Majipoor Chronicles by Robert Silverberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The Geography of the Soul" Robert Silverberg's big science fiction novel Lord Valentine's Castle (1980) depicts the attempts of the unlawfully deposed Valentine to regain his rightful position as Coronal of Majipoor, one of the four "powers" of the planet, journeying and juggling across the exotic landscapes and through the sprawling cities and among the 20-30 billion human and alien inhabitants of the huge world. The conceit of Silverberg's second Majipoor book, Majipoor Chronicles (1982), is that Hissune, the street boy who first recognized Valentine, has been working for four years in the vast bureaucratic Labyrinth doing things like preparing "an inventory of the archives of the tax-collectors" when, itching to experience new places and people, he bluffs his way into the Register of Souls, which stores millions of memory-readings made by millions of Majipoorans from millions of places and times. Each time Hissune experiences a memory, Silverberg writes a short story from the point of view of the person in question. The Hissune framing passages work with the stories to demonstrate how the various experiences (only a glimpse of a millionth millionth part of Majipooran life) give the bright and sensitive lad an education in human nature ("the geography of the soul") and hence help him to mature. Silverberg is also demonstrating the entertaining, transporting, mind and heart expanding nature of science fiction. The ten stories in the collection come from different points in Majipoor's 14,000 year human history and represent different modes and moods: romance, war, exploration, bildungsroman, origin, crime, comedy, tragedy, etc. "Thesme and the Ghayrog" is an affecting story about a self-absorbed young woman who falls awkwardly in love with a reptilian alien Ghayrog. "The Time of the Burning" grimly channels US history (e.g., the Vietnam War and Native American genocide) as it demonstrates that heroes do not always match the images made by time and adoration. "In the Fifth Year of the Voyage" is an absorbing tale of a ship of adventurers trying to cross the great ocean of Majipoor when they encounter a colony of metal-eating algae. "Calintane Explains" details the nature of three of the four powers of Majipoor (the Pontifex, the Coronal, and the Lady) and almost does something daring regarding gender, though Silverberg winks too much. "The Desert of Stolen Dreams" recounts the origin of the fourth power of Majipoor, the King of Dreams, who flays the souls of criminals with nightmares. In "The Soul Painter and the Shapeshifter" Silverberg again poignantly explores cross-species love, as a famous artist realizes that perfection is stagnation, heads for the jungle, and meets an indigenous Metamorph. "Crime and Punishment" presents the attempts of an impromptu murderer to escape the punishments of the King of Dreams by changing locales and identities. "Among the Dream-Speakers" features the self-doubt before the last test of a dream-speaker in training. "A Thief in Ni-Moya" is an amusing Cinderella tale detailing the benefits of being conned out of your life savings and family shop. "Voriax and Valentine," the last story and the closest in time to the events in Lord Valentine's Castle, explores a loving but fraught relationship between two brothers. Silverberg writes vivid, often finely defamiliarizing SF: -"Dulorn was far more beautiful and strange than she had been able to imagine. It seemed to shine with an inner light of its own, while the sunlight, refracted and shattered and deflected by the myriad angles and facets of the lofty baroque buildings, fell in gleaming showers to the streets." -"He reached for her hand. It had six fingers, very long and narrow, without fingernails or visible joints." -“Without warning the sun was in the sky like a trumpet blast, roasting the surrounding hills with shafts of hot light.” -"Several moons were out." He also writes many scenes revelatory of human nature: -Thesme feeling upset when she fails to freak out her people with her alien lover; -Eremoil briefly imagining telling the Coronal a different solution to the Metamorph problem; -Captain Lavon realizing he's had enough exploration; -Therion saying about his turbulent, strange paintings, "all my work is an attempt to recapture the happiest time in my life"; -Dekkeret questioning whether he needs to sear his guilt away in the desert sun; -Haglione trying to understand that he's being forgiven; -Inyanna laughing outside the estate of her "inheritance"; -Valentine trying to dismiss a disturbing prophecy. The readers for the male protagonist stories are men, for the female ones women. All of them are fine. Stefan Rudneki reads two stories well with his deep, rich voice. Gabrielle de Cuir nearly over-reads her story, elongating long vowels for effect ("She became aWAAAARE of soft brEEEATHing beHIIIIND her"). But really the readers enhance the stories. From here in 2017, some flaws or creaky points appear in the 1982 book. In none of the stories does Silverberg depict a homosexual or alien memory; it seems a little tame to depict the Other always from the point of view of heterosexual humans. And although the conceit of memory-readings is neat, the stories are so well-crafted that it beggars belief that messy human beings could record their memories so literately. And why are none of them narrated in the first person? Finally, considering its 14,000+ year history, a remarkably small number of figures recur. Silverberg's story telling is almost free of the cinematic page-turning violent action scenes so common in sf/fantasy these days. Instead, he maps "the geography of the soul": psychology, relationships, dreams, insights, love, transformation, culture, and the like. If you'd like a detailed, well-written, slow-paced trek through a well-realized exotic world full of exotic denizens (who essentially resemble us here and now), you'd probably like this book, though it'd be best to start with Lord Valentine's Castle. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Still Life by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Excellent Mystery with an Unfortunate Climax Who’d kill anyone in Three Pines? It’s an idyllic village in Quebec, a quiet place that doesn't appear on tourist maps (it can almost only be found "unexpectedly" like Narnia), a place where nobody locks their doors (except to prevent neighbors from leaving excess zucchini), where there may be a little marijuana but no violent crime or police force, where an annual touch football game is played on the village green, where poets and artists and ex-psychologists engage in witty and affectionate conversation, and where a plucky gay couple run a popular bistro slash antique shop slash B&B while bantering like Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. And especially who'd kill 76-year-old Jane Neal, a retired teacher who seems to have been universally liked (and loved) in Three Pines? It must've been a hunting accident! But most hunting accidents involve guns, while Jane was shot through the chest with an arrow, which is missing. And once Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Surete shows up with his homicide investigation team (including Jean Guy Beauvoir, his second in command of ten plus years, and Yvette Nichol, a rookie desperate to fulfill the dreams of her family and to impress Gamache), they start asking questions and poking around, and suspects surface. . . In Still Life (2005), her first Inspector Gamache novel, Louise Penny doesn't cheat or trick her readers. She hints at the identity of the killer unobtrusively but fairly. (I kinda started suspecting the person based on little signs about a quarter of the way into the novel, but kind of forgot about it or changed my mind here and there as the plot progressed.) She effectively sometimes uses Three Pines locals to provide us a bit of intel before the police get it, so we feel suspense as to whether Gamache will get it in time. As in the best mysteries, Penny's characters talk and think and act like real, interesting, and sympathetic people. Penny understands a wide range of human personalities and behaviors. She tells her story from the third person points of view of multiple characters: police like Gamache, Beauvoir, Nichol and locals like artist Clara Morrow, Jane's former student Matthew Croft, and bookshop owner Myrna Landers (the only black woman in town). It irritates me no end when mystery authors narrate stories from the points of view of culprits who never think about their crimes, unfairly throwing us off their scents… Penny I think avoids this slimy ploy. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is an appealing detective character to follow. A big man in his mid-fifties, bilingual in perfect French and English, well read (given to quoting from the Bible, Virginia Woolf, and Abbie Hoffman), observant, and full of empathy and sympathy. Unlike many fictional detectives, he is happily married and untroubled by inner demons or hidden skeletons. He wants the members of his homicide team to collaborate rather than compete, which, along with the fact that he's shocked by death (from a mouse caught in a trap to human shot in the woods), has led to the stalling of his career. His advancement has been hindered by his "fatal flaw" of helping people who don't deserve it and by his habit of stubbornly sticking to his instincts and principles to the point of insubordination. Refreshingly, he's fallible, as with the Arnot case, alluded to without explanation (one of Penny's techniques for making her characters feel like real people with their own present-affecting pasts). Nichol is another interesting character, because she runs so against the genre stream of earnest female rookie homicide investigators who appreciate the greatness of their male police officer mentor and eventually (despite early hiccups) build a mutually trusting, affectionate, and effective relationship. Instead, Nichol seems stubbornly unable to learn the investigative practices and life wisdom Gamache is teaching. She is manipulative, prickly, resentful, and smug. The kind of person who, after looking in a mirror at a sticker saying, "You're looking at the problem," searches the room behind her for answers. She disobeys orders, lies, screws up, blames other people, and acts abrasively superior when she (thinks she) does something right. How long Gamache will put up with her? There is plenty of interesting Quebecois culture in the novel: Thanksgiving in October, "tabernak" (tabernacle) as a strong swear word, cultural contrast if not conflict between Francophones and Anglophones, the dangers of hunting season for more than the prey. It is refreshing to read a mystery set in Canada instead of America. Lots of neat motifs woven in: still life (= arrested development, blaming others for your problems, waiting for others to solve your problem, etc.), long house (we enter it when we're born, leave it when we die), memory, etc. There is also plenty of neat literary stuff: like Gamache's quotations and references by other characters to Diogenes, Auden, etc. Lots of neat lines: "In the country death comes uninvited." "He was always delighted when a digital clock had all the same numbers." "Either that wallpaper goes or I go." (Oscar Wilde's last sentence, opportunely quoted in the novel) The audiobook reader, Ralph Cosham, is always understated and fine; nothing fancy or dramatic, just spot on, intelligent, understanding reading with perfect timing, pausing, pacing, emphasizing, etc. Unfortunately, the climax action is over the top given the rest of the novel and, to me, almost absurd and almost certainly unnecessary. "Please Penny," I pled after finishing the book, "you could get to the same moving resolution you end with without trying too hard to write an exciting climax with a bunch of people running around on a stormy night like keystone cops." Nevertheless, Still Life is as well done as a murder mystery can be, and quite funny and moving. If you like quietly and powerfully literate mysteries involving real fictional people, you'd probably like it. View all my reviews
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Swamp Poetry, Love Magic, Sorrow Eating, and Change "The weight of moonlight--sticky and sweet--gathered on her fingertips. It poured from her hands into her grandmother's mouth and shivered through her grandmother's body. The old woman's cheeks began to flush. The moonlight radiated through Luna's own skin, too, setting her bones aglow." Kelly Barnhill writes a lot of that kind of sensual, emotional, and poetic fantasy in her YA fairy tale novel The Girl Who Drank the Moon (2016). As the book begins, a mother tells her child about the wicked Witch who lives in the forest eager to destroy the entire Protectorate (AKA the City of Sorrows) unless the people sacrifice their youngest child to her each year. The novel then depicts a "Day of Sacrifice" on which the mother of the current child goes mad with grief and rage when the Council of Elders show up to take her baby girl away. Interestingly, the Witch in question, Xan, has no idea why the people of the Protectorate keep abandoning their babies in the forest year after year. But she rescues them from death by exposure and finds them suitable families among the people of the Free Cities on the other side of the forest. This time, however, she falls in love with the baby with the starry black eyes, so she accidentally "enmagicks" the girl by letting her drink her fill of moonlight. Feeling responsible, Xan decides to raise the child as her own granddaughter, calling her Luna. In addition to grandmother Xan, Luna's new family consists of her grandfather, a patient and loving 4-armed Swamp Monster called Glerk who is a Bog, a Poet and, in a sense, the whole world, and her brother Fyrian, a "Perfectly Tiny Dragon" who thinks he's a "Simply Enormous Dragon" and has been in a cute state of arrested development for 500 years. It's a charming modern fairy tale family. One conflict in the novel arises from infant Luna's inability to control her chaotic magic. Moreover, Xan's own magic is constantly flowing into Luna, leaving the old Witch increasingly drained and aged. Xan will have to do something with Luna and her power soon, but what? There are other conflicts. Not all Barnhill's characters are charming. Luna's biological mother, the madwoman in the Tower, is being imprisoned and studied for her damaged mind and memory by the Sisters of the Star (an order of female warrior scholars), and despite being denied paper, she magically creates paper birds that "massed in great murmurations, expanding and contracting." The leader of the Sisters, Sister Ignatia, savors other people's sorrow a bit too greedily, while Grand Elder Gherland wants to maintain the status quo a bit too greedily. One of the strong points of the novel is its characters, who are compelling and possess interesting, gradually revealed back-stories (Xan's childhood, for example, was not easy. . . ). Barnhill also works into her fantasy strong themes about magic, memory, time, change, education, sorrow, hope, family, and love. And her rich language makes mundane things magical and magical things sublime, while her wit makes conversations funny. Her writing is a pleasure to read, as in her many-- --sensual descriptions: "The child's scalp smelled of bread dough and clabbering milk." --neat similes: "She gave him a look as sharp as a blade, and he ran out of the room in a panicked rush, as though he were already bleeding." --fun lists: "Even when Luna was content, she still was not quiet. She hummed; she gurgled; she babbled; she screeched; she guffawed; she snorted; she yelled." --moving moments: "Luna's heart was pulled to her grandmother's heart. Was love a compass? Luna's mind was pulled to her grandmother's mind. Was knowledge a magnet?" --humorous lines: "I hope you will be able to make at least one person grovel today." --wise lines: "Trusting in invisible things makes them more powerful and wondrous." --and even some neat swamp poetry by Glerk: "Each sleeping tree dreams green tree dreams; the barren mountain wakes in blossom." The reader, Christina Moore, has a clear and seasoned American voice for the base narration and does a kind and crusty Xan, a deliberate and swampy Glerk, a convincing pre-teen and teen Luna, a scary Sister Ignatia, a funny crow, and so on. I loved her Fyrian, especially when he sings "Luna Luna Luna Luna" with atonal child fervor. I did notice some flaws in the novel. First, Luna and her mother's moon-shaped forehead birthmarks are Special Character Overkill. Second, part of the potent movement of the novel is the growth of Luna from baby to teenager, but although Barnhill mentions facial and magical "eruptions" breaking out when Luna nears 13, and there is even a powerful volcano getting ready to blow, the novel avoids menstruation (unlike, say, Jane Yolen's fascinating exploration of that part of a girl's maturing process in "Words of Power" [1987]). Third, a few too many times a few too many characters explain or summarize what's been happening with the sacrificed and rescued babies and the Protectorate's cloud of sorrow etc. Fourth, Barnhill moves into climax mode a bit too early and stays there a bit too long. Fifth, despite Barnhill's pleasurable language and vision, she is writing too much in the current YA trend of short attention spans, manifesting itself in short sentences and short chapters, in her case 48 chapters in the nearly 400-page novel. Finally, for purposes of suspense, at a key point Barnhill makes Antain, a bright and moral young apprentice Elder who'd rather be a carpenter, too dense and unquestioning for his character. Anyway, The Girl Who Drank the Moon is an impressive fantasy: scary, funny, moving, and magical. Readers who like YA fantasy lacking romantic triangles but possessing plenty of witty and poetic writing and loveable characters and human villains should like the book. (I almost regret another strong point of the novel, that it seems to be a stand-alone work rather than the first in an interminable series.) View all my reviews
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Murderer Adrift in a Dantean Irish Wonderland The narrator of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1940/1967) begins his story, "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade." The first chapter then relates how the narrator was abandoned and orphaned as a boy, educated at a good boarding school where he fell in love with the work of the physicist/philosopher/psychologist de Selby, graduated and lost his leg and gained a wooden one, came home to find John Divney running the family farm and pub, spent all his time and money on English, French, and German commentaries on his hero de Selby, and finally agreed to help Divney murder Mathers to get enough money to publish a "definitive" annotated de Selby index. For three years after the murder the narrator never let Divney out of his sight for fear that his "friend" would abscond with their victim's money, until Divney has the narrator go to the old man's house to retrieve the black cash box hidden under the floorboards there. But when the narrator reaches under the floorboards, he experiences an "ineffable" fugue, after which he finds that the cash box (which he saw a moment earlier) is actually absent, while Mathers is present and sentient. The narrator has forgotten his name (which he has never revealed) and now embarks on an absurd, disturbing, fantastic adventure, ostensibly to locate the cash box. Cries of amazement regularly escape his lips. He wonders if he "was dreaming or in the grip of some hallucination." Has he entered an Irish Wonderland, Heaven, or Hell? Are the bicycle-obsessed policemen there eccentrics, angels, or devils? The surreal situations are coherent and logical in a way worthy of Lewis Carroll. Sergeant Pluck, for example, explains that, due to "the Atomic Theory," by which atoms are "as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone," people who ride bicycles exchange particles with them, leading to this man being 23% bicycle or that bicycle 78% man, and so on. Did you never notice that bicycles often don't end up right where you left them? (Thus Pluck locks his bicycle in the solitary confinement cell.) Best not to ponder what happens when a man rides a woman's bicycle or vice versa! Then there is the creative second policeman MacCruiskeen who plays a musical instrument whose notes are so high they are inaudible and displays a series of inter-nested chests ending in ones so small they are invisible. As for the crazy, third policeman, Fox, out on patrol for 25 years, the less said the better. Meanwhile, the beginnings of the 12 chapters of the novel teem with footnotes relating to the theories, experiments, and writings of the narrator's crackpot idol de Selby as they prefigure the coming action of the chapters with topics like water, sleep, time, direction, roads, names, houses, and mirrors. The footnotes also mediate between de Selby commentators, like the two trusted experts, Hatchjaw and Bassett, and the "shadowy" Kraus and the "egregious" du Garbandier, some of whom may be pseudonyms or imposters, all of whom disagree on nearly everything. Isn't academia is prey to rivalries, forgeries, and unworthy subjects of study! This opposing mirror infinity is a motif in the novel: footnotes inside footnotes, scholars inside scholars, codices inside codices, chests inside chests, rooms inside rooms, bodies inside bodies. . . It is vertiginous. The narrator is odd. He is both honest and unreliable. We believe what he says, but note much that he leaves unsaid (like just what happened to his leg). After saying early on that he committed his "greatest sin" for de Selby, the narrator seems free from remorse for helping to murder an old man. He is both gullible and canny about "friend" Divney, knowing that the freeloader has been robbing their customers and him but letting himself get talked into killing Mathers for money and then refusing to be separated from Divney until the money has been divided. The narrator is not as bad as Divney, yet he is self-centered, as in his materialistic wants in "Eternity" and his big plans for "his" omnium (the essential divine building block of everything). All of the above is written by O'Brien with great humor, preventing things from getting too bleak, bizarre, or dry. The scenes where Pluck lists a series of names to see if one might be the narrator's, or a rescue company of one-legged men disguise their number, or the news that Hatchjaw was arrested in Europe for impersonating himself, or the explanation for how unerringly Pluck is able to locate a stolen bicycle, or Mathers' reason for saying no to every request, or the narrator's conversations with his soul ("Joe"), all these and many more are very funny. Another saving grace of the nightmare is the frequently lyrical, pastoral beauty. "Birds were audible in the secrecy of the bigger trees, changing branches and conversing not tumultuously. In a field by the road a donkey stood quietly, as if he were examining the morning, bit by bit, unhurryingly… as if he understood completely these unexplainable enjoyments of the world." But O'Brien is also a master of the disturbing detail, as of the police barracks: "I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning to the remainder." Audiobook reader Jim Norton gives a marvelous reading of the novel. His Irish accent ranges from the slight and educated (the narrator) to the broad and working class (Sergeant Pluck). He's also an uncanny uptight pompous British scholar, a nasal dead old man, and an italics-voiced soul. He reads every word and pause with perfect intention and understanding. If you'd like a richly written unique book with flavors of Waiting for Godot, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Divine Comedy, and the old Prisoner TV show, you should read The Third Policeman. View all my reviews
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "It Takes a Graveyard to Raise a Child" An assassin named Jack has come to murder a family, but after taking care of the parents and their daughter, he discovers that the baby boy has absconded from the house. The infant has toddled up the hill to the old graveyard (now a nature reserve), where the Owenses, a childless couple dead for a few hundred years, decide to raise him as their own son, while a refined man named Silas, who seems neither dead nor alive and who possesses formidable powers of persuasion, decides to be the boy's guardian. Silas names the boy Nobody. Nobody, Bod for short, is given "the Freedom of the Graveyard" and will be taught to read and write and Fade and Dreamwalk and so on by centuries-old ghosts. Silas will bring him food from the world outside the graveyard, which is off-limits for the boy, for that assassin is still a-lurk somewhere out there. The rest of Neil Gaiman's Carnegie and Newberry winning novel The Graveyard Book (2008) concerns the education and growth of Bod, each new chapter taking place later in the boy's life among the dead (and undead) and forming what is partly a Gothic fantasy re-telling of Kipling's Jungle Books (minus the non-Mowgli stories). Bod is Mowgli, the Graveyard the Jungle, the Owenses Mowgli's wolf parents, Silas Bagheera, and Jack Shere Khan. It's not an exact mapping, because Gaiman focuses on human nature, monsters, and civilization rather than on nature, animals, and civilization, but both works relate the extraordinary education of a boy in his ideal world and his maturing out of it. Chapter 2 relates the friendship between Bod and Scarlett, a spunky girl from the outside world. Chapter 3 involves lycanthropy and Lovecraftian ghouls and night-gaunts when Bod meets a new teacher/guardian, the unappealing Ms. Lupescu, who forces beet soup and lists of seemingly useless things on the boy. In Chapter 4, Bod learns about witches, potter's fields, Fading, and the returning nature of precious artifacts. Chapter 5 depicts a festive, floral dance of death featuring the living and the dead (but not, poignantly, the undead). In Chapter 6, 11-year-old Bod forgets to keep a low profile in a "normal" school outside the Graveyard. Chapter 7 features the climax of the novel, as well as poetical advice, an avuncular historian, a showdown, the limits of human imagination, and pizza. In the last chapter, Bod learns what you lose and gain by growing up. I like the concept of "monsters" bringing up a living boy in an old graveyard in England. The ghosts are funny and moving, their headstone phrases splendid, like "Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykwise?)" Gaiman does funny things with the two different ages of ghosts, personal (their age at death) and historical (the year in which they died): "The Bartleby family--seven generations of them--had no time for him that night. They were cleaning and tidying, all of them, from the oldest (d. 1831) to the youngest (d. 1690)." Bod is appealing: brave, thoughtful, curious, loving, and just rebellious enough. Silas is a great supporting character. By never writing the word vampire, Gaiman gives readers the pleasure of gradually confirming that the guardian is one, and Silas' attempts to hide his emotions from Bod are charming. I was moved by Bod's relationship with Silas, the Owenses, and Liza, the ghost of a young witch. I like Gaiman's reversal of traditional genre elements: cemeteries, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, even mummies all become protective, safe, good, etc., while the true monsters are humans who don't mind hurting weaker people. The themes are fine, about the need to challenge life to the point of pain and pleasure, the concept that most people cannot handle the impossible, the usefulness of learning, and the belief in moral ethical action. The writing is usually just right, evoking a fine dark wonder, or uneasy suspense, or witty fun, or creepy fear. There are many fine moments in the novel: Neat similes: "Silas's unmoving exterior was like the hard crust of rock over molten lava." Compelling magic: "Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind, Now slip, now slide, now move unseen, Above, beneath, betwixt, between." And funny exchanges: "Name the different types of people," said Miss Lupescu. "Now." Bod thought for a moment. "The living," he said. "Er. The dead." He stopped. Then, ". . . Cats?" he offered, uncertainly. I did have some troubles with the book. First, Bod's friend from the outside world, Scarlett, is finally both under-used and badly-used: passive and unfair. Perhaps Gaiman is demonstrating the superiority of a graveyard upbringing over a normal one, but he sets her up so promisingly and then… Second, Dave McKean's illustrations do not always work well. For instance, he draws Bod wearing regular clothes when he should be wrapped in a winding sheet, and his Silas looks little like the Silas of Gaiman's words. Third, the whole Bod as Special Destined Boy and the Secret Society of Jacks business is unconvincing, by the numbers YA fare. Fourth, the ghosts are all essentially good, when you'd think there'd be some baddies, just as there are baddies among the living. Gaiman must be trying to reverse our idea of ghosts, but in The Jungle Books many wolves follow Shere Kahn and want Mowgli out of the Jungle. Finally, amid his wonderfully creepy and creamy writing, Gaiman occasionally plays a false note. When Bod, raised by centuries-old ghosts and surrounded by vintage English expressions on headstones, says, "It seriously sucks to be frightened," he may be imitating the idiom of his schoolgirl bully interlocutor, but really. And Bod sometimes seems too canny and mature for his years, as when he sends some policemen packing. Anyway, fans of Gaiman should love this book, and readers who like reassuring dark fantasy with an edge should like it, too. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University