Of Swords and Parasols

By "recently-ish" I mean "I actually read most of these in the January-March range and kept thinking I'd give them proper writeups, but didn't."

"Hunger Games Trilogy" by Suzanne Collins: I've tried getting into these books several times over the last few years but kept failing due to my difficulty reading first person present tense. Unsurprisingly, I liked them once once I got past that, though I think they fall apart in some ways. (Largely due to a forced-focus on a romantic triangle that Collins obviously has no interet in, and having contain the story into a trilogy instead of making it a longer series.) The books have pretty much been talked to death everywhere, so I'll just comment that the parts that interested me the most were the portrayal of PTSD and the different ways characters dealt with it, and the use and manipulation ofthe media by various parties, particularly when Katniss (and others, but mostly Katniss) turn it into a weapon, and how Katniss creates a false public persona to stay alive.

Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones: Boy being hunted by mysterious magic critters seeks refuge with his grandmother's friend, finds his absentminded professor grandson instead. HIJINKS. Not DWJ's best, but I liked it a lot. But then, I think I like DWJ best when she's doing (err, "did") odd little makeshift families and "another world next door" types of plots and this is both of those with lots of eccentric locals running around. There isn't really much in it that wasn't in DWJ books that came before it, but it was pretty solid.

Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones: Boy stuck with unpleasant relatives during school break (David) meets another boy (Luke) who claims David freed him from prison, then people show up claiming Luke stole something and trying to reimprison him. Gameso f wit ensure regarding what happens to Luke, who claims to be innocent of this particular wrongdoing. Pretty fun. Who everyone is and what was stolen seemed obvious pretty early on, but it's probably a bit less obvious when the source material isn't getting continuous offhand mentions like it is now.

"Fallen" series by Lauren Kate: Sometimes-entertaining, sometimes-aggravating emo gothic ya about fallen angels, reincarnation, and blind romantic love being the most important thing in the universe. The first 2 books were pretty fun but the last two were rather trying (and there's a novella in the middle that's about half-and-half) and relied entirely on 2 things: 1. romantic love is the most amazing perfect thing ever and nothing else is a fraction as important and who cares about getting to know someone or if they're a bad/good person if you loved their previous incarnation, and 2. NO ONE TELLING THE HEROINE ANYTHING. *hem* Because if they had, it would have been over. SIGH. Dull main love interest and interesting enough heroine, but the supporting are considerably more interesting and entertaining. In the end, while it's a bit unfair and oversimplifying things, my main thought was "I liked this better when it was by Kaori Yuki and called Angel Sanctuary. But really, for emo gothic YA authors who have clearly read too much Kaori Yuki (if one can read too much Kaori Yuki) I much prefer Cassandra Clare.

White as Snow by Tanith Lee: An adaptation of Snow White that combines it with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. It may sound a bit odd combining one story in which a mother goes to extreme lengths to kill her daughter with another in which a mother goes to extreme lengths to rescue her daughter after she's abducted, but it works. This is the only novel-length print version of Snow White I've encountered that directly addresses both the weight of objectification of the male gaze and living within it, as well as the necrophilia and rape culture present within Snow White (before it got prettied up) and it handles all the topics pretty well and interestingly. Lee's prose andthe way she regularly transitions between versions of both myths might be offputting for some, but I liked them.

A Golden Web by Barbara Quick: A fairly lightweight YA novel about Allesandra Giliani, the world's first (known, and without any research, I suspect "world" means "Europe") female anatomist, who lived in the 14th century. Well as lightweight as you can be when your subject died before she was 20. Quick spends a bit too much time of Giliani's early life (with an unfortunate focus on The Mean Stepmother, who...is mean apparently for conflict, as Alessandra is explicitly the ONLY stepchild she has problems with) and not enough on the actual science part. That said, despite following a lot of "one special girl" conventions, it's still pretty enjoyable, and noteworthy for the relatively obscure subject matter.

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by Valerie Paradiz: Non-fiction book about Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's process of collecting fairy tales for what was initially an academic project. The reviews I read emphasized the fact that the tales were oral folktales primarily passed down by women of the rural and lower classes, and implied an emphasis on that, but it's more a biography of the Grimm's eith a heavier focus on the period of time they were collecting tales. (I actually suspect Pradiz wanted to write a biography of their sister, Charlotte Grimm, but was shot down.) She tries to draw allegories between the tales and the individual women who provided them, but while some work, most are a bit (or more) of a stretch, and she doesn't really dig into the stories in a way that worked for me. Still, it's a very interesting book and worth checking out, even if it wasn't quite the book I went in expecting.

Like many of the children of London at the dawn of WWII in 1939, Vivian Smith is being sent to the country for her safety. At the railway station, she meets a boy who she initially thinks is her cousin, Marty, but who she soon learns is not. The boy, in truth, is named Jonathan, and he and his friend, Sam, are from Time City, a city frozen in time that monitors and records the entirety of the timeline.

The boys think that Vivian is really Vivian Lee, the missing wife of their city’s founder, who they believe is responsible for Time City’s slow deterioration and the increasing instability of the timelines of certain centuries and important events. Like when WWII occurred. They’re so convinced that Vivian Smith is Vivian Lee that they’ve broken every rule they possibly could in order to capture her, and by the time they realize that no, this Vivian really is just a normal girl, she’s trapped in Time City, and has to help them save the place.

This was a very fun DWJ, though, like Vivian, I often only caught the “thes” and “ands” in the explanations of how Time City worked. It’s a very imaginative world, but one that I suspect will be headache inducing if I think about it too much. There are some of the requisite DWJ evil authority/family figures, but the main ones are actually quite nice, if odd, and the plot works surprisingly well, given that it revolves around two boys kidnapping a girl. And it has one of the best androids ever.

Her parents having died when she was too young to remember them, Hayley Foss has been raised by her strict, commanding grandmother and her more mellow, agreeable grandfather. Her grandmother, who homeschooled Hayley, seems to be completely under the thumb of Hayley’s Uncle Jolyon, and her grandfather less so. Having been very sheltered and isolated, Hayley is shocked when, for a transgression she doesn’t understand, she finds herself exiled to a family home in Ireland, where she’s surrounded for the first time by other children.

In Ireland, Hayley is somewhat taken in by her cousins Harmony and Troy, who are siblings, and heckled by another cousin, Tollie. She also discovers, and participates in, The Game, which the youths of the family sneak out to participate in at night. The Game is a scavenger hunt in which each child is given a mythic task (get a roc’s egg or a dragon’s scale, steal Sleeping Beauty’s spindle without waking her, pluck a golden apple, etc.) and must travel the different paths of a plane known as the mythosphere to get their prizes.

I’m a sucker for mythology and new takes on old tales, and so I very much liked the plotline and reveals of this book. Unfortunately, it’s more like half a book than a full book. DWJ’s books tend to follow a certain plotline, more often than not, and one that follows-sometimes loosely, sometimes closely-the traditional heroic journey. Here, we almost skipped straight from the displaced protagonist beginning to adapt to the strange new world to the climax, followed by a brief wrapup. I’d love for DWJ to revisit this as a longer work, or even follow it up with another short work that better develops things, but as it stands, this is an entertaining work with a lot of potential, but it’s not developed enough to be a really satisfying one.

Arianhrod (who prefers to be called Roddy) is the granddaughter of the weatherman of the Royal Progress of the Isle of Blest, which is a kind of moving royal court. When the Merlin (a magical protector of sorts, one of which the Arthurian Merlin may have been) dies and a new one takes his place, she learns that there may be a conspiracy surrounding him, and decides to find out what’s going on. Nick, a character from Deep Secrets, gets caught up in some cross-reality adventures, which eventually lead to his encountering a projection of Roddy and agreeing to help.

Roddy acquires a bunch of annoying relatives during her adventures. Nick acquires a charming elephant, a pregnant goat, and a powerful magician/assassin. Nick had more fun, I think.

The book largely altered between entertaining and passably enjoyable for me, with both high and low notes. I like both Nick and Roddy, but their stories didn’t always flow together well, and it took a very long time for them to really start working as one story. I also never really got a strong “OH NOES! The multiverse is in danger!” feeling. But Jones is very good at creating contrasting but compatible leads, whether romantic or platonic (though, now that I think of it, I think most of the platonic ones I’ve read have an indication that they won’t be in the future) and Nick and Roddy are no exception. And I thought there was something very, if a bit oddly “Awww”-worthy when Nick and Roddy first met (though not in the flesh) and Nick thought about how his perfect girl was absolutely nothing like what he’d thought his perfect girl would be like.

As a side note, one of the most entertaining bits of Deep Secret was Nick’s very, very slow progress of waking up in the morning (supposedly based on watching Neil Gaiman wake up) and here we get to see it again, but from Nick’s perspective. It was a highlight of an otherwise dull section on the book.

In general, I’d give it a solid thumbs up, if not as enthusiastically as I would some of Jones’s other books, were it not for one plotpoint that emerged later on.

( spoilers )

Rupert Venables is the magid (assigned magician/guardian) of Earth, and assigned the task of locating the heir of the recently deceased Koryfonic Emperor. This is a task made ridiculously difficult by layers and layers of secrets and codes, resulting in Rupert arranging for all the possible heirs to attend a fantasy convention so he can have them all in one place. Accompanying him are the ghost of his mentor and his ridiculously good looking neighbor, Andrew, who seems determined to tag along. Among the possible heirs are Maree and Nick, the niece and son of the convention’s guest of honor, who Rupert recently met disastrously.

I haven’t been to many conventions (specifically, I’ve been to one convention twice) but this is a very entertaining depiction of one. Rupert is something of a jerk, but a largely likable one, and I’m exceptionally fond of Maree’s bitterness. Many of the characters and their motivations and explanations make me want to cock my head to the side in the hopes that they’ll be more sensible that way, but it’s largely best to just go along for the ride and assume it will all come to a natural conclusion.

It’s a very entertaining ride, if a sometimes confusing one.

Set eight years after Dark Lord of Derkholm, The Year of the Griffin focuses on Derk’s youngest griffin daughter, Elda, as she goes to the wizard university to learn magic. With Mara’s permission, but not Derk’s. As soon as the tours ended, Querida went on vacation and turned the university over to Corkoran, a charismatic wizard, but also a slacker who spends his time obsessing over being the first man to walk on the moon.

Unfortunately, the university has even bigger problems than Corkoran. For one thing, the last forty years were spent turning out as many functional wizards as possible to be tour guides, but only training them to be that, nothing else. The new teachers, having been trained that way themselves, don’t know how to teach their students to be anything else, and so only the rudimentary basics are taught. The other problem is that, without the tours, the university has no funding. So Corkoran devises a plan to invite students from rich families to study at the university. Except that, when those students arrive, they come with absolutely no money, but with a lot of eagerness to learn. They also each come with a host of problems, including curses, angry parents, and a multitude of assassins.

The book is largely focused on the hijinks of Elda and her new friends as they deal with each other’s problems and the university’s incompetent staff, and start learning the magic and theories that used to be taught on their own.

I don’t think it was as good as Dark Lord of Derkholm, but this was extremely fun, despite a slightly rushed ending. I think, though, that I’m starting to burn out on fantasies set in a school, no matter how interesting and/or fun the school is.

This omnibus collects Conrad’s Fate and The Pinhoe Egg. I was actually surprised the second one was already in an omnibus, as it’s pretty new.

In CF, a young man named Conrad, who is the son of a reclusive feminist writer, and whose stingy uncle tries to get Conrad and his sister, Anthea, to work for him for free. After Anthea manages to get out from under his thumb by getting a scholarship to a school far away (and never coming home for holidays, knowing traps will be set to keep her there) Conrad lives in fear that, when he turns 12, he’ll be forced to leave school and work for free in the bookshop. He thinks he’s planned it out so that he’ll be safe and in school, only to learn that his uncle has arranged for him to go to work at the local castle. Conrad, it seems, has bad karma because he failed to kill someone in a past life, and if he doesn’t find and kill that person soon, he’ll be dead within a year. At the castle, Conrad meets Christopher Chant, who has run away from his guardian to look for his friend, Millie (who ran away from boarding school) who he’s positive is somewhere in the castle. There, the two boys discover that the servants are far from the norm, and that very strange magical things are happening.

This one was pure fun. I really should find young Christopher irritating, but I don’t. Mostly, I think, because he has good foils-first Millie, and now Conrad-who think he’s annoying and treat him that way, even as they appreciate his good points.

PE returns to Cat Chant as he meets a girl named Marianne Pinhoe, whose family dislikes the “Big Man” (Christopher) because they’re worried he’ll interfere with their magic. As they’re very big on misusing magic, they’re probably right. When Marianne’s grandmother wages a sneak-attack magical war against the Farleighs, another family with old magic in the area, Marianne is the only one who realizes what she’s doing. After she befriends Cat, she gives him an egg she found in the attic, which eventually causes the secrets of both families to be revealed. The book is put forth as being Marianne’s book, and should be, but is more Cat’s book. I didn’t find Cat to be nearly as irritating as he was in Charmed Life, (not really irritating at all, actually) but I still find him to be the least interesting of the main children in the Chrestomanci books. I didn’t think this one was as fun as CF, but it was still pretty fun.

I’m glad to see that the various Chrestomanci aren’t being as casual with their lives as they were before (I don’t care if you start off with eight extra ones! Don’t waste them!) but I wish there were a few more positive parental and authority figures in these books.

 Anyone ever read a book they should love, but can't quite?

I'm reading (though I'm thinking I'll set it aside for now and try it again later...like, sometime when I haven't just read 2 articles that are all about how you have to write to make the male great and have the girl meaningless if you want to sell, and haven't seen the only icon post ever-that I've seen-of one of my manga and have it have a huge number of icons, but the only female represented is the one who died before the series started) Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock.  On the one hand, I really like the story, which seems to be shaping up to be a retelling of Tam Lin, and the way Polly seems to have two sets of memories that don't go together, but...it seems specifically written for girls who want to be boys, or who wanted to when they were young.

Polly doesn't like looking like a pretty girl, she wants to look like her best friend, who is described in ver unfeminine terms.  When she has adventures being a hero's sidekick, she specifically pictures herself as a male sidekick.  All of her hobbies are specifically pointed out as normally being for boys.  When she stands up to bullies, she hates it when everyone calls her a Heroine, because that's just surface and meaningless, but being a Hero is real and your true self.

I like Polly, but I keep wanting to shake her and tell her that there's nothing wrong with being a girl, and it seems to be pointed out how much she doesn't like things connected to being female every few pages.

Does this continue the entire book, or is there ever a point where she realizes that it's ok to be a girl, and that you don't have to be a boy to be strong or cool or have adventures?

(And yeah, I realize a lot of this probably has to do with when it was written, but...)

*Was mistaken for a boy once when she had really short hair, and has never had short hair ever since.* 

ETA:  Since I probably didn't make it clear enough(from what I can tell):  I think a lot of my problems(being this prominent, at least) are due to my reading it right now.  I know who recced it to me and can tell why, and agree with their reasons from what I've read and shall try it again later.  Just very bad timing.

The two books in the second Chrestomanci omnibus, The Magicians of Caprona and Witch Week, are not actually about Chrestomancis, but set in the same multiverse, with Chrestomanci(I’m assuming both are Christopher?) playing a supporting role later in the books.

TMoC is set in an alternate Italy, focusing on the feud between the Montanas and the Petrocchis, two clans of wizards who have been enemies for two hundred years, and who provide the city of Caprona with its war spells. When Tonino Montana and Angelica Petrocchi-two children who aren’t good with magic-are kidnapped and the families told not to make anymore war spells, the two clans are quick to blame each other. Thankfully, the younger generation hasn’t had time to get that bad. In addition to Tonino and Angelica working to save themselves, there’s also Tonino’s brother, Paolo, and Angelica’s sister or cousin (I forget which) Renata working to save them. There’s also our version of Romeo and Juliet, Marco and Rosa, who thankfully are much more sensible than R&J. Actually, they’re pretty clever in trying to get around that whole “our families want to annihilate each other” thing. This one was just a pure blast, and I wouldn’t have minded it being a bit longer. I’d love a sequel a few years down the road, with the families still stuck with each other.

WW is set in an unhappy boarding school in a world where magic is outlawed and the inquisition is still going on, but many people are still born with magic. Nan is the daughter of a witch and gets bullied for it, but doesn’t think she’s a witch herself, Charles doesn’t get along with anyone, Estelle is a secret witch sympathizer, Nirupam watched a family member be burned alive, and Billy is bullied for being a teacher’s son. The first half with everyone wondering who the witch was and the mysterious spells and such was good, but I wasn’t overly into it. But then halfway through, we had people showing their true colors and running away and Chrestomanci was showing up in a huff and talking about realities being wrong and there was all the fixing of realities, and suddenly, I was having fun. Though, I probably shouldn’t have bulldozed through it right after bulldozing through TMoC. 

The first Chrestomanci omnibus contains (as far as I know) the first two books written in the series, Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant. In a universe with a series of twelve worlds, each world with eight alternate realities attached, the Chrestomanci are people who do not have alternate versions of themselves in the other eight worlds in their series, putting all nine lives into one body.

Charmed Life is about Cat Chant, a fairly spineless young boy with a domineering sister named Gwendolyn, and a penchant for dangerous accidents. After their parents die, Gwendolyn writes a letter to Christopher Chant, a distant cousin and the current Chrestomanci, prompting him to take them in. When she’s treated like a normal child, however, and not the powerful witch she believes herself to be, Gwendolyn wages a private war against Christopher and his children, dragging Cat along with her. The Lives of Christopher Chant backtracks about twenty-five years to tell the story of Christopher as a child, as his uncle manipulates him into taking part in an inter-dimensional crime ring, and he becomes the ward of the current Chrestomanci, Gabriel de Witt.