meganbmoore | (no subject)

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Some "possibly to check out later" results of a brief random fit of restlessness and access to amazon.com, pretty much to remind myself to check them out at some point, though any opinions are always welcome(why do you think I always post book lists?) Mostly upcoming YA fantasy.

Fate - Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Golden - Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The Abhorsen Trilogy Box Set - Garth Nix
The Forest of Hands and Teeth - Carrie Ryan
Magic Lost, Trouble Found (Raine Benares, Book 1) - Lisa Shearin
Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception - Maggie Stiefvater
Book of Shadows: Book One (Sweep) - Cate Tiernan
In the Serpent's Coils (Hallowmere) - Tiffany Trent

*also notes that the MMPBs of the second and third of Michelle Sagara's Elentra books just came out*

Also, has anyone seen Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day? it's one of those I meant to catch in theaters but never did, and I don't remember anyone ever commenting on it.

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The only one out of that list that I've read is the Old Kingdom stuff by Garth Nix. However, I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, and coming from someone who tends to bounce hard on a lot of high fantasy written in the last thirty years, that really says something.

chomiji and

redbrunja are both big fans of the books, if you want more perspectives on it.

Sabriel is more self-contained; you could read it and put it down and feel the ending was nice and complete. Lirael and Abhorsen, OTOH, you'll be glad you have the box set because the first one leaves you with a lot of plot threads open that will send you scrambling to the next for resolution. (Across the Wall, if you're wondering, only has one self-contained story set in the Old Kingdom, and the rest of the pieces therein are not set in that universe. It's a cute story, but unessential reading, for completists only I'd say.)

I enjoyed all three of them very much; I deeply appreciated that the world-building was not the sort of third-generation blurry Xerox of Tolkien filtered through D&D that turned me off the genre years ago, and that the language did not put me right out of it by feeling too contemporary to strike a faintly mythic tone, nor too faux-antiquated in the way that often seems to happen when modern writers try and fail to give a feel of Ye Olden Days without having the linguistic chops to make it feel seamless. The magical system, monsters, and races of this world are original and interesting, and the world-building is nicely understated; there's enough to give you a sense that this world has a long history of it's own, but it's never unnecessarily info-dumped in that sort of "Tolkien had appendices so I'm gonna throw in a whole lot of stuff, too" way.

I get the impression that the first book is generally the more popular of the two -- I liked it a great deal, and it is much more of a classic heroic-fantasy sort of narrative, but personally I found Lirael (both the book and the character) to be much more deeply emotionally resonant.

The boxed set is pretty well priced...Amazon's discount has it at about $16, so not much different from a single HC.

I think what people forget about Tolkein is that the appendices were actually...interesting. And largely had important info.

Yep...and at the same time, they were at the back of the last book for a good reason: you don't HAVE to read them to make sense of what's going on. If you're the nerdy sort who loves digging in deep to the history and languages and family trees, they're there and you can have fun with them, and they add more depth and enjoyment to it all -- but if that's not your sort of thing, you can just wade into the text and anything that's truly essential is explained there. And this is one of the many things that a lot of the bad Tolkien imitators don't seem to get -- they seem to think that people are reading for world-building and that means they have to have lots of made-up words and complicated genealogies and timelines, and then they try to smack you in the face with MY WURLDBILDING, LET ME SHOW YOU IT.

I think what people forget about Tolkein is that the appendices were actually...interesting. And largely had important info.

That's true! I normally space out when the needlessly intensive worldbuilding in fantasy epics gets in the way of the real plot, but I actually liked reading the appendices to LOTR. Maybe it's because there were a lot of characters in the trilogy that were hardly explored or were only mentioned in passing, that I only realized after reading the appendices also had very interesting and distinct personalities and stories. ^^

I agree with what they said about the Old Kingdom Trilogy too, and that's what I like about Garth Nix in general, actually. I think he admitted in one of his interviews that he focuses on the plot and characters first, before he really works on the world/universe he set the story in. ^^

I really liked Sabriel very much; I liked Lirael and Abhorsen too, but not as much as the first book, probably because Lirael and Sameth had more...issues than Sabriel, which I sometimes found hard to sympathize with. ^^; But I like the trilogy in general...I liked it so much I even bought Across the Wall And Other Stories, Garth Nix's collection of short stories, just for the novelette Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case, which is a follow-up to Abhorsen. ^^;

I really liked Sabriel very much; I liked Lirael and Abhorsen too, but not as much as the first book, probably because Lirael and Sameth had more...issues than Sabriel, which I sometimes found hard to sympathize with.

*nod* That sounds an awful lot like conversations I had with

redbrunja after I'd finished the series. She preferred the first one, because Sabriel is in more the self-confident, ass-kicking heroine mode she loves, whereas so much of Lirael's life was filled with unrelieved emotional misery that while she sympathized, she found it rather painful going at times -- whereas I preferred the second book over the first for pretty much exactly the same reasons! I liked and admired Sabriel very much, but I couldn't really identify with her on a deep personal level. Lirael, on the other hand, hit so many of my own issues that it was really almost scary, so there was a much deeper emotional investment for me. (Although as noted below, Sameth bugged me because, at least until things started seriously falling apart, he didn't HAVE any issues worth whining about, and yet whine he did.)

I think my general tendency is to like the less complicated character best, but be more emotionally invested in the one with issues, or who are "less cool."

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