The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am not a monster. I am a robot.” A robot packed in a crate is washed up on a deserted island after a storm sinks a ship transporting a cargo of robots somewhere. A gang of curious sea otters investigates and accidentally turns on the robot, birthing her like Venus out of the shell (crate). The island is only deserted in the sense that there are no people on it, for it is teeming with all manner of wildlife: in addition to flowers, trees, and grass, there are foxes, geese, rabbits, bears, beavers, robins, chickadees, geese, opossums, turtles, stick bugs, pikes, squirrels, deer, and more. We are told early on by the narrator, “As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not like animals do.” This is quickly proven false, as the robot, who calls herself Roz (short for Rozzum unit 7134, Brown’s playful nod to the Rossum’s Universal Robots of Karel Capek’s seminal robot play RUR), evinces curiosity and survival instinct, likes to stay clean, and wants to fit into her new environment. There are moments when she feels happy, as when she manages to escape from a mudslide during a sudden heavy storm. And another time she feels fear because, programmed to survive, she does not want an aggressive bear brother and sister to attack her, so she runs away from them. And yet Roz is not biologically alive. Getting energy directly from sunlight, she doesn’t need to eat. She “sleeps,” but only by shutting down her nonessential functions. Her perfect lines and angles contrast with the irregularity of the island’s flora and fauna. And to the animals on the island, she is at first a “sparkling monster” to be avoided. Interestingly, it never occurs to her that she doesn’t belong there, and instead she feels that she is home. Because of course she was born (turned on) on the island: “I’ve been here my whole life.” The story, then, depicts Roz’ attempts to settle into her new life on the island, learning to camouflage herself to look less artificial and more natural, observing animals communicating with each other so as to learn their universal language, making friends (and enemies), becoming a mother (adopting an orphaned gosling she names Brightbill), building a home, and generally being affected by the community of animals on the island as she affects them, the robot becoming wilder, the animals more civilized. If Roz can say, “I awoke just a machine, but you have taught me how to live, how to be wild,” the animals learn from her how to cooperate, build shelters, and use fire. There are many neat scenes in the novel, like when Roz learns from watching an opossum play dead that she can play alive, or when she “wakes” in the middle of an abnormally cold winter and finds many frozen dead animals and birds (“the wilderness is filled with beauty but also ugliness”), or when Brightbill tells Roz about his adventures migrating south for the winter. The plot is unpredictable. The writing is simple but affecting, being beautiful or moving or funny or suspenseful. The many monochrome illustrations are neat: simple, beautiful, childlike, distinctive, effective. Interestingly, although Roz is gendered female by the text, the pictures show her gender neutral. The novel is a mixed bag about gender. On the one hand, it’s a little disappointing in being rather gender normative. It is true that the mothers in the story are the strongest characters physically and emotionally. And Roz is a highly sympathetic and admirable female protagonist. But it would be interesting if Roz were male and her son Brightbill female. As it is, Roz the female robot becomes a mother, while Brightbill her son becomes flight leader of his flock. There are no gay animals on the island! For that matter, there is no sex, either. In spring new baby animals appear as if by magic, without a word as to their generation. Roz, of course, is a sexless, virgin mother. Sure, it’s a kids’ book! But it has violence and death and droppings. But the lack of any hint of sexual reproduction feels weird. Could there be a way to allude to it so kids wouldn’t get it, but adults or teens would? Anyway, there are plenty of neat messages for kids about things like mortality, global warming, cooperation, and families, as when Brightbill asks Roz, “You’re not my real mother, are you?” and Roz answers, “There are many kinds of mothers,” so Brightbill decides, “We’re a strange family, but I kind of like it that way.” There is also something thoughtful going on in the book regarding the nature of life, artificial things like robots and wild animals like those on the island having more in common than at first meets the eye. Multiple times we are told that Roz or an animal is or is not “designed” to do something or “natural” at doing something. And in “A Note About the Story,” Brown says, “animal instincts are kind of like computer programs.” The novel explores how living creatures (robots or animals) may or may not transcend their programming. About the audiobook version, yikes--the intrusive movie-like music and redundant sound effects (which reproduce textual mentions of splashes, crashes, tearing, button clicking, etc.) during the first 8.5 minutes are difficult to endure, and the excrescent noise almost made me stop listening. Luckily, it stops after several chapters, leaving us with Kate Atwood’s mostly fine reading. Her base narrator and Roz are fine, and some animals like the pike talking underwater are great--though sometimes she tries too hard to “do” different animals, making the beavers, for some reason, stuffy pseudo-brits. When the music and sound effects return with about 18 minutes remaining, they almost ruin the ending. Another irksome thing about the audiobook: every time the narrator addresses us, Kate Atwood says, “listener,” whereas in the original novel the narrator says “reader.” I want to read the original book when listening to an audiobook version, not something adapted for people listening to it. A nice feature of the audiobook is the free pdf file that includes the illustrations from the physical book. I am looking forward to using the physical book in my ESL classes. View all my reviews
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Wonder by R.J. Palacio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Extraordinary Ordinary Extraordinary Boy Wonder (2012) by R. J. Palacio is a funny and moving novel about a ten-year-old boy who was the unlucky winner of the genetic lottery, born with an incredibly rare genetic condition (craniofacial anomaly) such that the doctor thought he’d die, and his survival ushered in an infancy and childhood of operations to build his face and seal his cleft palate. August (Auggie) Pullman says he’s really an ordinary kid and would be normal if other people saw him that way, but even after twenty-seven surgeries his face looks as if it had been melted by fire and still horrifies children and repulses adults. Auggie takes his condition and its effect on people philosophically and humorously but also sensitively (he is a human being who can be hurt). In his passion for Star Wars and his love for the family dog Daisy, he feels like a real, relatable kid. He is disarmingly dependent on his parents, liable to whine and cry and sit on their knees and cuddle with them. The book begins with the end of Auggie’s days of home schooling: his protective parents want him to start growing up by entering the fifth grade at Beecher Prep for middle school. Will it be as his father fears like sending “a lamb to the slaughter”? I found it hard to stop reading because I needed to find out what would happen to Auggie or what he would do next. One of the (mostly) effective things about the book is that Palacio writes it in eight parts (each with many short chapters, the book following the YA trend of short chapters and sentences), and while Auggie narrates three of them, the other five are narrated by other children: his older sister Via (a high school freshman), his friend at school Jack, another friend at school Summer, Via’s boyfriend Justin, and Via’s ex-best-friend Miranda. At their best, the different parts give different insights into Auggie and his situation and into the challenge faced by all kids entering adolescence. For example, whereas Auggie refrains from describing his face, only saying, “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse,” his big sister Via describes it in appalling detail, as well as frankly expressing—without rancor—what it’s like to be the oft-neglected sibling of such a younger brother. And Jack’s narration reveals how a well-meaning, kind kid could in a moment of thoughtless fitting in unintentionally hurt someone. Perhaps Palacio tries too hard to distinguish Justin’s narration from the others by having him talk in present tense with lower case pronoun i, and had she replaced his narration with that of Auggie’s Eddie Haskel-esque nemesis Julian she might have deepened her novel. Sometimes a character says something that doesn’t ring true, as when Auggie talks about walking back from a school event “in that giggly kind of mood” with his friends (I can’t imagine a ten-year-old boy saying “giggly”). Though her narrators are at times too intelligent and articulate for kids (a feature of most YA fiction), overall Palacio captures the voices of ten-year olds and fourteen-year olds, with plenty of “likes” and “Dudes” and slang and cultural references. She also nails the trials and tribulations of middle school and high school, with their homework, projects, lockers, lunchtimes, cliques (jocks, popular kids, nerds), etc., though the Principal Mr. Tushman and teachers like Mr. Browne, who has the kids in English learn a character-building precept each month, may be a bit too good to be true. Much YA fiction features special kid heroes who feel different from everyone else, and by being so special Auggie is no different. Apart from his facial condition, he is one of the smartest and funniest kids in his class. He is brave to put up with the quick look away adults do when they meet him for the first time and months of near total ostracization and hurtful teasing from his peers, including the Plague game they play whereby anyone who accidentally touches Auggie becomes infected. Helping him through all this are his friends and exceptionally loving and supportive family (Justin and Miranda admiringly prefer the open and warm expressions of love and down to earth humor of the Pullmans to their own families’ distant relationships). Strangely, Auggie seems uninterested romantically in Summer, an intelligent and beautiful biracial girl. Whereas his friend Jack tells Auggie that Via is “hot” and comes to have a crush on Summer, Auggie himself never seems to think romantically or fantasize sexually about her or any girl or woman (not even Princess Leia in a bikini with Jaba the Hut!). One would imagine him feeling a pang about Jack (with his normal good looks and lively personality) liking Summer, but he reveals no jealousy or despair. I started to get crushes on teachers when I was about five and on girls when I was about nine, so I wonder why Pallacio neuters Auggie in the book. It is another example of presenting him as ordinary in his words, despite his face, but really making him unnaturally extraordinary. (view spoiler)[While the first parts where Auggie is getting used to school and making friends were the best, moving me to tears or chuckles, the ending indulges way too much in the special child’s desire to be affirmed. The book should end after a three-day, two-night nature outing Auggie’s class goes on, during which an ugly verbal and physical assault on Auggie by some older kids from another school finally secures him the support, respect, and affection of his classmates, but Palacio botches it by going on to depict an excrescent triumphal graduation climax (maybe my junior high school was unusual, but we only had a ceremony when we actually graduated, whereas Auggie’s school has a ceremony for the fifth and sixth grade students). Auggie’s special award (“the Henry Ward Beecher medal to honor students who have been notable or exemplary”) and standing ovation reveal what has been developing throughout the novel: despite his saying he’s ordinary (XBox, hot dogs, Star Wars, etc.), Auggie is extraordinarily intelligent, humorous, articulate, loving, and loveable. As his mother says, “You really are a wonder, Auggie.” I’d have preferred him to have just survived his first school year with other kids without the standing ovation. (hide spoiler)] Readers who want a feel-good story that will make them empathize with (and want to be kind to) articulate, sensitive, and funny kids who are physically very different should like this book. It reminds me a little of Diary of a Wimpy Kid infused with kindness. View all my reviews
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I feel that I have lived” Zora Neale Hurston begins her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) with a historical overview of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first officially sanctioned all-black town in America, including details on the conflict between the USA and the Cherokee and Seminoles and the runaway black slaves they adopted into their tribes. She then describes the backgrounds, personalities, courtship, marriage, and children of her parents; recounts her childhood (the most interesting chapters in the book for me), including her questioning, creative, and wandering mind and love of stories (which led her to chafe at the standard “pigeon hole way of life”); her vivid visions of future turning points in her life; the breakup of her family with the death of her mother; her education; her professional career (as ethnologist and writer); her love life and friendships; and her thoughts on race and religion and America, etc. The book ends well, but the audiobook—finely read by Bahni Turpin—adds an Appendix featuring a series of essays and short pieces, many of which repeat anecdotes, parables, ideas, and turns of phrase that she uses in her autobiography, such that I began feeling a chafing redundancy. After the Appendix comes a Chronology by Henry Louis Gates that ends with the sad fact that Zora Neal Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, and that Alice Walker discovered and marked her grave in 1973, launching a Hurston revival. Hurston’s writing, as in her splendid Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is savory and rich, refined and earthy, witty and concise, including colorful utterances by her family and friends, as when her father became enraged when she asked for a horse for Christmas: “It’s a sin and a shame. Let me tell you something right now my young lady. You ain’t white. Ridin’ a horse. Always trying to wear the big hat.” She can write a lyrical sensual poetry in prose, too: “I was only happy in the woods and when the ecstatic Florida springtime came strolling from the sea, transglorifying the world with its aura. Then I hid out in the tall wild oats that waved like a green tea veil. I nibbled sweet oat stalks and listened to the wind soughing and sighing through the crowns of the lofty pines.” And an earthy pithy writing: “This was the very corn I wanted to grind” (i.e., an excuse to physically fight her stepmother). And great similes: “Strange things must have looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection.” And she writes great lines about-- Feeling different: “If the village was singing a chorus, I must’ve missed the tune.” Prayer: “Prayer seems to me a crying of weakness and an attempt to avoid by trickery the rules of the game as laid down… I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life as it is does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it.” Religion: “Mystery is the essence of divinity.” Love: “Much that passes for constant love is a golded up moment walking in its sleep. Some people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and desolation they have staked everything on life after death and the resurrection. So they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly for the miracle of the moment to burst it’s bonds and spread out over time.” Patriotism: “I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.” Poverty: “There is something about poverty that smells like death… People can be slave ships in shoes.” Hurston would disapprove of the current movement for reparations for slavery. She says that although slavery and reconstruction were “sad” and that America would be better off without them, they are in the past, and she is a forward-looking person who does not want to go around beating on the coffins of our unpleasant past and does not want to confront descendants of slaveowners to blame them for the actions of their ancestors. She also argues that there is no such thing as race and that she does not like constructions like “race consciousness” or “race pride” or “race problems,” and that after all everybody is an individual and is not determined by the color of his or her skin and that there are good and bad people among the members of every skin color. In this, she does not acknowledge the stacked deck with which black people must play the game of life in America or the racist environment in which they must try to survive in the USA. And when viewed from the current context of Black Lives Matter and the police shooting of unarmed black men, she seems a little disingenuous and out of date when saying that everyone has a chance to do what they want to do if they work hard. At the same time, in great detail she lists multiple criteria you can use if you want to determine what a black person is, and I would imagine that some of them must seem stereotypical and offensive to Black people. E.g., if the person likes making up words that sound good in context, if the person likes imitating others, if the person cannot agree with their friend, if the person likes acting dramatically, etc., then the person is a “Negro.” I think she only partly has her tongue in cheek as she undercuts her claims elsewhere that there’s no such thing as race, especially when you take into account her compelling account of organizing “natural Negro songs with action” in which she says she wanted to present and promote the “real music of my people.” I did like the book a lot, though not so much as Their Eyes Were Watching God. But fans of that book or of Hurston should read her autobiography. View all my reviews The Inquisitor’s Tale, Or The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog (2016) by Adam Gidwitz2/22/2021
The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog by Adam Gidwitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I hope, if nothing else, this book has convinced you that the Middle Ages were not ‘dark.’” The Inquisitor’s Tale, Or The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog (2016) by Adam Gidwitz begins with the narrator saying that in 1242 King Louis of France, the greatest king in Europe, is fighting a war against three children and their dog. The narrator asks if anyone in the inn he’s in knows anything about the wanted fugitives, and a female brewster begins a series of colorful Medieval types (Nun, Librarian, Chronicler, etc.) telling different parts of the children and dog’s story as the main narrator interjects bold font questions and comments about what he’s hearing. The children are varied: Jeanne, a peasant girl subject to fits and prophetic visions; Jacob, a Jewish boy capable of supernaturally fast powers of healing; and William, a huge biracial bibliophile oblate possessed of superhuman strength. Their dog Gwenforte, a white female greyhound, became a holy dog after Jeanne’s parents wrongly killed it. After the children meet, they have run-ins with natural or supernatural denizens of medieval Europe, including a band of brigand knights traumatized by their Crusader experience; a giant Benedictine monk called Michelangelo reputed to be as wicked as he is fat; and a dragon afflicted by deadly flammable flatulence. They also encounter historical figures, some of whom like Chretien de Troyes and Roger Bacon play cameo roles, some of whom like the ultra-pious and complex King Louis and his ultra-pious and unpleasant mother Blanche of Castile play substantial supporting roles. Why is the King of France down on the children? Will they become martyrs? Who IS the narrator, and what is his agenda? Gidwitz’ novel has many virtues: endearing characters, lively writing, suspenseful events, surprising developments, humorous touches, beautiful scenes, appalling actions, and philosophical-moral depths. It combines contemporary vision (the interracial, interfaith, intergender, interspecies friendship of the protagonists) with medieval worldview (miracles, supernatural beings, ignorance, and faith). It teaches readers (like me) ignorant of the Talmud something of its nature and importance to Jewish people (e.g., “Whoever destroys a single life destroys the whole world”). It gives readers ignorant of or interested in the middle ages some historical-cultural illumination. The scene where the children see the vast, teeming city of Paris for the first time is great, especially when they encounter Notre Dame or witness a Lombard moneylender beating a Jewish one. As he vividly depicts the era, Gidwitz does not sugar coat its cruelty and squalor: a lord and his lady use a corner of their hall for relieving themselves, Christian teenagers’ idea of fun is burning down the Jewish part of their town, and the Crusaders in the Holy Land think to liberate Damascus by killing everyone in the city. He also reveals some of its virtues: beautiful books, awesome cathedrals, cultural mixing, and some open-minded, educated, tolerant, humane people. The novel rejects intolerance, prejudice, and cruelty and accepts a universal conception of God (though I kind of wish William were Muslim). It vividly depicts life, which is said to resemble an eye-wateringly potent cheese: “Rotten and strange and rich and way, way too strong.” It presents humanity in its complexity: “People were too strange to understand. . . They were like life. And also that cheese. Too many things at once.” It also splendidly conveys the wonder and value of books, each of which, even today, represents multiple human lives. There are moments of sublime beauty, like a wonderful description of sunset at Mont Saint-Michel. The illustrations by Hatem Aly are full of interesting details and wit. One of the pleasures of reading the book is scrutinizing the pictures to see how they do or don’t depict what’s going on in the story. They make the book feel like an illuminated manuscript. Although the novel does some interesting things with narrative, different people telling the different parts of the children’s story that they witnessed, most of the “tales” are told in what sounds like a single narrator’s voice (except perhaps for the Jongleur’s pseudo-cockney). Indeed, Gidwitz’ use of short punchy sentences and paragraphs for most of the storytellers and of present tense narration for many of them, as well as plenty of contemporary English idiom, makes the book’s style too current YA for my likings, e.g., “You gotta understand,” and “The sacks. With the books. The only Talmuds in all of France.” (view spoiler)[Finally, I have mixed feelings about the unambiguous, unified nature of the novel. Despite the book’s title and chapters called “The Nun’s Tale” and so on, this is NOT a modern take on the Canterbury Tales, in that here all the different “tales” are chapters combining to tell a single story. And it turns out that the supernatural or divine elements of that story, including an Archangel slumming it up in the world, a Holy Dog being resurrected for a mission, and children performing miracles, are all real. It might have been more interesting had some narrators been unreliable or contradicted each other’s versions of events or disbelieved the children’s miracles etc. (hide spoiler)] Moreover, there is too much potty humor meant to entertain young readers. The farting dragon is fine (inspired by a medieval text Gidwitz read, the creature resonates with the themes of life as a rich cheese), but there is an unconvincing early slapstick scene involving a dung heap, and a few too many jokes confusing ass (donkey) with ass (bottom). But it is an entertaining, moving, unpredictable, and thought-provoking novel, especially in its last quarter. And in his “Author’s Note: Where Did This Story Come From?” and “Annotated Bibliography” after the novel, Gidwitz interestingly explains features of the middle ages depicted in his novel (like heretics and inquisitors), as well as his research and inspirations for the characters and events. He references the recent killing of 140+ people in Paris by terrorists: “Zealots kill, and the victims retaliate with killing, and the cycle continues, extending forward and backward in history, apparently without end. I can think of nothing sane to say about this except this book.” View all my reviews
The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I will not fight—even to save my kingdom.” L. Frank Baum’s sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), begins comically and suspensefully. Roquat the Red, the tyrannical, childish Nome King, is in a bad mood, nursing a grudge against Princess Ozma the ruler of Oz and Dorothy the girl of Kansas, because in the third novel, Ozma of Oz (1907), they freed the royal family of Ev whom Roquat had enslaved AND took from him the source of his magic power, his Magic Belt. Therefore, he’s resolved to surprise attack the Emerald City, pillage it, enslave all the inhabitants of the Land of Oz, and retrieve his Magic Belt. His General opposes the plan, because Oz is protected by an impassable desert, and Ozma possesses too much magic for even the 50,000 well-trained Nome soldiers to overcome. Displeased, Roquat brains his General and then promotes to General an old soldier called Guph who’s gung-ho to conquer Oz because he hates good people, detests happy people, and is opposed to anyone content and prosperous. Roquat sets a thousand miners to work tunneling beneath the desert to Oz, while Guph visits formidable peoples (“evil spirits”) to enlist their aid in the coming war: the Whimsies (endowed with powerful big bodies but embarrassingly tiny heads they hide under large false paste board heads), the Growleywogs (bellicose giants), and the Phanfasms of Phantastico (who hide their true forms and “whose chief joy” is “to destroy happiness”). Between such ominous chapters Baum weaves lighter ones showing Ozma transporting Dorothy’s beloved Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to the Emerald City’s Palace, where they ought to be happy (in Kansas they were about to lose their farm to the bank). The scenes with Henry and Em trying to get used to the finery, pomp, ceremony, and bizarre beings of the Emerald Palace are fun, but they start fretting over not having any work to do for the first time in their lives. Thus she escorts her Uncle and Aunt on a tour of Oz, accompanied by Toto, the Wooden Sawhorse, Bellina the Yellow Hen, the Wizard of Oz, the Shaggy Man, and Omby Amby (the Captain-General of Ozma’s minute army), after which Ozma should have thought of something for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to do. The tour begins with a visit to the Royal Athletic College of Oz, where Professor Woggle-Bug T. E. has the students learning traditional subjects like arithmetic by taking sugar-coated pills, which frees them to devote all their time to practicing athletics. From there, the group visits a paper doll town, wherein a sneeze sends the denizens into disordered flight, and a jigsaw puzzle town, wherein a visit surprises the locals into scattering their body parts in small, confused pieces. They also settle an argument between a zebra and an crab as to whether there is more land or water in the world. More outre scenes and Ozites follow, featuring sentient baked goods in Bunbury, civilized rabbits in Bunnybury, people who talk too much without saying anything in Rigamarole, and people who worry about everything that might go wrong in Flutterbudget. All the while, unbeknownst to our heroine and her friends, the Nomes are coming, so the story unfolds with a charming suspense: “An unsuspected enemy is doubly dangerous.” Even when Ozma finally looks in her Magic Picture and sees the Nomes tunneling towards Oz and their demonic allies assembling, she takes no action, sanguinely saying that because her army is so small (consisting of only a handful of officers) and because there is no hope of defeating the invaders, there is no point in organizing any defense. Can even the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow reunited with Dorothy save Oz? Baum resolves the tour and invasion of Oz sub-plots with a satisfying and impressive contrivance. Perhaps to a fault Baum never met a pun he didn’t like. Almost everything the sentient utensils of Utensia say is a pun involving their shapes or functions or compositions. And the Scarecrow boasts about his farm, “The corn I grow is always husky, and I call the ears my regiments, because they have so many kernels.” There are MANY other puns, and if you dislike them, Baum’s book may irritate you. The novel has flaws or inconsistencies. Dorothy occasionally lapses into an odd dialect that may be kid English or Kansas English or both: “I can’t say ‘zactly” and “the joggerfys [geographies] will tell you…” For that matter, why can’t Toto talk in Oz when Bellina the Yellow Hen (also from Kansas) can? At times Baum’s fertile imagination escapes his sense and provides him more creatures and peoples and characters than he knows what to do with (the Shaggy Man, Omby Amby, the Cowardly Lion, and Tik-Tok don’t do much), but at the same time, his fantastic creations are usually grounded by a moral or satirical base. Indeed, each of the seemingly unrelated incidents of the tour of Oz expresses some message about life (e.g., don’t talk thoughtlessly or worry needlessly) or satirizes some aspect of human nature or civilization (e.g., universities prioritize athletics over academics, or your vision and understanding are limited by your environment). And combined all the different peoples in Oz celebrate diversity and make the reader more thoughtful. The core theme of this book concerns happiness: what it is, how to get it, how unhappy people feel about happy ones and vice versa, and so on. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were stressed in Kansas, so Dorothy thought to make them happy by bringing them to Oz, but they can’t be comfortable there without work. The King of Bunnybury believes he’d be happier living naturally as he did before Glinda used her magic to give the rabbits their civilized city and culture, but when he begins to imagine giving up the perks of royalty (his fine suit, chair, guards, entertainers, and singers), he changes his mind. The Nomes and Phanfasms want to ruin other people’s happiness, while Ozma would be unhappy to make other people unhappy even to save her own kingdom. There is a refreshing pacifist thrust to the novel. My favorite of the several Oz books I’ve read so far is the second, The Marvelous Land of Oz, but The Emerald City of Oz has plenty of charming whimsy, pointed humor, and unexpected developments (and a great ending). View all my reviews
The Rules of Enchantment by Wendy Tardieu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Magic, Ghosts, Artifacts, Teachers, Students, and Sex Wendy Tardieu’s Rules of Enchantment (2020) reads like a cross between Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (wherein a virginal young lady discovers magic and romance after entering the ominous tower of a notorious lone wolf wizard), Patricia McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn (wherein a young female scribe-librarian stops merely reading and recording magical adventures and starts participating in them), and the Harry Potter series (wherein magic students are divided into four distinctly different and rivalrous magical halls). With a healthy helping of graphic hetero sex. According to the cover, this is “an erotic fantasy adventure novel.” In Tardieu’s novel, the partially exiled Chamber of Shadow wizard-assassin Leith (the most ambitious and powerful student to come out of the Academy) is suspected of working towards retrieving the dread Gauntlet of Malantheus, so the Academy Headmaster Wickham sends the renegade a student, the enthusiastic former Shadow pupil and current scribe Kyler, so she may unwittingly spy on and or distract him. Leith plans to drive away Kyler (who had to give up magic because she either bored or injured her teachers), but his wicked crone partner in crime Marisele advises him to teach Kyler while carrying on with their ominous secret project. Surely it’s only a matter of time before teacher and student become romantically involved, as they are the only characters described as having “tresses,” Leith’s black and Kyler’s chocolate. Kyler’s best friend at the Academy, the Chamber of Sight apprentice Rowan, is none too pleased with her new assignment, because he wants to marry her and fears Leith’s reputation for illicit liaisons. But Wickham sets in motion his long game strategy with Kyler as pawn. The above five are the main characters of the novel, one of the pleasant things about Rules of Enchantment being its compact size and modest cast. Tardieu’s book is no doorstopper with countless characters, cultures, sub-plots, and settings. Yes, it’s still possible to write a short, less-is-more, stand-alone fantasy novel. But is her book a worthy fantasy? She writes some cool names and concepts, like the horrifying Hypnogoths (reminiscent of LOTR Ringwraiths + Harry Potter Dementors) who really don’t want anyone to mess with the enchanted relics and weapons they guard, and the Necromantis curse-spell that blasted Malantheus’ rebel followers in the past and still torments their spirits in the present. The four Chambers (Shadow, Light, Sight, and Spirit) have potential. There is neat dragon blood (that floats upward) and a fine dragon skeleton “which hung from gossamer wires and seemed to float above her.” She writes creepy horror, as when Leith’s voice goes “slithering into the youth’s ears,” or when “The bodies grew robes and pale flesh, like dead plants recovering leaves. . . As faces formed rapidly over ashen skulls, their mouths grinned and their eyes without irises shone like frosted windows.” There are evocative scenes: “The twilight lingered unnaturally long outside the windows. The study began to smell of blood and ashes as Leith neared the end of the incantation.” On the downside, Tardieu uses unmysterious Harry Potter-like Latin-esque spell names (e.g., Modifus, Levitum Momentus, Ascendo, etc.), and her writing can be unmagical to the mind or ear, as when it-- --feels corny: “Her eyes, warm gold-green and rimmed by black curling lashes lit up at the sight of him” (the comma after “lashes” didn’t make it into the e-book edition). --seems stilted: “’How foolishly bold is Wickham’s brood!’ she shrieked with laughter. ‘Don’t you know how quick your death can be delivered?’” --unnecessarily uses adverbs for dialogue tags, when content and context already convey how people are saying something: “’And what am I do to? Juggle apples for her?’ Rowan asked cynically.” --overuses passive forms of to be in descriptions: “The hall was decorated in rich, ruby-colored draperies, and the air within was warmed by torches fixed high on the walls. A banquet table was prepared, along with a large space in the center where people were dancing. There were musicians, bouquets of Gentilium flowers, and barrels of wine.” Yes, Novik and McKillip do romance and magic more pleasurably, beautifully, and originally than Tardieu, but she does make me want to continue reading her story, and I did enjoy the sex scenes. But... At twenty-one, Kyler is old enough, but she is a virgin when she starts, and there is something a little disturbing about an older and more experienced teacher teaching his student about sex while deflowering her. Furthermore, as I voyeuristically watched a woman and a man having sex, I almost lost the sense of Kyler and Leith as characters driving the plot forward. Indeed, the erotic sex is so distinct from the magic that it doesn’t feel like an integral part of the fantasy. Early on, Kyler says, “lust impedes magic, we all know that,” but that dogma is debunked by subsequent love-making and spell-casting, and the problem (for this reader) is that magic and sex neither hinder nor enhance each other here. By contrast, Novik’s Uprooted depicts the main characters’ different magics working together to generate a profusion of sensual flowers (that deceive a real bee!) in an act of intimacy, sharing, and union which morphs into actual sex, at first embarrassing both people. Instead of that kind of thing, after a steamy scene, Kyler says to Leith, “You’ve taught me so much more than magic,” as though sex is other than and superior to magic. Merging graphic sex and fantastic magic might have been more stirring. If you like sexy hetero sex scenes and compact stand-alone magical epic fantasy novels, then, this book might be good for you, but if you prefer sensual and magical prose, work by writers like Novik or McKillip might fulfill you more. NOTE: I was given this e-book by the publisher to review. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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