|
What
I'm Currently Reading Return to Currently Reading Menu Note: Most links go to the book's page on Amazon.com. When one has a knock-down migraine which diminishes just enough for one to be able to read, if not do much else, it's great to have a book that promises sheer fun at hand. Today that was Ellen Kushner's This book is new so no spoilers here. I will observe that readers who have not encountered the previous books set in Kushner's Riverside could read this one first with no confusion or diminishment of pleasure. One doesn't need to know the characters' back (or forward) history; as Katherine encounters them, we do too, through her descriptions both trenchant and humane. (Though it must be said certain lines and situations inevitably will resonate more with readers familiar with the previous Riverside stories.) Kushner begins with sixteen year old Katherine, whose uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine, offers, out of nowhere, to cancel all debts and even to help the family out of poverty if Katherine consents to live with him for six months and train with the sword. Of course she's going to take the offer--despite the fact that young ladies do not have anything to do with swords. Here are a couple of lines from the opening graf, and what swashbuckler among us can resist? . . .This was before I had ever been to the city. i had never been in a duel, or held a sword myself. I had never kissed anyone, or had anyone try to kill me, or worn a velvet cloak. And then, for the readers who know the story, that graf finishes: I had certainly never met my uncle the Mad Duke. Once I met him, much was explained. [pause for guffaw from those who know what that means] No summary here, except to say that Katherine does indeed learn to handle a sword. But you absolutely cannot predict what is going to happen while she goes about it. Meanwhile Katherine's first-person storyline interweaves with other points of view to make a delightful whole that covers a surprising spectrum of situations and emotions. There just isn't a note wrong anywhere, the characters are vivid, the humor a splash of light amid plenty of tense moments, introspective ones, sad ones, and some with exquisite poignance. Two observations of things that particularly impressed me: one, the true-to-life 'secret' lives of school girls who are mostly shut away from the world for their own good. These girls read and reread romantic novels in order to decode the world--novels chosen in hopes that the glorious landscape, passionate heroes (especially heroic villains) and noble emotions found there will indeed prove to be what the girls encounter when at last given the chance to take their place in the world. Their language is a private language, the characters in the romances so well known, so endlessly discussed, they prance alongside the realtime story as dream shades. This so resonated with my own teen experience, when encountering others who adored Man from U.N.C.L.E and Lord of the Rings and Georgette Heyer and Star Trek; what's more, this phenomenon resonates right back through literary letters and fiction clear to Charlotte Lennox who, in the 1750s, gave us The Female Quixote about a girl who raised herself on romance. As well as Jane Austen's far more fun iteration of the same plot in Northanger Abbey. The second thing that impressed me was how, as the young people encountered the worst aspects of the world--and indeed did not always escape them--they could observe, comprehend, and still retain their own integrity. How very refreshing--and how rare, unfortunately, in far too much fiction. Katherine has in a single day's reading become one of my favorite heroines. Three excellent YA reads:
The Shadow Thieves
. This is billed as the first in the Cronus Chronicles,
but the story is complete in itself. We begin with red-haired Charlotte Mielswetski, a girl who tends
to use judicious lies to get out of work at school and out of being questioned exhaustively by her
child psychologist mom. Charlotte is creative (she wants to be a heroine, and keeps starting
stories inside her head, which never get past the opening) and a bit lazy, but every day.
She finds out her cousin Zachary (called Zee) is coming to spend a year with her family,
for what turn out to be mysterious reasons. Zee is great--almost too great--he's instantly popular,
good at everything, and super polite, but before serious conflict between the cousins can develop,
the kids at school began getting sick. So many of them take to their beds the school is closed for
a week, and Zee is afraid it's his fault. A delightful encounter with a kitten and some creepy
encounters with tall weird men wearing tuxedoes convince Charlotte that Zee's weird story is true
. . . and by the way, so is the Greek version of the Underworld. Which the two kids are going
to have to go to. It's lucky Char always liked Greek mythology.
That story was made lively and readable by the voice. Ursu has a narrator right
on stage, whose asides are entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.
The ending once or twice descended into silly (and the prose seemed a tad hasty)
but it was an engrossing read, one I highly recommend for fourth graders on up.
And I have become addicted to the YA works of Charles Butler**
I gobbled down two of them recently, first
Death of a Ghost and right after it
The Fetch of Mardy Watt. Now
I want them all. Butler writes a darker sort of fantasy; these two have to do with ghosts and the underworld.
just as did the Ursu. Taht's their similarity, but in execution the books could not be more different.
In Death of a Ghost, Ossian is returning to Lychfont House with his painter dad, after a time in
Philadelphia, USA, where Ossian fell in love with another teen, Lizzy. His father is driving carelessly and fast,
they seem on the verge of a crash--we shift to an alternate dimension with a sullen goddess, Sulis, who
is angry that her soon-to-be spouse, Ossian, is missing. We shift back to Lychfont, where Ossian
and his dad have arrived, and while the adults are chatting wittily in the background, Ossian
pickes up the threads of his childhood life with Colin and his half-sister Sue. Ghosts walk,
dimensions shift, magic is everyday, as we unravel the mystery: what's going on with Ossian?
It's an engrossing premise, though I have to admit I didn't like this story as much as I loved
the second one, The Fetch of Mardy Watt. Ossian's already being in love with someone we
don't see, we're just told about, didn't engage me as deeply, and I have to admit to a personal
flaw here: any character who, in childhood, sacrificed small animals is just not going to win
me very easily to his plight. It's definitely a teen read--involving various types of love,
complicated with the shifting dimensions to the world, and threaded by the stylish (and sometimes heartless) talk of artists. And the prose is glorious.
The second book is aimed at a readership maybe a half step down from Ossian's
story, in that there is no romance. The quests here, besides the magical, are
about friendship, being, family. Mardy is a plain plump Irish schoolgirl who used
to be popular at her elementary school, but now that she's in a new school with the big kids,
she's just there. Neither popular nor unpopular. She walks to school with Hal, another leftover
from her old school; the school is more dreary than not, especially with spycams being set up
all over. And then there's this weird girl named Rachel who glares at Mardy from the back room
in French, and with a clever pun launches group teasing against Mardy that lasts a day or so,
until Mardy can return fire. Mardy is emotionally spiky not just because of these everyday schoolkid
issues but also because her older brother, the clever, elegant Alan, has been lying in
a coma for months, for no reason the doctors can figure. Then, after a strange encounter
with music and an engraved stone, Mardy finds herself thinning--not in the diet sense, but her substance is gradually fading away.
Neither of these books is predictable. The surprises
are not just random twists and turns, but are like trapdoors that
cause you to fall deeper into the story--and deeper into the
strangeness of the world. But what really shines is Butler's exquisite prose.
Frequently I'd have to stop and go back just to reread lines and grafs.
Here's from Mardy's first moment of magic:
She dawdled, going home. As she reached the park she heard again the strange plucked instrument
she had noticed on the way to school that morning. It was this, as much as a wish to drag out the
time, that led her through the wrought-iron gates and up one of three forking paths, to a circle
of flowerbeds and asphalt . . .Steps led up all around the cross, and on the side visible
to Mardy a bunch of winter roses had been laid. Lest we forget. She began to read
a dizzying list of names, each belonging to a dead soldier. [names] Once she had begun,
in fact, she found she had to carry on. The music, which was very close now--just on the
far side of the cross--seemed to insist upon it. Lest we forget. She could not move
further until she had dutifully read and remembered the name of each Burgess, Butterell,
Chandler and Crisp; and so to the next side of the cross, and the next, until John Zipes had at last been
laid to rest. And still there was no sign of where the music was coming from, or who was playing it.
Even now she could not move away. Mardy had heard that just before death a person's life flashed past--all in a moment.
What happened to her now was like that, but much slower. She was unwillingly engaged in a laborious act
of memory, unwinding each moment of her past like thread from a bobbin. She felt as if she had to or be turned to stone herself.
Finally--finally--the many-stringed instrument (a harp, was it, or a mandolin?) began drawing
its threads of sound together. The tangle of arpeggios became more dense and knotted.
Harmonies and discords vied dangerously, and at last a vast, enmeshed chord threw a net
of closely-wovem sound over her head. It billowed out and settled, dissolved at its edges
and tightened at its center, and bound her hand and foot.
These are intelligent books--I can see the smart sixth grader on up loving them
passionately, and going back to them again and again to consider different scenes and passages. I'm going to read them again.
**(Go ahead, explore his site. Be sure to visit his ancestors' page and listen to the snip from his father about inspiration,
and then go all the way down Butler's photos of his ancestors.)
7 July 2006 Jane
Austen--books
I know so well I can pick them up and turn to any page, knowing
immediately where I am in the story. Other reading has been historical research of various sorts,
some essays, some short fiction, and then when, at last, summer
vacation hit, I took down all my space opera favorites and reread
them. Doyle and Macdonald's Mageworlds,
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden,
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles
Vorkosigan books--and I read the third of the Vatta series
by Elizabeth Moon, Engaging
the Enemy. I really like this series. Moon, as always, tells
a ripsnorter of an action story while not overlooking the emotional
and above all moral dilemmas of her two heroines. She shows
what it's like when peaceful people are forced to consider defending
themselves . . . people who perhaps always expected others to
do the dirty work. She examines what it means to an individual
to be good at command. There is humor and color as well as exciting
action. A caveat: this is not the book to begin with. The second
book, Marque
and Reprisal, gives some background, but this one jumps
right into the story, and I believe readers would have a better
experience getting at least the previous one. I look forward
to the fourth. Crystal
Dragon by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller is the latest Liaden
novel, but it's a prequel--and a second half of a prequel at
that. So any reader who wants to try their work, either get
Crystal
Soldier, which is the first half of this story, or one of
the other Liaden novels farther up the timeline, like Agent
of Change or Balance
of Trade. I won't say much about it, except the voice is
quite compelling, and the exploration of the alienness of the
sherieksa, the beginnings of Liad, the tree--oh, so many things
are explained that when I reread the other books, familiar bits
from the first readings lit up, taking on new meaning. The ending
hit me with a tremendous impact. I do think therefore one could
begin this series at either end, with the "Crystal"
prequels, or forward, but if you begin with the prequels, do
read Crystal
Soldier first. Twilight
by Stephenie Meyer is that rare thing, a truly YA vampire novel.
What's more, it manages to maintain an innate decency while
still being about vampires. I don't know that I'm completely
convinced by the ending, about which I will not say more, I
will wait and read the next--but the fact that I really want
to read her next indicates the ambivalence doesn't reach far.
Sun-loving Bella chooses to move to Parks, Washington, which
she hates because it always rains there. But she feels responsible
for her flighty mom, whose new relationship has some troubles,
and so she goes to live with her dad, who's a cop, and a really
nifty guy. Her first day at high school, she sees some odd people--oddly
beautiful--at lunch . . . and soon gets involved with the best
looking of them, and the strangest, a guy named Edward. The
book begins very slowly as Bella relays every detail of their
meeting and interactions, and their many, many conversations--
like teens do when totally absorbed in attraction, yet retaining
enough rationality to go slowly for whatever reason. The pace
accelerates toward a very tense climax--one forgets she's writing
first person, the tension is so high. The story does have Mary
Sue aspects: Bella seems to be beautiful to everybody despite
her clumsiness, her first day of high school she is the cynosure
of all eyes (but don't the rest of us who weren't enjoy experiencing
that through a character as we never did in life?), though I
think that works in a romantic vampire novel. There has to be
the sweep of romance to keep horror at bay. I just finished a middle grade novel by Janni Lee Simner, called
Secret
of the Three Treasures. I really wish the author had been
permitted by her editors to keep her original title, which was
Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer. (Sidenote, I test-drove
both titles on a group of fourth and fifth graders, and in both
cases, every single hand shot sky high when I gave them the
second choice. About the first choice, one boy muttered, "It
better be real treasures, and not some book about three things
you have to learn." Well, young man, I can promise you
there really are three treasures in that book!) Tiernay is the
heroine--she prefers her dad's last name, West, because he travels
all over the world writing adventure stories about a cool heroine.
Tiernay indulges in Walter-Mitty-like internal adventures while
practicing at adventure until she can get into a real one, but
unlike Mitty, who was too afraid to stand up for himself, Tiernay
has the courage of her convictions. And so she does her very
best to become an adventurer, despite her mom really wanting
her to settle down and be a practical schoolgirl. Like when
Mom takes Tiernay out to dinner with her friend Greg and his
son Kevin, Tiernay orders squid and snails, because she figures
an adventurer has to get used to eating anything. Her reaction
to the food, and what happens at that dinner, would please any
reader from a smart seven on up. Tiernay soon gets her tip-off
to adventure, and she is no slouch about seeking more clues
and doing her detective work in spite of snippy school-girls
with their secret clubs, neighborhood bullies, and her exasperated,
practical mom. An adult might be able to figure out how the
story is going to go, but I really believe will enjoy it anyway
because the voice is superlatively delightful. I frequently
was laughing out loud, and when asked "What's so funny"
read bits to my son and spouse, and they laughed as well. Tiernay,
like Harriet
the Spy many years ago, is true to herself: what she is
inside, she is outside. Thre's no pretence, but no posturing,
either. Her reactions, her grit, and how her tale is narrated,
make this one a must for any school library shelf, I think,
as well as great reading at home. And I really, really hope
that Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer, will soon be launching
into her next case because I definitely want to read it. |
