bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with mythology

I remember Madeline Miller’s Circe making a bit of a splash when it was released in 2018 or so, and last year I snagged a copy off a friend. I put this squarely in the category of summer reading because of its relation to The Odyssey which is also summer reading, and now it is (basically) summer!

I must preface my review by disclosing that I think I’m about as much the target audience for this book as you can get. A solitary witch living on her own island in a sumptuous house that magically only requires as much domestic caretaking as she feels like doing? The dream. A wide-ranging tour through all of the most well-known Greek mythology, putting an Adult perspective on all the childhood favorites of a former D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths girlie? Easy fun and I get to feel well-read at the same time even though I ain’t. Lots of court intrigue and vengeance and murder and turning men into pigs, but it’s definitely all because our first-person narrator is the only immortal in the Greek pantheon with any impulse toward a moral compass? Self-indulgent but delicious, like a six-dollar scoop of ice cream.

The book isn’t written in the style of like, a picaresque romp through Greek Mythology; it is a much more seriously approached imagined biography of Circe, daughter of Helios, from her childhood as an affection-starved and neglected nymph in the subterranean halls of her father, through her exile to the island of Aiaia for witchcraft, to the end of the Greek age. In this time she has a couple attempted and actual love affairs, gets roped into all sorts of completely insane drama around her siblings (including her sister Pasiphae’s bearing of the Minotaur), has a child, deals with some monsters of both the shitty men and the mythological variety, and generally does immortal witchy shenanigans. At various points she faces off against such powerful figures as Helios, Hermes, Athena, and the guardian of the deep Trygon, and defies the order of Zeus to have a civil conversation with Prometheus. The plot is pretty episodic, given that it covers centuries, but it all does more or less congeal into the trajectory of a life, if a very long one.

The end of the book veers pretty far off from what I understand of Greek mythology, but in a way I thought was pretty interesting–Miller’s versions of Penelope and Telemachus go to some places that I would certainly not have expected from reading The Odyssey, but Circe is its own novel and I think it works.

Some books have been sitting on my to-read shelf for so long I can no longer remember when or how they got there. One of these books is Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth and Legend, which I apparently got long enough ago that I either didn’t notice or was at least sort of interested in “New Age”/pagan revival stuff rather than history/folklore studies. The back cover labels it “New Age/Mythology” and the introduction is by one Sirona Knight, a neopagan author of books with titles like “Faery Magick.” I could probably find a bunch of her books around town but I’m frankly no longer as interested in reading them as I was back in the day. Anyway, the intro to this text is a bit incongruous to the rest of it, burbling happily about how great it is that modern people are rediscovering Celtic mythology as a serious spiritual practice and blithely assuring us that recent scholarship has shown anything nasty ever said about it (especially the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices) to be the work of the pernicious Romans and Christians. From this there’s a sort of emotional smash cut to the extremely British, extremely Victorian opinions of Mr. Charles Squire, writing in 1905, dutifully ranking every last thing he can find to rank into “higher” and “lower, “primitive” and “civilized,” “degraded” and “advanced”; comparing Celtic antiquity to Greek at every turn; and confidently breaking down every supposed historical claim about ancient Britain and Ireland to show that it’s just myth, except the nasty ones (like the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices). It is, at least by Victorian standards, strictly a work of serious, secular scholarship. Knight’s intro and Squire’s own intro are two such different flavors of editorializing that I’m rather amazed they were allowed into the same book.

Anyway, I have a high tolerance for smug Victorian writing, so that didn’t really stop me from enjoying both the peek into the state of early 1900’s scholarship into Celtic myth, nor from enjoying the myths themselves. The book is split into roughly two parts: the first part gives us a study/overview of the ancient myths of Ireland and the Gaels; the second gives us the myths of the Brythonic Celts, aka the Welsh, both as they relate to the Gaelic myths (many of them seem to be basically the same gods and stories with slightly different names), and how they eventually grew into the legend of Arthur, undoubtedly one of the most influential legends/bodies of storytelling in the British literary tradition.

This seems to be as good a primer as any, if you are a particular type of reader who doesn’t need a primer on “reading Victorian scholarship” but does need a primer on Celtic mythology, which is… maybe not too many people these days, but it works for me. It’s not a compilation of tales put together short-story-anthology style, the way a lot of my Baby’s First Mythology books were that I read when I was a kid, but a dense 400 pages of names, place-names, context, legacies, and whatnot, mapping out the relationships between different stories more than telling them. That said, you get a good overview of the major player and there are a select handful of ripping good tales in there that you’ll learn the basic storylines of–the legends of Cuchulainn, and of Fionn Mac Coul, and of Diarmad and Grainne, and of Deirdre and Naoise and King Conchobar, and of Balor and his eye of death, and a bunch of other tales of the Tuatha De Danann and the beings who came both before and after them. I’m not great at remembering any of the gods’ names but that’ll change if I read more on the subject. The chapters on the Welsh were a little harder because I really can’t remember any of the Welsh names, but I remember the stories were fun, and the genealogy of the tales of Arthur was fascinating if only because of how much it deviates from the Arthuriana I’m most familiar with, most of which is already a generation or two downstream of Tennsyons’ Idylls of the King or Malory’s Morte Darthur, which I have never read. It’s a long way from ancient Wales to BBC’s Merlin or even T.H. White’s The Once And Future King. I received a book of the real olde-skool Welsh versions of the legends when I was in fourth grade, and the Welsh threw me so badly I didn’t get around to actually reading it until 2011.

Anyway, I can’t necessarily recommend this book to anybody as the most approachable intro to Celtic mythology, but I’m certainly really glad I read it, outdated as it is! I’m looking forward to reading more weird Victorian takes on ancient Irish literature from the Irish Literary Revival period. I’ve got a bunch of that weirdo Yeats sitting on my shelf.

After having read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Death of Arthur earlier this year I moved onto his The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, two English-language poems that retell, in the traditional meter and style, two segments of old Norse heroic stories from the Eddas.

The book is probably 30% poem and 70% notes. Ordinarily this would not be a complaint, since old Norse poetry is confusing to me and I definitely need notes! The problem here is that old Norse poetry is so confusing to me that I was still confused after the notes. The style of the poetry is freaking great–stanzas of eight short lines, full of what Professor Tolkien called a “demonic” energy. The poems are constructed to give you just the most-dramatic highlights, barely strung together, so they have the sort of manic pace of the “Previously on…” reel at the beginning of an episode of one of the better sorts of TV shows. The problem here is that those Previously Ons are very helpful to jog your memory if you actually did watch the earlier episodes, but they’re significantly less helpful if you are actually starting a show at Episode 8 or whatever and trying to catch up. Sadly, I am unfamiliar enough with the whole Sigurd myth cycle that I remained gloriously lost the entire time.

That said, what I did experience was still cool enough that it makes me want to get more familiar with this myth cycle so that I can figure out what’s going on and have an experience that was more like my time reading The Death of Arthur. There’s some really bonkers, bloody stuff in here, curses and dragons and poison and cursed gold, and it sounds like Attila the Hun makes an appearance, and clearly this is right up my alley so it’s probably time to read, like, the copy of The Nibelungenlied that I’ve been carting around since I was first introduced to the Baby’s First Germanic Myths version in high school, and maybe track down a copy of either or both of the Eddas.

It just occurred to me that since most of the notes are endnotes to the poems, it might also behoove me to go back and read the poems again now that I’ve read the notes. You can tell how infrequently I read anything remotely difficult that I did not do this as soon as I got to the end of the notes.

::intermission music plays::

OK THIS IS BETTER

I’m definitely spotting some Lord of the Rings-y stuff in the first poem, The Lay of the Völsungs, both in terms of plot elements (a sword shattered and the pieces kept and re-forged later for the chosen one, dragons, dwarves unleashing great evil) and just general vibes. There are also some parallels I can spot between this and other mythology, but I suppose there’s only so many things you can make up before you have to start re-using elements. For example, Sigurd tastes a drop of the blood of the dragon Fafnir, as he is roasting Fafnir’s heart for the dwarf Regin to eat, and starts being able to understand bird talk. This to me seems to parallel the ancient Irish story of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the one drop of hot fat from the Salmon of Knowledge that he accidentally tastes while cooking the Salmon for somebody else.

Everything that happens once Gudrún’s shitty family is introduced makes a lot more sense on the second read, and some long-forgotten memories of the plot of The Nibelungenlied are stirring in my brain. I am more clear on the bit where Brynhild tells a whopper (which I support, even if it does get everybody murdered) but am still a bit lost on why one of Gudrún’s brothers is now a werewolf.

The second poem, the Lay of Gudrún, is a SEQUEL, it picks up just after the funeral pyre of Sigurd and Brynhild, this makes more sense now. These poems are very big on ladies wreaking horrible bloody vengeance (which, as mentioned, I support). Gudrún’s horribly bloody vengeance manages to be even more horrible and bloody than Brynhild’s, which is saying something, and it’s a much more gripping story the second time around now that I’ve figured out who Högni is and just generally what’s going on with Atli and the cursed gold. In fact, reading it a second time, I feel dumb because Gudrún actually recaps everything that happens right at the end before she commits suicide. Whoops.

Anyway, these are some delightfully murdery poems, but apparently the order of operations for uncultured philistines like me is: read poems, read notes, read poems again.

Because it is dark and cold and my brain is very tired and everything is on fire, I decided it was time for some comfort reading, so I scanned my shelves looking for some tropey Anglophile ten-year-old girl fiction, of which I never seem to run out. I went with a used copy of Jane Yolen’s Sword of the Rightful King that has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while although I cannot remember where I got it. I have at least two other pieces of unread Arthuriana sitting on that exact shelf but this one was the shortest and seemed the easiest feel-good read.

Sword of the Rightful King is a retelling of the part of the Arthur legend where he pulls the sword Excalibur out of the stone, therefore making a big show to the rest of the country about how much he really is the legitimate High King of all Britain (no strange women lying in ponds in this telling). In this version the sword is named Caliburnus, and a couple other characters have names out of older alternate versions of the legend than the ones most people think of--Merlin is Merlinnus, Guenevere is Gwenhwyfar (the proper Welsh spelling), Camelot is Cadbury (like the creme egg).

The main plotline here is that Merlinnus has contrived the whole sword in the stone thing specifically in order to shut up the various clans and tribes and lords and chieftains that doubt Arthur’s claim to the whole island, by putting the sword in the stone himself and casting a spell on it that no man can remove it unless Merlin says the spell letting him. Our villain, Morgause, the North Witch, tries to interfere with this, because she is hellbent on assassinating Arthur and using her three of her four terrible sons--plus her one non-terrible son, if possible--to spy on him. The one non-terrible son, Gawaine, is despised for mysterious reasons by Merlinnus’ new apprentice, a young boy named Gawen who has a number of secrets, of which his real identity is the most easily and soon guessed if you are familiar with the type of children’s fiction this book is (hint: this book was written after the ‘80s).

There are some weaknesses to this book, like that Gawaine is our main viewpoint character for most of the first half of it and then is basically relegated to a secondary character for the second half. The breaks it makes with the original legend are modern and not too overdone with this particular story, but not exactly what I’d call pioneering within the children’s fantasy genre overall for a book published in 2003. But it is fun and familiar and satisfying the way going to Medieval Times and eating chicken with your hands off a pewter plate is fun and familiar and satisfying, and has similar vibes to works like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King or the BBC’s Merlin. Overall I am glad that I went with this one instead of jumping right into The Mists of Avalon, which might also be appearing soon in this winter’s hibernation reading.

Some days, you're tired and unproductive and don't want to do any of the things you're supposed to do that day, and so you pick up books based on criteria like "What is short and looks non-taxing" and that's when it turns out that it's good to have gently wacky things like Norse Mythology... According to Uncle Einar in your TBR pile. I'd borrowed it from Bobby even though he had substantial criticisms of it, which means it was a strong contender for just staying in the TBR pile forever while I worked my way through things people had only said good stuff about, but most of those are longer and don't tell stories I already know.

Who is Uncle Einar? I have absolutely no idea. Presumably the author's uncle. I don't know if he's real or fictional. He is a framing device, retelling old Norse myths--most of which I remember from my own childhood, from D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths and Mary Pope Osborne's Favorite Norse Myths--in a breezy, spoken sort of way, full of second-person asides to the children and with every "um" and "heh" transcribed. The stories are modernized in the way that medieval retellings were "modernized" from their earlier versions, which rarely works as well when modern authors try to do the same thing, because for modern audiences, modernity is boring and not fantastical; we already live here. I have no idea why medieval audiences liked that stuff so much. Some of the results are humorous; some border on twee. Actually, scratch that. It's definitely twee. I ended up with the sense that, while this book was quick and easy and somewhat amusing to read, it must have been a blast to write, especially considering the author is a Ph.D. in Norse mythology and so presumably has spent a good deal of time being up to her eyeballs in the real old-timey stuff and might want to play around with mixing together her worlds and seeing what came up. And I will grant that the result is much more accessible to a modern lay reader than slogging through the Eddas, which is why I spent today reading this book and not my copy of The Sagas of Icelanders.

While this book is framed as being told to children, our possibly fictional Uncle Einar seems willing to tell the children some stories that didn't quite make it into any of the myth anthologies that I was allowed to read in elementary school, although he is necessarily vague on the details.

Even though this is a book that contains such notions as Heimdall working for the FBI, even though the FBI is a US-specific entity, I still ended up doing fact-checking on certain claims in order to determine what was based in myth and what was made up for this book. I was unable to corroborate the claim that Heimdall was the god of editors; as best I can tell, this is a joke. I was also thrown for a bit when Freya's cats were given the names Puff and Fluff; I had been under the impression they were named Bygul and Trjegul (Bee-gold and Tree-gold, i.e., Honey and Amber), but it turns out that these names were only bestowed upon said cats in 1955 by the author Diana Paxson. How did I ever survive being an insufferable nerd before Google?

I don't entirely know if I'd recommend it to someone unless they were making some pretty specific asks, like "I want to read a story in which Loki turns into a mare and gets knocked up, but also there are jokes about union regulations."

I loved Three Parts Dead so much that I immediately ran, did not walk, to borrow the sequel Two Serpents Rise from my roommate, and then I ate it (by which I mean I read it really fast; eating other people's books is rude).

The book started off inauspiciously with me catching two minor terminology errors in the first chapter, which depicts what is clearly a game of no-limit Hold'em, one in which our main character makes a very bad fold. But at least the book knows it's a bad fold, so it's got that going for it. Fortunately, things get better after that, as we learn more about the city of Dresediel Lex and the complex system of creepy magic that keeps it supplied with water.

Dresediel Lex, part Las Vegas and part Tenochtitlan, is a desert city that is trying to be very modern and run on Craft and ignore its prior history of human sacrifice, a history that only ended a few decades earlier. Our main character, Caleb, is the Dresediel Lex equivalent of an annoying finance bro, doing risk management and analysis for Red King Consolidated--the magical Concern that runs the city's water supply--and playing a lot of poker. He has daddy issues -- quite understandably, since his dad is one of the last priests of the old religion (the one that feeds its gods hearts) from before the God Wars, and he keeps running around trying to overthrow the Craftsmen and return to the old ways, and basically being a creepy terrorist zealot.

In classic annoying white bro protagonist fashion, Caleb picks up an Obligatory Love Interest by seeing a woman out and about and immediately becoming completely obsessed forever. In this case, the woman is a cliff runner named Mal, who turns out to be a Craftswoman for the firm that Red King is currently in the middle of a rather complicated merger with.

Meanwhile, back at Caleb's job, one of the reservoirs is suddenly full of creepy demons, and while that initial attack is sorted out easily enough, it really wasn't supposed to happen and it turns out to just be the first in a long line of complicated god- and demon-related acts of sabotage that somebody somewhere is committing against Red King Consolidated and Dresediel Lex's water supplies. The resulting complex web of law, religion, magic, explosions, and creepy lobstery water demons is fantasically difficult to sum up but it all makes sense in the book, I promise.

Despite my general underwhelmedness with both Caleb and Mal as people -- seriously, they're perfect for each other, because they're both irritating and I would not like to hang out with either one of them in real life -- I thoroughly enjoyed the book. They were still entertaining enough characters, and they certainly went through enough interesting shit. Plus a lot of the secondary characters were great, especially the Red King, a coffee-drinking skeleton who usually appears in a red bathrobe, because he lives in the creepy pyramid that is the Concern's headquarters. Caleb's dad is also actually quite hilarious, despite being a giant scary religious zealot.

Anyway, it's a book about unsustainable resource extraction, but it's also about giant fiery serpents and water gods and human sacrifice and all that good stuff, so it's quite a head trip in a good way.

The Raven King is, I think, the most Raven Cycle-y of the Raven Cycle books. It’s also my favorite because my copy is signed by Maggie Stiefvater herself, which is always a plus. But it’s also a really fulfilling end to the series, drawing on all the themes and motifs set up right at the beginning—Blue’s prophecy and the vision of Gansey’s death and the tomb of Glendower and all that stuff—but also introducing wacky new elements and characters right up past where you’d ordinarily think you’d be getting much new information in a story this long. Henry turns out to be pretty important, and while it seems weird to be basically adding a fourth Raven Boy a few hundred pages from the end of a four-volume series, Henry is too awesome for it to matter—as is RoboBee, Henry’s magical robotic bee that functions as something between a familiar and a James Bond spy gadget.

Much of the series thus far has dealt with uncovering family secrets, but there are still more to be discovered, and they’re pretty big ones. Ronan has the most outlandish ones, and you’d think they’d be predictable after a while but they’re somehow not—after finding out in book two that his father dreamed up his mother and in book three that he dreamed up his brother, you wouldn’t think there would be more things to find out that he accidentally dreamed up, but there are. And that’s not even getting into the business end of things. Adam is still in some sort of weird possession/communication with the spirit of Cabeswater, which was getting better for a while as he learned to listen to it, but which is not becoming a problem again as Cabewater gets infested with the demon awakened at the end of the last book, which looks like a giant-ass black hornet (because wasps and bees and stuff are a huge recurring thing in this series and if I’d known I would have insisted the bees panel talk more about it at Readercon) and seems to function a lot like Hexxus from Ferngully. Henry has… well, he has the backstory that gave him RoboBee. Gansey is dealing with all his rich dude legacy problems, plus the having died already once thing, and while this Glendower quest has taken him all over the world, it turns out the answers might lie closer to home than he suspected.

Blue may be having the worst of it, though, because they found her father and brought him home, and he’s been cowering in a broom closet avoiding Gwenllian for the whole time, and it’s kind of sad. And then there’s some stuff where Blue might be basically part tree, and it’s pretty weird, even though Blue already has a lot of experience with being weird. It’s above and beyond weird and Gansey is still going to die.

On top of that, Piper, who has graduated to becoming our main villain after murdering her husband and adopting the demon hornet, might be more knowledgeable about magic shit than her husband was, but still does not seem to really grasp the gravity of what she’s doing when she decides to sell the demon hornet to the magical-object-collecting community. Frankly, the Piper/demon alliance is not the most seamless pairing of personalities, and it’s pretty hilarious. Piper also disses Legal Sea Foods, because she is the worst. Legal is a venerable Boston institution and their food is delicious even if they are functionally a chain now.

While the plot gets darker and weirder and more and more people die and Cabeswater is unmade, the language in the book actually gets funnier and more Stiefvater-y, and somehow it works. Part of this is because there are deceptively goofy-sounding characters like Piper and Henry, who are, respectively, amusingly shallow trash and using humor as a form of camouflage/coping mechanism for all the weird shit he’s part of. But even the third-person narration has gotten even less invisible than it was at the beginning of the series, using all sorts of interesting tricks like repeated lines, words and half-words floating about with no punctuation, stream-of-consciousness description, and jokes. Also, how do you not laugh every time you see “RoboBee” written on the page, no matter how dire the situation? Especially when everything else going on is so medieval?

Overall, it does end up reminding me a bit of the Lynburn Legacy books, with a similar blend of death and jokes, and of the modern and the historical. I’d definitely put it in the “sassy Gothic” subgenre that I wish was larger because it’s basically the sweet spot of Relevant To All My Interests. I can’t wait to see what Stiefvater comes up with next.

Current Mood: caffeinated

I got back up to Maine to finish the Raven Cycle books! Go me!

Technically I started Blue Lily, Lily Blue the last time I was up there but I only got a few pages into it. But this time I splonked down on the porch and pretty much ripped through the whole thing. It was pretty glorious.

In this one, Blue’s mother has disappeared to go look for Blue’s father underground. Blue and the Raven Boys start sort of looking for Blue’s mother, but also looking for some entities known only as the three sleepers. One of them is the king they’re looking for, Owen Glendower. They’ve been warned that one of the sleepers must be woken and another one must not be woken; apparently, there’s no word on the third.

Of course, it’s the third one they end up actually waking first; this is Owen Glendower’s awesome and thoroughly batty witch daughter, Gwenllian. (No, I don’t know how to pronounce that. Irish I’m starting to get a hold of but Welsh is still quite beyond me.) This is possibly not even the weirdest thing going on, even though Gwenllian speaks in riddles and songs and wears multiple dresses at a time and has giant curly hair that she keeps things in and generally sounds like a cartoon character drawn up by a disgruntled Disney animator on acid. I heart her.

We meet more bad guys, including the Gray Man’s insufferable former employer, Colin Greenmantle, and his similarly insufferable wife, Piper, who—in a fun twist that I appreciated more than words can say—Colin seems to believe is his trophy wife but who actually knows more about creepy magic shit than he does and has a lot more experience dealing with it and, consequently, can command more power and get up to more nefarious things that Colin doesn’t quite understand. It’s enormously satisfying.

In other news, Gansey and Blue start secretly sort-of dating; Adam is dealing with how to interpret invasive communications from Cabeswater, with help from Persephone; Ronan is doing sketchy dream stuff at the Barns that no one seems to quite understand and that isn’t working anyway; Noah is still dead but having an increasingly bad time of it; and Gansey’s British friend Malory has found a mysterious tapestry featuring three bloody-handed ladies who all look like Blue.

Most of the magical action in this book focuses not on Cabeswater but in a cave on the property of a man named Jesse Dittley, a large farmer who speaks in all caps and only eats Spaghetti-Os. The cave carries a curse on it that results in a Dittley dying in it every couple of decades or so, otherwise the walls of the farmhouse bleed and all that other poltergeist stuff. There are actually multiple caves because there’s also one for the sleeper who must not be woken (guess what happens to that one at the end of the book), but it’s complicated figuring out where they are and how they’re all connected, because magic.

We also meet an amusing Aglionby student named Henry who does not seem very important at first, just very friendly and cheerful with big hair. He drives an electric car. He will be important later.

I’m getting some of the plotlines confused in my memory because this book does quite a large amount of setting up things that are going to explode spectacularly in the next book and I don’t always remember where one book ends and the other one begins, with the exception of the bit with the sleeper who must not be woken. But it doesn’t have that lack of tension that some books that are all setup have. Things are moving along and weaving together in complicated ways that all will probably make sense eventually and everyone is having lots of feelings and there’s some lovely register-switching going on depending on whose head we’re in at the time. Colin Greenmantle has a glib, dismissive, affectedly witty inner voice that’s simultaneously as insufferable as he is and genuinely funny to read. It’s almost painfully modern in the context of all the mythological timeless stuff going on in the rest of the series, even though it’s reminiscent of writing styles that I love when they’re on the Internet, but it does an extremely good job of characterizing Colin as a superficial type who doesn’t really understand what it is that he’s messing with. Meanwhile, the rest of the book is filled with lush, colorful prose interrupted by periodic bouts of swearing, usually from Ronan.

Ronan, by the way, is an underappreciated comic genius. Probably nobody would ever tell him that since he is angry and powerful and all dangerous and stuff, with his pet dream raven and his biker jacket and his fighty attitude and his adorable crush on Adam, but his trolling abilities are top-notch (especially regarding deployment of the murder squash song) and he can do wordplay in both English and Latin. Also, Chainsaw might be my favorite character in the whole series.

The book does end on a massive uh-oh, with a bunch of people dead and bunch of other people who were previously either lost or dead being recovered, so I can understand why fans of the series were very upset about having to wait for the next book to come out. It’s the sort of thing that’s why I waited so long to read this book in the first place, and I am glad I did, because it meant I got to jump right into The Raven King.

Current Mood: caffeinated

Do you ever, like . . . read a book wrong? Because that's sort of what I felt I did with Kai Ashante Wilson's short but intricate debut novel, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Though it's less than 250 pages long, it took me nearly three weeks to read, mostly in small chunks of 10 pages or less.

This is not the recommended way of reading this book. There's too much going on, and it's not all laid out and explained as clearly as one might need if one is, you know, not actually fully paying attention.

The basic storyline is that of a demigod (put simply) named Demane, a healer, who is traveling with a band of mercenaries/security guards to escort a caravan across a magically-guarded road through the Wildeeps to its destination. The road is supposed to be protected from the mysterious time-and-space-bending monster-filled magic of the Wildeeps, but there are reports of something coming onto the road and eating people anyway. Demane and another demigod-posing-as-a-human, who goes by "the Captain," have to protect their fellow mercenaries and hunt down the threat, while simultaneously pretending to be humans and hiding their relationship with each other from the humans, who are apparently not OK with that sort of thing. If that sounds boring, it's because I'm explaining it badly. The narrative is structured nonlinearly, with a lot of flashbacks and bits that are hinted at, and it's a very character-driven story, so the main point of the thing is really more Demane's struggles to find a place within the humans' weird ways of doing things, managing his relationships with all the other fighters in the caravan, and, eventually, learning to go back to and harness his demigodhood to protect them.

The language in the book is a big glorious colorful tapestry of code-switching, blithely ignoring the constraints of any one register or sensibility of real-world history. Some of it dips into a sort of modernist, poetic stream-of-consciousness style; other parts are gory and action-movie-y; some bits are silly to the point of slapstick (some humans are silly to the point of slapstick too, so I supposed that's realism); the setting is mostly in the pseudo-medieval-fantasy vein--although it's more of a McAfrica than McEurope--but there's elements of science fiction, or at least science fiction terminology, woven in there too. There's slang that sounds very modern to my ear, which I admit I could be entirely wrong about since it's mostly Black slang and I'm not very well educated on Black slang, and there's bits of French and Spanish tossed in (which was fun but frankly a little jarring since it's a secondary-world fantasy), and basically the point here is that it's a ridiculous ton of fun if you like playing with language! Also it keeps you on your toes.

People closer to the topic than me have written, and in all likelihood will continue to write, insightful things about what it means that nearly the entire cast of characters in this book is black men, and the two leads are queer black men. I will read those things; right now I'm only going to say that I don't think this should be such a rarity. (Also I don't think reading it damaged my fragile white lady brain or anything.)

I'd be very interested to read more things set in this universe, partly because it was really engaging but also partly because there's clearly a lot more to it than was actually explained in the book itself and now I'm curious. I'm also not sure if this is a standalone novel or the first in a series; it has an abrupt ending that really seems like it could go either way.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: none

So far, one of the most-hyped books I've seen this summer was Shadowshaper. Granted, I deliberately sought out a bunch of the hype because I loved Daniel José Older's adult "ghost noir" fantasy books, Half-Resurrection Blues and Salsa Nocturna. But then it was actually released, and even more hype appeared, in places I was not expecting it--Holly Black's review in the New York Times, for instance, or Kate Beaton praising it on Twitter.

I had deliberately chosen to avoid preordering it so I could buy it at Readercon and get the author to sign it. I had deliberately chosen to torment myself.

After a brief heart attack when the Crossed Genres table said they only had limited copies available so we should all hurry up--I had to be late for the con because of work so this scared me--I finally arrived at Readercon, and ran immediately to the dealer's room to get two copies (one for me, one for a friend) before I keeled over dead.

Now recovered from Readercon (except financially) and not deaded, I can say that I have read Shadowshaper and it was quite worth all the running around and flailing.

Shadowshaper is the story of Sierra Santiago, a 16-year-old street artist in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (i.e. the current one). Sierra's project for the summer is to paint a mural of a big old dragon on the side of an abandoned monstrosity of a development project in the Junklot, near where all her old dude neighbors play dominoes. Things start to get weird when she notices that one of the other murals in the Junklot, a portrait of a now-deceased neighbor, is fading--and crying. Also, her grandfather--who hasn't spoken coherently in over a year, since he had a stroke--suddenly starts apologizing and telling her to hang out with Robbie, a tattoo-covered Haitian kid at her school. And then a thing that's basically a zombie shows up at a house party and chases her, at which point things are definitely weird and she's not imagining it.

This confluence of weird things is how Sierra finds out she's a shadowshaper, a type of sorcerer who can channel whatever spirits are present into art, bringing the art alive and giving the spirits form and herself access to the spirits' power. It's a very original and thoroughly enviable form of magic power, and one that I (and probably every other reader of the book) instantly coveted. The shadowshaper community is in a sorry state, though, having been hijacked by male chauvinism and anthropology over Sierra's lifetime, which is why she didn't know about it.

Sierra, her awesome wisecracking friends, tattooed cute shadowshaper Robbie, Sierra's brother Juan who is in a salsa thrash band, a librarian at Columbia, and Sierra's possibly-a-gangster godfather all must band together to find the mysterious, powerful ancestral spirit Lucera and save the shadowshaping tradition from the machinations of a power-hungry anthropologist named Dr. Wick, who has gotten a little too deep into multiple of the spiritual traditions he studies and is, apparently, miffed that he hasn't been accepted as the #1 most powerful leader in all of them, like the sweeping-in-late-outsider white dude always does in stories like Dancing with Wolves/Dune/Avatar/any of a number of others. He's convinced that the shadowshapers need to be "saved," for a value of "saved" that apparently involves killing a bunch of them, and he has to be the one to do it.

Daniel José Older is not shy about his political views, especially the view that white people need to learn when to stay in their lane, and while he is extra not-shy about them on panels and on Twitter (seriously, everybody go follow him on Twitter), the book is also a pretty explicitly political book (all his books are). Because he is a very smart dude, he doesn't believe that there's such thing as a non-political book, just books that don't acknowledge their politics or explore them intelligently and ones that do. This particular book explores issues of gender, race, gentrification, the imperialist history of anthropology, street harassment, ethnic identity (this is different than race), plus the YA staples of family, finding out unflattering things about grown-ups in your family, and taking on adult roles and responsibilities. There is a lot of a lot of stuff going on here, is what I'm saying. It is both built into the fabric of the plot and, often, called out explicitly, which I know is not necessarily everyone's bag but would probably be kind of weird not to do, because I think most people occasionally do try to talk about stuff that's going on with other people. It also establishes Sierra as an intelligent straight-talker who's not afraid to call out bullshit--or in some cases, who becomes not afraid to call out bullshit, which is a vital growing up skill.

A big part of the book is Sierra's sense of identity and place as a black Puerto Rican in Brooklyn, and as an outsider to all of these things (seriously, I think the last time I went to Brooklyn was when my great-grandmother was alive, for her surprise 90th birthday party, which is not what killed her don't worry) I am not in any way qualified to be having opinions on how this is approached or portrayed--the author knows more about this than I do, for obvious reasons--but what I will say is that, to someone not very familiar with this milieu, it's very vibrant and grounded, with a palpable sense of place and culture that permeates everything and makes it all feel cohesive and natural. Like, sometimes people know exactly what they're talking about but they're not very good at bringing it alive for other people, and this does not seem to be one of those cases. And I love, love, love that the city functions like a city--and especially like a city at this current moment in time for U.S. cities--with street-harassing douchebags yelling gross things at you when you walk down the street, and public transit taking like ten goddamn years to get anywhere, and the lightning speed of gentrification turning things into Starbuckses every time you look away for a second--all that I am in a place to tell you is all VERY TRUE STUFF these days. (The place is Boston, supposedly the most rapidly gentrifying city in the U.S. right now.)

Anyway, all of that is wrapped up in a big loud fun fast-moving ACTION FANTASY PLOT of FANTASY ACTION, with FIGHTING CHALK NINJAS and SNOTTY OLD CHURCH GHOSTS and DRIVING REAL FAST and SNEAKY INFILTRATION OF LIBRARIES and ZOMBIE ATTACKS and WITTY BANTER and all that fun stuff. And a lot of stuff about music, which I personally sometimes find a bit weird to deal with in books because my imagination fails me, but in this case I now really want salsa thrash to be a thing. (Is it a thing? Can someone make it so, if not?) And there is of course an Obligatory Romance, which, me being me, I believe has two main things going for it: it is blessedly straightforward (no triangles! no creepy starting-off-hating-each-other!) and the dude is not an overbearing twit. (For anyone unfamiliar with my general reactions to romances--which are divided into "wanting to punch one of the parties" and "not wanting to punch either of the parties"--that was a positive assessment.)

Oh, and the librarian character was the best, because librarians are the best. Except for sometimes when Sierra's friends are the best, because they are all full of hilarious one-liners.

I finally caught up with Mark Oshiro in reading Discworld, which means I just finished rereading Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. I didn’t remember much of what happened in this one, except that it was parodying Ancient Egypt, and the parody Egypt country was called Djelibeybi, which is the best name ever, except that I think at the time I first read it, it was easy for me to cater to any cravings for Jelly Babies since they sold them at my local Stop & Shop at the time. I should see if they have any at Fort Point Market. I really like Jelly Babies.

Anyway.

Djelibeybi is an old kingdom, and a kingdom proud of its history. Its extremely well-preserved history. Honestly, at this point, Djelibeybi’s incessant preserving of its history is about all it's got going for it, as the elaborate funerary structures it builds for all its pharaohs have bankrupted the country, and everyone’s so in thrall to tradition that they haven’t invented anything in centuries, not even mattresses or plumbing. King Pteppicymon, a forward-thinking sort of pharaoh who hates pyramids, sends his son Pteppic off to Ankh-Morpork to become an assassin, so that he can make some money.

When Pteppic has to come back to Djelibeybi and be king, then, he is full of all sorts of non-Djelibeybian ideas from forn parts, which leads to chaos and mayhem. It would probably have just led to plumbing and mattresses if he'd been allowed to do what he wanted, but ironically, he butts heads with his extremely traditionalist advisor Dios, who is deathly afraid that any degree of change constitutes chaos and mayhem, and the result of their antagonistic interactions result in the construction of a pyramid for King Pteppicymon that's so big it bends space and time--and that causes ACTUAL chaos and mayhem. Joke's on you, Dios.

While much of this book is a bit chaotic even by Discworld standards, it's still quite a work of art--there are layers upon layers of puns, some excellent trope subversion on the part of the handmaiden Ptraci, Pratchett's signature literalism about the power of belief, and some very clever digs at both actual and popular imaginings of ancient Egyptian history. (There are "walk like an Egyptian" jokes that I had somehow forgotten about.) It even has some heartwarming smart bits about identity worked in around all the mathematically inclined camels and quantum.

I just finished reading N. K. Jemisin’s The Kingdom of Gods, the third book in her Inheritance trilogy. (As is happening more and more often these days, when I say I read it, I mostly mean that I had Mark Oshiro read it to me.)

This book has its own arc, taking place quite a while after the end of the second book, but it also serves wraps up the overarching storylines and themes in the trilogy as a whole, which is essentially the story of the second era of the Three. The narrator in this third volume is Sieh, who has appeared in the first two books as a trickster god and the god of childhood, and is the oldest and most powerful of the godlings (the minor gods who are the children of the Three).

Sieh, it turns out, is powerfully lonely. He is envious of the Three, even after their centuries of fighting one another, and he yearns for a love as complete as theirs, and is kind of a brat to everyone else about it. He meets and befriends two young Arameri siblings, a blonde white girl named Shahar and a brown boy named Deka who are nevertheless twins, and then everything goes completely bonkers. The three of them accidentally blow up part of Sky, Sieh spends eight years in a coma in Nahadoth’s belly and wakes up turned partly mortal and aging, a previously unknown godling of revenge is stalking Sieh over some secret that Sieh has no idea what the hell it could possibly be, and somebody is slowly but steadily killing off the entire Arameri family with magical poisoned masks and, apparently, has been for generations. Also maybe the Apocalypse is happening? This book isn’t about “saving the world” in any kind of middling, metaphorical “keep our country/civilization more or less the way it was” kind of way; the stakes in The Kingdom of Gods come down to whether or not they can prevent the bad guy from unmaking the universe. I don’t want to give too much plot away because there’s massive game-changing curveballs every chapter or two (which has been pretty much par for the course in this trilogy—I don’t know how she does it!).

The characterization is great—Sieh, while basically a total brat, is a humorous and entertaining narrator, one you can often sympathize with even when he’s not being particularly likeable (or, like, having his pet necklace planet murder people). The last vestiges of the Arameri are very, very strange people, some of them just starting to learn about introspection and compromise and paying attention to other people for the first time in millennia. Shahar is determined to be good but sometimes has a pretty vague concept of what that means, as she is being groomed to be the new head of the Arameri family. Deka is sent off to scrivener school and basically uses that time to level up until he is the most ridiculously magically souped-up human ever, at which point he is both adorable and goddamn scary. Their mom is… hard to describe. There’s a whole slate of memorable secondary characters, including Ahad, the guy who was Nahadoth’s day-self in his captivity but is now a separate entity who is basically a godling but doesn’t know his nature; Glee Shoth, Itempas and Oree’s fiercely no-nonsense daughter; Hymn, an impoverished local girl who Sieh kind of befriends but who finds him largely to be a problem; and Usein Darr, bosstastic new ruler of Darr who is leading the revolt against Arameri rule. There are also a ton of awesome cameos by Yeine, Nahadoth, and Itempas, which range from funny to cute to heartbreaking.

One of the more unique aspects of this book, which can be a little jarring sometimes but which overall I think works, is the passage of time. Sieh manages to skip years at a time, sometimes just because nothing happened, sometimes because he’s asleep or unconscious or recuperating inside Nahadoth or some other weird shit. The variety in the lifespans of the characters is huge, so skipping months or years or decades has a much larger effect on Sieh’s relationships with some characters than with others. Oree Shoth is apparently still around nearly a century after her story takes place. The time jumps really illustrate how much this trilogy is the story of AN ENTIRE ERA, not just an entire era in human history but an entire era in the universe’s history, and in the history of the gods. And these eras are begun and ended through the god-sized and god-powered versions of ordinary family drama stuff—love and loneliness and jealousy and spite and judginess and marriage and sex and children and kindness and loyalty and people being assholes to each other. Also murder, sometimes. It’s epic in the way that ancient mythologies are epic, in the period where humans had started to conceive of something bigger than just the god of this tree or that spring, but before we’d come up with something quite as all-encompassingly boring as monotheism. A universe where there are beings who can unmake it because they’ve spent eons stewing in the resentment of Daddy didn’t hug me enough is a universe with the capacity for real drama, and Jemisin, having gone and created such a world, certainly doesn’t stint on the drama. None of it feels cheap or soapy, either (although I think soapiness gets a bad rap, but that’s for another time); it’s really engaging and obviously the end of the universe is quite serious business.

I very much intend to pick up the Dreamblood duology at some point; I don’t know what it’s about but supposedly it’s even weirder than this series. Which should be fun!

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "Storytime," Nightwish

Back in the fall I read N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms along with Mark Oshiro over at Mark Reads, and it was so good that it was super difficult to read it at such a slow pace. It is still difficult, but I am a little more used to it, so I got off-track fewer times when reading its sequel, The Broken Kingdoms.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms seemed to wrap up as a complete story pretty well, so I thought I had a pretty decent idea of picking out what was the thing being set up for the next novel: Itempas’ punishment to wander the world as a human until he learned how to love. I am pleased to say I was right! Other than that, though, I was not in the least able to foresee a damn thing about this novel. It was continually surprising in awesome ways.

This story has a different viewpoint character than the last one, which I’ve decided is something I really love in series. Our protagonist is a young artist named Oree, who sells arty things to tourists in the shadow of the great tree that Yeine magicked up at the end of the last book. Oree is Maroneh, meaning she is descended from the survivors of a tribe of people whose entire continent was destroyed by Nahadoth in the God’s War. Oree is also blind, although she can see magic.

One day, Oree finds a dude asleep in her muck bin, and she takes him into feed and clean him. He ends up staying for a while. He is a rather strange dude, as he never talks, he periodically kills himself and then comes back to life with no trouble, and he also glows for a few minutes every day as the sun comes up. Since he never tells Oree his name, she starts calling him Shiny. Shiny is, obviously to the reader, a crankily mortal Itempas, but Oree doesn’t know this as the Arameri have covered up any public knowledge of Itempas’ punishment.

What the Arameri have not been able to cover up is that Nahadoth and the Enefadeh are free, Yeine exists as a goddess, and a bunch more minor gods/children of gods, called “godlings,” have popped up everywhere. When the book opens, Oree has recently broken up with a godling called Madding, who is the god of obligations.

The plot here really kicks into high gear when it is discovered that someone is killing godlings and removing their hearts. Oree gets initially drawn into this for three reasons: one, she discovered one of the bodies. Two, Madding and all his friends are, predictably, angry and worried. Three, Shiny is so spectacularly upset at this that he actually talks. Unfortunately, a bunch of priests of Itempas show up, and, being snotty assholes, make everything worse, resulting in everybody getting on the Order of Itempas’ Most Wanted list, and Oree discovering that in addition to being able to see magic, she can also paint magical portals! This is an awesome power that I wish I had so that I could teleport places and not spend two hours of every workday in the car. Unfortunately, it is also a dangerous power, particularly when you accidentally put priestly policemen halfway through the portals and then they close. OOPS. This brings Oree to the attention of a creepy-ass cult called the New Lights, which is sort of a splinter faction of the Order of Itempas, and they have a dastardly plot to use demon blood to kill the Nightlord. “Demon” is the term used for any offspring of gods and mortal lovers, and they were supposedly exterminated when it was discovered that their blood kills gods. The New Lights, in addition to being creepy theocidal murderers, are largely really scary because they are super culty and are absolutely entitled as all hell. They are the kind of people who are like “You will like us and join us willingly! We will keep you imprisoned by force until you understand what nice and right people we are” but who cannot stop being mean snotty condescending assbags for even ten seconds. It doesn’t even occur to them to even try, they just feel entitled for Oree to like them personally without them being at all nice to her. People like that drive me up the fucking wall, and N. K. Jemisin does a creepily good job of making me hate the New Lights A LOT in a very short span of time. They are THE WORST. Then they get even worse. I don’t really want to talk about how much the worst they are, partly because I will get angry and partly because we’re into the part of the story where Jemisin drops giant plot twist bombs every chapter or so, so everything is spoilers.

It’s hard to pick out one thing as a particular strength for this book because Jemisin is just such a masterful storyteller. She’s got an incisive eye for the nuances of power; in this book the focus is a bit less on race and more on religious tribalism and disability, but she’s got the same gift for going right to the heart of complicated social justice matters—stuff usually talked about with a whole host of useful but often academic specialized terminology—using everyday, effective, and often humorous language. Her pacing and characterization are very tight, and I find her plots nearly impossible to predict. Overall, I just find her writing really engaging; her viewpoint characters have very relatable and human internal narrations even when the stories are literally about finding out that they are not human or turning into non-humans. Even the romances with god dudes who are complete assholes (and yeah, both Nahadoth and Itempas are pretty much giant assholes) doesn’t bother me as much as it usually does because they’re written with a lot of understanding and very little mooning about. (Not that mooning about is always terrible in romance but it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to follow when you’ve got no idea What On Earth Does She See In Him.)

Oh, and some of the godlings are awesome and some are terrifying and some are terrifyingly awesome (GIANT TEETH LADY I AM LOOKING AT YOU) (AND THEN HIDING IN TERROR WHY DID I LOOK AT YOU WHY); there needs to be a Neil Gaiman Award for Fabulous Creepy Mythic Creatures in Fiction just so that N. K. Jemisin can win it.

I cannot wait for “The Kingdom of Gods.”

Over at Mark Reads, Mark has just finished up reading N K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a copy of which I had picked up at Readercon over the summer. Since I had the book but hadn’t begun reading it yet when Mark announced it as his next project, I tried to read it along with Mark, at the glacial pace of two or three chapters per week.

It turns out, I am not good at reading on that kind of a schedule. Sometimes I would accidentally read ahead; other times I’d forget to read a chapter on time. But the book was good enough that I kept coming back to it no matter how many times I screwed up the reading schedule, and now I have finished it.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is about a woman named Yeine, the young leader of a small “barbarian” country called Darr. Yeine’s mother, Kinneth, was once the heir to of the Arameri, the ruling family of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms—functionally, the Arameri rule the world. Kinneth was disowned for marrying Yeine’s father. Now Kinneth is dead, and Yeine is summoned to the Arameri city of Sky—an entire city elevated on a pillar, so it literally sits in the sky—by her grandfather. Here she is told she is now one of his three heirs—the others being his niece and nephew, Scimina and Relad—and that the three of them are now in competition to see who will rule next.

The story, however, is not entirely about the competition. (In fact, I think the competition is really the weakest part of the book—I’m not really sure how it works? It’s never clear what the criteria are for determining a winner…) The book is largely about Yeine trying to figure out the circumstances of her mother’s death and to learn more about who her mother was when she was an Arameri. Yeine also turns out to be unwittingly involved in a plot by the Enefadeh to get free. The Enefadeh are really the main plot in the story—they are gods that have been enslaved in corporeal form and given to the Arameri as weapons.

Currently, the universe is functionally monotheistic—only one god is in power, Itempas, also known as the Skyfather, who is the god of order and light and stability and all that sort of thing. However, once, there had been three ruling gods—Itempas, Nahadoth the Nightlord, and Lady Enefa, the goddess of life and death and transience and all that cool stuff. Itempas murdered Enefa and enslaved the Nightlord, along with all of the lesser gods, and gave them to the Arameri family, who had been the most loyal priests of Itempas. Itempas and the Arameri have run the world in a brutally orderly fashion ever since. (And I mean BRUTAL. The Arameri are basically what you’d get if Nazis were a royal family.)

The gods are some of the most fleshed-out characters in the book, besides Yeine (and, in a weird way, Kinneth, even though she’s dead the whole time). Yeine develops a weird sort of romance with Nahadoth, although it takes her much longer to develop any sort of civil communication with Naha, Nahadoth’s daytime self (who is basically a different person. And kind of a creeper). The other god we see the most of is Sieh, the god of childhood, who is the son of Enefa and Nahadoth, and is actually the oldest of the second generation of gods. Sieh is adorable, most of the time, and apparently it takes effort and energy for him to remain childlike—he grows up if he’s too worn out. The other main gods that we see around Sky are Kurue, the goddess of wisdom, who is really quite obnoxiously cranky and stuck-up, and Zhakkarn, the goddess of battle. Enefa has… some cameos, as well.

Notable humans in Sky include T’vril, who is basically the head servant, and who becomes one of Yeine’s few actual friends, and Viraine, the scrivener (basically a magician—scriveners perform magic by writing in the gods’ language), who is manipulative and skeezy, but who turns out to have a big role in Kinneth’s backstory. Scimina and Relad are really fairly minor characters—Scimina is prideful and sadistic in the extreme, and Relad is a sad drunk, and that’s largely it.

Apart from my not really getting the competition plot, I liked this book a lot, largely because I like thing that are surprising and relentlessly political. Issues of race, economics, and power feature very, very heavily, and there is some interesting gender stuff in that Darr is a traditionally matriarchal society (Sky, interestingly, seems to be fairly egalitarian; murderous fuckwittery appears to be considered an appropriate pastime for all genders, provided it is enacted upon people poorer or browner than oneself). A lot of it is very heavy, but I managed to outsource most of my feelings of readerly torment to Mark, who emotes better than I do anyway. Now I have to get a hold of The Broken Kingdoms; I’m already a day behind…

I just finished reading Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless and I have so much I want to say about it I don’t know where to start.

I bought this book right after Readercon, as Catherynne Valente had been there and I had met her and she was lovely and I figured I should read her adult novels, as the only thing of hers I’d read was The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making, which has really stuck with me, and the more I think about it the more impressed I am with the way that it seems to be familiar and strange at the same time, both for children and adults, a simultaneously traditional and modern fairy tale. When trying to decide which adult book to buy, I settled on Deathless, which promised to be a retelling of an old Russian folktale about Marya Morevna, a character I am minimally familiar with due to her appearance in the Tatterhood and Other Tales anthologies I was obsessed with when I was wee. Also the title and cover seemed specifically crafted to get my attention, because I am predictable.

The story, in short, is about a Russian girl named Marya Morevna, who runs off with and marries Koschei the Deathless, the Tsar of Life, who can really be surprisingly evil considering he’s the god of life. Also surprisingly creepy! His magical land of Buyan is a place where all things are living, meaning that the walls are made of living skin and hair and the fountains spurt blood and aaaaaaggghhh, but I am getting ahead of myself. Maria finds out that she is basically the latest in the Koschei-and-his-wife story, which usually involves him abducting a girl named Yelena, who then eventually runs off with a hot but dumb dude named Ivan and steals Koschei’s death. But not permanently, because folktales and fairy stories never permanently end.

Marya’s version of the story begins around the beginning of the Communist revolution and takes us through about World War II, and there is a lot of Soviet history and culture featured prominently in the book. Some of it is funny, such as the various folktale creatures that take up Party allegiance, and some of it is harrowing, like when Marya runs off back home to Leningrad with Ivan, and is trapped there through the Siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, the deadliest siege in history.

In addition to being extremely well-researched in terms of history, Catherynne Valente really blew me away with her use of language, which is something I don’t say very often (I generally think in modern books I should be engaged with the story and possibly exploring ideas about [insert themes relating to humanity here], not counting metaphors), but this book does some really rich, multi-layered, poetic things with language without getting dense. She makes ample use of old fairy-tale-telling conventions, particularly repetition/mirroring and things happening in threes. Marya has three older sisters, and every time something happens with the sisters—whether it’s the sisters getting married, or Marya going to visit them, or her sisters’ husbands appearing to Ivan as birds—it is broken into three scenes, one for each sister, from oldest to youngest, and the scenes all play out with the same structure and most of the same language, with very specific details changed. Each of the sisters marries a bird who turns into a man who represents the Russian ideal of the year they were married. There is probably some symbolic stuff that I missed since I know little about birds, but I learned a bit about the evolution of the Russian ideal man. Baba Yaga—now known as Comrade Yaga, except when she thinks that’s too familiar—famously sends Marya on three quests, the last of which involves Marya having to ride Yaga’s mortar and pestle. The scene where Marya gets in the mortar—written from the mortar’s point of view, preceded by a scene where Marya makes her preparations—is one of the most delightfully weird scenes I’ve read in anything in a long time; I was so delighted, in fact, that I read the scene three times and showed it to somebody else before I could continue reading.

Other bits that stuck with me included: Madame Lebedeva’s speech on makeup, the Communist house-imp committee (a natural occurrence, given the Communist practice of moving multiple families into one house), Naganya the rifle imp, the dragon that does paperwork for Stalin because he can kill more people that way, and—for me, the most perfect encapsulation of what this book does that makes it so awesome—the introduction to the village of Yaichka.

I admit I was reading so fast that I missed the first obvious clues about what was going on Yaichka, when all of Marya and Koschei’s neighbors were being described. I twigged on to who the neighbors were at the third set of neighbors, who are the last Russian royal family. The citizens of Yaichka are known only by their first names and patronymics, no surnames; the bell only rang in my fat head when I saw that the youngest daughter of the third family was Anastasia and their son was sickly and named Alexei. Then I went and started the chapter over, with their neighbors Vladimir Ilyich and his wife Nadya Konstantinova, and their two little sons, Josef and Leon, and their description of how everything in Vladimir’s household is equally distributed, and how he has a gift for convincing people of strange ideas, and how little Josef tends to smash things up without really “getting it” about whatever problem his parents are trying to solve… and then I realized who this family was and it all made sense and was also beautiful and metaphorical. The second neighbor I couldn’t recognize so I Googled the names it gave and hoped the first result would be the right one, and I think it was, because it seemed to make sense when I reread the passage. (The second neighbor was a famous Russian military commander I had never heard of, and his passage described how precise and orderly his house was, and how he and his daughters defended Yaichka from the wolves howling in the woods.)

The only thing I didn’t really get about this book was some of the discussion about marriage, which is fairly significant, since the book is enormously about marriage. But I have never been married, and all discussion of marriage is alien-sounding and uncomfortable for me on a visceral level. So all I can say about the treatment of marriage in this book is that it is very dramatic. She does mention that to outsiders it looks incomprehensible, and that I can agree with.

This book definitely left me wanting to do a great deal of research about Russia and Russian folklore, and then come back and read it again. Alas, I probably won’t, as I have about ten other Catherynne Valente books I have to read.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast

As you may have heard, particularly if you are anywhere near Boston, Neil Gaiman has a new book out, called The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This book is kind of a big deal.

Since I am eternally behind the times, I have been reading The Graveyard Book instead. This was published five years ago. I picked up a beautiful but sadly unsigned copy at Porter Square Books, because I ~~have all the willpower of a sloth~~ wish to support independent bookstores instead of chucking the entirety of my disposable income at Amazon.

I got the one with this sexy, Gothy cover:

*pets*

Ahem. Anyway. The Graveyard Book is essentially a retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which I have not read, because I win at being an English major. (I have read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. And “White Men’s Burden,” which, um.) Except, since it is a Neil Gaiman book, it has ghosts instead of animals.

The protagonist of our story is Nobody Owens, known as Bod, whose entire family is murdered when he is a toddler. The baby survives by wandering into the nearby graveyard, where he is adopted by some ghosts and given the Freedom of the Graveyard. In addition to ghost parents, he also gets a Guardian, a mysterious being named Silas who is neither living nor dead, and who can leave the graveyard in order to get Bod food and other stuff he needs, what with not being a ghost himself. Most of the book is pretty episodic, which makes sense since it based on a short story collection. The main plotline, however, has to do with Bod growing up, and, of course, with finding out who killed his family and why, and stopping him from finishing the job. (The man is still planning on finding the baby that got away and killing him. But he is prepared to wait.) (He is kind of a sick fuck. There are reasons for this.)

One of the main strengths in the book is the same thing that is one of the main strengths in pretty much all of Neil Gaiman’s books, namely, awesome creepy supernatural creatures. The ghouls are both scary and adorable, with hilarious names like “the Bishop of Bath and Wells” and “the 33^rd President of the United States” (NOT Harry S. Truman. Just the 33^rd President of the United States). There’s also a very, very, very old entity, that may be a single being or may be a group, which guards the very oldest pagan tomb under the graveyard, known as the Sleer. The Sleer is hard to describe without giving stuff away, but be assured that they are very creepy and very important to the plot, and also kind of cute and sad? Poor Sleer, stuck guarding an empty tomb for centuries. They must be so bored.

There are also illustrations, because Neil Gaiman books are fancy like that.

I highly recommend this book, not like anybody needs me to recommend it, since we all already know that Neil Gaiman books are generally pretty awesome. I laughed, I cried, I got tingly-crawly feelings on my skin, although some of those turned out to be carpenter ants actually crawling on me. (And this is after I put down two different kinds of ant bait. Le sigh.) I really should have read it five years ago.

Current Mood: good

In the absence of there being a third Faeries of Dreamdark novel, I read the first book of Laini Taylor's new series, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It was super good.

First of all, and most dangerously, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is conspiring with numerous other things in my life right now to make me want to get a tattoo. But I am scared to, so mostly likely I will keep dying my hair funny colors and getting things pierced instead. But man, tattoos always seem like much better ideas in stories than they do when your aunts are complaining about how much it costs to get them removed.

*herm*

Anyway.

This book is, at its heart, a romance, by which I actually do mean a love story this time rather than a knightly adventure or whatever, although it certainly has a bit of that too. It is one of the star-crossedest of star-crossed love stories I have read in a very long time, where, at various points, the lovers are (a) on opposite sides of a thousand-years-long war, (b) living in different worlds, and (c) on opposite sides of being alive or dead.

Our protagonist in this story is Karou, an art student in Prague, because Prague is mysterious and sexy. Karou has blue hair and lots of tattoos and draws a lot. Her best friend is named Zuzana, who is tiny and sarcastic and generally awesome. When Karou is not arting around Prague having awesomely awesome banter with Zuzana, she runs errands for her foster father. Her foster father's name is Brimstone. He is a chimaera, which basically means he is a wacky amalgam of beast and human parts, with horns. Her "errands" usually mean running around the world acquiring teeth. Karou doesn't know what the teeth are for. Brimstone has a nifty portal system where the door of his office can open onto any of a number of doors all around the world, kind of like Howl's castle.

One day, mysteriously beautiful people with wings burn handprints into all of the doors, and they stop working. Enter the seraphim, and our main love interest dude seraph, Akiva. Akiva is a soldier, like pretty much all the seraphim, because basically all the seraphim and the chimaera have been doing for a thousand years is warring with each other. Karou learns all this after Akiva starts mooning around after her being all intrigued about ~~her hawtness~~ why a human girl is mixed up with the chimaerae, and they get in a fight but he doesn't kill her because he reminds her of his dead girlfriend from fifty years ago who had been a chimaera and therefore they had been star-crossed and tragic and she died. Then they hang out on romantic cathedral rooftops in Prague and stuff, and learn things about Karou's past and the war between the seraphim and the chimaerae and what Brimstone actually uses all those creepy teeth for, and Karou hatches a cunning plan to get to the other world where the seraphim and chimaerae live, now that all Brimstone's portals have stopped working.

As far as preternaturally hunky nonhuman boyfriends who occasionally watch people sleep like creepers and also spend a lot of time feeling bad about what terrible monsters they are go, Akiva barely annoys me at all. In fact, I actually like him! He has good reason to feel all bad about himself and make sadfaces about what a stoic relentless killer he has turned out to be, since grief can do terrible warping things to people, even people who are not trained to be soldiers from when they are five, and the plot is very twisty and allows for him to genuinely be terribly mistaken about things, so there is none of this self-indulgent Edward Cullen-esque angst-for-angst's-sake business. Just fucked-upness. Serious, serious fucked-upness. Which makes for a much better story. Also, Akiva's awkward attempts at humor are actually funny.

This book is lush--Gothic, beautifully descriptive, sometimes poetic, sometimes hilariously casual (like every time Zuzana shows up). The funny bits and the ethereal bits and the big damn crazy bits all weave together into a colorful, otherworldly story that is exactly the sort of thing I want to be able to write someday but don't think I'll be able to pull off. I will be eagerly awaiting the sequel, Days of Blood and Starlight.

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

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

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

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

So, after getting myself all caught up on Merlin via Netflix last month while I was all super busy, I decided to continue with the King Arthur thing, and picked up a copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King, since I had run across a small excerpt in one of the Prentice Hall Lit books I did some projects on at work (and in return, I was gifted with the entire set of them! Yay!).

This book starts off very silly, with "the Wart"'s "eddication" under Merlyn, which seems to consist predominantly of getting turned into animals, except the time he and Kay go on adventures with Robin Hood. The tone of the whole thing is kind of like having the story told to you at a club by a slightly tipsy nineteenth-century British gentleman who thinks you have never heard of the Middle Ages before, by which I mean is is charmingly silly, sometimes casually racist and sexist in that cheerful sort of way that passed for being very progressive a hundred years ago, and full of extremely dated references drawing parallels between Arthur's Gramarye and "modern" Britain (and when I say extremely dated, I mean extremely dated--there are references to a bunch of famous cricket players I've never heard of). He also employs the delightfully out-of-date traditions of phonetically writing out everybody's accents and wandering off into treatises on Natural Philosophy, putting the feel of the book squarely fifty years before it was written (it was written between 1938 and 1941, apparently) at the latest, the exception being some of Merlyn's more anachronistic statements (Merlyn is "born backwards in time" in this one, and is played as an extremely comic character--a curmudgeonly absent-minded professor type who keeps saying things about evolution and Victorian fox-hunting that nobody else understands.)

The later bits of the story turn from comedy into melodrama, telling of Arthur's seduction by Morgause and the feud with the Orkney clan, and the insanely long and convoluted love affair between Guenever and Lancelot, and Mordred's revenge on Arthur and how he manages to turn everyone against each other and basically screw everything up. The darkest one of these is the story of Lancelot, which involves not one but two instances of the "bed trick," which is a terrible euphemism for "rape by fraud as a literary device". After the second time, Lancelot goes mad, and since this is the Middle Ages and everyone is stupid (although, sadly, there are a lot of people who are still this stupid), everyone is all like "What's his deal? Why did he go mad? Does it run in the family?" as if it were surprising that someone might go mad after being raped twice. Being a self-loathing sort, after Lancelot stops being mad, he ends up living for several years with Elaine and helping to raise their insufferably holy child, who later becomes the Sir Galahad who finds the Holy Grail. Eventually, however, he moves back to Camelot and continues to have a tortured love square with Guenever, Arthur, and God, for the next thirty or so years.

My favorite character in the lot is probably King Pellinore, who spends most of his life questing after the Questing Beast, with whom he has an odd sort of bond, due it being his destiny to quest after her and her destiny to be quested after by Pellinores forever, and the quest is apparently supposed to never end, so when he catches her it generally means something is wrong and they have to sort it out. There is a rather hilarious subplot in which Pellinore stops questing because he is in love, and Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides dress up as the Questing Beast to try and get him to chase them and stop moping, and then the actual Questing Beast shows up, and thinks they are her mate, and then everyone is lovesick and King Pellinore says "What?" a lot.

Overall, I quite enjoyed it! It has definitely stoked my interest in reading every version of the Arthur legends I can get my hands on.

Current Mood: tired

In honor of Halloween, I decided that this October I would reread Dracula. Yes, it took me six weeks. Shut up, I've been busy.

Anyway, a few months back I picked up a copy of the edition of Dracula that was illustrated by Edward Gorey. It has a black fabric binding with embossed silver letters and gorgeous thick ivory-colored pages and a red ribbon bookmarks and a gorgeous slightly spiky font and squeeeeeeee. I say these things because they are why I bought the book, since I already have two other editions of Dracula.

This particular edition of Dracula starts off with a slightly cranky critical commentary by someone who is way too serious to be handling Gothic novels, complaining that some people think Dracula is trashy, and this is clearly stupid because Dracula is A Great Work Of Literature, See, It Has Multiple Viewpoints! And it is true that Dracula is well-researched and is fairly tightly constructed for a Victorian novel and the Wilkie-Collins-esque "case file" format is well put together (which can be hard) and all that other stuff. However, it does not follow from these that Dracula is not a hilariously cranky piece of conservative whining about evil foreigners corrupting our good God-fearing English women and making them slutty, and that it is frequently highly sensationalized and mawkishly sentimental, and that Doctor Van Helsing's strange syntax doesn't make him sound like Yoda, as

cleolinda has astutely observed. I have already linked to Kate Beaton's fabulous take on the book.

That said, I actually do love the book, and I actually do like Mina, despite the "women's role is submissive helpmate" aspect of her "all I want in the world is to do helpful chores for all these wonderful men!!" thing, because (a) I do relate to and approve of the drive to develop skills and knowledge and be productive, and (b) most of her devoted helpfulness involves extensively documenting and typing up things, and I can appreciate that, over a hundred years ago, typing and secretarial work were actually new and progressive and exciting directions for women. (And even though it is now 2011, I kind of want to learn shorthand and own a typewriter anyway, just because.) Also Mina is cleverer than most female characters in Victorian novels, although in typical Victorian fashion, every time she figures something out about where Dracula is and what he's going to do next, Van Helsing or somebody praises her for "having a man's brain."

The biggest thing that struck me about this reread is the differences between Stoker's presentation of Dracula and the pop-cultural squabblings over Real Vampire myths. Eddie Izzard's famous "What the fuck's a low-powered vampire?" in his Horror Movies sketch castigates the Coppola version for having Dracula walking around in the daylight rather than crumbling to dust; however, so does Stoker--the crumbling-to-dust thing was made up by whoever wrote the script for Nosferatu. I also generally tend to think of old myths as spreading vampirism by bite only and that the "human drinking vampire blood" thing is the domain of modern stories that can't have entire villages turning into vampires; however, Stoker kind of uses... both. I had kind of forgotten about Dracula getting younger, too. Although you almost never see that one used anymore.

Anyway, next up I need to read something that is not a reread and perhaps that will not take me forever and a day to do.