bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with children's

Last November I finally got around to reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s legendary A Wizard of Earthsea, and this November I borrowed several of the sequels with the intent of reading them at the writer’s retreat. I ended up spending the whole retreat reading Gormenghast instead, but the dark and cold and rain greeting me upon my return to real life this week meant it’s been prime time for curling up on the red velvet couch with some tea after the sun goes down at 4:30 pm. So Tuesday and Wednesday were dedicated to the quietly creepy The Tombs of Atuan, the first of several sequels.

The Tombs of Atuan is the story of a girl who was once known as Tenar, but who, upon being identified as the newest reincarnation of the First Priestess of the Nameless Ones, becomes known only as Arha, the Eaten One. Her life is one of both immense power and extreme subservience to the dark and malevolent old powers of the Earth, and Arha rules over a very small religious demesne consisting largely of vast, dark underground caves full of buried sacred treasures, plus an above-ground compound full of dour women and eunuchs who live a harsh monastic life that seems to consist mostly of home-spinning black cloth and eating lentils. While within this religious compound everyone (or, well, almost everyone) is clearly convinced that the Nameless Ones are far greater and more terrible than the Godkings that rule the Empire they’re nominally a part of, the outside world largely lets them alone–no one has even tried to steal any of their sacred treasures in ages.

Until Ged, hero of the first book in the series, shows up to try to steal half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, the most valuable and sacred of all the aforementioned sacred treasures. And rather than killing him instantly, which would have been the safe thing to do, Arha keeps him alive–nominally because she wants to toy with him and make an example out of him, but really because she is curious–curious about their first real theft attempt in ages, of course, but also curious about the rest of the world, curious about wizardry, and curious about the Ring of Erreth-Akbe and its (supposedly) missing other half. This is much more of a psychological novel than an action novel, with Arha and Ged’s strength tested mainly in two ways–first, for her to decide to leave the caves and become Tenar again, and then for them to actually get out of the caves alive. The Ring, it turns out, is actually very important.

One of Le Guin’s favorite themes is that freedom is scary and difficult, and that is on full display here, especially given that she spells it out pretty explicitly because this is technically a children’s book. Tenar leaves a repressive and isolated religious cult in which she gets to be very important, and goes out to be free in a wide world she doesn’t understand, where she is basically nobody and none of her skills are of any use. The caves whose secret passageways she has memorized have collapsed. She does not herself have any magical powers. She doesn’t even know how to read.

This book was pretty short, clocking in at about 220 pages including the new afterword from 2012 (which is extremely worth reading, if only for the phrase “endemic trilogitis”), which combined with being very slowly and deliberately paced means it’s really not a very long story either. It is nonetheless a powerful one.

Back in the before-times I was at a real live in-person convention and attended a kaffeeklatsch for Catherynne M. Valente, whereupon I bought a copy of The Glass Town Game. All I knew about it was that it was about the Brontes, and since I like the Brontes, that was about all I needed to be interested.

The Glass Town Game is a novel about a fictionalized version of the game that the Bronte children actually played together. It is, in many ways, a classic children’s portal fantasy, with strong The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland vibes and very similar illustrations. It’s got the same long winding sentences and twee capitalizations and charmingly pun-based humor, and lots of references to British history and literature. It’s nominally for younger readers but full of references to things that most likely only adults will get, so it was very charming to read as an adult, especially one with a degree in English literature. I can’t quite decide if I like it with the same part of me that likes the Muppets or the same part of me that likes Cold Comfort Farm, but it definitely goes in a very different direction from most of the 19th-century-Gothic-novel fanfiction I’ve seen, and I appreciate that.

Despite clocking in at over 500 pages (which is one of the reasons I picked it up now), it’s a very fast read, since it is written more or less at a middle-grade level. I’m not sure it was real deep–themes include the importance of storytelling, and that Branwell is a sexist little shit–but it was a very charming, Anglophilic way to sink a February weekend.

My brain needed a break between reading very dense queer theory and reading more very dense queer theory, so I picked up my copy of Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, which has been languishing on my shelf for quite a while. I bought it a few Readercons ago at a kaffeeklatsch and I’d forgotten that it was signed and had my little sketch of one of the chainsmoking Goth aliens from Space Opera in it.

I liked the first Fairyland book pretty well and loved the second one, so I was hoping to like this one as much as I liked the second one, but I’m afraid I only liked it as much as I remember liking the first one--which is still enough that I will probably pick up the fourth book sometime in the next few years. In this book, September is 14 years old, meaning she is starting to learn grown-up things like how to drive a car and how to be stern. Given that she is only 14 she ends up getting quite a lot of unsolicited advice about marriage, which makes some sense in-context as the main questions in the story have to do with things like time and fate and predestination, and 14-year-old September is repeatedly faced with the knowledge that she is eventually, as an adult, going to have a child with Saturday the Marid, which seems like a really awkward thing to be told by the universe when you’re 14. I wouldn’t have a child with anybody I knew at 14 if you paid me.

Overall it was very cute and very poignant and whimsical and all that stuff I expect from Fairyland book at this point. I feel like I had a bit more trouble following the plot than usual but I also didn’t care very much because deliberately whimsical portal fantasies are often a bit picaresque-y and can get away with the plot being a little bit secondary in importance; it’s mostly there to give the tour of your portal world structure. That said, this felt a little squidgy on structure compared to the last two.

The plot, such as it is, involves the Moon, which is currently going through a set of increasingly disruptive earthquakes (moonquakes, rather) that most of the people September runs into are blaming on a very large and very fast Yeti named Ciderskin. September, who has now been designated a Professional Revolutionary on her visa to Fairyland, must therefore get educated quickly on the backstory of Fairy colonization of the Moon, which involved cutting off a Yeti’s paw and using it to mess about with time, in order to figure out how to stop Ciderskin from disrupting the Moon and its inhabitants any further. Of course, not all the ancient history September learns is quite true from everyone’s perspective, and Ciderskin turns out to have his own reasons for doing things, and we learn some important lessons about the pitfalls of treating other people as tools. There are a lot of really good one-liners and turns of phrase that made me to “Ooh, I’ll have to remember that” and of course I have completely forgotten them all already. If I ever reread these books it will be for the purpose of writing down all the whimsically phrased sage advice September gets so I can make myself look clever.

Overall a charming, escapist read, and a strong example of excellence in the Children’s Portal Fantasy genre, which is admittedly an overstuffed category but one which I have a really big soft spot for.

I have had this copy of Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Maid in my possession for approximately a hundred billion years, or at least 25, as the inside cover features an ancient address and an ancient phone number. I have distinct childhood memories of starting it on multiple occasions, but it’s hung out on my “to-read” shelf since I started separating books into read and to-read shelves, as I cannot for the life of me remember if I ever finished it or not. It’s a middle grade book of the sort of early-medieval girl’s historical fiction that constituted many of my favorite childhood reads, like Wise Child and Catherine Called Birdie, and that has continued to fascinate me as an adult with books like Hild. So it seemed like a good candidate for like, escapist bathtub reading.

For a middle grade book, it took me entirely too many baths to get through, especially given that I tend to take two-hour baths. I’m once again not really sure why. It’s certainly not that it was too hard to read, like it might have been back when I first got it; it’s a middle-grade book. Something about it just tended to not draw me in as much as books that are exactly like this generally do and seem like they ought to. I can’t identify anything particularly wrong with it, I just kept not being real hooked. I got a little more invested near the end, once a bunch of shipwrecks got involved, but I didn’t really care about any of the characters except sometimes the Maid; they all just sort of came off as collections of meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories. And I say this as someone who generally would be quite interested in meticulously researched 13th century Scottish lifestyle accessories! I think some of the difficulty with getting into it might be that if you’re going to talk that much about clothing that doesn’t exist anymore, it might be useful to have pictures or something, so that I don’t spend so much mental energy trying to visualize the difference between a garde-corps and a cote-hardie, or trying to differentiate between all the terrible medieval hats. I cannot google “barbette” in the bath, the point of reading in the bath is to get away from my google machines, and I certainly can’t remember what a “barbette” is no matter how much medieval nonsense I read, because I hate hats too much. Usually this does not bother me that much, but something about this book had me unusually bored for a book about a girl whose older sister is a regicidal witch and who constantly winds up in near-death scrapes.

Sometime this past week I wanted to read a book but I had half an hour before I knew I was going to conk out and also I didn't feel like committing to anything, so I did the thing I've been been doing a lot lately when I feel like that, which is reach for an Edward Gorey book. Except I'm all out of proper Edward Gorey books, so I did the next best thing, which was to reach for a book illustrated by Edward Gorey and that seemed vaguely of the same sensibilities. So I elected to read Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc (the byline reads "Hilaire Belloc, rediscovered and illustrated by Edward Gorey").

Cautionary Tales for Children falls somewhere between Ogden Nash poems and The Gashleycrumb Tinies, being a series of extremely British humorous poems about terrible things happening to disobedient young'uns. One of the tales, "Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death," was familiar to me; it must have been in some anthology or other that I read when I was younger. Most of the stories give away their endings in the titles, and also all the children have absurdly British names, which is probably unsurprising coming from an author afflicted with the appellation "Hilaire Belloc."

Anyway, the illustrations are cute, the deaths are grisly, the rhymes are sometimes a little bit slant, and the capitalization is decidedly of the Emphatic variety. My biggest criticism is that the two most boring tales, in which the children are merely reprimanded instead of dying horribly, are put right at the back, so the book ends on a bit of a flat note. Other than that, it's pretty much exactly what I wanted.

While looking for another book to start last night I noticed that I had a few Edward Gorey (or at least Gorey-illustrated) books on my TBR shelf instead of over where all the other Edward Gorey books are, and I figured that one would be about the right length that I could read the whole thing while feeding the cats. So I picked up The Willowdale Handcar, which did in fact take me almost exactly 15 minutes to read.

This story concerns three friends--I assume they are friends; they are hanging out together--named Edna, Harry, and Sam, who find a handcar at the railroad station in Willowdale and decide to ride it around to other towns, seeing whatever they can see. Most of what they see is random, rather boring stuff, touched up with that very dry Gorey sense of whimsical absurdity, such as visiting a man with a collection of telephone pole insulators. A handful of events hint at another, much more exciting story, involving Edna's friend Nellie, her beau Dick, a friend of Dick's who is driving around frantically, and a financier named Titus W. Blotter, and an abandoned baby that looks like Nellie. The three traveling friends never quite figure out what the story there is, even when they rescue Nellie from being tied to the train tracks, and neither does the reader.

The book is subtitled The Return of the Black Doll, which... doesn't feature in the story at all. It is pictured on the cover and in one illustration. It is never mentioned in the text. These are the sort of odd little things you get when you read Gorey books.

I am also reminded that I have lived in Massachusetts since 2006 and have not yet been to the Gorey House. Who wants to organize a day trip with me before Cape season kicks off too much?

I remember little about the last Prydain book, The High King, only liking it very much. Rereading it, I can see how little me must have thought it the most wondrous and exciting thing, although I'm sure that a lot of it went right over my little head, especially all the stuff at the end, which is a bit heavier than I remembered, although it all turns out well enough.

In this book, the magical sword Dyrnwyn has been stolen from Prince Gwydion by Arawn Death-Lord, who probably can't weild its power anyway, but now nobody else can either. This obviously necessitates the entire cast of characters from the first four books all getting together to defeat Arawn once and for all and stealing the sword back. Taran has to rally all his friends, including the folk of the Free Commots who only ever go and fight if they feel like it since they have no lords, and then has to balance being a rookie battle commander responsible for the lives of hundreds of other people with his own longstanding desires to be a Big Damn Hero, plus his intention to ask Eilonwy to marry him, which he basically never has a good moment to get around to doing until all the way at the end even though it's been his intention since the beginning of Book Four. There are a lot of plot elements here that are STRONGLY reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, even more than usual, like when they try to go through a difficult mountain pass in a bitter snowstorm, right down to being led by a dwarf to take an underground path instead that all then goes horrendously wrong (there are no Balrogs in this book, though). All the threads of various characters' stories are tied up very neatly, which is very satisfying in a children's book, and Hen Wen makes a prophecy in the beginning, which is finally all sorted out right at the end. Arawn's death seems a bit fast, but that's how things happen at this reading level, I suppose, and anyway we've never spent as much time in this series face-to-face with Arawn himself as we have with other lesser villains and henchmen and regular terrible people. If you're older than about twelve, you get no points for guessing who the High King in the title winds up being.

All in all, the whole series is just the quintessential kind of really charming, whimsical, mythologically-based adventure fantasy that makes you want to wear a bedsheet as a cloak and go chase your siblings with sticks until you're old enough to start going to Renaissance Faires and that kind of goofy stuff. I am partly blaming rereading these for my purchase of a pewter cloakpin at a touristy little gift shop on the Halifax waterfront, but it's possible the blame should be more properly placed on having read them the first time, which is the sort of thing that helped me grow up into the type of person that thinks Celtic knotwork-patterned pewter cloakpins are a reasonable and useful purchase that I will obviously get lots of wear out of in everyday life (which I will, because it is small and therefore perfect for scarves; I am wearing it *right now*). Anyway, highly recommended if you have a little geek in your life; these are classics for a reason.

In the fourth book of the Chronicles of Prydain, Taran Wanderer, the Assistant Pig-Keeper sets off on a quest to find his parentage, because he wants to ask Princess Eilonwy to marry him, which is something we could see coming from a lot earlier in the series. This is by design the kind of quest that sets a hero off on a series of tasks exploring all the surrounding lands to see where he fits in, which is always a fun sort of quest to read along with. Taran's first few stops have him revisiting folks he's met in prior books, such as the boisterous King Smoit, in whose cantrev Taran smooths out a fight between two warring lords who keep stealing each other's cows. Then Taran winds up back in the Marshes of Morva, where he had gone in The Black Cauldron, to seek out the three hilarious witches who keep wanting to turn him into a toad, to see if they can help. They suggest he go find a magic mirror up in the mountains somewhere, which will show him the truth of himself. Taran for a while abandons this quest and just sort of wanders around instead, where he spends some time thinking he's the son of a herdsman on a very bleak moor (there is much character growth occurring during this arc, since thinking he's the son of a herdsman puts a dent in his hope that he was really a nobleman and would be a socially appropriate match for Eilonwy), then goes and spends some time living off the land with a very lucky and resourceful scavenger guy and his family; then he goes and spends some time among the craftsmen of the Free Commots, which is basically a set of democratically-run towns famous for having really skilled craftspeople. In true fairy tale fashion, in Taran's time in the Free Commots he learns three trades--smithing, weaving, and pottery--and while none of them turn out to be his calling, he crafts three items for himself in his time there (a sword, a cloak, and a bowl) that turn out to be very useful and important later on.

Since Arawn is very much a background menace in this book and Achren has been reduced to living harmlessly with Dallben, our main external antagonists in this book are a mercenary, who steals Taran's sword and gets away to continue to be an ass in the next book, and an evil wizard who actually *does* turn Taran's companions into animals (temporarily; obviously Taran defeats the wizard at the very last possible second). In his journey, though, Taran hears a lot about how the life of the common people of Prydain is partly as hard as it is because Arawn has stolen many of their long-kept, hard-earned secrets about crafting and farming and all that stuff, and his general evil deathiness has made the land less fruitful. So it's fairly clear where we're leading up to in the final book.

I'm not going to spoil what we do or don't learn about Taran's parentage in the end, but there's a very clear moral message about it. Out of all the Prydain books, this is structured the most like an archetypal fairy tale, with lots of episodic adventures in which people learn very important things about the world and themselves and how to treat other people and what's really important in life.

Pretty much the only bad thing in this book is that Eilonwy's off princessing for the whole thing, a state of affairs that I dislike almost as much as Taran and Eilonwy do.

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!

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.

It was a bit of common wisdom among my Harry Potter community many years ago that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was one of the less good ones — better than non-Harry Potter books, of course, but inferior to the other books in the series.

For the life of me, I cannot remember why.

I spent a chunk of last Wednesday devouring the thing from cover to cover and I was at every moment riveted, although every word and em-dash (J.K. Rowling loves em-dashes) was as familiar to me as the sight of my own hands. Though this installment of the series is not yet really dark, it's still got high stakes and a lot of tension, since most of the plot is just trying to figure out who the antagonist even is and then both the memory of Tom Riddle and the basilisk need to actually be defeated. Rowling's touch for mystery writing is really on display, as is her flair for writing secondary characters who are cartoonishly unhelpful but in, I have sadly learned in my wise old age, a realistically frustrating way. Dobby, Gilderoy Lockhart, the painfully earnest Colin Creevey, self-indulgent toilet ghost Moaning Myrtle — all of them are irritating as hell in the most amusing possible ways. Other hilarious things include Ron's broken wand, the flying Ford Anglia (which later goes feral), Fred and George (of course), the Headless Hunt's general douchiness, the drugging of Crabbe and Goyle, and the cranky singing Valentines.

As usual in the Harry Potter books (as in life), friendship and kindness are of paramount important; many rules are meant to be broken but it's still useful to do your homework (or at least to have someone in the group have done their homework); and racism is bad. And, of course, we are taught that "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." (We are also taught not to trust anything that can think for itself if we can't see where it keeps its brain, which is increasingly difficult out here in technologically advanced Muggle-land.)

Though this is a short book, it does a lot to build up the backstory to the larger Voldemort story that will be the main conflict in the rest of the series. We learn about Parseltongue, and why Hagrid was expelled, and that Dumbledore used to be younger and has not been an old man and head of Hogwarts since time immemorial, even though it seems like he should be. (In this part of the series, Dumbledore is still the greatest. If he were any greater, we wouldn't need Harry.) We also get to meet MORE WEASLEYS which is great because the Weasleys are the best. We also get more Malfoys, who are basically foils for the Weasleys, in that they are the worst.

Anyway, it was a beautiful three hours or so, rereading this book, rivaled only by the rest of the day when I reread Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (review forthcoming).

2016 having been an epically exhausting year on a number of fronts—including the reading one, where I skimped on fiction and instead subjected myself to many math-heavy poker books—I decided to end it with a nice reread of the Harry Potter series during my week off. I got started pretty much the second the Christmas festivities were over, spending most of the 26th curled up either on the couch or in the tub with my first American edition of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

While I remember the basic storyline and many of the most pop-cultural moments very, very well indeed, what with having read this book at least a hundred times before (I was an early adopter), I still found myself surprised at just how familiar some of it was: I could remember the exact flow of entire sentences and paragraphs as I'd read them previously, years and years ago; I could remember pronunciations I'd gotten wrong in my head back when I read it last. I don't think I've read these books since the seventh volume came out about five years ago.

Somehow, probably because the books eventually get so serious and because they had such a profound effect on myself and on our culture, the one thing I had managed to sort of forget was just how freaking funny they are. Things aren't super heavy in this book yet, although we are introduced to the basics of Voldemort's story, and the finale is pretty damn creepy. Mostly things here are still a little bit cartoonish, with a similar vibe to other snarky British children's fantasy like Roald Dahl, featuring amusingly gross wizarding world hazards like troll boogers. The images in my head of this one are still heavily shaped by Mary Grand-Pre's drawings and a lifetime of watching Muppets more than they are the actual Harry Potter movies (Hagrid is the Ghost of Christmas Present, pass it on), since the movies didn't start getting made until nearly half the series was published.

The book itself is still a delight to hold and to read, with nice creamy parchment-y paper and that jauntified Copperplate lettering at the top of every page. I admit I did a lot of uncontrollable nostalgic giggling and a good deal of reading sentences aloud to myself just to delight in them. Rereading this one was a beautiful and pure experience that put me back in touch with my inner child and was overall GOOD FOR MY SOUL, a well-deserved and much needed joy, from "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much" to the typographic note at the end.

In the latest edition of Failing At Book Clubs, one of the books clubs I'm in read the entirety of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series, which all in all is probably about the length of one regular adult novel. Despite being given plenty of lead time, I managed to only read the first book, The Book of Three, and then missed the actual book club because I was sick.

I remember the Chronicles of Prydain very fondly from my childhood but I think I hadn't quite realized how long ago in my childhood I read them since I was very surprised at how quickly things moved along when I started reading. I guess I haven't actually read them since my reading level surpassed a 5th grader's, nor have I read much in the way of other books at quite that level. Middle grade is about as young as I go these days, except for the Victorian classics.

Anyway, the book was still cute and adventuresome for all that, and had that early-medieval British Isles thing going on that I like so much. I'd forgotten that it takes place in basically Wales, not England. I really need to learn more about Wales; it seems an interesting place with a lot of wacky history.

Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh is the fourth and, currently, last volume in R.L. LaFevers’ series about Theodosia Throckmorton, the eleven-year-old daughter of two British Egyptologists, who is able to sense magic and remove curses from ancient artifacts. In this installment, Theodosia travels to Egypt with her mother—an archaeologist who is nevertheless completely unaware of all things magical—to return a sacred artifact to the ancient order of the Eyes of Horus. As usual, she is pursued by the evil Serpents of Chaos, who are the actually dangerous order of occultists that tend to pursue her (the other one, the goofy Black Sun, were disposed of in the last book). Guarded, in part, by her contacts with the Brotherhood—another secret order, this one dedicated to guarding the lost knowledge of the library of Alexandria—Theodosia has to manage her time carefully in order to return the emerald tablet without her mother finding out, which unfortunately means a lot of playing too sick to go to the digs.

As much as I liked this book, putting Theodosia and all her special Egypt powers back into the milieu of Egypt occasionally got a little awkward as the book danced along trying to keep Theodosia sufficiently protagonist-y without splatting too hard into a white savior storyline. The results are mixed, what with Theodosia's role in the various plots and orders being very very special, but also a lot of pretty well-developed secondary Egyptian characters and a sympathetic look at the Egyptian nationalist movement.

While there is a lot of Gadji, I still think there is not enough Gadji in this book. I'd read a book entirely about Gadji.

I think this book is emotionally strongest (and least squidgy) when dealing with Theodosia's feelings of alienation towards her family and her secrecy-strained relationship with her mother, especially when more of her family history is uncovered.

Miss Theodosia Throckmorton is the sort of MG heroine I would have been completely obsessed with had R. L. LaFevers' delightful series been around when I was about ten or eleven. As it is, I'm unashamed to eat this series up with a spoon. I'd read the first two a couple years ago when I temporarily stole them from Asshole Ex's younger sister, and more recently, a friend of mine who works for HMH--after also getting me hooked on LaFevers' His Fair Assassin trilogy--procured me copies of books 3 and 4.

I read Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus all in one day, which was yesterday, when I was suffering a stomach bug that required a billion hours of napping to get over, otherwise it wouldn't have taken the entire day. Despite my having forgotten quite a lot of what happened in the first two books, it was still a fun read, and most of it got explained again enough that I wasn't lost for long.

The basic concept of this series is that Theodosia Throckmorton, the daughter of two Egyptologists who work at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London, can sense magic--specifically, curses of the sort that hang around on the ancient artifacts that tend to wind up in antiquities museums. She's also a fair hand at removing them, although occasionally something gets out of hand and we get a book.

In this third installment, Theodosia and her little brother Henry discover an emerald tablet, and it appears that everyone is after it. "Everyone," in this case, includes the Serpents of Chaos, a thoroughly evil secret society; the Black Suns, a mostly just completely batty but also somewhat evil secret society; and Awi Bubu, an Egyptian mesmerist who may be more than he seems. The only people who aren't after the emerald tablet, in fact, is the Chosen Keepers, which is unfortunate for Theodosia as she supposedly works for/with them and they keep blowing her off.

As one would expect, basically all the grownups in the series are oblivious numbskulls, even the nice ones, such as Theodosia's kindly but very career-focused parents. All the same, they are entertaining secondary characters, and some of them are even sympathetic, such as the socially inept Stilton. The younger kids are much more fun, though, especially Theodosia's street urchin friend Sticky Will and all his weirdly-named brothers.

This series strikes an odd middle ground of not overly romanticizing the Victorian era but not really dealing with any of its social issues in much depth either--it's just sort of dropped in there that, for example, Sticky Will's mother is still alive but is barely making ends meet as a laundress and will have to keep laundressing until she drops dead of exhaustion. Upon reflection, I think this is probably appropriate for middle grade, so that the book remains a fun adventure and doesn't turn into an issues book, but the children who read it still shouldn't grow up to be intolerably stupid adults who think the Victorian era was all manners and spiffy hats.

On to book four, while I wait for the second His Fair Assassin book to clear at the library.

In a desperate bid to complete my Goodreads challenge this year (Why oh why did I extend it by 25 books?), I have been looking at the shortest, fastest-looking reads on my TBR shelf, and that means middle-grade. Luckily, because I have excellent taste in middle-grade fiction, this meant I finally got around to reading Niel Gaiman’s Coraline.

I’ve seen the movie, which was pretty awesome—directed by Henry Selick, who is the only stop-motion animation director worth having direct your stop-motion movie—so I mostly knew what the storyline would be, although it’s been a couple of years.

Since this is a Niel Gaiman book, and particularly one of his children’s books, it’s both cute and creepy. Coraline moves into a new flat with her parents, and is bored, feeling that her parents aren’t paying enough attention to her because they’re doing boring grown-up things, like working.
Coraline fancies herself an explorer, so she explores the flat and her upstairs neighbor and her downstairs neighbors and eventually explores her way through a door that opens into brick wall most of the time, and find herself, Alice-style, in a mirror version of her flat populated with alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. Her “other mother” seems quite nice at first, paying her lavish attention, but Coraline realizes something is up when she returns to her real flat and her parents are missing. Coraline and the other mother begin a terrifying game wherein Coraline has to get herself, her parents, and the ghosts of other trapped children out of the alternate universe and into the real world—or she’ll be stuck as the other mother’s pet forever, or at least until the other mother uses up her soul.

This story was simple, whimsical, and creepy all at the same time, with Coraline’s spare, childlike voice directing a close third person narrative that ends up feeling more than a little surrealist. It definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie, since there’s a lot of morbidly whimsical visuals in the book and I can’t remember how they were done. Overall it’s an excellent modern fairy tale, and I think I would have particularly loved it had it been around when I was eight or so.

Finishing out the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Mark Oshiro, and therefore I, just got through the fourth volume in the series, Talking to Dragons.

Talking to Dragons is the one I read the least frequently when I was younger, and as a result, it is the one I had forgotten the most about. I remembered that it took place several years after the end of Calling on Dragons, and that the main character was Daystar, and something about a fire-witch, and obviously that it wrapped up the whole Wizards Have Imprisoned King Mendanbar plot. I also mostly remembered not liking it as much as the others, probably due to the relative lack of Cimorene.

While there was indeed a sad lack of Cimorene, I found I actually did like the book quite a bit this time around! I cannot help but wonder if some of my change in opinion comes from knowing that this book was actually written before the other three, rather than before. The style is definitely a bit less developed than the other books, particularly the humor—it’s cute and silly and funny but I still feel like it’s a bit less polished than the rest of the series. I’m also really, really super impressed that the references to/summaries of the previous books match up exactly and quite specifically; I guess even if she wrote this book first she had the whole series outlined or something? I mean, I was basically listening with an ear towards seeing if she fucked up, and she didn’t, and I think that’s very impressive because honestly, there’s continuity errors between the first and second Discworld books and they’re just one story.

The basic plot of this book is that Daystar, son of Cimorene and Mendanbar, has no idea who he is, and is therefore very surprised when one day, following a visit by the wizard Antorell, his mother gives him a magic sword and kicks him out of the house in the general direction of the Enchanted Forest. Daystar survives the Enchanted Forest largely by being very polite to everyone and everything. He means a dreadfully impolite but sasstastic fire-witch named Shiara, a small excitable lizard named Suze, Morwen (yay), Telemain (also yay), a silly princess and her doofy knight, and a small, nameless, genderless, slightly whiny adolescent dragon, not necessarily in that order. At one point, Daystar, Shiara, and the dragon are in the Caves of Chance and they all meet an ineptly demanding pile of animated blackberry jelly, which is something I had clean forgotten about right up until they met it and then it all came flooding back to me that I had once thought this thing to be the cutest little monster ever.

`Overall I think it makes a solid conclusion to the series in most ways, but it will probably forever remain the odd one out for me.

I have been meaning to read Holly Black’s Doll Bones for quite a while, as I have adored all of her YA stuff but have never read any of her middle grade stuff, and Doll Bones sounded like the best place to start because the title sounded creepy as hell. Creepy middle-grade is the best middle-grade! It’s so cute and rarely manages to actually creep me out because I’m all grown up now (mostly).

Doll Bones is told from the protagonist of a middle-school boy named Zach, who plays an awesome sort of pirate adventure fantasy game with his two best friends, Poppy and Alice, using various dolls/action figures. In their game, an antique doll that Polly’s mom keeps locked in a cabinet serves as the Queen.

Stuff gets weird when Zach’s dad, an occasional proponent of the “teach kids that life is hard by deliberately making their lives hard” school of childrearing, declares that Zach is too old for this make-believe stuff and throws all of Zach’s action figures away. Zach, too embarrassed and upset to admit that this happened, tells Poppy and Alice that he doesn’t want to play the game anymore. So when Poppy starts telling him that the Queen is talking to her, Zach thinks he’s just trying to lure him back into the game. When Poppy and Alice actually show up at his house in the middle of the night telling him they have to go to somewhere in Ohio to bury the Queen doll because the bone china of the doll is actually made from the bones of a murdered girl, Zach decides to go with them, if only to shut Poppy up. But as the quest continues and weird things start to happen, Zach becomes increasingly convinced that the Queen really is a restless spirit.

Mostly, though, Zach and Poppy and Alice fight, and keep secrets from each other, and generally put all their friendships through the wringer, as they all try to work through what’s a game and what isn’t, and what’s really important to all of them. This is definitely one of those stories that’s largely about stories, which is totally fine by me. It’s also very much about friendship and the importance of being honest with your friends, which I am generally inclined to find heartwarming and adorable.

The thing here that I am MOST impressed about is the doll’s backstory. HOO-EE. That is some hardcore shit and no mistake. It’s gruesome and heartbreaking and sort of morbidly beautiful because ~art~ and it’s got some real Victorian and Romantic novel tropes woven in there very effectively, and certainly much more subtly than any Victorian novel actually used them (I guess you can’t ever really do “grief-stricken mad genius artist” that subtly, but… I’ve seen worse). The doll itself is giantly creepy and gruesome and just gets more so every time you learn something else about how it was made; and the Queen’s… characterization? Ghost powers? They kinda run together—are pretty unsettling.

The thing I felt the least impressed with might have been the very end? This may just be me getting unused to standalones or shorter books, but I remember being surprised that I had reached the end, not because it was a dreadful cliffhanger or anything, which I’m getting rather used to, but because everything had seemed to wrap up neatly, so I was waiting for one more twist or something weird to pop up and be not actually settled or something like that… I think I’ve gotten used to “Oh look we’ve finished our quest, we can go home now” as being the fake-out to a story ending instead of, like, how books actually end. Even though that’s kind of the standard way for stories to end and has been for much of the history of Western storytelling and I should know this because I have a goddamn degree in this sort of thing.

Overall I found this to be a good, cutely Gothic kind of read and I’m sure I would have gotten all obsessed with it and had a whole Phase if I’d found it when I was in late-elementary or middle school. Also I’m glad the only doll I have in my room is a nice goofy mass-produced Monster High doll (don’t judge meeee we didn’t have Monster High when I was the right age for it) or I might have been creeped out for reals and not slept for a week.

Calling on Dragons was possibly my favorite one of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles books when I was younger. It’s a little bit darker and a little bit weirder than the other ones, but this is offset by a heightened number of sassy talking animals.

Calling on Dragons is told from the perspective of the witch Morwen, who has been previously established as totally awesome in the first two volumes. While it’s great to hear a story from Morwen’s perspective just because Morwen is awesome, the real treat here is that Morwen is the only human who can understand her cats when they talk. Morwen owns nine cats—none of whom are black—and they are fantastically catlike, filling the whole range of cat personalities from lazy to snobbish to hungry. (Fiddlesticks in particular reminds me of our own lovely dumb cat Khaleesi.)

Morwen is dealing with her usual witchy business—namely, planning a garden show and trying to avoid the whinings of a cranky traditionalist named Arona Michelear Grinogian Vamist who thinks she’s not stereotypical enough—when her cats find a six-foot-tall white rabbit named Killer. Killer is not actually supposed to be six feet tall; he has accidentally gotten enchanted. In investigating Killer’s size issues, Morwen also finds evidence of wizards, who are supposed to be banned from the Enchanted Forest. With the help of the nerdtastic mage Telemain, one of the architects of the spell that is supposed to stop wizards from causing trouble, Morwen reports to King Mendanbar and Queen Cimorene of the Enchanted Forest, where they discover two very important things: one, Queen Cimorene is pregnant, and two, Mendanbar’s magical sword is missing.

You might think Mendanbar would be the most obvious member of the royal household to go a-questing for his sword, since it’s his sword and he’s not pregnant, but this is impossible due to nerdy magic reasons. (Mendanbar is predictably unhappy about this.) So Morwen, Telemain, Cimorene, Killer (who is now a floating blue donkey), Kazul the King of the Dragons, and two of Morwen’s cats go a-questing to get the sword back from the Society of Wizards instead. Killer picks up a few more unfortunate enchantments, we run into a lot of characters that make amusing meta references to other fairy tales (including one Farmer MacDonald), that annoying Vamist dude turns up again, and eventually, after many wacky hijinks and parody/metahumor/deconstruction of fairy tale conventions, the sword is retrieved. Unfortunately, they do not live happily ever after; they are instead mercilessly CLIFFHANGERED and then you have to go read the fourth book.

Rereading this book again as an adult (and being helped along by the perspective of someone who has no idea what’s going on… this person, as usual, being Mark Oshiro, my #1 source of cheating on my annual book challenge and of not passing out from boredom at work), I got to re-appreciate how clever a lot of the jokes are (you know how jokes start to seem more obvious than they are when you’re familiar with them), but also how some of the stuff dealt with in this book is a bit more… heavy? Real-world-y? There are a lot of ways in which this book is a little bit less about fairy tales and more about, like, regular bad people. The first two books were full of the heroes temporarily melting wizards; in this one, Kazul finally loses her patience giving them chances to regroup and starts actually eating them. Up until this point the series had really shied away from characters the reader has met actually dying. Arona Vamist is very much a garden-variety bully, conformist, and authoritarian; he’s not a magical creature in any way, just a busybody using fear, lies, and social pressure to screw innocent people over in the name of abstract ideas like “tradition.” And, of course, there’ s the ending, in which it turns out that it will take years to undo the mess the wizards left them in, rather than everything getting wrapped up in a nice shiny bow at the end of a few weeks. There’s also a strong message of “don’t eat random shit that you don’t know what it is, particularly when people tell you not to eat it.”

On the other hand, there’s also cranky magic mirrors and an always-hungry floating blue donkey who keeps getting insulted by sassy cats, so it’s not like the book is overall much of a downer.

Following up Dealing with Dragons, Mark has read the second book of Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, this one titled Searching for Dragons. And so I have reread it as well because I could read this series all day every day.

Searching for Dragons has a different protagonist than the first book, although Cimorene is still in it, being sensible and awesome. Apparently it is considered a risky move to have the protagonists differ in the books of a series? I don’t get it; I have read a lot of good series with each book being from a different person’s POV. POV changes are awesome.

Anyway, our new protagonist is Mendanbar, the young King of the Enchanted Forest, a slightly awkward dude with little patience for much of the formality of kinging. Mendanbar is smart and effective but has a somewhat fuzzy grasp of the magic he uses, which is tied directly to his role as King of the Enchanted Forest—as King, he is the only person with the sort of access to the Enchanted Forests’ magic that he has, and the ability to manipulate it directly. It’s a really cool magic system, too—basically, the forest is full of threads of power, and Mendanbar can see and manipulate the threads. Mendanbar’s main failing as king seems to be his inability or unwillingness to delegate, meaning he does basically everything himself and has no time to get his hair cut. He has rather excellent advice-giving skills but seems to only be able to use the on other people. He is generally just super adorkable and I am pretty sure he was my first literary crush, and he is PERFECT for Cimorene and all other love stories are boring.

The plot in this one is a very odd sort of quest. Mendanbar finds a huge patch of his forest reduced to dusty wasteland and stripped of its magic, and goes to try and find someone who can tell him about it. This leads him to Morwen, who sends him to Kazul, except he meets Cimorene instead, who tells him that Kazul is missing and she was about to go looking for her. Mendanbar decides to accompany Cimorene, since he has to talk to Kazul, and his other option is going home to try and deal with wizards, who are being sneaky and possibly troublesome and who Mendanbar suspects are attempting to deliberately start a war between the Enchanted Forest and the dragons. Wizards are terrible. Magicians, on the other hand, are big nerds, and we meet one in the form of Telemain, a magician prone to going on long intellectual jargon-laden monologues about magical things. I remember thinking that Telemain’s lines were funny and unintelligible when I was wee, but now, after several years of reading billions of pages of academic-speak in a variety of disciplines, I understand basically everything he’s saying (even though he’s talking about magic and magic isn’t real!) and it kind of makes the rest of the cast—who are all ostensibly adults, even if young ones—seem a little dense. But that is really the only part of the book that has not grown up well. Other interesting personages they meet include a giant who has a cold and is getting a bit too old for marauding, a dwarf who can spin straw into gold and keeps getting stuck with people’s firstborn children, and a flying carpet repairman. It’s all metahumor all the way, mashed-up fairy-tale edition. (I believe this series was highly formative in turning me into the type of person who hosts a costume party for the season premiere of Once Upon a Time, which I did yesterday because I am a big dork.) (I went as Evil Queen Regina because she brings new meaning to the phrase “gothy fabulous”.)

Watching Mark read this was just as fun as the first book, whether he was tsk-ing at Mendanbar for being a princess bigot (he kind of is, although I kind of sympathize, because nothing makes a group of people seem more annoying than when they continually want something out of you that you don’t want to give… I feel like Mendanbar hates princesses kind of the way everyone else hates Jehovah’s Witnesses) or calling the wizards all sorts of nasty names, like comparing them to bronies. Sadly, there was no “Ford of Whispering Snapes” in this book, although his enthusiastic shipping of Cimorene and Mendanbar makes up for it.

Morwen’s cats are also amazing. They are much smarter than my cat. I can’t wait to see more of them in the third book—I vaguely remember them as being hilarious and awesome but other than that it’s been so long since I’ve read it that I don’t remember what was awesome about them!

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Once Upon a Dream," Maleficent trailer version