, then some creepy, condescending wizards who keep sneaking around and seem to be up to something. Also, Cimorene and her fellow princess Alianora are trying to perform a fire-proofing spell, and they can’t seem to find powdered hen’s teeth anywhere.

With the help of Morwen, a no-nonsense witch who lives in the Enchanted Forest, and the Stone Prince, a not-entirely-twitty adventurer burdened with expectations of greatness due to a prophecy (and additionally burdened with having turned into stone), Cimorene and Alianora discover, and manage to foil, a dastardly plot by the wizards and one particularly nasty dragon to seize the role of King of the Dragons. I’m obviously not going to tell you how, but it’s one of those satisfying endings that neatly incorporates elements from a gamut of amusing little subplots and episodes that happened earlier in the book, so everything fits together quite neatly and tidily, which is what you want in a fairy tale.

After nearly twenty years you’d have thought I’d be able to come up with coherent words for talking about how awesome I think this book is, but mostly I just squee and flail a lot. (Morwen would think me very silly.) It takes a good sharp look at a lot of the more silly, sexist, and harmful fairy tale tropes, but it does it with charm and humor and in a simple way that’s easy for small children to grasp. It has all the feel of a delightful fluffy merengue of a Disney movie but there’s some real Valuable Life Lessons, like what fairy tales were invented to teach, buried in there.

Mark is now on to Searching for Dragons, the sequel, so expect a review flailing about how awesome King Mendanbar is sometime in the next few weeks.

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.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Les Miserables, Original Concept Album

I'm still too scarred from Les Mis to read any grown-up books, so instead I read a children's book that seemed vaguely like The Sort of Thing I Like: Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland, it turns out, is a lot of the sorts of things I like, and it is things I like to such a degree that it was occasionally a bit much, but overall I had a very good time reading it. It's written in a very deliberately cute and faux-Victorian style, mimicking the tone of classic children's lit books like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, which is a little bit odd since it takes place in the World War II era and was written, y'know... two years ago. But I like a little bit of faux-Victorian whimsy and so I decided to just roll with it, which I think was a good choice, because it really is a charming story.

The book is about a twelve-year-old girl named September, who lives in Omaha with her mother, a mechanic, while her father is in the Army. One day the Green Wind comes and takes September off to Fairyland to have adventures. After going through a lot of whimsical bureaucracy, September finds herself on a quest to recover a witch's magical Spoon, which had been stolen by the evil Marquess who rules Fairyland. The Marquess is a little girl who has been introducing all sorts of real-world no-fun things like laws and taxes and bureaucracy and order to Fairyland, after having killed the beloved old Queen, Good Queen Mallow. September picks up a few traveling companions, including a Wyverary (half Wyvern, half Library) named A-through-L and a Marid (a sort of mermaidy creature with an odd relationship with Time, who can grant wishes when bested in a battle) named Saturday. After obtaining the Spoon from the Marquess, the Marquess badgers September into going on another Quest, this time for Good Queen Mallow's magic sword, which is not always in the shape of a sword, but is a powerful weapon nonetheless. We're pretty sure something nefarious is going on here and that this particular Quest is not a good idea, and September's adventures get a bit grittier as she both tries to complete the quest and tries to figure out what precisely she's doing and why precisely it's a bad idea for her to be doing it and, of course, how to get out of it without the Marquess cutting off her head.

While the style of the book is almost painfully small-children-y and old-fashioned, the story itself deals with some more modern and more advanced themes than Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland do. September is a pretty awesome heroine, and her adventures make her wrestle with all sorts of ideas about home and family and government and friendship and belonging, and the twist at the end brings up some serious questions about goodness and evil and blame--the Marquess' backstory, there are some serious twists there, and it is basically THE MOST sympathetic villain backstory--and also many of the most important characters are ladies, which I like. (There are some pretty awesome secondary characters who are ladies too, like the Faerie woman who wrangles wild velocipedes for a living.) (They say "velocipede" instead of "bicycle" because it's cute and fancy that way.) In the second half of the book, her adventures get a little darker and grittier than in Victorian novels--she really does have to build a ship herself and circumnavigate Fairyland in it, and it ain't pretty.

Apparently some people have compared this book to The Phantom Tollbooth, which I think is probably a pretty apt in a "If you like X, you may like Y" kind of way.

So, unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard that Peter Jackson has made a movie adaptation of the first third or so of The Hobbit, which I did see, and I do have Thoughts about it, but that's not what I'm writing here today. This here blog is primarily about books, and since I am a big ole nerd, I decided it was imperative that I reread The Hobbit so that I could nitpick with maximum accuracy, and I did so.

My main two impressions are as follows:
1: I still adore The Hobbit and think it is awesome.
2: This is so obviously not the kind of story Tolkien is comfortable writing, like, at all.

Tolkien is very lucky that Britishness in general reads as being totally adorable all the time, because the writing in The Hobbit is wicked stilted. Tolkien's attempts at being funny are always a little stiff, and frequently a bit obscure (does anyone know what "attercop" means and why it is insulting? Did you know WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT?). Thirteen dwarves is way the hell too many, and there isn't enough time to even begin characterizing half of them, so at the end the only ones I feel I have any idea who the hell they might be are Thorin, Fili, Kili, Bombur, Balin, and Dwalin, and even then Fili and Kili are basically a single unit. The elves in The Hobbit are way goofier than the ones in The Lord of the Rings, even when they are the same elves. I had forgotten that the trolls had silly alliterative common names--they are like Bert and Bill and Bob, or something--and that nearly every time our intrepid heroes are in mortal danger, SOMEBODY starts singing. The structure of the plot is actually fairly weak, which I never noticed before--the quest is full of random dangerous detours and getting-attacked-by-thingies and about 80% of them are resolved Gandalf ex machina. Thorin is frequently described as "basically decent" and as being on the side of Good rather than of Evil, but his actual shown-not-told characterization could charitably be described as "a complete dickbag."

All that said, The Hobbit is still cute and epic at the same time, and Bilbo Baggins is still one of the greatest Unlikely Heroes ever written. And I still think that joke about the invention of golf is hilarious.

One of them is named Boudicca.

Totally not in honor of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all, because I totally forgot about it, I finally got around to reading what was once and Advance Reading Copy of Adrienne Kress' Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. I don't know what you would call it now, as it is no longer in advance of the release of the book, which happened in 2007. If I ever am blessed with advance reading copies of anything else, I will try to read them in a timely enough fashion that the review will be all hip and useful to people and stuff.

Anyway, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman was something halfway between the sort of thing I really like to read and the sort of thing I could see myself writing on a day when I was feeling inordinately clever and pleased with myself, in that it is a fun swashbuckling adventure involving kidnapping and pirates and conspiracies and lost treasure and a spontaneous musical number, but it is also distinctly aimed at nerdy ten-year-olds who consider themselves immensely superior to their peers, and not twenty-something-year-old overeducated former nerdy-ten-year-olds-who-considered-themselves-immensely-superior-to-their-peers. So some of the tropes struck me as a little tropey and some of the jokes struck me as a little twee, but this is hardly surprising, since I basically picked it up off the shelf at random because I was annoyed that I did not have my copies of A Song of Ice and Fire on hand for rereading. (Waaay different kind of story.) It makes ample use of Authorial Voice in the tradition of Victorian children's stories, and it still contains pirates, and it never quite tells you when or where the story is supposed to take place, which sort of leaves the reader (if the reader is me, anyway) sort of assuming it takes place in late nineteenth-century England from the diction, and then getting very jarred when things like laptops and plastic gloves and sophisticatedly computerized refrigerators show up.

Our Heroine is ten-year-old Alexandra Morningside, a nerdy ten-year-old who is immensely superior to her peers. She goes to the very prestigious Wigpowder-Steele Academy, and becomes very good friend with her sixth grade teacher, Mr. Underwood, who is a pretty cool dude and teaches her fencing and things (she is, of course, quite good at fencing, because no matter how nerdy your Adventure Protagonist For Nerdy Children is, they are always good at martial athletics. This is why I could never be a nerdy children's book Adventure Protagonist). Alex learns of an ancient feud between the families of Wigpowder and Steele, where Wigpowder was an infamous pirate and Steele was the philanthropist that made sure half of his fortune got turned into a prestigious academy after his death. The feud concerns the other half of the treasure, which has, of course, been buried. Several generations later, Steele's last descendant has become an infamous pirate, and Wigpowder's last descendant is Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood gets kidnapped by pirates who think he knows where the treasure is, which he doesn't. Alex finds out, but does not get kidnapped by the pirates because she gets temporarily kidnapped by hilariously evil and gross old ladies instead, and so when she escapes she goes on a grand quest to rescue her teacher and help him find the buried pirate treasure that is his birthright. Alex' adventures on her way to kidnap her teacher are ridiculously funny and just to the side of the sort of thing you'd expect them to be. In addition to more run-ins with the hilariously evil old ladies, Alex meets a drunken magician, a super-fancy hotelier who is attempting (rather disastrously) to run his hotel via mind-reading, a kindly Navy captain, a movie crew attempting to film a movie with a (or rather, the) Extremely Ginormous Octopus, and a train full of rather twenties-style partiers where time doesn't move right. And this doesn't even get us to the pirates, who are quite an entertaining crew indeed.

I quite enjoyed this book but I must admit that at the end I found myself less wanting to read Kress' second book than I did just wanting to hang out with Adrienne Kress, because I think that we seem to both have similar interests, such as pseudo-Victorian children's stories, badass lady pirates, and making personal asides to the Reader while ostensibly talking about someone else's story in order to show off how witty we are.

I may read the second book anyway, once I am off my books-buying abstinent stint.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: "War of the Thrones," Blind Guardian

Okay, I have no idea how to go about reviewing a choose-your-own-adventure book. And before you ask, it was RESEARCH. For serious. Okay?

Um, this one was called Pirate Treasure of the Onyx Dragon and it was as glorious as the title suggested. Description-free, second-person You and your sister Hannah go to spend the summer with your aunt Lydia on her island off the coast of Seattle, and decide to investigate the whereabouts of a sunken ship that one of your ancestors sunked a hundred years ago. There are many ways to go about this, landing you in various tropey situations such as chasing smugglers via scuba diving, getting shanghaid off to Shanghei by Chinese mobsters, and being the very special white people who get the privilege of listening to sekrit tribal stories by a bunch of wise old Indians. (You may not have any description, but from the illustrations and descriptions of your relatives, you're probably white.) In one story arc there is a badass lady pirate; in another one, some jewel thieves and their overdressed patron known only as The Duchess. You may also end up in a cave with bats! As is necessary for any good CYOA book, about a third of the fourteen possible endings result in your death.

I seriously do not know what else to say about this; it was very short and it was a CYOA book about searching for pirate treasure with your little sister. It was fun and cheesy. I would not particularly recommend it unless you are under 12 years of age or are, for some bizarre reason, in need of doing research on choose-your-own-adventure books.

On Liz’ recommendation, I finally got around to reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, which I ~mysteriously~ found in my basement a few years ago and had been vaguely intending on reading ever since. It is a big mysterious mystery where these books came from, since I literally just found the boxed set sitting in the basement one day and nobody has any idea where they came from. (It is likely that someone gave them to my mom and she forgot about it, but it is more fun to say that it is mysterious than that we sometimes forget about stuff.)

The Dark Is Rising Sequence (according to the box, it is a Sequence, rather than a Series or Quartet) consists of four books, all of which follow a young boy named Will Stanton. Will is an Old One, despite only being eleven, because he is the last of a group of immortals called the Old Ones, who can travel through time and have all sorts of magic powers and whose job it is to stop the Dark (the supreme force of Evil in the universe) from defeating the Light (you get the idea) and taking over the world and doing that which the Side of Evil in Epic Fantasy Epics always like to do.

The first book, The Dark Is Rising, covers little Will’s awakening as an Old One on his eleventh birthday, when he ~~gets a letter from Hogwarts~~ meets another Old One named Merriman and starts being taken out of Time and learns gramarye (“knowing,” i.e. “how to use magic,” and I’m pretty sure it shares a root with “grammar”), and is given his first quest, which is to unite six Signs from where they are hidden in different places and times around England. The six Signs all together make up one of the four Things of Power, which the Old Ones will need to defeat the Dark when they have their final rising in the fourth book, because more MacGuffins means more fun for everyone. The very formal, very dramatic, very epic-fantasy-book-ful nature of the scenes involving the Dark and time travel and the Old Ones are mitigated by the adorable family scenes, in which Will and his parents and his eight brothers and sisters are all wholesome rural English farm people (although his dad is actually a jeweler) who bicker and eat and drink a lot of tea and are just so adorable and British. The story takes place between Will’s birthday on Midwinter’s Day and goes through the twelve days of Christmas, when the Dark is most able to wield their power and try to disrupt Will’s quest, and bury England under a Snowpocalypse kind of like this year. Can Will find all six MacGuffins and join them into a single MacGuffin and save his family and temporarily defeat ~~Lord Voldemort~~ the Dark Rider?

Greenwitch takes place the following summer in a picturesque little fishing village in Cornwall. Simon, Jane and Barney Drew had discovered a golden grail there the summer before, and it has just been stolen out of the National Museum. With the help of their Great-Uncle Merry who is actually Will’s master Merriman, and Will Stanton, and a picturesque cast of Cornwallian (Cornwellian?) characters including a gouty captain and a dog, they will have to defeat an array of weird characters of the Dark to recover the grail and find the manuscript that decodes the engravings on it, which one of them had thrown into the ocean the year before. This all gets a little difficult when the ancient ceremony of the Greenwitch is held, where the locals build a giant witch out of trees and rocks and offer it to the sea as a sacrifice. The Greenwitch claims the manuscript, and the Light and Dark both want to convince her to give it up, but the Greenwitch belongs neither to the Light nor the Dark, since apparently good and evil are really low down on the list of supreme powers in the universe. High Magic is higher, and so is Wild Magic, which is what the Greenwitch and the ocean have.

In the third book, The Grey King, we move to Wales, which is EVEN MORE picturesque and rural and adorable than Buckinghamshire or Cornwall. The book features some handy scenes in which Bran, an albino boy with a ~mysterious past~, teaches Will how to pronounce Welsh place-names, which was quite useful even if it didn’t move the plot forward for an entire half chapter. In this book, Will has to acquire a lost golden harp (Thing of Power #3), so that he can wake six Sleepers and banish the Grey King and vanquish evil foxes and some other stuff, and Bran can learn about his mysterious past. There are also a lot of altercations with a nasty sheep farmer named Caradog Pritchard, who wants to shoot everybody’s dogs. We learn a lot about Welsh history and mythology, including some odd takes on the King Arthur legends. Everyone drinks a lot of tea, and there are a LOT of sheep.

The fourth and final book is Silver on the Tree, which brings us back to Wales. This time, Simon, Jane and Barney Drew are on holiday in Wales, and so is Will, and of course Bran lives there. The five children and Merriman make up “the Six,” which means they all have important parts to play when the Light wields the four Things of Power to stop the Dark from winning their final Rising. First they have to get the fourth Thing, which is a crystal sword, which made me laugh so hard I almost died. (Maybe a crystal sword was less cheesy when these books were written thirty-five years ago. When did crystals get overdone to the point of being always silly?) Bran’s mysterious past is extremely important in this plot, and there are hints of a childlike attraction between him and Jane that doesn’t really go anywhere. This book is even heavier on all sorts of old British Isles history and mythology that I’d never heard of, all about medieval Welsh uprisings and King Arthur and glass towers and things. I felt like the grand climax of the Dark’s final attempt at Rising was a little strained, what with the really complicated choreography of fourteen hundred MacGuffins (now including a tree and a very specific bunch of flowers) and destinies (way more than the allotted Six) and too many myths all showing up at once. But it was a really good ride getting there.

The series as a whole is an odd mix of epic and adorable, and somehow the flavor of it kind of reminds me of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child, which I read several hundred times as a child. It’s got that whole creepy rural-Celtic-Britain mythos going on, which always has a particular feel, and which I really can’t find the proper words for. The Dark is Rising Sequence clearly shares a lot of tropes with The Lord of the Rings, but somehow comes off as a lot darker, despite being written for a much younger audience. It might just be the contrast between the main plot and all the adorable sheep-farming scenes, though.

Like many British novels, this series induced me to drink several dozen cups of tea while I was reading it.

NOTE: Amazon tells me there are actually FIVE books in this series, WHAT IS THIS I MUST FIND IT AND READ IT.

NOTE #2: The post title is not from this series; it is something a Nac Mac Feegle says (more or less) in one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.