Uprooted by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sensual, Romantic, and Contrived Magic Seventeen-year-old Agnieszka knows like everyone else in her village that the local wizard called the Dragon is going to take her best friend Kasia to live in his Tower for ten years. During that period she’ll never be seen by anyone outside, will learn mysterious things, and will presumably sleep with the wizard, after which period she’ll finally exit the Tower only to leave their valley forever. The Dragon has been doing this kind of thing every ten years for well over 100 years and always chooses a 17-year-old-girl with some kind of gift, for beauty or kindness for example, which is why Kasia, who is extremely beautiful and kind, is expected to become his victim. Of course, we are not completely surprised when the Dragon ends up choosing Agnieszka instead, because after all she is the first-person narrator, and her only gift seems to be the ability to stain and tear or otherwise damage her clothes. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) then depicts Agnieszka’s difficult instruction in magic, difficult because she can’t seem to manage the simplest cantrips because the Dragon teaches her an elegant, beautiful, systemized kind of magic at odds with her nature. We quickly learn that she is uniquely gifted but in a different more intuitive and spontaneous way. The stakes are high, because Agnieszka’s valley and kingdom (Polnya), along with that of their neighbor Rosya, are under threat from the malevolent magical Wood, which is constantly seeking to extend itself, presumably bent on turning the world into a foul forest. Thus it is given to sending demonic Wolves to corrupt people so they will murder their families or Walkers (like malignant Ents) to steal people into the Wood so they may feed its Heart Trees, and so on. Novik’s novel is an absorbing read because Agnieszka is an appealing protagonist, and it’s interesting to read about her learning about magic, her abilities, the Dragon, and the Wood, and to watch as she finds herself experiencing new things, ranging from the horrifying to the mystifying and from the brutal to the sensual. And supporting characters like the Dragon, Kasia, and the Wood are compelling, too. It is a novel by turns suspenseful, beautiful, horrifying, humorous, moving, and romantic. It does fall prey to the old author-can-do-anything-she-wants-with-magic plot contrivance temptation of much fantasy, for at key points Novik tends to make Agnieszka find or not find a useful spell or run out of or not run out of magical energy in ways that do not seem altogether consistent or convincing. But Novik does also interestingly tweak typical modern fairy tale fantasy tropes like heroic prince, amoral wizard, and malignant wood. She also does plenty of fine sensual and vivid writing, as when she describes the first time Agnieszka reads a book of magic aloud: “The words sang like birds out of my mouth, beautiful, melting like sugared fruit.” Or as when she does some magic: “My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path.” Her novel explores interesting themes like the costs of immortality associated with magic, for as one centuries-old witch with countless great-grand-children says, “Once you’re old enough, they [lovers] are like flowers,” so “You learn to love other things than people.” Agnieszka doesn’t want to accept that, but does she have a choice? And I am thankful that Novik’s novel may be read by itself rather than as the first in an interminable series. In that and in her fine writing and compact cast of appealing characters and themes about life and love and creativity and power, her novel reminds me of Patricia McKillip’s work. Fans of such fantasy (who like hot romantic lines like “I wanted to rub handprints through his dust”) should enjoy this book. But be ready for audiobook reader Julia Emelin’s thick Slavic (Polish? Russian?) accent! A few hours into the book I came to like it and the exotic eastern European flavor she imbues the story with, and she does a splendidly scary Wood voice when speaking from inside possessed people. The problem is that she also maintains throughout the novel a rather monotonous, stilted delivery, with odd pauses in mid-sentence that often made me think a sentence had abruptly ended only to have it start up again. So you’d best listen carefully to the sample before buying the audiobook and compare it to a sample of the newer version of the book read by Katy Sobey in a crisp British accent with more natural rhythm. View all my reviews
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Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Racism, Consumerism, Alienation, and Fantasy Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018) is a collection of 12 short stories about race, consumerism, and alienation. Most of the stories are told by first-person narrators, most of whom are male. The cleanly written stories range in genre from magical realism (or urban fantasy) to sf dystopia and in mood from horror to humor and from outrage to acceptance. Here follows a brief, annotated list of the stories. “The Finkelstein 5” is an excoriating satire of the racism directed at African Americans, especially in the arena of “justice.” Here a white man has been acquitted after chainsaw massacring five African American kids because his lawyer successfully argued that he was acting in all-American self-defense. In that context, the protagonist Emmanuel defiantly raises his “blackness index” (monitoring how black you are on a scale of 1 to 10) by donning baggy pants and a backwards cap. Will he join a violent resistance? “Things My Mother Said” is a vignette about the protagonist and his supportive and hard-working and wise mother. “The Era” takes place in a future in which devastating wars have led to a backlash against “dishonest” emotions and empathy and in which people pay to have their kids genetically “optimized,” although sometimes mistakes cause “shoelookers.” The narrator, Ben, who is ostracized because he wasn’t optimized, speaks a great line without any irony of his own (though we sure sense the author’s behind him): “I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.” “Lark Street” is a moving and funny nightmare in which the narrator is visited in the middle of the night by his girlfriend’s aborted twin fetuses. Adjei-Brenyah writes vivid descriptions of the twins’ webbed fingers and toes, transparent skin, tiny bodies coated with blood, and lively personalities. At one point the male twin tells the narrator, “I think I have more balls than you, and I’m still a trimester away from genitalia.” “The Hospital Where” is an allegory of the struggle to become a successful writer, including the morality involved in mining people for story material. The narrator takes his father to the hospital, where he recounts his bargain made with the Twelve Tongued God to enable him to become a successful “winner” of a writer and decides to inform all the patients that they’re healthy and should go home. “Zimmer Land” satirizes contemporary American culture via a theme park for adults (for now) where they can pay to (supposedly) explore problem solving and justice. Patrons pay to enter modules like Terrorist on the Train or, the most popular one, Cassidy Lane, which involves cul-de-sac home defense with extreme prejudice against a loitering black man. The title story satirizes American consumerism by turning Black Friday hysteria into a zombie-mall scenario worthy of George Romero. The ace salesman narrator works in a store besieged by biting, clawing, moaning, hissing, and growling people ravenous for their desired purchases. After having been bitten by a customer, the narrator became able to speak Black Friday and so to understand that, for instance, a howl means, “I won’t be alone with this. They’ll like me now.” “The Lion & the Spider” concerns the high school senior narrator and his relationship with his apparently ne’er-do-well father who told the guy and his sisters great stories about Anansi the African spider trickster god when they were little, but who has seemingly abandoned his family, forcing the narrator to start working in a Home Improvement center unloading delivery trucks. “Light Spitter” is a fantasy exploring the psychology of outcasts. After the narrator is murdered in her university library by an alienated student, the rest of the story depicts the interactions of the odd couple, the victim on her way to becoming an angel and her killer on his way to becoming something else. “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” features the salesman from “Friday Black,” here explaining (in a less exaggerated satire) his successful salesman techniques as he recounts trying to sell some coats to a white family. The story reveals why he’s only the 10th ranked salesman for the chain in the country, while his female co-worker is the 7th. It’s a funny story but goes on a bit too long. “In Retail” is another satire set in the same mall as “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Coat,” but this time it’s the narration of IceKing’s rival salesperson telling us how, “Even in nothing jobs like this, you need to think of ways you might really be helping somebody. Or you could end up a Lucy,” a worker who recently jumped to her death. “Through the Flash” depicts a neighborhood caught in an apparently eternal time loop after the Flash, a big bomb, annihilated everyone, making them eternally recycle through time, constantly being killed and “reset” by the bomb. As they repeatedly go through the Flash, they gain abilities, like the 14-year-old girl narrator’s super strength and speed and her brother’s super brain capacity. When the story begins, she has decided to become a New Me who wants to make everyone to feel “supreme and infinite” after she has been “the Knife Queen” into torturing everyone in her community in ever more creative ways. The story is matter-of-fact in its depiction of the cruelty of children, but ends with an odd transcendence. The two audiobook readers, Corey Allen (reading the male narrators) and Carra Patterson (reading the female ones) have appealing voices and read the stories with intelligence, empathy, and clarity. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are full of satire, humor, horror, and love. I’d like fewer first-person narrators and less present tense narration and more narrative variety. But it is an impressive first collection (though I don’t think I’ll be re-reading it soon). View all my reviews
The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Readable, but Sometimes too Sympathetic and Detailed Biography Alison Weir’s The Life of Elizabeth I (1998) is a detailed and readable biography of Elizabeth I. The introduction of Weir’s history explicates the social, religious, international, political, and cultural context surrounding Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne after the death of her half-sister Mary. The book then goes on to depict the coronation of Elizabeth, her early challenges as the 25-year-old unmarried ruler of England, like the religious divide between Catholics and Protestants, the pressure put on her to marry, the pressure put on her to name an heir, and then the roughly 45 years of her reign, including the difficulty of balancing Spain and France against each other. Weir focuses on Elizabeth’s ability to remain the virginal unmarried queen mother of England while stringing along various international princely suitors and playing off their countries against each other and indulging in probably unconsummated romances with her favorite courtiers, like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and later his step-son Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. There were many interesting things I learned and/or enjoyed reading about in the book: --How second-rate and divided a power England was compared to France and Spain, with the country being split between Catholic and Protestant and economically challenged; --How closely the European powers and England were to each other in terms of ambassadors, spies, royal marriages, and so on; --How complicated Elizabeth was: her dissimulating, dissembling, prevaricating, procrastinating, and circumventing personality, her soft spot for handsome and manly men, her intelligence and education and many interests and abilities (languages, education, translation, hunting, dancing, etc.), her knack for (usually) choosing the most capable and loyal men as her advisors and administrators, her rage at people who married without her permission, her reluctance (compared to other rulers then) to execute people, and her lack of concern for the suffering of animals (e.g., much bear baiting going on then); --How tenuous and contingent Elizabeth’s hold on power seemed to her (and probably was) throughout her reign (partly because she was Protestant in a world of Catholic powers and partly because she was thought by many to have been Henry’s bastard); --How envious and rivalrous were her favorites and advisors; --How fraught was her relationship with Mary Queen of Scots; --How lonely and miserable was Elizabeth’s death. I did get impatient during the first dozen chapters, which seemed at times an endless reiteration of Elizabeth’s courtship games. In Chapter 9, Weir even refers to “her old game” of stringing suitors and their supporters along. Apart from a partially successful treaty with Scotland and France and a debacle for the army she sent to France to retake Calais, there is little matter concerning how she ruled in the first dozen chapters, when I often wondered how Elizabeth was actually ruling during her first years—what she was doing (or even what were her small council and parliament doing) vis-à-vis taxes, the poor, and so on. It takes till Chapter 13 for Weir to focus on Elizabeth’s qualities and practices as a ruler. Things do pick up when Elizabeth’s relationships between Mary Queen of Scotts, Leicester, and especially Essex develop. I also sensed that Weir at times reveals her sympathies for Elizabeth and England a bit too strongly. At one point we read, “Fortunately, news had come from Ireland that . . . Mountjoy was making headway against the rebels, which disposed the Queen to clemency,” so Elizabeth didn’t strip the men knighted by Essex (against her direct command) of their titles, so their wives could still be called Lady Something instead of returning to Mistress Something. For whom and in what way was this “Fortunately”? At another point we read, “Neither the log book nor the Golden Hind survive today. The ship was rotting by 1599. By then, Drake was himself dead and already a legend, occupying an enduring place in the affections and the imagination of Elizabeth’s subjects and successive generations for many centuries.” Weir could write a bit more about how Drake from the Spanish point of view was a nefarious pirate. I also felt that sometimes Weir presents a few more details than necessary. The book has tedious moments, concerning the fashions of the 16th century, including different types of jewelry and collar frills etc. Or concerning a house that Amy Dudley stayed in that still stands (though it looks different than it did when she was there), and Mr. Foster is buried there. Or concerning Blunt, whose tomb may still be found at Kitminster Church. Or concerning a new kitchen Elizabeth had made at Hampton Court, one that survives today as a tearoom within the palace. Twice we learn that Elizabeth preferred silk stockings after once trying them. Twice we learn about her face-whitening make-up. About the audiobook reader Davina Porter, I was glad that she doesn’t try French/Spanish/German/Dutch/Italian accents when reading the many quotes from the letters or diaries etc. of various ambassadors etc., but she does read with a Scottish accent for Scottish figures and with a broad country accent for Sir Walter Raleigh, which seems out of place given her avoidance of continental accents. She also assumes gruff or condescending or irritated etc. voices to gussy up Weir’s prose more than is necessary in an already lively book of history and biography, and often tries to make, for instance, passages dealing with executions extra moving. Generally I found her trying a bit too hard to dramatize the history (though that may be a matter of taste). Finally, people interested in detailed, readable, popular histories and the reign and age of Elizabeth I should like this book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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