Sweet Sugar

TL;DR - Cheryl Strayed is amazing.

I read Wild recently, and I loved it, and I can't wait to see the movie.  This brought me around to wanting to read Tiny Beautiful Things, which is a compilation of advice from her Dear Sugar column at the Rumpus.  I read the column when it was active, and I liked it but didn't love it.  Her advice is very internal, very much about encouraging people to be their best selves.  It felt vague and mushy to me; wasn't my favorite.

But after Wild blew me away, I decided I needed to go back to her advice. And it was well worth it; I don't know if I'm more mature emotionally or as a reader or if it's just having it all in one place, but this was such an amazing compilation. 

I love advice.  I love both the problems (drama!) and the solutions (tidy wrap-up!).  This is not advice that pays off in helping you to envision the end of each story by giving the asker a map of how to behave and others' likely responses.  This is more like what I'm looking for at this point in my life--advice on how to be a good person.  It's about how to take the messiness that is living and focus it, channel it toward something that is good and meaningful to you. 

Honestly, I don't know if I'm going to be a different person after this, but reading these essays, I believe I can.  Which is a really wonderful feeling. 

Cheryl Strayed, all the way. 

On Not Reading

Lately I've been doing this thing where, instead of reading books, I spend time online fiddling with book sites.  I go to the library and put something on reserve; I add something to Goodreads and read a review and look at a few top ten lists for the year.  I'm thinking about reading a lot more than I'm actually reading. 

I think it's overstimulation; my list of things I absolutely want to be reading right now is so long that I can't even approach it; it's like the time I literally walked in circles around my dorm room, getting distracted by one task every time I reached for another.  I put my hand on my laundry bag and spotted my textbook out of the corner of my eye, realized that was more urgent and picked it up, only to notice that there were dirty dishes underneath it, which is way too gross and should be taken care of before I sit down to do anything as committed as studying, but taking the dishes to the sink I walked past the object I had borrowed from someone up the hall and promised to return right away, shoot, better grab that, and I'll get the laundry in the washer while I'm out, except the textbook....

I think that's why I've been rereading; it keeps me from having to commit.  Every book I want to read is one that I really need to read. I've been putting off reading Raven Boys for years for no reason; I have an advance copy of Shadow Scale, which I've been DYING for since I read Seraphina two years ago.  There is a new Jo Walton on my kindle!  I just claimed Fool as my favorite book but haven't read the sequel!  There are a dozen other books and situations on this list.  My head is swimming.

And so I'm not reading.  I'm looking at the pile and feeling overwhelmed.  But no more.  Right now--right now--I'm going to open something up and just go.  I'll let you know what it turns out to be.

Anne of All the Things

I've been rereading the later Anne of Green Gables books; after the Christmas movie marathon, I realized I wanted to go back to Anne's big romances in Anne of the Island. Then I got swept along into Anne of Windy Poplars, and now I've been caught up in Anne's House of Dreams. Haven't read any of these books in years, and it's very interesting to come back to them, especially after watching the movie, floating in on memories of favorite bits.

The Island I loved as much as I remembered and expected to, mostly because, to me, it's all about Gilbert's friendship/love.  I think Anne's five proposals are delightful.  Ruby Gillis's goodbye is heartbreaking.  Patty's place is loveable, especially Aunt Jamesina.

But there were definitely some things that I noticed this time around that were interesting.  Phil Gordon, the conceited chatterbox, is really kind of irritating.  I didn't mind her as a character so much, and she speaks some important words of truth at least once in the book, but I absolutely don't understand what Anne sees in her--she's so full of herself and judgmental of others.

Also, a lot of the details about college are glossed right over--there's a lot of telling instead of showing.  The "showing" is always in the conversations between the girls, and with non-school related people, especially older ladies.  But every scene with Roy is one of telling, as is the whirl of social functions and the intensity of classes.  We don't even get a glimpse, just a summary of clubs, football games, dances, and evenings with friends.  Only the homely moments are painted.  If I didn't know better, I'd say this is a book about the university experience by someone who never had one; perhaps Lucy Maud Montgomery just didn't have the gay, delightful experience she imagined for Anne.

Windy Poplars (I don't know why they've got 12-year-old Anne in front of Green Gables on that cover) was full of delightful anecdotes, but my favorite parts were all about people besides Anne.  At the beginning of the book, the whole town is set against her (because she got a job that the ruling family wanted to go to one of their own), but she mops that up very quickly and the rest of the book quickly becomes the Anne Is Amazing Show.  Everyone loves her, every school child considers her a mentor, every young person confides their woes in her, and she goes around making matches between every pair of people she can.  It's kind of exhausting, and the format--letters to Gilbert interspersed with third-person chapters--makes it even more noticeable, as Montgomery's love of Anne starts to get conflated with Anne's own thoughts.

The other notable thing about this book is that it's absolutely full of pairs of old ladies living together.  The widows at Windy Poplars, the two sisters of Maplehurst, the grandmother and the Woman who live with Elizabeth.  Pairs of widows and spinsters abound here. I don't suppose it means anything; it's just an observation.

Finally, the House of Dreams, which I'm smack in the middle of.  Once again, I love the town and the secondary characters best.  Captain Jim is delightful, but I feel like I hardly know Gilbert at all.  He and Anne are described as taking long rambling walks and talking for hours, but we get so little of this, I can't really picture the shape of their marriage, which is really disappointing. 

And I can't help but imagine that coming out of three years as principal of a large school and Most Popular Young Woman in Summerside must make keeping house in lonely (if beautiful) Four Points Harbor seem kind of slow.  Gilbert's at work all day and Anne's in the kitchen?  I don't know that she's doing any writing or anything, and it makes me kind of sad.

There's such a sweet nostalgia in reading these again, and I've been trying to fill in the gaps of the day to day life of Anne and Gilbert with my imagination, but I'm not quite getting there.  It's sad, really. 

And I can promise that I won't reread Anne of Ingleside.  It took me decades to get around to that one, and I never got over the fact that Anne had all those kids but never took in an orphan.  The settled, staid Anne bears so little resemblance to the young charmer she was that I hardly knew her.  I suppose that's what growing up used to mean; very glad I never tried it myself.

Favorite Book

If you ask what my favorite book is, I usually roll my eyes.  How can a person answer that?  How do you compare Pride and Prejudice with Going Postal?  Is it the book I want to reread most often (The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp), or the one I think is most technically mind-blowing (Asterios Polyp), or the one that makes me think the most (The Sparrow)?

At some point in the past 20 years, I would have listed any of these books as my favorite, along with Clan of the Cave Bear, Shining Through, The Nun's Story, Cloud Atlas, and The Color of Light. I still enjoy all of these books, and at one time or another have loved them for a wide range of reasons.  But I just finished rereading Christopher Moore's Fool, and I think that if you made me pick today, my drop-dead, desert-island choice would be Pocket, Drool, Kent, Cordelia, mad King Lear, and the ghost (there's always a bloody ghost).

My original review was short and didn't say much besides how worried I'd been that I wouldn't like it. It's a crazy book, a fast-moving romp, full of vivid, disgusting imagery (mostly involving the genitalia of animals), wild coincidence, and lots of dirty sex.  I could see an argument to be made about there not being enough female characters, though I disagree--given the source material the women get their parts, and each one--from Shanker Mary the laundress to Bubble the cook to Rosemary the witch--is a separate character with an internal life, and if men spend a lot of time ogling them, they react differently and have their own feelings about it. 

Even Regan and Goneril are very different nasty pieces of work.  This read through, I was able to follow the action a little more carefully, and it was interesting to notice how much of the unpleasantness Pocket actually puts in motion himself, and how his motivations start and change.  There is a "sex scene" (the sex is offscreen) that could be problematic--probably is--but given the context, it didn't bother me at all.

Anyway, I'm trying to acknowledge the problems and holes (things like coincidences contrived by ghosts and witches, and motivations that change without changing the action) to acknowledge that it's probably not perfect, but I didn't notice that while I was reading it.  I loved Pocket's Vorkosigan-like ability to have a plan ready and to talk anyone into anything.  I loved his affection and protection of Drool, and Cordelia, and the Anchoress.  I loved that a lot of people have a lot of sex and that it's treated so lightly.  I loved Kent's loyalty.

And I think the part of this book that had me thinking, that gave it a real core that got at something interesting, was Lear himself.  Because not enough stories face up to ugly contradictions in a way that I find emotionally satisfying, and I feel like this one does.  I don't honestly remember how much of the detail of Lear's character--the backstory from his reign--come from the original Shakespeare and how much Moore looked up and how much he fabricated.  But Lear is simultaneously a great king who led his country well; a traitorous jerk who killed people for his political ends; a jealous, power-hungry despot who destroyed lives on out of pique or on a whim; a loving father who would wants his daughters' happiness above anything at all; a protective lord to Pocket himself. 

Pocket has to face all these Lears at once and to reconcile them.  He's lucky time and William Shakespeare made most of the decisions for him.

And the end!  Let's just say that a traditional tragedy is perhaps over-tragic, and that what it really needs is a happy ending.  Best. Ending. Ever.

So: if you ask me this week what my favorite book is, I have an answer for you.  Huh; how about that?

Webcomic in Print

I read a few webcomics, not a ton.  Some of them lend themselves more to publication in print than others.  There are sets of strips that remind me of hours I spent flipping through Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County as a kid--for this, I go to Kate Beaton or xkcd.  There are ongoing stories, graphic-novel-style; I follow a few of these online--Gunnerkrigg Court, Blindsprings.  Some of them might lend themselves to book form--I actually find that the density of spreading the pages out over days can get a bit confusing; I can't follow half of Blindspring because so much is hinted at.

Anyway, I had never heard of Katie Cook's Gronk: A Monster's Story before I saw the ARC listed on Netgalley, but when I saw the cover I had to read it.  Gronk is an adorable monster who hates living in the deep, dark, monstery woods, so she comes out to live with geek girl Dale and her cat, Kitty, and her dog, Harli.  Gronk loves cupcakes and nerd culture.  She's adorable.

Her comics are adorable, too. I read them to my six-year-old, and although he required some explanations, and missed out on my delight over Dale's geeky T-shirt collection, he was quite fond of them.  I personally love the big, sweet dog, Harli.  These are charming little comic strips.

I'm not sure they make a book, though.  A lot of them are one-panel gags--not slapstick, but funny or aw-shucks cute.  That's the kind of thing that reads better in a one-shot, right?  Where you're coming to it, getting your moment of zen, and then moving on with your day, rather than going from one moment of zen to the next till you're glutted with zen.

I read these with my son, who's 6.  He liked it, made me keep reading even when he didn't get all the references (he doesn't know Harry Potter yet), and loved the kitties.  Maybe, if I'd read it on my own, I would have dipped in and out in a way that was more conducive to enjoying it as it is.  Then again, since it was an ebook, it's not like I would have treated it like a coffee table book to dip into and out of. 

I've bookmarked Gronk, and I'm going to read every one from now on, so whether the book was the best introduction or not, it got me hooked.  I suppose that speaks highly of it!  Katie Cook, I like your taste in books.  And monsters.

Station Eleven: Better Than The Stand

I put that up front, because the basic outline of the end of the world in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is very close to Stephen King's The Stand: a supercharged flu virus sweeps the world and kills 99.9% of the population in a few weeks.  There's almost nothing else in common between the books, except possibly a fascinating attention to the detail of what it's like to be a survivor; still, it was enough for me to think that Station Eleven reads very much like Mandel read The Stand and asked, "why would you mess up this lovely story about humanity with some trumped up notions of good and evil?"

In fact, the notion that there is a Greater Purpose is exactly the opposite of what this book is about.  It's about how connections, explanations, and causation is not the same as meaning, purpose, or reason.  "Everything happens for a reason," says one character, coming across as vaguely New Agey.  When another character says the same thing 20 years later in a different world, it's ominous, and the heavier implications of that statement are much more clear.

It's a hard story to summarize, because it follows several characters in several time periods.  The lynchpin is Arthur Leander, a famous movie star with a preteen son, three ex-wives, and the role of King Lear in a new production. He dies in the first scene, not a victim of the flu, but of a standard heart attack.  It's tempting to map out how all the characters are related to him, but the truth is that it's both complicatedly interconnected and not particularly neatly tied up: Jeevan, a member of the audience who tries to save Arthur's life, used to be a paparazzo in LA and once took a picture of Arthur's first wife, Miranda.  Miranda was an artist who wrote a series of comic books that Arthur gave to a little girl in the play, Kristen.  Kristen survives the plague and, many years later, is an actress with a traveling symphony.  Clark was one of Arthur's oldest friends, but they drifted apart when they became famous.  Their stories intertwine, and the threads cross between the world before and the world after. 

The two stories that thread through this are Arthur's life, in the past, and an encounter between the Symphony and a town controlled by a dangerous religious zealot.  They are very different stories--the life of a man from a small town who becomes a movie star and a tense post-apocalyptic piece.  They are tied by the characters, but also by the notion that all stories are tied together somehow, that the threads that hold the world together are not big, important cords, but rather fine, delicate weaving, so interconnected that the tiny threads make strong cloth.  At least, that's what I think.

The other thing that I think this book is about is the question of whether to go forward or backward.  I'm going to get to this in my last discussion question below (really just a bulleted list of points; so much easier than having to segue between them!) but I think it's one of the core themes of the story and I want to bring it up.  This book is very much about the past versus the future, in some very complicated ways.

Okay, let's get to this.

1) Let's get this out of the way: the epidemiology here is sketchy, right?  If you look at the speed of infection and the speed of death, even with a 100% infection rate and a 100% mortality rate, it kills too fast to spread like this, right?  I mean, maybe that first plane could take out all of Toronto, but nobody sick makes it to the little backwater towns where no one's even passed through this month who's been on a plane.  So that's a little sketchy.  Which brings us to:

2) The loss of the infrastructure is what really brings us down.  How off-the-grid can you REALLY live?  Especially unexpectedly in the winter?  It definitely seems like things would stabilize eventually, but it makes you think about the supply chain for every single little thing around us.

3) There is a difference between a scarce-resource apocalypse and a resource-rich apocalypse.  Essentially, in some stories, most people die but the world remains--survivors have the leftovers and the same natural resources that were available 1,000 years ago.  In the other, the world has been ravaged, or civilization breaks down without killing most of the population, and suddenly supply and demand are off.  Very different end of the world books.

4) This makes for a fairly peaceful end of the world here, which I find kind of beautiful.  Life is not easy--there's little medicine, people die very easily--but starvation isn't the big killer.  By the time the canned food runs out, most people have figured out that they need a garden and to hunt.  People can be cautious instead of afraid.  I love this opportunity to glimpse this best side of humanity.

5) There is some discussion in the book of the right way to raise children in such a world; do you teach them about the past, and all the wonders they can't even comprehend?  Or do you let that die, teaching them only about the world around them?  The answer to this one seems obvious to me, but I think the emotional baggage of the past would play a bigger role when facing the question in reality.

6) Moments in the book that broke my heart or moved me or that I want to talk about: the house Kristen and August go into, where the parents are dead in their bed and the child dead in its own; the moment when Kristen realizes that she's about to die and everything becomes okay; Clark and Arthur going out to dinner; the museum.  No spoilers; just discuss.

7) What do you make of Miranda?  Kris didn't like her at all; I found her intriguing.  She was not someone I related to, but someone I recognized; wholly turned inward, with only the most tenuous connections outside herself.  Because it's what the world dictates, she follows those, and so she ends up in her relationship, in her job, married.  But her art, her story, is the only thing that's real to her.  She's unlike all the other viewpoint characters, though, and she breaks the pattern of who's included.  What do you think is the reason?  Does it have to do with her comics?

8) Don't you want to read her comics?  It sounds amazing, and beautiful, and complicated.  Maybe too heavyhanded a metaphor, but this ties back to the question of weather connection implies meaning: it's a similar story, but not a similar ending.

9) The big question in the story-within-the-story is about whether to go forward, into a dangerous and precarious unknown, or to try to go back to something that is ruined, and to make a life in those ruins.  I think this ties directly into all the different tensions in the story--the zealots, the question of how to raise the children.  Do you want to move forward, or do you want to move back?  Moving back isn't literally possible, of course, but clinging to the memories, living on them or against them, allows them to dictate your future. 

This post is ridiculously long, and I want to go on and on about that point--about how I think that concealing the past from the children is, counterintuitively, about clinging to he past.  Holding the past as history lets you move forward with hope and intent; hiding it as a secret makes it present and dangerous, keeps you living with it.  About how Arthur's life is all about moving forward--from his small hometown, out of college into acting, through three marriages.  About Miranda's forward motion in life, and how she brings what matters with her.  Clark and the Museum; the symphony and Shakespeare.  The zealots and the belief that the old world had to die for the new one to be born. 

It's silly to apologize; this post is no more a jumble than most of my posts.  But this book was amazing--I would never have believed it would work, and here it is, lovely and perfect, full of people doing the best they can--even the villains.  The more I think about it, the more I love it.  You should absolutely read it.

Monday's Lies

When I read Jamie Mason's first book, Three Graves Full, my response was wow, this is going to be a great writer; I can't wait to read what she does next.  I was SO excited to see her next book, Monday's Lie, when it showed up at Netgalley.  And while it wasn't quite the masterpiece I was hoping for, I'm watching her get better and better, and it's a really fun ride.

The pieces of this book are great. Our protagonist and narrator, Dee, was raised with her brother by a single mom, who was amazing.  She was a spy, and she taught her kids to be mini-Sherlock-Holmeses--observing everything, deducing everything.  She was smart and wise and loving, but her life was messy, and Dee has moved as far away from it as possible by marrying the most conventional man she could find.  She is determinedly normal.

There are sort of three converging parts of the story: flashbacks to Dee's childhood, including stories of her mother's adventures; the story of her marriage to Patrick and the normal, normal, normal life she's been working on; and the present moment, where she's driving somewhere to meet someone for we know not what till the climax of the book.

And here Jamie Mason does the same thing she did last time--she takes what is essentially one huge, ripping good scene, and builds a novel around the backstory of that scene.  Now, the backstory is great, but it's clearly backstory, even when it's shown instead of told.  Everything converges on the "present" moment, and the most detail and energy is put into it, but it's not the most compelling part of the story.

Her mother, Annette, is the most compelling part of the story.  I'm not an expert, and I have to assume Mason did her research, but the spy stuff seems really sketchy to me.  She's a single mom whose kids know she's a spy, but aren't supposed to tell the neighbors?  I mean, how is that secure?  She lives at home for months at a time and then goes off for days or weeks on missions, okay, but then there are also people coming to their house in the middle of the night doing shady business?  Is that how spying works?  It seems pretty unconvincing.

But Annette, with her sharp charm and cool wit, really makes the story.  Dee's life revolves around her--her mysteries, her lessons, her absences, her warmth--long after she's gone.  Dee's marriage is a direct reaction to her unconventional upbringing, and the cracks in her marriage show how, in trying to give her children something more than others have, Annette may have deprived them of basic lessons that most people take for granted.

I love a book about uncovering deception, about spying and poking around and figuring out what's really going on with people who are ostensibly being honest with you.  And that story was fine here.  But the place where this book succeeds is in being a book about mothers and daughters, and in that place it's excellent.  Keep 'em coming, Jamie Mason.

Returned!

I've been on vacation.  And book club is this week.  And I will have many things to say.

Right now, though, I have only a moment to say that my two favorite Anne of Green Gables books are Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars, I think, and that I'm rereading them and glad to do it. They make a very soothing break from the end-of-the-world story that is the excellent Station Eleven, which you might not want to read on an airplane.

Look for more later this week!

WORST ENDING EVER

I am so sorry to have to write this review. I wish I'd written it two days ago, when I was only 80% of the way through War of the Wives, by Tamar Cohen.  I had a lot of interesting things to say about this novel, the story of two women who find out, after the death of Simon Busfield, that they were both married to him.

It's a salacious setup, and I was looking forward to something very trashy, but what I got was actually kind of a thoughtful character study.  Told in alternating points of view by two very different characters, I felt like it was a much better portrait of Selina, who is older--posh, poised, superficial, and maybe rather shallow.  Lottie, who is flaky, artsy, and kind of a mess, seems to only half-matter; the rest of the time, she's there to show how Selina looks to the outside world.

Both women are pretty irritating in their own ways--I liked Lottie better from the beginning, just because she seemed more human and empathetic, but I think that made Selina more interesting to follow.  As she watches her life fall apart, we get to watch her both figure out what parts of her life actually mean something to her and which she just allowed to happen to her.  We also get her discover the internal lives of everyone she's been casually judging for so long.  It's really an interesting and worthwhile story, if a bit British with the aggressively superficial pretense of everything being fine in the face of a complete mess.

There's also a sort of subplot with a bit of mystery--shady business deals Simon may have been involved in, details about how he died, whether someone is threatening the families.  There's a lot of tension among the kids, which, again, is interesting to read about, if frustrating to watch Lottie fumble everything.

So, 95%, even 97% of a good book.  And then, literally in the last ten pages, A BUNCH OF RANDOM STUFF HAPPENS.  Like, someone turns out to be a murderer, which you find out through the recitation of a stereotypical Bad Guy Monologue.  While there is appropriate setup of this character being sketchy (just the right amount; the setup is well done), it's like the book had to be ended very suddenly.  Oh, plus, it turns out there are TWO crazy people who don't seem crazy until the very last minute--the VERY last. 

So then, we get the scary confrontation scenes, the bad guy announcing their evil to the narrator, who is trapped in a small room with them and scared.  And then....cut to the epilogue, which takes place five months later.  Everything has sorted itself out, and the characters have a bunch of expository conversations revealing what's happened in the past few months, and then the book ends. 

I cannot express the sputtering outrage that I felt at the ending--it was poorly planned, poorly constructed, poorly executed, poorly timed, poorly paced.  The last 10 pages are flawed in every conceivable way.  I don't think I've ever read a book that needed 40 more pages before, but here it is. 

Now is the part where I explain that I got a free copy of this from Netgalley for review.  I hope I don't have to say that it's an honest review.  I don't write many horrible reviews of advance copies, because I don't finish them when I don't enjoy them.  But I enjoyed this one quite a bit. 

Except.

Sigh.  Well, now I'm turning to L.M. Montgomery for consolation; a reread of Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars is in order, as a palate cleanser.  Not a bigamist or murderer to be had in the Maritimes, no sirree.

King Again

I'm not going to go on too long.  I know you've heard it before.  You've even heard before how you've heard it before.  But I can't read a Stephen King book without saying it again and again--get an editor, man!  I mean, if only because this short story (which is how it's billed) is 240 pages long.

So the book is called A Good Marriage, and there's nothing new here.  As always, the premise is interesting--a 40-something woman goes digging in her husband's workbench for batteries while he's out of town and discovers the driver's license of a woman who's on the news as a missing person.  That's almost all I know; it's pretty early on. 

Now, I've thought a lot about what I'd do in her situation, and I have to say, no offense to my wonderful husband, but I'd call the cops.  I mean, either he did it--which, I wouldn't believe that, but if it's true, you want that out of the way--or he didn't, in which case someone else put it there.  Someone's been in your house.  Seriously, ladydude, you need the police.

But I suspect this is going to turn into a mano-a-wife face off kind of thing, which would be more interesting if the only thing isolating her with the killer wasn't the fact that she's not going to the police.

All of this is guesswork so far, of course, and the fact that my guesswork and expectations are so annoying says a lot about how I feel about Stephen King at this point in my life. 

But what I really feel is Jesus man, you need to learn some new writerly tricks.  Because I'm so tired of the random catchphrase that someone remembers at an inopportune moment that then keeps flashing through their head at odd, punctuating junctures.  I'm very tired of how, in trying to make his characters normal, he makes them seem boring, as though the inner lives of the people around us were as pedestrian as their outsides appear.  Or maybe more to the point, I'm annoyed with how his women always have this non-person feeling to them, this uncomplicatedness, whether they're being heroic or victimy.

I don't know why I still pick these up.  I blame The Stand, which was amazing, even if it had every single one of his problems, from Madonna/whore female characters to catchphrases to bloat.  Or, heck, maybe I'd hate that if I read it now; maybe I've outgrown him.  Either way, next time I reach for one of these, someone please stop me and hand me something by Sarah Waters, or Aliette de Bodard, or even Joe Hill.  Anything, really.  Thank you.

Gone Wild

I really didn't expect to like Wild.  Why?  I used to read Strayed's Dear Sugar column at The Rumpus, and if I thought it was a bit verbose for my taste, I couldn't help but admire the true empathy and compassion of the writer.  She told a lot of personal stories, and she used metaphors with a lot of emotional resonance--something that doesn't usually work with me, but somehow made the same advice that anyone rational would give--you need to leave him; you have to forgive her; you must love yourself--feel much more solid that you'd expect.  She acknowledged how hard a lot of these simple prescriptions are, and she talked a lot about the emotional work involved in following through with them.

But--hiking.  A soul searching journey through the mountains.  I expected this book to be like listening to a bunch of John Denver songs in a row--mostly about being one with the earth, and best done when a little stoned. 

Somehow Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern talked me into reading the book.  The movie looked a little more whimsical, and Laura Dern's appearance in the ads emphasized the relationship with her mother.  Her mother's death is something Dear Sugar talked about a lot--how losing her mother at the age of 24 completely changed her life, threw her for a loop that led to a lot of self-destructive behavior and eventually a lot of wisdom.  I liked that emphasis in the trailers.

So I picked up Wild, and I'm kind of shocked that I loved it.  First off, Strayed can write.  Look, I really, really hate mushy, spiritual, what-life-really-means insights.  I don't like generalizations about spirituality or Truth or the state of one's mind and emotions.  I like concrete specifics.  And here, Strayed dealt with abstracts through concrete specifics, and also blew the straight-abstract stuff out of the water.

Okay, what do I mean?  (Seriously, you're talking about specifics, Sharon, be specific.)  Okay, most of the actual book is spent on the trail.  It's about the days of putting one foot in front of the other, and much of that time is spent on the small facts of hardship, deprivation, exhaustion, solitude, and unpreparedness.  It's a nitty-gritty how-to, only mostly a how-not-to, since she wasn't as prepared as she could have been.  Much more time is spent on the tangible than on the intangible.

But at the same time, this is definitely about the emotional aspects of the journey.  It is not about beautiful views, and she only communes with a couple of animals.  Her mother is tied through the story with memories, anecdotes, and explanations of what Cheryl herself is thinking about.

There's definitely a metaphorical element to the story; that would be hard to avoid.  From the backpack so heavy she literally couldn't lift it at first to the shoes that are too small no matter how much she insists that they're right, there are clear parallels between the internal and external journey.  Between the detailed descriptions of boredom and stupidity at the beginning and the smooth, clear sailing near the end, the writing style definitely captures the sense of both her physical and emotional journey.  But it doesn't club you over the head.

Essentially, you can't pick apart the hiking story and the emotional journey.  Neither is slave to the other, and both are engrossing and incredibly touching and left me so empathetic to this experience I've never had.  I understand the desire to pitch everything to try to get rid of your ugly baggage.  I'm proud of her for taking on this overwhelming task without being adequately prepared for it.  I know the scrambling sense that if you just try hard enough, you'll be able to hold together the sandcastle that's coming apart in the relentless tide.

And now I kind of want to go hiking.

Gillian Flynn Complete

I have now officially read all three Gillian Flynn novels published so far.  (Doffs cap for applause.)  Thank you, thank you.

Sharp Objects was, I believe, her first novel, and I'll start out by saying that while it's readable and engrossing, it's not as good as her others.  Dark Places is, I think, by far the best, though Gone Girl takes the prize for wildest reveal and messed-uppest characters. 

I feel like I'm starting with the bad news, but really, I guess that's because it's not very bad.  I mean, the fact that her other books were better doesn't make this book anything but good.  As with the others, the hardest part is the sheer unpleasantness that Flynn is so good at--discomfort and ugliness, pathos and awkwardness. 

Camille has escaped the one-horse town of Wind Gap where she grew up miserable, and now she's a journalist in Chicago--if not successful, then at least working.  But now two little girls have been murdered in that tiny town, and Camille has been sent to report on it.  This puts her face to face with high school frienemies, her estranged mother, and a decades-younger sister she barely knows.  Camille's investigation of the murders and her involvement with one of the detectives parallels her growing tension with her family and her inability to hold it together.

Camille is not a healthy person, in about a million ways, but she's a great protagonist.  She's such a mess; she vacillates between going along with whatever she's pointed at and fighting against everyone around her.  She's hurting all the time, but she doesn't complain about it; you can just feel it come off the page in her drinking, in her bad choices, and even in her determined attempts to do her job and solve the murders.

The town is almost unbelievably oppressive, between the dead-end jobs, the horrifying hog-slaughter plant, various gaggles of frenemies, and Camille's bizarre family, who if I had read Faulkner I would probably call Faulknerian. A distant, prim father figure, an ultra-feminine mother who alternates between distant and doting, and a spoiled child who demands to be petted and drinks too much.  It's a strange, ugly story--almost too ugly, and almost too obvious in its ugliness. 

But Camille, who's trying so hard, even when she doesn't know how to do more than get out of bed in the morning, is the right protagonist for this place.  You can see how she came from here, and how in a horrible way she belongs here, but you want her to get out so badly.  Only in this book could I root for Camille.

So, what do I think of Gillian Flynn's third best book?  Mostly it makes me desperately want her next book to come out, because even with its flaws, I want more.  That counts very much as a thumbs up.

Summary Season

It's blog round-up season, where we count out how we did last year and name our favorite books.  And I've been offline for weeks (well, mostly) and have not even started, so you'll have to wait, just like everyone on my Christmas card list, and also sometimes the credit card company when I forget they exist.

So, to get myself back into the swing of things: some fun things I've been enjoying from around the internet lately.  I'll get back on the horse this week with a couple of reviews I've had in my back pocket, and I'll try to do a year in review before 2016.

You know which bloggers kill me, though?  The Book Smugglers.  They bring in all these guest authors to give you their Best Of lists for the year, and now my to-read has grown, like, offensively long, whereas before it was just troublingly long, or maybe just mind-blowingly long.  Their month of Smugglivus posts have buried me in book hunger, but I'll just link give you the one link to their own Year's Best list, because I think it's fairly representative of the feeling of "Yeah, I want to read that....and that...and that....and ALL THE BOOKS!!!" that I get from the internet nowadays.

At Tor.com (what deliciousness isn't?), Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer is doing a reread of the original Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, which (the reread) is a delightful geekout on how simultaneously hokey and satisfying those books are.  One of the entries is called "Valdemaran Public Health and Epidemiology."  Enough said, except that I think I love you, Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer, and I know you live in Eastern Massachusetts so call me, 'kay?

This one almost counts as a mini-review, because I just read Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang's In Real Life, and I have nothing to say except exactly what the Book Smugglers said, every word of it.  With underlining on the "convenient ending" and "white savior" parts of the article.  It was fun to read and the illustrations were absolutely lovely but BLARGH.  (Aarti's brief review also linked back to TBS; I think they dealt with this very comprehensively.)

Oh, there's so much more, but I have to go to work in the morning.  Welcome to 2015, everyone!

Christmas Book

I don't read a lot of holiday themed books--I enjoy the holidays a lot, but that enjoyment feels very personal to me, and I don't really relate to the generic heartwarming thing that go into holiday-focused stories.  What feels universal is the stress, which I also feel, and which drives me so far, far away from wanting to read about it.  Let's not talk about all the holiday things I haven't done yet.

And book club never meets in December.  We tried this year, though!  And we picked Wishin' and Hopin', by Wally Lamb,

Yeah...not so much.  This book is the literary equivalent of the movie A Christmas Story, which I hate.  It's for people who are nostalgic for the '50s (to the extent that they extended into the '60s).  It's a great book to give to your father-in-law if he's a certain type of father-in-law.  My dad might like it, because it's about nostalgia for being a ten-year-old boy in an innocent world (and the world is innocent--there's only one black kid at this Catholic school in Connecticut, but he seems to suffer no prejudice.  The Russian girl gets a lot, but she can take it.)

It's also like a grown-up's version of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which there doesn't need to be.  I mean, aside from a couple of dirty jokes that the narrator doesn't understand, there's nothing here that's any more complicated than in that kids book. 

So, yeah.  It's not that the book wasn't well-written, or amusing, but that there was no substance to it, and that the point of it is that life was pretty good back then, though maybe the nuns were stricter than they needed to be.  Big ball of meh.

Godling Watch

You may recall that I loved N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy.  It's come out as an omnibus (I also love omnibi!), and to with it we have a new novella set in that world: The Awakened Kingdom.  Thanks to Netgalley for a review copy.

As I mentioned, I loved these books.  They're complex but comprehensible, and they deal with some really intricate stuff--how would gods living incarnate interact with human beings?--without getting too abstract or too preachy.  Each book was close enough that they felt very cohesive as a trilogy, but they were not exactly sequels--not only were the main characters different, but they told about the same overarching world events from very different points of view, which prevented any of the standard trilogy things from happening (weak second book, awkward segues between them, etc.).

This novella also takes place quite a long time after the original series, and the narrator is a new godling, just born.  In fact, the language, attitudes, and behavior of the narrator change dramatically over the course of the book, as her vocabulary and understanding of the world increases; I can see how the beginning would be distracting, because the voice is so childish.  I didn't find it to be distracting, though--I actually thought the balance between vocabulary and understanding was quite artfully done, so there's that.

The newest godling, Schill, travels to the land where Yeine was born, hundreds of years after she became one of the Three, to learn more about mortals and to find her nature.  (This story is all about finding your nature.  You might say this theme was laid down a little heavy-handedly.)  She finds the land of Darre has become an oppressive matriarchy, with the rights of men severely curtailed and their humanity constantly questioned. 

This, too, might be seen as heavy-handed; some of these scenes appear almost exaggerated, with men being ignored and their beauty being discussed and their inability to be rational debated and women treating them roughly.  At first I thought some of these scenes were clunky, but if you twist them and rewrite them so the women are wearing carefully described robes and behaving modestly and the men are lecturing them, you realize that it's actually not heavyhanded at all--neither the behavior nor the writing.  If the roles were reversed, I wouldn't have noticed that the scene existed. 

This is pretty powerful, and if you came to me with the argument that this is an Issue book, I wouldn't be able to tell you you're wrong.  But because of Jemisin's care with character, because of her gorgeous depiction of cultures and subcultures and politics (national and familial), because of Shill's childlike straightforwardness and fast-developing wisdom, it's a lot more than that. 

I think the only criticism that I would actually level is that the book is structured into two halves, really, and the first one didn't have much at stake.  In the first half our narrator is born, and tries to find her place, and realizes all the impediments to this that she faces.  And it's interesting, and we like her and want her to succeed, but there's no risk, no tension, and no stakes.  The first half mostly takes place in the gods' realm, where time doesn't mean much, and power is so real and visible that it's not really something anyone is struggling with.  So while I loved the world- and character building going on here, it felt kind of weak to me.

When Shill's travels bring her to Darre, we being to get entangled in mortal politics, and we meet Eino, and things begin to feel more urgent, because there are now lives at stake.  Query Shark is always telling me that it's all about stakes, and it's true that without them, there's tension missing. 

As for the end--it fit with the story, and it was satisfying on some levels, but on others, it was a little out of left field.  I feel like Shill's path was perfect, but Eino--I think I needed Eino's story to fit together a little more tightly.

But reading about Yeine and Itempas and Naha and their children and their world--it's always a delight.  It's not without flaws, but it was a pleasure to read, and I can't ask for a lot more than that.

Under the Skin Before the End

That's an odd title for a post.  Let me clarify right away: this book, Under the Skin, by Michel Faber, is crazy and weird and fascinating, and I'm almost to the end but I want to talk about it SO MUCH.  I know myself; I need to write the post before I get to the end or there is no chance that I will say all the things I want to say. Therefore, this post.

The first thing I have to say about this book is that there's a reveal, kind of.  I mean, it's not a twist ending, but when the book opens, you don't quite know what's going on, and that's a huge part of the experience of the book.  So I'm going to talk about the book in two stages; in the second half, there will be spoilers.  I'll warn you when that happens.

As the book opens, Isserly is driving around rural Scotland hoping to pick up a hitchhiker. She's pretty anxious about it, actually--stressed, excited.  She wants one with broad shoulders.  She's got a system.  She's done this before.

Already, something is clearly a bit off.  At this point, you're intrigued in a horribly voyeuristic kind of way.  Does she have some sort of sexual compulsion?  Is she an axe-murderer?  You're pretty sure it's one of those.  You're looking for clues--how she pictures them, what she's looking for, the subtleties of the language.  The narrator is third person, but we're tight inside her thoughts, but this is just a normal day for her, so there's no explanation.  We're looking for clues.

Gradually, across dozens of pages, multiple scenes, I started to have suspicions.  I can honestly say there was no one moment when I knew what was going on.  Suspicion grew to a firm theory grew to real comprehension.  This reveal, this uncertainty, looks easy, but has to have been incredibly tricky to craft.

Okay, before we go to the spoilery part, let me just say that I just looked this up and realized that this author wrote The Crimson Petal and the White, which I've never read but have heard of.  This is fascinating to me, though I'm not sure why, or what it means.

One other thing before you stop reading (which you should because of the spoilers): they made this a movie, with Scarlett Johansson.  I have no idea how they did that.  It looks very stylish, which actually bugs me, because the book is not stylist.  It's very naturally written, very simple in its use of language, structure, everything.  This is deceptive about it, but it's also what allows it to get at the ideas it's trying to get at--style would take away from the real human core of this, and so I cannot see how the movie could do the ideas justice.  And the plot is kind of meaningless without the ideas.

Anyway, fair warning: you do NOT want to read the rest of this post if you are interested in the book.  Actually, you know what?  Go read the book and the come back to the post.  Because the unfolding is really half of the thing.

Here we go.

Time to leave.

Seriously.

So this book is about what makes us human, what makes one a person instead of a creature.  You could look at it from an overly simplistic point of view and say it's about animal rights and vegetarianism, but I don't think that's really the point.  I mean, all those points are contained in the actual main point here, which is that we define what life is worth, what an entity is worth, by some yardstick that we hold for what humanity is.

I'm not explaining this well.  But it's complicated to explain, which is why it kind of takes a novel to do.  Isserly's attitude toward vodsels made me think of colonialism, and the notion that "we" are civilized and "they" are barbarians, because of some arbitrary list of things that we have and they don't.  (I'm picturing an Englishman in a uniform with a walrus mustache mansplaining this to a lady with a parasol, FYI.)  So we have monogamy and corsets and chairs, so we are civilized, but they have none of these things, and so are savages.  And this is nonsensical, right?  Completely ludicrous.

But.  But then you go from the civilized/savage spectrum to the human/inhuman one.  This is a line that has always been blurred in the minds of people who are invested in the former spectrum.  (Note: I am working pretty hard not to start talking about race and social justice, because I am not currently coherent on the subject.  But if you notice how those topics relate to this review, rest assured that this is very much on my mind as I write this.)  And you can approach it from another point of view: what makes an animal--an intelligent social animal, like a gorilla or a dolphin--less a person than a human?

I think that most of us would end up saying language.  I don't know enough about animals to say whether this should change our thinking about dolphins, gorillas, or prairie dogs, but I do know that this book puts the question front and center. Isserly speaks the vodsel language, but it doesn't change her feelings.  But she hides the fact of that language from the soft-hearted Amliss Vess--the perfect picture of a rich kid liberal--because she knows it means something.

There is so much going on here, and it's late and I can't write much more.  But there are issues of class--being forced into the underground Estates, spending most of your income on your oxygen and water rations, and never seeing the sky; physicality--how much of who you are is your body, and when beauty doesn't fulfill its promises, and how looking different separates you (and here I'm thinking about the movie Avatar and the book Eva); freedom--what would you give up, what would you do, if your choices were the Estates or the Scottish coast? 

It's not even that I want to talk about the book, but that the book makes me want to talk about all these things, about what makes us human, and about what makes life worth living.  This is why I have a blog.  But even if you haven't read it, if you want to have a drink and talk about the meaning of humanity, please let me know.  I'm all in.

Kieron Gillen Round Up

Who is Kieron Gillen, you ask?  I did, too, when I started reading The Wicked + The Divine. Turns out, though, that I had two of his books from Netgalley, both just because they looked interesting.  (I'm kind of a Netgalley addict.  It can be a real problem for me.)  Anyway, they're very different and really good, and I think together they make a pretty good primer on KIeron Gillen, Comics Writer.

The Wicked + The Divine, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie Mckelvie, is a recent publication; the comic is on something like its seventh or eighth issue, and the first collection is just coming out.  There's something very up my alley about this one.

This is a book about pop stars, fame, and the cult of celebrity--literally. Once every century or so, twelve gods take human form.  They actually take it--each one inhabits a living person, usually a young adult, and those people live for a short period as the god (two years, I think?) and then die.  It's a high price and a crazy ride, and it comes with adoring fans, two sets of memories (human and god), and adoring fans.

The main character is Laura, a girl who is a kind of groupie, and she takes up with Lucifer (who embodies a crisply classy woman).  But things get complicated when assassins pop up, Lucifer is accused of murder, and the gods are turning on each other.  Their relationships are complicated, their personalities intense, and their motives vague.  Laura's trying to track down who's setting Lucifer up, and getting in deeper and deeper with these rock star immortals.

So I like Laura a lot--I mean, she's kind of an annoying teenager, but she's supposed to be, and you can see her trying to be more grown up, but not quite able.  And Lucifer is amazing--all the gods, really, are incredibly charismatic, even on the page.  In the story, they have a powerful, indefinable draw for people, but even as simple characters, each one just projects such personal competence, such perfect themself-ness (what is the word I want?) that they are intriguing.  Amaratsu is good, and loving, and friendly.  Lucifer is funny, and cynical, and razor sharp.  Baal is about power; the Morrigan is about madness. 

Okay, here's the flaw--there are way too many of them.  Very few of the names are familiar, and several are long and contain many of the same letters.  I'm supposed to be following conversations about the personal politics of characters I haven't seen or met, can't even quite pronounce, and don't know anything about.  I'm confused, is what I'm saying.  I'm able to keep going anyway, and the bigger plot points make sense even if you don't follow it, but it's kind of frustrating that I can't quite follow it.  I'm holding out a lot of hope that more volumes will give me more room to learn the characters.

Three, by Kieron Gillen, Ryan Kelly, and Jordie Bellaire, has some of the same issues, especially the shallow one of everyone's names being complicated and hard to remember (place names, too).  That's because it takes place in Sparta.  There's an added layer here that The Wicked + The Divine didn't have, though, which is that all these Spartans look exactly alike--same hair, similar faces, same EXACT armor.  So yeah, it's not entirely my slow-wittedness that keeps em from telling them apart.

There's also a lot of history to learn here, and since this is kind of a side story that takes place during 300, it's a very different view of Sparta.  So much of the story revolves around history, though, that there's a certain amount of info-dumping that goes on, and I think the story that's here would have benefited a bit from being spread out more, so it could focus more on the people involved, instead of making them game pieces that illustrate their time and place.

Helots are lower than slaves--if you ever wondered how you can have a society that's ALL WARRIORS ALL THE TIME, it's because there are helots doing everything else.  They're considered inhuman; periodically strong helots are slaughtered just to keep them from rebellion.  Anyway, there is a massacre, and three helots end up on the run, while a troop of 300 Spartans is sent to chase them down and administer justice.

The story of the three runaways is great, and I wish I'd had a little more time with them.  Things felt a bit rushed, and what could have been subtle was painted in broader strokes.  The stories of the Spartans who follow them are probably more interesting, but this is where I got confused--there are two kings of Sparta, apparently?  And they answer to some other body? There's some political stuff that means an important guy ends up going after them; he's clearly got a complicated life thing going on, and I followed none of it, and I'm disappointed because I think it would have been worth it.

So, yes, this was a very good story that would have been better for a deeper, more robust telling, and for a chance to build the world more gradually.  Or maybe it would have been better for my having seen the movie 300.  That could be it.

I'm definitely going to read volume 2 of The Wicked + The Divine, though.  

Christmas for Your Budding Bookworm

Bookworm or geek!  We're building a geek here.  I don't imagine you need toy recommendations--my son found a toy catalog in the mail and meticulously circled 95% of the items in it.  Toy ideas are easy.

But books!  The problem is that to find good books, you have to have read the books, and who has time to go around reading kids' books ahead of reading them to the kid?  So here are some ideas for books your kid might enjoy if they're anything at all like mine--which is to say, 5 or 6 years old and loving a big adventure story.

Superheroes
Adam's way into all things superhero.  Marvel, DC, you name it.  It's not always easy to stay age appropriate in this realm, but there is some good stuff out there.

Tiny Titans, by Art Baltazar and Franco.  Volume 1 is called Welcome to the Treehouse, but they are all wonderful.  All the sidekicks of the DC universe--Robin, Kid Flash, Beast Boy, Supergirl, Speedy, Raven--all hang out in a treehouse and go to a school where benign supervillains are the teachers.  There's nothing scary here--it's all about adventures of being a kid.

Calling All Super Friends, by Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela, and Stewart McKenny. This is the first in another series--the grown up DC heroes face some kid-appropriate baddies, like Kanjar Ro and his gong that turns all people into animals!  (Spoiler: the Super Pets save the day in that one.)

Power Pack, by Marc Sumerak and Gurihiru. Volume 1, The Kids Are All Right. Adam loves this stuff, tells me all the jokes right after.  The four pre-teen superheroes team up with Marvel favorites for kid-friendly adventures.  This one you might want to look at if you're worried about scariness levels--they have real adventures.  But it's definitely going to be the best Wolverine comic for a six year old, I'll tell you that.

Other Comics
Superheroes are Mike's domain; other comics are more my thing.  These are my absolute favorites; Amulet I actually started reading by myself, and Adam ended up looking over my shoulder till we were reading it together.

Amulet, by Kazu Kibuishi.  If you don't have a kid, put this one on your own wish list. Emily discovers she's a Stonekeeper, which gives her special powers but also demands great sacrifices.  She faces adventures with her brother Navin by her side, along with an amazing cast of robots, anthropomorphic animals, and sometimes their mom.  It's grand and epic and gorgeous.  So far there are six volumes in what I've heard will be a nine-volume series.

Zita the Space Girl, by Bet Hatke.  An absolute freaking delight.  Zita is friendly and impulsive and so, so brave, and when her friend Joseph is in trouble, she dives into a wormhole to rescue him and finds herself on a strange world of creatures and robots.  She gains allies and has adventures!  There are some scary bits, but mostly it's girl power and robots.

Missile Mouse, by Jake Parker.  The only drawback here is that there are only two volumes--this is some rip-roaring adventure, with a galactic superspy named Missile Mouse who gets himself into all kinds of trouble, and out again.  This one, unlike the others mentioned above, is very much a shoot-em-up, and there are laser blasters everywhere--but, of course, only in the best possible way.

Picture Books
This is the category that's easiest to give if you don't know kids, or don't know the particular kids you're giving to very well.  These choices are guaranteed winners--gorgeous, adorable, fun books that I promise the kid will love.


Julia's House for Lost Creatures, by Ben Hatke.  By the author of Zita the Spacegirl, this is an adorable book about a girl who, when she's lonely, puts out a sign to invite lost creatures into her  house.  The creatures are adorable, their problems are charming, and I just want it to have a dozen more pages of illustrations.

Max's Castle, by Kate Banks.  This was a recent library find, and a lucky one.  Max and his brothers build a castle out of their alphabet blocks, and everything that happens in the castle is made up of letters, from the DRAGONS to (with a few blocks rearranged) the DUNGEON.  They get in trouble and out of it with their alphabet blocks (they turn a dangerous SPEAR into some delicious PEARS), and my beginning reader had a great time seeing the connections of the sounds.  Definitely one for kids who are sounding things out.

Elephant and Piggie, by Mo Willems. There are a dozen of these books, and they're all hilarious.  They're easy to read and the drawings are so simple, but there is SO MUCH emotional complexity in there, and the reading becomes a delightful performance.  Most of them make me laugh out loud, but Adam's current favorite is A Big Guy Took My Ball.  I like We Are in a Book! because it's so meta, and I think There Is a Bird on Your Head! is my favorite, but I Am Invited to a Party gets quoted the most often around our house (we must be ready!).

Whew!  This barely scratches the surface; there are runners-up in all these categories, including Superman Family Adventures, by Art Baltazar and Franco (by the team that brought you Tiny Titans); Bone, by Jeff Smith (I recommend the colorized version); and anything else by Mo Willems, especially Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator!  Plus I didn't even get into chapter books, since we've had somewhat uneven results there--though I highly recommend Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin.

So go forth and buy books for children!  Buy them by the pile--parents love gifts that are quiet and don't need batteries or take up a lot of room.  Enjoy the giving season!

Memory Lane

I don't get to do much rereading; it used to be one of my favorite things, but now that they've invented the internet, I know way more about what's coming out ahead of time, and now that I have an e-reader, I get my hands on things fast, and there's just no stopping me.

But Open Road Media has rereleased Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, and they generously gave me a review copy.  I've wanted to reread this specific book for a while; I had pulled my paperback out of wherever it was hiding and put it on my "active" shelf.  Synchronicity.

Have you read this book? I remember loving it, and finding it a little confusing, but that was true of a lot of things I read as a teenager.  Since then, I've read a lot more Robin McKinley and developed a very clear sense of her writing style--it's very high fantasy, with archaic sentence construction and a great deal of royal formality.  There is a lot more explanation of what takes place than there is dialog or scenes unfolding; it is as if the author is writing you a letter explaining what happened, in plenty of detail and appropriately paced, but with circumstances often explained in summary.

This sounds bad; it's not.  She pulls it off.  A full 80% of this book was absolutely wonderful as I'd remembered it.  And the confusing part...was still confusing.

But now I understand why it's confusing, and I can explain it.  The first half of the book is about Aerin not fitting in.  She's the king's daughter, but she's different from her family--her mother was a foreigner, a witch-woman, and Aerin shows no sign of the powers that run in the royal family.  She has only one friend, her older cousin Tor, and she's tormented by her other cousins.  She spends a lot of time with her father's old out-to-pasture horse, and reading.

She starts to find a place for herself when she makes herself a dragon-killer--though the only dragons that are still in the kingdom of Damar are small, they're dangerous, and she learns to fight them and finally become useful.  But when the Great Dragon awakes--unheard of for hundreds of years--she is overmatched.

So that's the first half of the book, and it's sooooo good.  It's about insecurity, and how it can keep you separate from people who love and cherish you, and it's about finding yourself, and it's full of good details about how Aerin struggles to shape a life that fits both her and the world she belongs to but doesn't belong to.

Then the book changes, and she goes on a quest.  And she learns more about herself, and that maybe there are other places where she might fit, and that's excellent.

And then.  And then there's this weird interlude where she has to face a Big Bad Guy, and this part reads like an odd fairy tale, and I could nitpick why this part bothered me, but mostly it's because it comes out of nowhere and is like a long dream sequence, which really removes a lot of the menace and immediacy.  The bare facts of the incident are effective, but I found it more confusing than anything else, almost like a page that tied in from another book and had to read a certain way to match the facts.

And then, after this, we go back to the story we were reading, where the two parts of Aerin--the one that belongs to Damar and the one that does not--have to find a way to live with each other, and to find a life that works for her.

So you've got more than half of a very good book, a weird little fourth act, and then a really lovely, satisfying ending.  And it's enough--I love this book, and I love Aerin and Tor and Luthe and Arlberth and Teka and Talat, and I love to hate Galenna.  It's beautiful, and if it's still a little confusing, I would take twice the confusion for another dozen pages, for an epilogue one hundred years later.

Which is probably why I now need to go reread The Blue Sword.