Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars informative, suspenseful, absorbing, and moving--but oh, the present tense and short sentences! To write Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers (2017), Deborah Heiligman read the letters between the brothers and their family members and friends and spent years researching and thinking about her subjects until she was ready to write her book. And it is excellent: informative, absorbing, suspenseful, and moving. Heiligman tells the story in fourteen parts called Galleries, beginning with a Threshold and an Entresol and ending with an Exit, as if in reading her book we are walking through an exhibition of Vincent's paintings and the life that produced them. The Galleries range from Beginnings (1852-1872), move through topics like Missteps, Stumbles (1875-1879), The Quest (1880-1882), An Expanded Palette (1885-1887), and A Sense of the Finite (1890) and end with Remains (1890-1891). Each Gallery is made up of multiple chapters with titles like The Rose and the Thorn, Vincent and Theo Walking, Sorrow, Uncle Vincent’s Paintings, A Happy Visit, and Theo Alone. There are plenty of epigraphs from letters. Each Gallery begins with a two-page monochrome reproduction of a relevant sketch or a painting by Vincent. In the middle of the book, there is a set of eleven color reproductions of important paintings. After the book come useful appendices: People (family, friends, colleagues); Vincent and Theo's Journey (a chronology); Author’s Note (why and how Heiligman wrote the book); a Bibliography (books and articles); Endnotes (supplemental information and citations of letters); and Index. Through the course of the book, Heiligman provides many interesting details about Vincent’s family, childhood, failed attempts to become an art dealer and a missionary, painstaking efforts to learn how to become a painter, early dark sober works, discovery of vibrant color, artistic theories, techniques, and media, struggle with mental illness, friendships with other artists, relationship with Theo, and so on. As for Theo, there are interesting details on his successful career as an art dealer in the Netherlands and Paris, his relationship with his beloved (but difficult) older brother, his long pursuit of an initially uninterested woman and eventual marriage to her, his syphilis, and so on. If, as Heiligman says before her book begins, “The world would not have Vincent without Theo,” she also demonstrates that the world would not have Theo without his wife Jo. Not only did Theo support Vincent financially and emotionally and believe in his art and make possible the many paintings by his brother that we love today, but his wife Jo indispensably supported Theo in his support of Vincent and also believed in his art. I had known nothing about her before reading this book. In Vincent’s watercolor painting of a windmill near the Hague, two male figures face each other, one looking taller than the other but also slumped, rumpled, and importunate, and although it rarely shows up in books about Van Gogh, according to Heiligman it should be one of his most famous works. In their letters, the brothers mentioned meeting at that windmill and drinking milk there and talking, and the author’s analysis and description of that encounter and of the painting and of its significance to the relationship between the brothers and her belief that “it makes sense to see the men as Vincent and Theo,” make reading this book worthwhile. I learned many other interesting things from this book. For example-- --Vincent’s difficult childhood, including his awareness that a year before he was born his mother gave birth to a stillborn son who was also called Vincent, and his tendency to destroy his youthful attempts at art if his family praised them. --Vincent’s guilt over being such a financial burden on his brother, and Theo’s saintly generosity and assurances, as in one letter that's excerpted for an epigraph to a chapter: “Your work and... brotherly affection... is worth more than all the money I'll ever possess.” --it’s possible that just as Van Gogh perhaps did not cut off his own ear (did Gauguin do it, and Van Gogh cover up for him?), Van Gogh did not shoot himself (did a boy playing with a gun do it?). -- Theo suffered from syphilis and died horribly from it barely one year after his brother’s death. That Theo accomplished as much as he did for his brother and for the world of art while declining in health is miraculous. That he managed to avoid giving the disease to his wife is as well. Chapter 101, Vincent’s Paintings, is remarkable. For it Heiligman selects some titles from the almost 150 paintings he made during a year in an asylum and arranges them in a two-page spread. The selected titles swirl around the pages like the clouds in the sky in the famous Starry Night painting, and the title of that painting appears on the two-page spread larger than those of the other titles and is placed in the center of a swirl just like the moon in the original painting. Another remarkable chapter is 120, Vincent’s Brother, January 25, 1891, which consists of but two potent paragraphs of one sentence each: Vincent died in Theo’s arms. Theo dies alone. The main flaw I find in the book is that Heiligman writes in the currently trendy style of so much young adult American literature: present tense (which feels affected in a biography) and short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. I'm not against those things per se, but I do think they are overused in too many books these days and in this one in particular. The 409-page book consists of 121 chapters. The extreme brevity of Chapter 120 increases the tragic power of its contents, but because there are similarly short sentences and paragraphs everywhere in the book, the emotional impact of that chapter and of short sentences and paragraphs anywhere else in the book are attenuated. There are MANY places like the following: Vincent and Gauguin are both prolific, and Theo is having success selling Gauguin’s work. Soon, Vincent is sure, Theo will sell more of his, too. The brothers’ hard work is paying off. Vincent is realizing his dream of the studio in the South. Although he and Gauguin are not the easiest of companions and the arguments continue, it all really does seem to be working. Until it isn't. Anyway, I learned from this book so many interesting things about Vincent and his paintings, Theo, Jo, love, and the art world of the late 19th century in Europe. View all my reviews
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The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Overwrought Reading of an Overwritten Story The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) by Alix E. Harrow has a promising premise, an ambitious attempt at a UFT (Unified Fantasy Theory): all the myths, legends, fairy tales and so on (including all their magical artifacts and supernatural beings, as well as much of the change, revolution, and evolution in history) derive from portals between worlds. Ten thousand such “Doors” (ten thousand representing an infinite number) exist connecting countless worlds, and “leakage” happens when inhabitants pass between worlds and bring or carry away artifacts and ideas and the like. Seventeen-year-old January Scaller is telling her story in 1911, starting with when she was a “temerarious” and imaginative seven-year-old girl of color and traveled in 1901 from Vermont to Kentucky with the wealthy white collector Mr. Locke. She left their hotel, wandered into a field, and found a blue Door, through which she briefly entered another world with an exotic and beautiful island city. Mr. Locke, her guardian while her father Julian is off looking for exotic artifacts, burned the blue Door and set about educating all such “fanciful nonsense” out of her and training her up to be a “good girl.” Increasingly unhappy, January’s life changed again when as a teenager she found a book called The Ten Thousand Doors of January in Mr. Locke’s house and discovered that it was written by her father about, at first, a girl from Kentucky called Adelaide “Ade” Lee Larson, and later about his own past and January’s mother and how they came to know Mr. Locke and so on and so forth. Chapters from his book read by January alternate with chapters of January telling her own story. Just what January’s father is doing for Mr. Locke and just what Mr. Locke’s creepy New England Archeological Society is up to are mysteries that January will find out about as she struggles to grow up and find her own voice and purpose. The writing by Harrow is often fine, with potent lines and similes describing characters and feelings and Doors and so on. The beginning is great: “When I was seven I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing.” There are many other impressive similes, like “as if an invisible housewife was tugging at the corners of reality,” and “Both Bad and Sammy looked like they had died and been reanimated by a sorcerer of questionable skill.” She has a sense of humor, like “Good manners are advisable when dealing with strangers or ghosts.” The story’s heart is in the right place, criticizing gender and racial and class discrimination and promoting imagination, fantasy, and change. (It makes a couple nods to different sexualities while keeping the protagonist safely heterosexual.) Harrow writes pointed lines like, “You don't know how fragile your name is until you watch a rich man drag it away like signing a bank loan.” The book has other virtues, like being a compact stand-alone novel instead of a first doorstopper volume in a series. However, the novel also has numerous problems… One is that despite early 20th-century bêtes noirs of racism, sexism, and classism and references to early 20th-century fiction like Oz, White Fang, and Tom Swift, the story doesn’t FEEL like America circa 1910, unlike, say, The Golem and the Jinni (2013) by Helene Wecker. January talks like a contemporary girl (e.g., “The hell I will”). Why did Harrow set it a hundred+ years ago and not, say, now? To do race and gender commentary without criticizing contemporary American culture? Worse problems involve January being incredibly and unbelievably obtuse at key moments, so Harrow can make the plot go. She has January not realize important things like the identities and relationship to her of the young lovers in her father’s book and the identity of the rich white man who made an offer to Ade’s family etc. long after the reader has figured them out, such that when January finally has a moment of revelation, her surprise feels absurd. At one point, January knows an enemy has gotten the drop on her via a magical feather that bestows invisibility on the bearer, but when she gets the guy at her mercy, she only takes his magical compass. It seems like Harrow wanted January to be visible for the ensuing climactic showdown without thinking of a more believable way to make that happen. Furthermore, when you give a character a powerful ability like, say, being able to write anything she wants to change the world (short of bringing back the dead), you must then think of good reasons for her not to use that ability when she obviously could but doesn’t. Such mood breaking plot contrivances don’t only involve January. Jane has been hunting forest ogres in another world for 22 years or so and is super capable and alert, but at one point Harrow has her stay sleeping while January takes her heavy pistol from her waist and then has her not notice that the pistol is missing while pursuing a villain until she finally tries to draw it, all so Jane can be wounded for the plot. Exacerbating the unbelievable obtuseness of her characters is Harrow’s tendency to overwrite. She almost never meets a situation without thinking up a cool simile or metaphor to describe it, as with voices: “like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust,” “like a disused hinge,” “as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows,” etc. Some of her metaphors feel strained, like “My thoughts were a flock of drunk birds ricocheting between despair… and a childish bubbling excitement.” Corny or absurd lines occur, like “Hearts aren't chess boards, and they don't play by the rules.” For dramatic effect, she starts overusing the rhetorical strategy of structural repetition, e.g., “I felt... felt... felt...” and “Away from... away from... away from...” The irritating effect of all that overwriting is exacerbated by the reader, January Lavoi, whose over-emoting, lengthening of vowels, and strenuously different voices (like January’s little girl voice) begin irritating the ears. The two overdone forces--Harrow’s writing and Lavoi’s reading--make each other seem ever more overwrought, until the whole thing is hard to continue listening to, especially when January is so often unconvincingly obtuse. Thus, this ambitious fantasy novel irritated more than impressed, and I felt relieved to finish the audiobook. View all my reviews
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Brand had stolen my dog and I had to try Griz is a boy living with his father, mother, big brother, big sister, and two terriers Jess and Jip on a small island in the Outer Hebrides near Scotland. It’s been well over a century after a “soft apocalypse” they call “the Gelding” rendered humans sterile or infertile, reducing the number of people in the world to, they calculate, less than ten thousand. Griz’s family lives by farming and fishing, supplementing their needs and interests by “going Viking” (scavenging through abandoned houses etc. on other islands) and by “Frankensteining” (cobbling usable machines etc. from various sources). There is no more electricity, and most science has been lost, though Griz’ father continues to “Leibowitz,” trying to maintain some scientific and technological knowledge. Griz had another older sister, Joy, but she fell from a cliff into the sea, which loss led to his mother falling and damaging her brain so she cannot speak. The only other people they know is a family called the Lewises who live on another island. Early in his story, Griz goes farther from home than ever before because of the visit of a stranger. Brand is a man with red boat sails, icy blue eyes, fiery red hair, a flashing smile, and a gift for telling stories. He says he’s a trader and an adventurer. But he’s also a liar and a thief, stealing Griz’ dog Jess. And because dogs are at least as rare as people (perhaps because people sterilized or poisoned them during the Gelding), and especially because Griz’s dogs are family, he recklessly sets off with only his remaining dog Jip on a quest to retrieve Jess from the thief. The novel, then, recounts Griz’ adventures in a world with a vanishingly small number of people, a world nature is reclaiming from the impressive ruins of “your” civilization, roads, bridges, buildings, towns, etc., “The sheer relentless immensity of all that had been left behind by your people.” Griz is writing his story to “you,” the imaginary friend he has conjured from a scavenged pre-Gelding photograph of a boy jumping joyfully in the air on a beach with his younger sister and their dog. So Griz regularly addresses “you,” saying things like “The plastic your people made was strong stuff,” “With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing them?” and “Was it always safer being a boy than a girl when you were alive?” Griz likes writing (needs to write) because he likes reading: “I lose myself in stories and find myself.” Reading, he says, is another way to survive; it helps us know how we got here. And opening a new book is like opening a door and traveling far away. He often alludes to books he’s read, like The Hobbit, the Narnia books, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Asterix. His favorite genre is post-apocalypse, so he’s read novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Road, The Death of Grass, and The Day of the Triffids. Griz reads such books “sideways” to find out about life when they were written. Griz is a good storyteller. He likes to drop suspense bombs into his narrative like, “That's how I ended up here alone with no one but you to talk to,” and “I did not know that one day I would feel exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by bolt from out of a clear sky,” and “We were just going to get some honey. Not everything sweet is good for you.” Griz also has a knack for concise and telling description, as when he sees bramble-overgrown houses like shells out of which tall trees are growing, or as when he describes what it’s like for the first time to walk in a green forest or to climb a dilapidated roller coaster track or to eat a fresh peach or to listen to violin music or to see an impossible bridge (a breathtaking arch, light and joyous, a leap made from stone). Griz’ story does what the best science fiction does: defamiliarizes our everyday world. He makes us see newly things that we take for granted like cars, music, bridges, marmalade, squirrels, songbirds, zoos, and statues. At one point, he says something like, “Having been in the ruins of your world made me feel strongly the fragility and glory of life.” That is just what Fletcher’s novel does. At times it is a little unbelievable that Griz could read SO many books. When he sees some partially submerged giant windmills, he references Don Quixote tilting at them, and I can’t imagine a boy reading that long, difficult, strange novel (especially given how hard his family has to work to survive). At times Griz seems a little too aware of how things were before the Gelding, as when he asks, “Do you think the animals [in zoos] felt like they were in prison?” In such times Fletcher the author yanks me out of an otherwise deep immersion in Griz’ world and voice and thrusts me into the here and now. Despite such authorial intrusions, Griz is a compelling character. He’s ethical. He dislikes violence. Though he does kill deer and rabbits for food, when hunting he always makes them suffer as little and as shortly as possible. Despite his tendency to do rash things (like setting off on his boat alone with Jip to pursue a man who might be dangerous), Griz is also thoughtful and sensitive. He says things like, “My once bigger now forever smaller sister” (because Joy was older than he when she died, after which he’s continued growing). And “Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold the whole universe. A fist only what it can grab or hit what it can't.” It’s a tight, powerful, suspenseful, beautiful book. In addition to Griz, there are other memorable characters, especially Brand, Jeanne d’Arc, and Jip. And author Fletcher reads the audiobook version perfectly. The novel is a paean to dogs (alas, nary a member of the cat family is mentioned). Griz relates many great instances of canine behavior, like chasing rabbits, being affronted by squirrels, seeing or hearing or smelling things Griz can’t, and acting like Griz should be able to solve problems or be in charge. “’Things could be worse,’ I told Jip, who thumped his tail and went back to licking the rabbit.” View all my reviews
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Contemporary Epic Fantasy with a Generic Nemesis Tane is an apprentice dragon-rider from Seiiki in the East. For her, dragons are divine, wise, beautiful beings of air and water. Ead is a mage-agent of the Priory of the Orange Tree sent to secretly bodyguard Sabran Queen of Inys in the West while serving as one of her maids in waiting. In the West, dragons are demonic, malevolent beings of fire and earth. To Tane, Ead’s people are wicked wyrm-killers, while to Ead Tane’s people are wicked wyrm-lovers. If Tane and Ead’s cultures and religions were seeing the same creatures according to different prejudices, Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019) might be more interesting than it already is, but in fact they are seeing different species who only share great size, strength, and age. The dragons of the East are benign beings who fly via organs in their heads called “crowns” and breathe air, while the dragons of the West are evil monsters who fly via wings and breathe fire. And while the eastern dragons are foes of the Nameless One, the western dragons are the Nameless One’s minions. The Nameless One is a Satanic figure who was bound down in the Abyss a thousand years ago and whose apocalyptic liberation is rumored to be at hand. Can the different peoples unite to save their world from the apparently inevitable return of the Nameless One and his draconic army? Involved with the millennia-long conflict are two celestial jewels made from and for two kinds of magic (earth and star), a powerful sword composed of both magics, three magical trees (hawthorn, mulberry, and orange), and multiple religions. With its rival religions, Elizabethan, Africanesque, and Asiatic cultures, sublime dragons, talking birds and ichneumons and vivid descriptions (e.g., “Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea”), Shannon’s world is well-imagined. The chapters of the novel rotate among four point of view characters (two female, two male) in different regions/cultures of the fantasy world (west, east, south). Shannon features more than one sympathetic gay character, as well as a post-racial world in which no one looks down on anyone else for having a different skin color, of which there are plenty. In addition to dragon-riding warriors like Tane and dragon-killing mages like Ead, there are many other strong female characters: the Gloriana-like Queen Sabran of Inys, the Golden Empress leader of 40,000 pirates, a princess trying to rule behind her demonic dragon-possessed father, a thousand-year-old witch of the wood, a younger sister who’s tougher and smarter than her big brother, and more. The male characters are less interesting, but there is a fine one, the exiled gay alchemist Niclays Roos, still mourning his high-born lover, still seeking the elixir of immortality, and still nursing a grudge. The reader, Liyah Summers, does a good job of enhancing the text. Although she tends to get in a similar rhythm during the narration, she uses a variety of English accents (e.g., RP British, northern British, Caribbean English, and even, I think, American South) for characters from different cultures, doesn’t try too hard to make male voices sound male, and does pretty cool ichneumon and dragons and ancient witches. The most disappointing part of the novel is the generic, one-dimensional satanic dark lord nemesis, the unimaginatively named Nameless One. There is no explanation or exploration of his motivation to turn the world into a burnt wasteland or of that of his “draconic army” (dragons, wyverns, cockatrices, basilisks et al). Milton’s Satan makes the Nameless One look empty and boring. And when you think of Cob in Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore or the Crippled God in Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, or even of Voldemort or Sauron, Shannon’s Nameless One is disappointing. I would prefer something interesting happening whereby, for instance, it turns out that there is no Nameless One, that he is a product of religious fanaticism driving war among the human cultures, instead of a real bogeyman driving the humans to cooperate. Other disappointing features of the book are the not infrequent times when Shannon employs glaring authorial plot contrivances or sleights of hand to put her characters through extra hard challenges or to get them from point A to point B on her map. She makes Tane and her dragon way too conveniently strong or weak depending on plot requirements. Although it is a relief to find a one-volume stand-alone epic fantasy book these days, I often got the feeling that the novel should either have been longer or shorter. Some of the other rulers apart from Sabran maybe didn’t need to be introduced or should have been introduced earlier with more to do on stage. The Golden Empress (queen of the pirates) feels like an untied loose end. It does require an investment of time and mind to get into ANOTHER secondary epic fantasy world with its own history and cultures and so on, but once several chapters in, the compelling characters and their various situations take over, and it becomes a page turning experience with some surprisingly moving moments. The climax was neat in being compact and exciting. But I did find that several weeks after finishing it was a rather forgettable book. View all my reviews
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Vivid, Edgy Urban Portal Fantasy about Portal Fantasy Quentin Coldwater, seventeen, is an unhappy, cocky, competitive nerd who excels at passing tests. Although he hasn’t grown out of a childhood obsession with a Narnia-esque five-book fantasy series about visiting a world called Fillory, and his hobby is doing slight-of-hand magic tricks, Quentin can’t believe in magic. On this winter day in Brooklyn, he goes to his Princeton admissions interview only to find that the interviewer has just died. The paramedic hands Quentin an envelope that was supposedly left for him, sending him through an overgrown abandoned lot and into summer at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. He’s given an entrance examination consisting of normal mathematical problems as well as requests to translate Shakespeare into an imaginary language and to draw a rabbit that starts running around the test book eating other questions. When the Dean tells him to do some real magic—not sleight-of-hand tricks—a confused Quentin unconsciously recites something in his made-up language and tosses a deck of cards that assemble into a card house replicating Brakebills’ architecture. Thus begins Quentin’s magical education at Brakebills, the first and longest section of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009). Whereas J. K. Rowling draws out Harry Potter’s education at Hogwarts over seven novels, one for each year of Harry’s life, however, Grossman condenses Quentin’s five-year course of study (taking about four years because he skips one year) into about half of his novel. This telescoping still leaves plenty of opportunities to describe and explain magic, which requires natural aptitude, strong will, anger matched with restraint, and intense study and practice, including multiple languages, different “disciplines” of magic, complicated finger and hand gestures, and care for the circumstances around any spell. There is at least one college for magic on every major continent, and more than a few magicians passing as normal people: like Harry Potter, The Magicians requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief that nearly no one in our world would notice the magic going on around them. Not that Brakebills is Hogwarts and The Magicians a Harry Potter book! The pupils here are college students, the female characters are more compelling, the writing more sophisticated, the action spicier--smoking, drinking, swearing, snarking, drugs, and sex--and the psychology and the conflict much less black and white. There are no cartoonishly awful characters ala the Dursleys or Draco Malfoy and his minions. There is a strong homosexual supporting character (though Grossman imagines few people of color, leaving the book quite white). Quentin is often an unlikeable protagonist, being self-centered and causing harm to others, but his growth through suffering and guilt is well done and humanizing. Above all, about half-way through the novel, the characters and story graduate from the Hogwarts model of magical school education and begin a critical but affectionate and imaginative parody of The Chronicles of Narnia. The graphic violence and Big Brother-like ram gods of the portal world Fillory may make squeamish readers and Aslan lovers squirm. My favorite part of the book is Grossman’s celebration, deconstruction, and complication of Narnia. Grossman uses the omnipresent Fillory to explore the different ways in which children read such fantasy stories as children and remember and reread them as adults, to demonstrate the nearly overwhelming desire we have (especially but not only as children) for escape and adventure in fantasy worlds, and to make the fantasy (magic, etc.) of his own narrative world feel more real. Grossman’s writing is usually good to read, whether profane dialogue (“Wake up!” Alice said. “This isn't a story! It's just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there!”) or uncanny fantastic happenings or beings: “It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman's hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes--she appeared to be looking right at them--were midnight blue and didn't move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.” There are vivid descriptions of what it feels like to do magic: “. . . streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing--it was like they had been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.” There are impressive scenes that transcend genre, parody, pastiche, or whatever, like when Quentin encounters the Beast during a lecture, runs naked to the south pole, or first visits the Neitherlands. Grossman’s student characters speak American slang: “Dude,” “I'm freezing my tits off,” “You fucking fucked him,” etc. He makes funny and apt similes from our world’s popular culture, like Scooby-Doo, an anti-pollution commercial from the 1960s, and Andy Warhol. He inserts pop culture refs here and there, as when the students sing “Heart and Soul,” mock the wands of Harry Potter, do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” dance, or imagine a porn mag for trees called Enthouse. (Strangely, despite the pervasive influence of Narnia via Fillory--e.g., seemingly benevolent god and wicked witch, different time scales, inevitable ejection from the fantasy world, human siblings who become kings and queens, world between the worlds, etc.--the characters never mention C. S. Lewis’ books!) I enjoyed The Magicians and look forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy. People who like Harry Potter and Narnia but want something edgier and more ambiguous for older readers should like this one. View all my reviews
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 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 Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necessary and Potent, but too Rich Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Map of Salt and Stars (2018) is a moving, harrowing, beautiful novel framing a folktale, the frame story occurring in 2011 during the chaos of the Arab Spring, the folktale in the 12th century during the conflict between the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, the Sunni Turkish ruler Nur ad-Din, and the Shia Fatimid caliphs. After the death to cancer of her father (“Baba”), eleven-year-old Syrian-American Nour moved with her mother and two big sisters, sweet Huda and prickly Zahra, from Manhattan to Homs in Syria--just in time for the start of the Syrian civil war. As the novel opens, Nour is still grieving the loss of her beloved Baba, and so she begins telling her favorite story that he used to tell her, about 16-year-old Rawiya running away from home, disguising herself as a boy, and becoming the apprentice of the map-maker al-Idrisi as the old man is about to embark on a journey to make the most accurate and complete (and beautiful) map of the known world for King Roger of Sicily. Nour, then, recounts two stories: her own in the present as she and her family embark on their refugees’ journey west through Syria, Lebannon, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, and Rawiya’s adventures with al-Idrisi visiting the same locations 800 years or so earlier. How the two tales mirror each other is one of the pleasures of the novel. Both Nour and Rawiya are spunky, sensitive, capable, intelligent, likeable girls, and while Nour’s mother is a professional map maker, so is Rawiya’s mentor. Nour’s story is realistic and features no supernatural creatures, whereas Rawiya’s is a historical adventure peopled by real figures like King Roger and by fantastical figures like the roc. I was quite moved by Nour’s 2011 story, which depicts things that many Americans (like me) should be more aware of: living in a city being destroyed by civil war (kids trying to hear the shelling as distant thunder), becoming a homeless refugee, making deals with human smugglers, crossing deserts on foot, boarding rickety ferries vulnerable to fires and missiles, stowing away in a refrigerated fruit truck, and encountering young men bent on rape. All such scenes are depicted with an intense, sensual, and emotional detail that render them suspenseful and terrifying. And Nour’s relationships with her father’s best friend Abu Sayeed and her two big sisters, Zahra and Huda, are fine. The folk tale about Rawiya was less compelling and a bit too long. One problem I had with the novel concerns Joukhadar’s impressive style, scintillating with striking similes and descriptions, because often I wondered, “Could an eleven-year-old girl say that?” For example: --“A truck disappears under the shimmer of heat in front of us. Mountains loom. Cliffs of red sandstone rise up, wind carved, pockmarked like sheets of termite-eaten wood.” --“Arabic fills the air like a flock of startled birds.” --“an oblong pastry armored with almond slivers.” Sometimes I was pulled out of my immersion in the story to marvel at Joukhadar’s poetic language and or to question whether Nour could use it, especially for details that don’t seem relevant or important enough to warrant the attention, e.g., “al-Idrisi’s beard was tinged with dust, and the wind lifted stray camel hairs from his turban.” Sometimes Nour’s distinctive descriptions were too much of a good thing. The occasional misuse of lay/lie in the novel (e.g., “My stomach hurts and I want to lay down”) makes me wonder if they’re Nour or Joukhadar’s mistakes. . . I also found myself wondering why Joukhadar made Nour prone to synesthesia, so she sees sounds and letters as colors, like this: “’Nour.’ It’s Mama’s voice, warm cedar brown, its edges curled up into red. She’s annoyed.” The novel would have been moving, beautiful, terrible, and poetic enough without the synesthesia, which seems to serve mainly to make Nour more special, which, in her curiosity, intelligence, sweetness, courage, love of stories, and so on, she already is enough. YA overkill. Speaking of YA fiction, first person present tense narration is so common these days (e.g., Hunger Games, Divergent, Dread Nation) that it almost ruined my reading. If Joukhadar had used third person for the frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I could have more easily accepted the vivid poetic writing. Or if he had had Nour use the past tense for her frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I wouldn’t have kept thinking, “When is she telling her stories?” Joukhadar avoids detailed contemporary political commentary, as Nour knows little of what’s going on in Syria and doesn’t explain the different sides fighting the civil war or criticize the western world’s lack of sympathy for the plight of refugees like her family. The main good the novel does is to make us imagine through the eyes of a precocious girl what it’s like to have one’s world and home and family upended (“How many times can you lose everything before you become nothing?”) and then to have to go on a series of refugee journeys with ever dwindling resources (“Is pain poisonous?”). Despite my criticisms, I was moved, impressed, and enriched by the novel and recommend it. I usually prefer rich writing to plain. And we need more YA novels about Arab protagonists. The reader Lara Sawalha talks like a typical American girl for Nour’s narration and dons a Middle-Eastern Arabic type accent for the characters in Rawiya’s story. She does a good job both ways (though she does for some reason pronounce coyote as kay-otee and turquoise as tur-kwise). If you like fantasy and reality and YA fiction and are curious about Syrian/Arabic/refugee culture and plights, you should read this book. It answers the following question in the affirmative: “Is there still room in the world for extraordinary things?” View all my reviews
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Satisfying Conclusion The fifth and last novel in Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series books, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (2016), begins right where the fourth left off, with September the girl from Nebraska having been crowned Queen of Fairyland and All Her Kingdoms. The situation is, however, complicated. Also at the end of the fourth novel September used a dodo’s egg to restore everything as it was before, partly to return her own age from forty to fifteen, after having been prematurely aged at the end of the third novel by the Yeti as he midwifed a new moon. An unexpected side effect of the dodo egg restoration is that now at the beginning of the fifth novel, every past ruler of Fairyland (“dead and alive and other”) is back in the capital Pandemonium eagerly wanting to resume their rule! To defuse the chaotic situation, the Stoat of Arms (a sentient seal comprised of a blue unicorn, a little girl in knight’s armor, a brace of golden stoats, three black roosters, three silver stars, and a tiny Fairy) declares that September will rule for three days, after which a race called the Cantankerous Derby will be held to determine the new ruler of Fairyland: “All hopefuls, thoroughbreds, long shots, cheaters, townies, speed demons, and dark horses shall commence a Wondrous Race, beginning in Pandemonium, and ending at Runnymede Square in the ancient city of Mummery! The winner shall receive the Crown. . . . All are eligible! Ravished, Stumbled, Changelings, Fairies, Gnomes, Rocks, and Trees!” The object of the race is to be the first to find by fair means or foul the hidden Heart of Fairyland. Unlike the boring races of our world, for which racers are limited to a circular track or modest course, racers in the Cantankerous Derby may go anywhere they want in the whole world of Fairyland. For the start of the race, each racer is put in a separate bubble of space time so they can all get started without bothering each other. Each racer must finish the race with a steed, and at the start all steeds are swapped randomly. If any two racers meet during the race, they must fight an eccentric duel, with the loser having to leave the race. And halfway through the race everyone’s relative positions will be randomly swapped. Like most of the earlier novels in the series, then, this one is an exciting episodic travel adventure, in which September and her best friends, A-Through-L the Wyverary (who believes he is half library, half wyvern) and Saturday the Marid (who lives backwards and forwards in time) visit various outree Fairyland locales and locals as they race against the past rulers of Fairyland, including Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness; Cutty Soames, the Coblynow Captain; the Headmistress; the Emperor of Everything; the Ice Cream Man; the First Stone; Queen Mab; Thrum the Rex Tyrannosaur; and the Marquess, September’s foe in the first Fairyland novel; and against some new pretenders, like Hawthorn the Troll, Tamburlaine the Fetch, and Blunderbuss the scrap yarn Combat Wombat introduced in book four. The prime minister of Fairyland, the scary Madame Tanaquill, who wears a dress made out of iron buckles, horseshoes, and blades, despite (or because of) fairies being allergic to the metal, is the 2-1 favorite to win. September has mixed feelings about the Race. On the one hand she just wants to go home to Omaha where she belongs with her mother and father and dog etc., but on the other hand she’s keen to continue being Queen because then she can stay in Fairyland with her friends, and, after all, one should to the job they’re given to the best of their ability. A minor sub-plot involves September’s aunt Margaret, who from when she was nine has been secretly visiting Fairyland and performing terrible and grand feats there under the name Pearl, escorting the girl’s parents to Fairyland to look for her. The book is full of the rich pleasures of Valente’s fantastic imagination, wit, wisdom, and style: lists (“Fairyland races ladies against chariots, centaurs against cheetahs, carriages against flying carpets, phoenixes against Dodos”), personification (“The heart of Meridian is a hut that wanted to be a library when it grew up”), humor (“I know some of us are very cranky, having only recently come back from the dead, but reanimation is no excuse”), playful narrator, e.g., “From a narrator’s picnic blanket, there’s nothing you can’t see”), wisdom (“No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings”), and fantasy (“The carriage-driver was a lady caught halfway between beautiful and terrifying—her face so gaunt, her hair so wild, and her eyes so huge that she looked like an electrified dragonfly who had once asked to be made into a human girl for Christmas and almost, almost gotten her wish. She snapped a whip made of cricket’s bone”). Sometimes Valente’s style and imagination can become too precious and profligate: “Because she was quite a large and opinionated country, and because she was as old as starlight and twice as stubborn, and because she had a mountain range on her left border that simply would not be bossed about, Fairyland decided to do something about it one day in March just after her morning tea.” But it’s better to read a book that’s too full of imagination than one that’s too empty of it. Anna Juan’s illustrations for each new chapter page are dark, grotesque, and beautiful, and the ending of the novel is unexpected and satisfying. Readers who like contemporary fairytale fantasy that revels in language, style, story, and imagination should like the Fairyland series. The first two books and the fourth are splendid, book three exhausting, and this fifth one satisfying. View all my reviews
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Finding Fairyland Fun Again Or “If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving” Catherynne M. Valente’s fourth Fairyland novel, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015), begins with the Red Wind and her flying panther spiriting away from Fairyland a reluctant troll boy called Hawthorn (he’s been happy at home with his magical parents and huge pet toad), and sending him to Chicago, where he becomes a Changeling called Thomas, replacing the human infant son of the Roods. The neat thing about this novel in the context of the series is that while the first three books feature September, a girl from Nebraska, visiting Fairyland, this one depicts Hawthorn, a “boy” from Fairyland, visiting our world. The common element is the child protagonist as stranger in a strange land, and one of the many sources of pleasure in reading this novel lies in Valente’s imaginative depiction of Hawthorn’s Fairyland perception of real-world things like apartments, pancakes, and “the Kingdom of School,” wherein “A Teacher is the same thing as an Empress only a Teacher wears skirts and uses a ruler instead of a scepter,” and “There is a curse called Homework a Teacher may cast if she longs for her power to continue after the great bell has rung,” and “a peculiar breed of demon-wights called Report Cards” guard the Kingdom. There’s a wonderful, painful chapter depicting Hawthorn/Thomas’ inability to assimilate to life in Chicago, because his experience as a troll in Fairyland when he could talk with stones and everything was alive makes him constantly tear apart his toys and other things in the Rood home in his frustrated efforts to get them to respond. On top of that, he’s always uttering fanciful “nonsense” about things like the King of Pancakes or calling his human mother a witch because she can do things like flick a switch to light up the house and make blue fire roar out of the stove top, after which she says, “Magic.” Thus, his father is always saying the boy is not Normal, despite the Changeling trying to be as Normal as possible by writing down the “laws” of our world in a notebook called Inspector Balloon (he hopefully names everything because without a name a thing can’t exist and can’t talk to you). The friendship between Hawthorn/Thomas and a fellow Changeling he meets at school, a wooden fetch girl called Tamburlaine, is funny, unpredictable, and moving. The novel soon has the pair and their animated object companions, a feisty scrap-yarn wombat toy called Blunderbuss (who says she’s a “combat wombat” from the Land of Wom) and a gramophone called Scratch (who communicates by playing scene-appropriate records) returning to Fairyland. There they are seized by the mobile Capital city, Pandemonium, where the current monarch, Charlie Crunchcrab, sets them on a quest to get him out of being King without having to die first (for “Fairy countries mate for life”). They’re advised to find the mysterious and disreputable Spinster, who may be able to help. They meet human Changelings, learn about their exploitation, and more, as Valente reverses the direction of the novel’s defamiliarizing culture shock from aliens visiting our world to aliens returning home. The way she works it all out is interesting and neat. Whereas I found the third Fairyland book, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), turgid and hyperventilating (filled with characters reciting lengthy exclamation mark punctuated monologues), this book is a pleasure from start to finish. Despite being shorter than the previous volumes in the series, it has just as many delightful and imaginative fantasy elements and rich and playful lines. Like these: Fun Fantasy Riffs “All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Penmanship, owing to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Primeval Trolls. Tufa, shortly after solving the mystery of walking upright and making friends with bridges, hunted down a wild Alphabet and made it her pet. Alphabets are one of the longest-lived creatures in all the grand universe. The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, grumbling to itself, devouring passing slang, and blessing, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that tamed it when the world was young.” Imaginative and Vivid Descriptions “His troll-self stretched and reached up from his belly, popping its aching joints, pushing aside all the bits of him which were not-troll, straining toward the pencil with jaws open. The troll was ready. Finally, it was his turn. The troll in Thomas seized the end of the pencil in his own sharp teeth and chewed it into a fine point, delirious with the happiness of having something to do. It felt like biting into a quarter and spitting out pennies.” The familiar made new “Any city looks a bit like its mother and father.” Witty, Playful, Self-Aware Narrator “Do you remember being born? Only a few can say they do and not be caught immediately in the lie, and most of them are wizards. I, of course, remember it perfectly. Certain benefits are granted to narrators as part of the hiring package, to compensate for our irregular hours and unsafe working conditions. As clear as waking, I remember your hands on the cover of the book, your bright eyes moving swiftly over the pages, the light of your reading lamp, your small laughs and occasional puzzlements.” Wisdom for YA Readers “Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.” I have only a small criticism and a medium one: Valente can misuse lie/lay, as in “Equator is a great fat serpent who lays around the whole world,” and the book doesn’t really end but serves as a prelude to the fifth and final novel in the series, as, the third, fourth, and fifth books make one story arc. Luckily, this book revived my desire to finish the Fairyland series. Readers who like fantasy with original imagination, playful narrators, and rich language should enjoy Valente’s series, but should start with the first one, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011). View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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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 ...
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