April 17, 2008 at 11:56 am · Filed under Books Etc
I really wasn’t expecting to finish this challenge so soon. It just happened that several appropriate myth/folklore/fairy tale reads fell into my lap. It worked out really well, because all the books were very different from each other, while still fitting the theme.
Widdershins by Charles de Lint was a perfect book to start with. Written by the man who is apparently the pioneer of the urban fantasy genre, and set in a North American city of his own creation, it includes a lot of Native American/Canadian myth that was almost entirely new to me. (Interestingly, to me Newford seemed like an American city, although it’s never stated—and when I checked on Wikipedia, I found that apparently Canadians tend to see it as American, while Americans assume it’s Canadian! It makes me wonder what cues we’re each picking up that say “American” or “Canadian” to us.)
Agatha Christie’s The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite wasn’t an obvious choice for inclusion into the challenge, but the folklore surrounding the Harlequin has always fascinated me. This book was a re-read, but the character of Mr. Quin was no less magical for that!
Robin McKinley’s re-telling of Beauty and the Beast in Beauty was interesting, bringing the characters to life. It’s not my favourite fairy tale re-telling, but for that matter, the original story isn’t exactly one of my favourite fairy tales. Beauty is a kids’ book and basically fluff, but fun, romantic fluff, so I enjoyed reading it.
Ironside is pretty much as far as you can get from Beauty and still be a romantic fairy tale. Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales are much darker in ambiance than most young adult fantasy, but that’s part of what makes them so original. Plus, unlike, say, Laurell K. Hamilton, she knows that takes more than long hair, rampant violence, and looser sexual mores to make faerie society feel truly alien.
Sorcery & Cecelia is a more traditional fantasy novel, except that it’s also an epistolary mystery set in Regency England. There was also the touch of the gothic about it, which I liked a great deal.
I enjoyed all five books I read for this challenge, and I’d recommend them all, although Widdershins, Ironside, and Sorcery & Cecelia were without question the best. I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream too recently to re-read it in June, but maybe I’ll watch the movie on Midsummer’s Eve!
Thanks, Carl, for hosting this challenge—I had a blast!
Oh, and I fulfilled my requirement for the Chunkster Challenge, but it runs all year, so I’m upping my goal from 4 chunksters to 12.
Tags: Once Upon a Time II
April 16, 2008 at 11:22 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Young Adult Literature
56. Sorcery & Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer (Young adult historical fantasy) 320 p.
I swear I only went book shopping to look for Xenocide, for the second time this week, but I came home with this and its sequel instead. (In fact, I made a third shopping trip today; still no Xenocide, but five other books, quite cheap.) I’ve always liked Wrede’s Dragons series, and I’d heard many good things about this series, and there were remaindered hardcover copies of The Grand Tour going cheap.
Sorcery & Cecelia is an epistolary novel with a twist: all the letters in the book were actually sent by the authors, to each other, and they didn’t set out to write a novel. They were just playing the Letter Game: two people (they don’t have to be writers) carry on an in-character correspondence. They chose to be two cousins, best friends Kate and Cecelia, living in England in 1817. An England just like the one in our world, except that magic exists, and witches and wizards abound. Early in her Season, Kate is nearly poisoned by a witch who mistakes her for the Mysterious Marquis. Meanwhile, Cecelia finds herself spied on by an elegantly-dressed young man, and her new friend Dorothea begins to have a rather startling effect on the gentlemen of the neighbourhood.
This is a really excellent young adult novel. The writing is quick and clear, and the characters are delightful. The book has a real sense of humour, with delicious absurdities in every letter. The tone, too, is wonderful—the book is dedicated to Austen, Heyer, Tolkien, and Kushner, and their influence (or at least the women’s) definitely shows in this comedy of manners. There’s something so delightfully gothic about the “Mysterious Marquis”, and the same atmosphere pervades the book. Not many modern authors choose to create that kind of atmosphere; the only one I can think of, funnily enough, is Lemony Snicket.
Anyway, if you like Austen, Heyer, or Kushner, as well as young adult novels, you’ll probably enjoy this. Not because it’s a rip-off of those authors, but because it has a similar sensibility. The plot and the characters, however, are all the authors’ own. And the characters, especially, are people I enjoy spending time with. Cecy and Kate are fabulous; intelligent and independent young women, but still believable as Regency ladies. Altogether a very satisfying read!
Pages read: 15,456
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Caroline Stevermer, Fantasy Classics Challenge, Kate and Cecelia, Once Upon a Time II, Patricia C. Wrede
April 15, 2008 at 2:01 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Young Adult Literature
55. Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale by Holly Black (Fantasy) 323 p.
I was going to wait for this to come out in trade paperback to buy it, but I was out looking for Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide last night, and stumbled across a used hardcover copy. It reeks of incense, not surprising if you know Seeker’s Books, the store where I found it, but it didn’t bother me once I got used to it. Better incense fumes than cigarette smoke.
Anyway. Ironside is the direct sequel to Tithe, but also stars one of the characters from Valiant. If you plan to read the series, you probably shouldn’t read this review, because it will inevitably contain spoilers for those first two books. Okay? Okay!
As usual, I found myself a little dragged down by the darkness of the atmosphere at the beginning. And just like the first two books, the story soon drew me in and made me forget why I’d ever been bothered by it. In this book, Kaye is still living with her grandmother in New Jersey, although her mother has an apartment in New York. At Roiben’s coronation, Kaye is goaded into making a declaration of her feelings for him, and is rewarded with an impossible quest: find a faery who can tell and untruth. Until she fulfils the quest, she cannot see Roiben again.
Meanwhile, Queen Silarial of the Bright Court is determined to gain control of the Unseelie throne, but is hampered Roiben’s hatred of her. Kaye and Cornelius do their best to help him, but they each have problems of their own to deal with.
I actually liked this the best of the series so far, although I can’t put my finger on the exact reason. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting more used to Black’s depiction of the faerie courts, so I feel like I have a better grasp of what’s going on. Or maybe the story she’s telling in Ironside just appeals to me more. I loved the shout-out to Emma Bull early in the novel, since the series clearly owes a great deal to War for the Oaks, even though there’s a lot that makes it unique. And as always, Black does a fantastic job of making faeries alien and strange in believable ways.
I really hope Holly Black will write more about these characters, although I’ve heard this will likely be the last book.
Pages read: 15,136
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Holly Black, Modern Faerie Tale, Once Upon a Time II
April 15, 2008 at 1:47 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
54. Beauty by Robin McKinley (Children’s Fantasy) 247 p.
This is a pretty good retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I say “pretty good”, although up until the last chapter or two, I would have said “wonderful”. Aside from the very end, which I felt was too pat, too quick, and reinforced a lot of negative baggage about women’s looks, Beauty is an excellent read.
As a child, Honour Huston prefers to be called Beauty. By the time she’s sixteen, she heartily regrets this childhood nickname, because she by far the plainest of three sisters. She does possess both courage and honour, though, and when her father makes a promise to a beast in a castle garden, Beauty volunteers to be the one to fulfil it. Almost entirely alone in a magnificent castle, with no one but the Beast for company, she slowly learns to trust and care for him.
Of course, everyone knows the story, and there aren’t really any surprises here. That’s okay, though—I don’t look for wild originality and sweeping changes when I read fairy-tale re-tellings; what interests me are all the extra details an author can provide, like the character’s feelings, or bits from her everyday life. Robin McKinley does just that, turning the Beauty and Beast of the old story into living, breathing people.
Pages read: 14,813
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Once Upon a Time II, Robin McKinley
April 14, 2008 at 2:54 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
53. The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 552 p. (280 p.)
The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite collects all of Christie’s short stories featuring Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Harley Quin. It also includes a novel, Three-Act Tragedy, and a novella, Dead Man’s Mirror, which are Hercule Poirot stories featuring Mr. Sattertwaite in a cameo role. I didn’t actually re-read those, since it hasn’t been long since I last read them, and since they don’t include Mr. Quin, and so don’t really fit the atmosphere of the short stories.
The book opens with The Mysterious Mr. Quin, a collection originally published in 1930, which first introduced the characters of Quin and Satterthwaite, and includes 12 short stories. All the stories are told from the perspective of Mr. Satterthwaite, a kind, elderly gentleman, well-off, a bachelor, slightly snobbish, a connoisseur of art and music, and a man who enjoys his comforts. Christie often describes him as the playgoer type—a man sensitive to impressions, interested in the drama of life.
In The Coming of Mr. Quin, Mr. Satterthwaite is the guest at a New Year’s Eve house party when the subject of Derek Capel’s suicide is raised. Some years earlier, the house belonged to a friend of the current owners, who shot himself, though no one was ever able to discover the reason why. Suddenly, not long after midnight, there are three loud knocks at the door, and the host goes rises to open it.
Framed in the doorway stood a man’s figure, tall and slender. To Mr. Satterthwaite, watching, he appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow. Then, as he stepped forward, he showed himself to be a thin dark man dressed in motoring clothes.
Mr. Quin’s car, it seems, has broken down, and he’s come to the house hoping to stay warm while his chauffeur fixes it. It soon emerges that Mr. Quin was also a friend of Capel’s, and the party continues to wonder about his suicide. Mr. Quin has a strange idea that mysteries may actually be easier to solve some time after the fact, because events begin to appear in their true perspective only after the passage of time. As he comments, “the contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.”
As they continue to discuss the problem, new interpretations of the old facts begin to emerge. It isn’t long before Mr. Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite are able to put together a true picture of the death of Derek Capel, not only finding the truth, but uniting a pair of unhappy lovers, as well.
The other eleven stories follow much the same lines. Although the stories don’t always take place long after the crime has been committed, the solution always hinges on a re-examination of the evidence putting the facts into their proper perspective.
In The Shadow on the Glass, the shooting of two young people seems to be connected to the ghostly figure of a Cavalier, known to appear in the glass of an upstairs window. When Mr. Quin turns up unexpectedly, his presence prompts Mr. Satterthwaite to solve the case. At the ‘Bells and Motley’ is the story of a chance encounter between Quin and Satterthwaite at a country inn, where half an hour’s conversation reveals the solution to an old mystery. It’s followed by The Sign in the Sky, in which Mr. Satterthwaite manages to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death by the evidence of a mysterious sign seen by a servant.
The Soul of the Croupier is an odd story, one which contains no crime at all, only the union of lovers which is a theme throughout all the stories. In it, a young American man becomes ensnared by an ageing but beautiful adventuress, who has a past known only to one man. The able stage-management of Mr. Quin leads to a satisfactory resolution.
Similarly, The Man from the Sea does not deal with solving crime, but with preventing tragedy and uniting lovers. When Mr. Satterthwaite, on vacation on a Spanish island, meets a suicidal man on the edge of a cliff, he listens to the man’s story. Not long after, he finds himself listening to another story, one with unexpected points of similarity, and finds a way to make things right for both his new acquaintances—with, of course, the invaluable, behind-the-scenes assistance of the mysterious Mr. Quin.
Mr. Satterthwaite got up, trembling a little.
“I must get back to the hotel,” he said. “If you are going that way.”
But Mr. Quin shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I shall go back the way I came.”
When Mr. Satterthwaite looked back over his shoulder, he saw his friend walking towards the edge of the cliff.
In The Voice in the Dark, a conversation with Mr. Quin stimulates Mr. Satterthwaite’s memory, giving him the solution to an old deception and a new murder. An unexpected encounter with Mr. Quin at the opera in The Face of Helen leads Mr. Satterthwaite to an acquaintance with a pleasant, ordinary young woman whose beautiful face sparks tragedy wherever she goes, and the opportunity to prevent a murder.
One of my favourite stories in the collection is The Dead Harlequin. At the showing of some watercolours by a new artist, Mr. Satterthwaite buys a painting that sparks his imagination: a dead Harlequin lies on a black-and-white-tiled floor, while the same Harlequin looks in at the window. The setting is a place he knows, the terrace room at a country house called Charnley. He also feels that he recognizes the face of the Harlequin, an old friend of his. Impressed with the artist’s work, Mr. Satterthwaite invites the young man to dinner with himself and a friend. He half-expects Mr. Quin to show up that evening, and he does—as do two other unexpected guests, leading to the solution of a fourteen-year-old murder.
The Bird with the Broken Wing is a rather melancholy, creepy tale of the suicide, or possibly murder, of a young woman. Not beautiful, but with an air of tragedy, she intrigues Mr. Satterthwaite because she has got a quality of enchantment he’s rarely seen. When her body is found hanging on the back of her bedroom door, Satterthwaite is sure that a murder has been committed.
When Mr. Satterthwaite travels to Corsica with a Duchess in The World’s End, a chance encounter on a day-trip to a tiny mountain village leads to the vindication of a man accused of theft, and the restoration of joy to a very unhappy young woman. Of course, none of this would be possible without Mr. Quin, the man who comes unexpectedly, and leaves as suddenly as he arrives.
The last story in The Mysterious Mr. Quin is Harlequin’s Lane, my favourite. When the two professional dancers hired to perform in a village harlequinade are injured in a car accident, a former dancer takes the place of Columbine, while Mr. Quin, naturally, dances the part of Harlequin. The brief description of the dance and of the story of Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and Pierette was something I loved as a child. This story, more than any of the others, embodies the magic that makes the Quin and Satterthwaite stories so special.
As I said, I skipped Three-Act Tragedy and Dead Man’s Mirror, which aren’t actually Quin and Satterthwaite stories at all. The collection ends with two short stories published in other collections: The Love Detectives and The Harlequin Tea Set.
In The Love Detectives, a minor car accident leads to Mr. Quin’s presence at a murder investigation. With his prompting, Mr. Satterthwaite is able to see through some tricky evidence and solve a murder, saving the life of the person who would probably have been convicted of the crime.
The last story is The Harlequin Tea Set, which makes a perfect end to the book. On the way to visit an old friend, Mr. Satterthwaite meets Mr. Quin in a coffee shop, and later manages to prevent a terrible tragedy. It’s a good mystery, and I really want that tea set for myself!
I was always attracted by the image of Harlequin as a child, a happy trickster dressed in a bright rainbow of colours. I love how Agatha Christie’s stories show the everyday, ordinary, matter-of-fact world of Mr. Satterthwaite alongside the mysterious, magical, unearthly world of Harley Quin. That she never feels the need to solve the mystery, to expose the secret of Mr. Quin, is one of the greatest charms of the stories for me.
It’s that wonderful, supernatural quality of Harley Quin that leads me to count this toward [ouatii], as well as as a bonus read for the [aac].
Pages read: 14,566
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Once Upon a Time II, Quin and Satterthwaite
March 22, 2008 at 10:54 am · Filed under Books Etc
What with reading my first book for this challenge yesterday, I completely forgot to post my list of books and actually, you know, sign up for the challenge. Once Upon a Time II runs for 3 months, from March 21 through June 20 (and links to reviews can be posted at the Review Site.) During that time, I will complete Quest the First by reading 5 books that fit the challenge’s criteria: fantasy, folklore, fairy tale, or myth. Since I already read a lot of fantasy, I want to choose books that specifically have a folklore, fairy tale, or mythic feel to them.
- Widdershins » Charles de Lint (myth)
- The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite » Agatha Christie (folklore)
- Beauty » Robin McKinley (fairy tale)
- Ironside » Holly Black (fairy tale)
- Sorcery & Cecelia » Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer (fantasy)
Tags: Book Lists, Once Upon a Time II
March 22, 2008 at 12:19 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
41. Widdershins by Charles de Lint (Urban Fantasy) 560 p.
I’d heard enough good things about Charles de Lint that when I got the chance to buy Widdershins, with its very attractive cover, at half off the remaindered price, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t know much about this book before I read it today, except that it was urban fantasy and part of a loosely-connected series of novels set in the imaginary North American city of Newford. I didn’t know how much I was going to love this book.
Actually, even after I started it, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it at all. The beginning, where a young Celtic fiddler named Lizzie is stranded by car trouble and has her first encounter with the magical world, caught my interest in a limited way. I liked Lizzie, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing a good bit more of her, but the point of view shifted in the next chapter, to a character I wasn’t nearly so interested in (although luckily Lizzie returned throughout the book.)
I’m not a fan of perspective shifts; they only work for me when I’m equally interested in all of the characters, and when the author resolves suspenseful episodes before skipping to another point of view. Charles de Lint doesn’t do that, unfortunately, and it continued to be something of a problem for me throughout the book—although less so as I got to know and be interested in more of his characters.
As Charles de Lint mentions in his author’s note, Widdershins was written partly because of requests from his fans that he write more about a particular character, Jilly, and show her getting together with her friend Geordie, since everyone but the two of them can see that they’re made for each other. I’m very grateful that de Lint didn’t limit the scope of his book to Jilly and Georgie, because I found them by far the least interesting characters in the book—especially when they were together! Maybe it’s because this book was written with established fans in mind, but there was a lot more telling than showing when it came to their personalities; I still don’t feel like I know much about the two of them beyond the things said by other characters in the book.
So I was reading along, mildly interested, but not enough to carry me through a 560-page book. The urban fantasy element wasn’t much different from other things I’d read, the plot wasn’t really going anywhere yet, and the characters weren’t wonderful enough to carry the story on their own. Then I got to page 111, and I started to sit up and take notice.
He was a curious little man, born a treekin—a kind of fairy about the height of a man’s knee, made of twigs and mulch and leaves and moss, all held together in the shape of a human body with a weaving of braided grasses and vines. Treekin needed to replenish their body parts from time to time—when a twig got old and chipped, or when a grass braid snapped and the press of leaves and moss that gave shape to limbs began to fall away. The materials they needed for repair were easy to find, even in a city, for there were always gardens and parks to plunder amongst the tall towers of concrete and steel.
But in the past few decades, many of the treekin began to utilize bits and pieces of electronics and computer parts for their repairs, metamorphosing over time into creatures made as much of wiring and circuitry as they were of organic material. Eventually, some, like Edgan, became creatures entirely made of synthetic castoffs; each techno treekin—as they came to be called—as individual as the materials they were able to scrounge. In Edgan’s case, he had a torso built up around a computer motherboard; his limbs and head were a complicated tangle of wiring and less identifiable objects, though his nose was certainly a spark plug and his eyes a pair of camera lenses.
He was in Computer World tonight because he’d recently seen another of the techno treekin sporting an iPod in the twisting snarl of wires that held her torso together, and he simply had to have one himself. He already had a PDA wired into his motherboard body—as well as a digital camera and a pair of cell phones—but its memory capacity couldn’t match the sixty gigabytes of the iPod. The iPod would be perfect for storing the data he pilfered from the Internet, but he also liked the shiny whiteness of its case for how it matched his spark plug nose.
I don’t know why, but that passage really appealed to me, and from that point on, I was fully engaged in the story Charles de Lint’s characters were telling me. In the end, it’s an intriguing one, about a potential war between the fairies, who came over from Europe with the first North American immigrants, and the Cousins, or First People, who were there before them. It’s also a story about hurt, malice, abuse, and vengeance, and how those things can keep hurting even after the fact. Ultimately, it’s about love and understanding, and about finding common ground. The message was a little heavy-handed, but the plot had a strong enough hold on me that I didn’t much mind.
There were a few other things I was going to mention that could have been better, but on the whole I loved the book so much I don’t want to add too many complaints to my review. Even characters I wasn’t very fond of at first tended to grow on me, and the majority are people I’d like to read more about. That’s why I’m going to end this on a positive note, with another quote (a short one this time!) Here’s an exchange between the crow girls that for no good reason had me in stiches:
“Don’t be rude,” she tells Zia.
“They’re not bribes?”
“Why would out veryvery good friends Geordie and Jilly ever need to bribe us?”
Zia shrugs. “So that we’ll behave?”
“Don’t mind her,” Maida says to me. “She was brought up in a tree by an old magpie.”
Pages read: 11,424
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Charles de Lint, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Newford, Once Upon a Time II
