Cygnet by Patricia McKillip

[meganbmoore]

Cygnet is actually a reprint of two McKillip books, The Sorceress and the Cygnet and The Cygnet and the Firebird. The duology focuses on Nyx Ro, an eccentric sorceress who lives in the bog instead of her mother's vast holding by choice, and her relative, Meguet Vervaine, a swordswoman who serves Holder Ro.  

In the first book, a Wayfarer (gypsy equivalent) named Corleu, who has distinctive white hair and a love for stories, is separated from his people, and then his True Love.  His quest to find her leads him to the bog where Nyx lives, and she decides to aid him, despite Meguet's entreaties that she return to Ro Holding.  In the second, the kinswomen get caught up in the affairs of a mage from another world, a search for dragons, and a young prince who is trpped in the form of a firebird.

My McKillip experiences seem to range from "very enjoyable, but I didn't retain much" (The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Harrowing the Dragon)  to near mad love for (Ombria in Shadow, In the Forests of Serre, Od Magic) with the few others Ive read ranging in between, with Cygnet falling somewhere in the middle.  I really liked Meguet and Nyx, and meguet's relationship with the Gatekeeper, and I liked how the enigmatic, charismatic rule was a woman who indulged her oddball, sorceress daughter, and how the pensive, committed, stoic warrior was a woman.  It was also  interesting to see elements that show up in other McKillip books all combined into one place:  the bog witch, the important animals, the vengeful mother seeking a lost child, the prince trapped in another form, the other worlds, the time travel, etc.  Despite the fairy tale set-up of most (all?) of her worlds, a lot of these elements seem to usually be kept distinct.

Comments

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Ah, The Sorceress and the Cygnet! If I recall correctly, that was the first of McKillip's adult books that I read, a very looong time ago. It was certainly different from many of the other fantasy books I'd read up till that point, and I find a lot of the imagery really sticks with me - the house of stars, Nyx killing birds in the swamps, the house sigils (is that what they were?) coming to life. The central female characters are pretty cool, aren't they? And Nyx is reminding me terribly of someone real - or real-ish; I think it must be an actress from a dorama. Who could I be thinking of?! This will bug me now...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

All sorts of interesting things with birds.

Nyx is kind of like that weird but cool character in manga and jdramas who is often in the backgroud, but will randomly come forth and save everyone's butt.

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Now I have a mad hankering to re-read these two books. They can go high on the to-do list for October.
And I think that it's Nakama Yukie I'm being reminded of when I imagine Nyx! It must be that long dark hair. We watched the first Trick mystery yesterday and various seasons of Gokusen have been floating around recently, so that's probably why I have her on the brain *grin*.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

HAH! Well, Nakama Yukie actually is playing the kind of character I was talking about in those 2, just as the main character!

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Ha - exactly! Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think she'd make a great Nyx in some hypothetical live action adaptation (like that'd ever happen).

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Atrix Wolfe is the only one of hers I've read so far, and that was very much in the same "enjoyable while it lasted, but didn't stick" vein for me...which probably sounds a lot more negative than it should be, really, for me finding a recent-ish vaguely-European-setting high fantasy that DOESN'T make me bounce off so hard I want to throw things is pretty impressive, given my increasing allergy to the genre! The only reason I was tempted to keep it rather than turn around and put it back on BookMooch was for the sake of the gorgeous Kinuko Craft cover. I've got Riddlemaster sitting here on the TBR stack, at least, that's the one chomiji particularly recced. And now I must poke at your tags and see if you have reviews of the others.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Only for every one I've read.

They all have vaguely-European setting his fabtasy, though, though many are clearly more "fairy tale" than anything else, and a lot have a bit of a feeling of mixing cultures.

I can't really pin down why some don't stick with me as well, but the three I listed have some things in common: They're all also strongly about the place, they all have several storylines going the same place(true of most McKillip, but I notice more there) they all have a romance that will clearly happen after you close the book, but it isn't a part of the main story, and they all focus around a female character cast into an impossible situation.

Hmm...ok, most of those are in most McKillips(though many have a more obvious romance) but I think I just notice them more in those.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I'm not allergic to quasi-Europe settings per se, although I do particularly love to see things set in or based on other countries and cultures just for variety's sake. But in high fantasy in particular, it's another one of those things, like worlds throwing in elves with polysyllabic names and dwarves and hobbit-clones, that gets me wary because it was so prevalent in all the bad Tolkien clones that put me off the genre so badly in the first place. I like classic European fairy tales and myths and history, and I like writers like Tolkien who've clearly done massive amounts of research in the original material. It's the folks who seem like they've learned everything they know third- or fourth-hand via other genre writers who tend to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of that is why I've been gravitating towards histical fantasies lately, and the magic-lite ones.

McKillip seems to take fairy tale tropes and build worlds around them to create new fairy tales. You might try In the Forests of Serre, which has a very Russian (esp. Baba Yaga) feel, or Winter Rose, which is a Tam Lin story.

Have you read Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology or Meredith Ann Pierce's Dankangel trilogy? Despite the way the 3rd Darkangel book falls apart (you're kinda better off stopping 40 or so pages from the end of that one) they both create huge fantasy tapestries without relying on the typical Tolkein/european formula.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Nope to both -- really for the most part, if it's fantasy published in the last twenty years, and you haven't seen me talking about it here or with Red and/or Cho, the answer to "have you read --- ?" is almost guaranteed to be "no". I burned out really, really hard and it's only in the last few years that I've even tentatively started dipping my toes in again, and that's been helped a lot by you three and a couple of other friends having generally compatible enough tastes that I can tell from your recs if something's likely to work for me. (In prior decades, too many of the folks who tried to rec me stuff had VERY incompatible tastes, so their recs were...hit and mess, shall we say. As in, some of the SF recs worked quite well for me, but an awful lot of their fantasy faves made me want to hurl things and start bonfires...)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The McKillip's I can't speak for regarding others, but the Pierce and Valente seem to be pretty well liked by others who are burned on the medieval-lite stuff.

I think there's still a lot of Tolkein-based medieval-lite coming out, but there's also some pretty good medieval-lite stuff mixed in that's based on the medieval idea, and traditional tales and paths, both epic and fairy tales, as opposed to Tolkein's medieval-lite mythology. Some of the stuff (Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel comes to mind) came out while the genre was drowning in Tolkein knockoffs and just got mixed in, but there seems to be more of a concentrated effort to not use his rules and setups as much.