A Thousand and One Wildwood Review
Hey,
So I finished up a couple more books.
First up, Wildwood by Colin Meloy. This is a young adult fantasy book in the vein of Narnia or Peter Pan, but it was written by the lead singer of The Decemberists and thus has a Portland hipster flavor to it -- which actually works surprisingly well.
The story concerns Prue McKreel who loses her brother to a murder of crows one day. The birds pick up her brother and carry him off to the Impassible Woods, a wild, untamed stretch of forest just west of Portland. Determined to find her baby brother and get him home, Prue sets out to enter the IW and along the way, her geeky classmate Curtis managed to tag along.
Once inside the forest, they find a world of enchanted talking animals, fierce bandits, Dowager Governesses and quiet Mystics. Prue and Curtis are separated and have their own separate adventures eventually re-uniting to help save the Impassible Woods and its denizens.
It's a young kids book, but it's pretty well put together. The book errs on the side of showing a more complex world. The bad guy is pretty unarguably bad and the good guy are pretty unambiguously good, but they have disagreements and complexity that the kids have to negotiate as best they can. Even though the good guys win, there's no easy path back to a former golden age, people have issues to work out. All that said, the book isn't terribly gloomy or anything just a little more ambiguous than you might see in a lot of these books.
Anyway, it was a fun book and while Amazon indicates there are more books in the series, this felt pretty self-contained which is always a plus.
Next up was Habibi by Craig Thompson. This is a hefty, and gorgeous graphic novel. I plowed through it's 300 pages pretty quickly.
The story revolves around two orphans, Dodola and Zam, who escape from slavery. Dodola raises Zam as best she can in their isolated hide-away. Then Dodola is captured and sent to the Sultan's harem while Zam wanders into the city to try and find her. Eventually, they re-unite and make another flight for freedom.
Woven into all of this are stories. Middle-Eastern and Islamic folktales. Arabic calligraphy, magic numbers, alchemy and a whirlwind of culture. The story touches on race and sex and power and poverty and ecology. It's an incredibly dense book and it just keeps pouring out new layers of stuff to think about.
Most people would think that a white guy trying to do a book so steeped in Islamic culture would be a disaster waiting to happen. I'm no expert, but this looks to be very deftly handled with a great deal of love for its subject matter and a focus on how the characters draw in and draw on their faith to help them make sense of the world around them. A great book and one that I think a lot of you out there should take a look at.
later
Tom
So I finished up a couple more books.
First up, Wildwood by Colin Meloy. This is a young adult fantasy book in the vein of Narnia or Peter Pan, but it was written by the lead singer of The Decemberists and thus has a Portland hipster flavor to it -- which actually works surprisingly well.
The story concerns Prue McKreel who loses her brother to a murder of crows one day. The birds pick up her brother and carry him off to the Impassible Woods, a wild, untamed stretch of forest just west of Portland. Determined to find her baby brother and get him home, Prue sets out to enter the IW and along the way, her geeky classmate Curtis managed to tag along.
Once inside the forest, they find a world of enchanted talking animals, fierce bandits, Dowager Governesses and quiet Mystics. Prue and Curtis are separated and have their own separate adventures eventually re-uniting to help save the Impassible Woods and its denizens.
It's a young kids book, but it's pretty well put together. The book errs on the side of showing a more complex world. The bad guy is pretty unarguably bad and the good guy are pretty unambiguously good, but they have disagreements and complexity that the kids have to negotiate as best they can. Even though the good guys win, there's no easy path back to a former golden age, people have issues to work out. All that said, the book isn't terribly gloomy or anything just a little more ambiguous than you might see in a lot of these books.
Anyway, it was a fun book and while Amazon indicates there are more books in the series, this felt pretty self-contained which is always a plus.
Next up was Habibi by Craig Thompson. This is a hefty, and gorgeous graphic novel. I plowed through it's 300 pages pretty quickly.
The story revolves around two orphans, Dodola and Zam, who escape from slavery. Dodola raises Zam as best she can in their isolated hide-away. Then Dodola is captured and sent to the Sultan's harem while Zam wanders into the city to try and find her. Eventually, they re-unite and make another flight for freedom.
Woven into all of this are stories. Middle-Eastern and Islamic folktales. Arabic calligraphy, magic numbers, alchemy and a whirlwind of culture. The story touches on race and sex and power and poverty and ecology. It's an incredibly dense book and it just keeps pouring out new layers of stuff to think about.
Most people would think that a white guy trying to do a book so steeped in Islamic culture would be a disaster waiting to happen. I'm no expert, but this looks to be very deftly handled with a great deal of love for its subject matter and a focus on how the characters draw in and draw on their faith to help them make sense of the world around them. A great book and one that I think a lot of you out there should take a look at.
later
Tom