Books That Are Purple
Purple seems to be a popular color for books; I don't know why. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what's inside. Perhaps because it's bright, but not red? Or it's a favorite color, but not blue? I have no idea. I don't know why book covers are the way they are. Obviously, in theory, a book's cover is supposed to help sell it, but in practice I don't think book designers really have a clue what's going to be eye-catching in a store. I certainly don't. Of course, I'm very rarely browsing for books--almost always I go book shopping with a list and stick to it, partly because I have finite time and money and I am the sort of person who would buy every book in the world if it would fit in the car, and then feel overwhelmed by giant towering precarious piles of books that I will never have the time to read. Of course, that's what my house looks like now anyway. Ahem. Anyway, so it's not so much that I care about book covers: if they are amazing I notice them, but if they are terrible I just sort of get used to them. So, when a series gets a new look--as Holly Black's Curseworkers series did between the hardcover editions of the second and third books of the trilogy--I wonder why. Presumably because the publisher thinks the books could be selling better than they are. I wonder how often changing book covers actually improves sales.
There are two main ways to decorate book covers: with art that is produced specifically for the book, or with art that already exists somewhere else. Either category can include non-photographic art (e.g. the new covers of the Curseworkers Trilogy, or Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child in the former category, and the covers of Tracy Chevalier's books featuring famous artworks in the public domain in the latter) or photographic (e.g. the original Curseworkers covers in the former category, and the covers of Malinda Lo's Ash and Huntress and my edition of Margaret Powell's Below Stairs in the latter).Personally, I most prefer beautiful, elaborate art covers, whether the art is original to the book or not--I'm happy enough to see Medieval tapestries or Vermeers on books. Otherwise, I usually prefer even simple original drawings or paintings to original photos, but stock photos I don't like for two reasons. One, even if they are appropriate photos--as in Malinda Lo's Ash and Huntress, they tend to make for rather boring covers, and there's the very strong possibility that you will see the elements used again and again by all kinds of different books. But Two, and this is what I really hate, so often the random stock photos pasted together are totally inappropriate: I read one book not too long ago that's supposed to take place in Tibet and the cover featured 3 stock photos blended together: 1) a soaring turkey condor, copied in different sizes, 2) an indigenous Bolivian woman, and 3) a mountain valley so generic (and so distant! Making the human figure out of scale on top of everything else) that I couldn't even begin to guess what continent it was on. Advertizers' stock-photo-happy designs can get even more ridiculous than this, as in an ad Dad saved from the Honolulu Advertizer many years ago now, that said "Visit New Zealand!" and had a picture of none other than Mount Moran reflected in the Oxbow!* But perhaps nothing tops in badness the alligator with muppet hair on the cover of Allison Goodman's Eona. :P
So, looking at Holly Black's Curseworkers series... It's not that I was so in love with the original covers--indeed I think the new art is pretty cool--but that now I will have the trilogy on my shelf and the third book in the series will look like it doesn't fit or belong with the others, because it's in such a different style. The old covers feature photographs of models, while the new ones have highly stylized drawn faces--uh, so stylized that it took me a while of looking at the book to figure out it was more than just a pattern of random dots. At first I thought they'd only changed the cover of White Cat, which got me thinking about photographic covers and The Male Gaze--Do boys not want books with pictures of good-looking boys on them? Or just not grumpy looking ones holding fluffy animals? Whereas 'girl-books' (read: YA romance with a female hero) seem to almost universally get good-looking-but-objectified girls on the cover--furthering girls' training to accept The Male Gaze wherein girls and women are only acceptably "beautiful" when either dead or overly sexualized, and usually both at once. Which is not to say that the model on the cover of the original Red Glove (taken by one Michael Frost) looks like a corpse. Taken at face value it looks like Lila is about to be kidnapped by a menacing smoking glove--which has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the book. But taken as part of our overarching culture, it says "Attractive blond girl menaced and frightened by mysterious grabby villains = scary sexy exciting fantasy!" Which is not a message I care for ever, and especially not for impressionable young people. (The original cover to White Cat on the other glove looks like that guy is about to murder that poor fluffy cat... which isn't so very far removed from the plot after all.) So, in that way, I actually like the new covers better, but at least the original photos looked like they could be characters in the world as written, unlike the people on the covers of Malinda Lo's books--though at least (thank goodness!) those young women are neither dead nor objects.
Ultimately, my favorite cover of the six books I'm reviewing today is for Thirteenth Child (art and design by one Christopher Stengel). It's very boring, but it gives a good sense of the atmosphere of hte story--Western motifs--though perhaps Gothic lettering wasn't the perfect choice...--and a little dragon to hint at the magic. Not sure if it draws in the Middle Grade readers, but I suppose at least it doesn't put them off.
But I'm not actually here to talk about Judging Book Covers today! I want to talk about Worldbuilding! Which is not the strength of any of the fantasies in question. But does it matter?
I recently had a small Ack! (that's a technical term, for instances of minor and short-lived panic) the other day as I considered that L&W is not 100% accurate! No, not in that everyone can alter matter through magic, but in that I have chosen to create a world where the wildlife and climate patterns closely resemble (but do not exactly reproduce) certain Real Earth regions but the geography Does Not. On one hand, I've only done this to make writing this thing easier on myself, so that Plot Can Happen with the minimum of contrivance of navigation--whole swaths of land are ignored because they are not settings for the story. On the other hand, I think this is Totally OK--I mean, it's called verisimilitude, not veri-exactitude. But how little is too little? Would someone who, say, lives in a seasonal tropical dry forest be super-annoyed by something in the book that makes it clear that I don't? Or is the fact that it's set in a Fantasy World enough to just go with it? I think my conclusion is that if something is Obviously Wrong, there has to be a good reason for it, and not just authorial ignorance and/or laziness (hence the Ack!), but what is Obviously Wrong? What is Obviously Wrong to one reader won't be obvious at all to another (and obviously not obvious to the author!) Can a fantasy world affecting verisimilitude have, for example, a river that flows uphill without overt magical explanation or reason for it, just the sense that the author actually never considered that rivers must flow downhill? I daresay some readers will be much more annoyed by that than others.
As for things that are only obvious in certain parts of the world--there also comes a time when a writer simply HAS to STOP RESEARCHING, and she must ask herself two things 1) Is it important to the book to know when jackfruit** flowers in this kind of climate? 2) Would I, the author, be annoyed when someone says, "You terrible author! Fully One Billion People know that jackfruit only flowers under X weather conditions!"? The choices before the author are: a) do the research because it actually is important to the book and I don't want Fully One Billion People to think I'm an insensitive, lazy ignoramus, b) cut the blooming jackfruit because it's only there for atmosphere anyway and at worst Fully One Billion People will simply think I'm an ignoramous (but not necessarily lazy!!) for leaving out a food as vitally important in the everyday lives of everyone who lives in Real Earth Equivalent Climate as jackfruit, or c) Leave the jackfruit in one bare sentence of the novel as atmosphere and don't do the research because it's just not worth it, since Fully Six Billion People (approximate number) will just say, "Ooh! Atmosphere!" and Fully One Billion People can go ahead and call me a lazy author (but not ignorant!), and say, "She did research, just NOT ENOUGH." (There is also d) leave it in, but call it a smeerpfruit so that Fully One Billion People can say, "Smeerpfruit is clearly jackfruit--why not just call it jackfruit?", and Fully Six Billion People will say, "Wow, Smeerpfruit! How original! How fantastical! What a creative Genius our author is!" But frankly, I find that approach rather silly.)
Of course, the choices a, b, c, and d do not exist in a vacuum. A USian audience will be comprised mostly of people who have no clue when jackfruit flowers (and a large percentage who'll think jackfruit is made-up anyway), and will see it as just a piece of Exotic Atmosphere without caring that Fully One Billion People see it as an important food source (at least I found one person saying she loves it on the internet). But the problem is that fruits that grow in Real Earth Equivalent Climate are always (OK, most of the time) presented as Exotic Atmosphere, along with the people and animals who eat them. In the way that, say, blueberries are not. I mean, you never see prose like this:"Cat'ethelweena found the smeerpfruit shrub in the lush temperate bog-marsh, where twigs scratched her bare vanilla-milkshake-colored legs where her fanciful native costume of shorts and flipflops did not cover them. Pausing now and then to swat away the clouds of vicious blood-sucking insects who carried deadly temperate diseases in their bites, she filled her traditional hand-made plastic bowl--covered with exotic patterns symbolizing native plants and flowers--with ripe smeerpfruits. Their skins were of a strange deep bluish purple color, with a silvery grey bloom over them, and a star-shaped dimple on the flower-end--the whole fruit a symbol of the cold and silent Temperate Night. She popped one in her mouth to test its ripeness; as she bit down the tough skin burst, sending a tiny taste of the exotic sweet-tart flavor (reminiscent of jackfruit) over her tongue. Then, when her native-style plastic bowl was only half-full, she heard a loud 'whuff!' and smelled a pungent smell, like the first bite of bittermelon made scent. It was the fearsome Black Smeerp! Cat'ethelweena had seen many, since they feed primarily on smeerpfruit, but this one still filled her with terror, with its five 3-cm-long talons on each of its feet, and its massive slavering jaws which could exert over 200kg of force. This most fearsome and dangerous animal of the temperate bog-marsh was standing not half the width of a polo field away! One wrong move and Cat'ethelweena would be easy prey..."
Which brings me to Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. Back in 2009, Wrede got some flak because her fantastic United States of Columbia had no native humans living on it.The problem was not in the concept of people settling a New World populated only by dangerous magical beasts, but that in Real Life (that pesky thing again!) the U.S., thanks to genocidal policies of its government, very nearly didn't have native people living in it (today Native Americans make up barely 1% of the total U.S. population). Perhaps it wouldn't have been so offensive if the rest of the Northern Hemisphere had likewise been affected by dragons and spectral bears and sphinxes? Because one wonders how humans ever colonized Eurasia with all those creatures running around. Or, if they are uniquely North Columbian, how did they evolve? We do have a few native North American animals that evolved here after all, and one--the puma--is a fierce predator who can and will eat humans.
But over all, the worldbuilding is fairly superficial. Change a few names--Avrupan, Hijero-Cathayan, Aphrikan, Columbian--move a few dates (There's a Secession War in 1838, but I don't recall it being clear if there was slavery, nor is it said why some of the states wanted to secede in the first place.), but keep all the good stuff--Washington Crossing the Delaware, Lewis and Clark (no wonder they died without Sacagewea!), land-grant colleges. I'm not saying its bad--because it's not; it's fun the way Wrede does it--but that I'm not entirely sure it makes sense: there are Rationalists who want to live without magic in a world where everyone does magic and it's completely normal. I like the conflict, but I'm not sure why anyone would think of Rationalism in the first place. Likewise, of course they call the Not-Mississippi the Mammoth River. Almost like they mapped how big it was and then decided to name it. Nor is it clear why there were not dragons and sphinxes and sabertoothed cats on the eastern side of the Mammoth River--but there were mammoths, we are told, which were killed by the Avrupan settlers.
These things didn't actually bother me so much while reading--the magic Wrede came up with is such that I can just accept magical explanations for the animals, and since the story follows a child, the politics didn't need to be very fleshed out. I found it quite easy to suspend my disbelief for the duration of the story, and I liked it well enough that I'm interested in the sequels. As I said, I took the worldbuilding lightly and could enjoy the fun of it without being taken out of the story by the parts that didn't seem to quite be plausible. But, as they say on the internet, Your Mileage May Vary.
As for the story, it's episodic and feels more like the setup to a story than the actual story, but I enjoyed the main character Eff Rothmer and her voice a lot. I liked how she grew and changed, and how her relationships matured--with her twin brother (the seventh son of a seventh son), and her father, and her friend William especially. She's definitely a girl who spends all her time with boys, but doesn't put down girlishness to feel better about herself, and as she ages, she develops more subtle understandings of her mother and her sister Rennie (who gets pregnant and then elopes with her boyfriend off to the wilderness). I also really like her relationship with her teacher Miss Ochiba. Despite everything, the book does have diversity--Miss Ochiba and Wash are of Aphrikan extraction (how, I'm not sure), and are also among the most interesting characters--and the knowledge of Hijero-Cathayan magic hints at more that may come. The book is about Eff's whole childhood, however, so it's full of much summarizing that by nature tends to drag, and the events that happen inform character, but don't necessarily lead naturally one to the next. I found the book slow-going until the last fifth or so of the book, when Eff finally comes into her own and has something important to do. So, I don't know. I liked it; I'll keep it for now and check out the sequels, but I wasn't super excited about it. Since it's a children's book, I'll add that I don't recall anything that would put off an 11- or 12-year-old. In tone it's very reminiscent of LIttle House on the Prairie, but not as good.
Speaking of not as good... Malinda Lo said in an interview that she pictured the characters in Ash as looking vaguely Chinese... that's why so many of them have blond hair, green eyes, and almost all have Irish names. /sarcasmIn fairness, she may mean the people native to the land, like Ash, while many of the blondest characters have come from Concordia, er, "a desert country in the Far South"*** Well, anyway, people in Ash's country have been interbreeding with fairies for some time now, so that must explain it. Anyway, Lo wanted to return to The Kingdom and write a prequel to improve on the worldbuilding. Huntress is precisely the book I was thinking of when I asked my questions above about Obviously Wrong thing. Lo doesn't have any rivers flowing upstream, but she does have a river that splits in two on its way downstream, a new moon that appears in the East at sunset, horses that run like small cars, and, what made me really mad, ravenous wolves who appear in packs of hundreds to kill everything in sight without stopping. Sigh. This is something that Does Not Happen In A Vacuum either. The horses-as-cars thing I really don't care about, since it's really not important to the story and is a very small thing, but the wolves--speaking of genocidal policies of the U.S. Government--this is inaccurate animal behavior that plays into the very anti-science gun-happy virulent ignorance that leads to large groups of people actively trying to extirpate (AGAIN!) a keystone species in a fragile wild environment. I mean, I have a personal love for wolves of a spiritual nature, but cold, objective Science says this species is vital to the health and stability of the entire ecosystem, and using implausible, inaccurate behavior just feeds into the irrational bigotry that is quite literally killing my backyard--which, by the way, thanks to Evil Genocidal Policies of Wyoming's Government, is not sacrosanct. Did you know that a gun-toting a-hole has the right in this state to trespass all over my property for the sole purpose of murdering the very creatures I moved here to get close to? He does. So, this makes me angry, because I live in the vacuum this happens in. Just as I'm sure an indigenous American might be really angry about Thirteenth Child in a way I, viscerally, am not.
There could be magically explanations for these things, but there aren't. These items are part of the verisimilitude, because they were not Obviously Wrong to the author... nor apparently anyone else who read the book before it was published. With Ash, these problems simply don't appear because the story is more vaguely set. Having the Generic TImeless Western European Fantasy Setting means the verisimilitude is already subconscious to most readers in our culture, and it doesn't need to be explained. The Hunt feels real because it is real (oh, except bloodhounds wouldn't be used for the actual chasing part; staghounds would be). The Fairies feel real because they are real--they've been like that since Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and before. Even the story is familiar--even if it seems Lo's primary version of Cinderella was the movie Ever After. So the reader can ignore the hand-waves and focus on the good parts of Lo's version: the character of Ash, the beautiful, sensuous writing style, the believable and sweet love story between Ash and Kaisa (even if Kaisa herself isn't so fully fleshed out--but she has hints of uniquity!^). Also, perhaps because they are not new, I love love love Lo's fairies. :)
Huntress actually does improve on the worldbuilding. This time the atmosphere is less Ever After-y and more Chinese-y, but once again I don't think the atmosphere is the important part--except for the atmosphere in Taninli, the fairy city, and on Elowen's island. The plot is much more original, though still standard heroes and companions go on road trip, solve supernatural mystery, save the world. But it worked, mostly. What didn't work is that the story didn't tell how the position of King's Huntress came to be--it hinted at it at the end--and then there's the whole ending, but I'm not sure I'd call that a failing. I don't know what Lo intended, but I actually kind of liked that the unicorn's judgement is subjective and pragmatic (though it would have been nice to have shown how "no one's ever innocent in those stories", instead of just saying it and then showing only two unicorn judgements in both of which cases the judged is found innocent.), and I liked that the fate of Elowen was necessary, and also that it had the effect that it did. (I'm being vague, because the details are a spoiler, and I enjoyed the book enough to want to preserve that for anyone who might read it.) I found the Fairy Queen's story moving.
What Huntress doesn't improve on is the romance. In this book, there is the sense that the love between Taisin and Kaede is Fated, and both of them spend most of the book trying to suppress their feelings for no apparent reason. I mean, I do understand Taisin's fear, but Kaede's reluctance didn't make sense to me (especially given that in this world same-sex relationships are totally accepted--though people still always seem to assume heterosexuality first...), and the whole relationship felt artificial, contrived. But Lo still managed to write their later scenes when (uh, mild spoiler) they do let their feelings for each other show, and by the end of the book, I was comfortable with the idea that they loved each other... though there was still the inexplicable mystical connection to them... and [Spoiler!] I thought Taisin's testing out her mental connection to Kaede without permission was creepy, but [Major Spoiler!] I did like how Taisin brought Kaede back after Kaede confronted Elowen. [end spoilers] Also I liked the other romance in our group of travelers, but the deaths felt a little gratuitous, especially since only one related to the plot, and it didn't get resolved.
The pace of Huntress is slow, but despite the denouement being on the long side, I wanted to know what happened after. I wasn't unhappy with how we left Kaede and Taisin, necessarily, since [spoiler!!] I was imagining them reuniting after a few decades [end spoiler], but I wanted to know 1) Who Mona was, 2) What the Sages knew to answer Taisin's questions, 3) How the office of Huntress worked and how Kaede established those traditions, 4) If the Huntress is somehow magically selected, since they all seem to fit some particular criteria, 5) How the relationship between the fairy and human courts worked out, how the two peoples got along, and 6) how they fell out again. Basically, Huntress was a good story, but it didn't actually explain the world of Ash. Also, I theorize that the cloak Sidhean (also I sort of assume that name is a joke/wry pseudonym... is it?) gave Ash was made of a unicorn skin. Oh, so 7) What happened to the unicorns? Oh, and 8) In Ash the fairy world has gone sort of Avalon-ish, and has faded into a different dimension; how did that happen?
So, Plot and Worldbuilding are decidedly not Lo's strong suits, but I like her characters, and her writing is lovely, and I still love her fairies. So I'm keeping them for now.
Holly Black' Black Heart, on the other hand was the best of its trilogy; I devoured it and loved every minute. Black's worldbuilding in these books is not that logical--the world is almost identical to ours, complete with our movies, our cell phones, our YouTube, but with magic. The glove motif requires you to believe that in a world where few people are magical, and doing any magic is illegal (except when it isn't, apparently), people would adopt the clothing that allows curseworkers to blend in to regular society, instead of flaunting their bare hands as proof of their moral superiorityBut I suspend my disbelief. ;) I seem to have forgotten almost the whole plot of Red Glove, and I feel like many of the supporting cast's strengths were ignored--Is Lila a curseworker? I know why Daneca won't use her power, and having Sam always use his only useful skill (for criminal activities) would make him a bit side-kick-y, but it seems like they could have done more in the story.
On a more spoilery note: I think it worked in the book, since it's told from Cassel's point-of-view, but I'm not sure how I feel about The Feds Are Just As Bad As The Mob. I feel like we're supposed to believe killing is OK if people you like (or the Feds) kill people you don't like (or the Feds, cough), and Gage is the one losing teeth, but Zacharov seems suddenly toothless--I mean, he's a Really Bad Guy, but he spends the book being all nostalgic and sitting at home with, uh, Cassel's mom. And speaking of toothless--Barron actually has a really good plot-related reason for being nicer now, and I like that his ambitions have not really changed, but the whole subplot with Daneca (and how Cassel "fixes" the situation)... I don't know. If Cassel's wrong about Barron, it seems kind of hard to ask readers to side with Cassel... The moral of the story is, er, If you're a born criminal, then you'll only regret it if you try to go straight.
The Bad: I'm not convinced how brilliant Cassel's solution to the Big Problems of the book really were. I'm not convinced of the story he told us about Mina, but I guess he did help her as much as he could. And the solution to the Patton problem... I'm not sure that would really work. Also, however much we dislike Agent Jones, his actions at the end seemed a bit contrived. The Ugly: Sam using the gun seemed a tad contrived too. Gage added a modicum of diversity, but he appeared for all of two scenes, and in the second he was basically a walking stereotype (though I have to say, part of me wonders if he doesn't intend to be that way--he seems to like artifice, what with the different clothes he wears for different purposes, etc. (On that note, Ms. Black: What kind of antelope? Topi, say it's a topi. Definitely a topi.)). Ah well, at least he was a killer. I mean, er... The Very, Very Good: The second scene with Dr. Doctor, the entire scene from the moment he walks in the door to the moment he walks out, is the Best Scene I Have Read In Any Book This Year And Possibly In My Whole Life. Absolutely perfect. I think it's Cassel's voice that makes it. I do like this series a ton, and the narrative voice is a big part why. First person, present tense, immediate, distinctive, smooth, emotionally right where it needs to be. I don't mean Cassel; I would use other words to describe Cassel. No, I am praising Holly Black's skill here. It was a very well-written book.
And briefly, for something completely different: Margaret Powell's memoir Below Stairs. I've been faithfully watching Downton Abbey--which I won't talk about, except to say I think it's very contrived and very pro-aristocracy, but I'm still enjoying watching it very much--and DA allegedly takes some inspiration from Powell. Powell's narrative voice can be petty, but mostly she's an engaging storyteller. The book is interesting, but it's more of a brief window into an alien world than an in depth study a writer could delve into again and again for research purposes. I can't help but wonder, though, what it would be like to read a story from a servant in a great house in an earlier era. Powell, after all, has a steady ambition for upward mobility, which she ultimately achieves, which, along with living in a culture that evolved to encourage it, gave her the opportunity to retire and write this memoire, knowing that people were interested in her life. A century before, though? I can't imagine a kitchen maid could afford such dreams, nor that she could write her story and get such a wide audience. Almost as interesting a book for how it makes you reconsider life today than for how it describes life back then.
Love, Susie
*For readers unfamiliar with my homeland, Mt. Moran reflected in the Oxbow is an iconic image from my backyard, taken by thousands of tourists every year from a parking lot on the main road through Grand Teton National Park.
**What the hay is jackfruit? My (limited) understanding is that it's like a big breadfruit that people actually like to eat. (My understanding is that people only eat breadfruit for nostalgic reasons. But I've never had any, so what do I know--it's smeerpfruit to me.)
***Australia??
^That should totally be a word. Sounds so much lovlier than uniqueness, don't you think?
There are two main ways to decorate book covers: with art that is produced specifically for the book, or with art that already exists somewhere else. Either category can include non-photographic art (e.g. the new covers of the Curseworkers Trilogy, or Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child in the former category, and the covers of Tracy Chevalier's books featuring famous artworks in the public domain in the latter) or photographic (e.g. the original Curseworkers covers in the former category, and the covers of Malinda Lo's Ash and Huntress and my edition of Margaret Powell's Below Stairs in the latter).Personally, I most prefer beautiful, elaborate art covers, whether the art is original to the book or not--I'm happy enough to see Medieval tapestries or Vermeers on books. Otherwise, I usually prefer even simple original drawings or paintings to original photos, but stock photos I don't like for two reasons. One, even if they are appropriate photos--as in Malinda Lo's Ash and Huntress, they tend to make for rather boring covers, and there's the very strong possibility that you will see the elements used again and again by all kinds of different books. But Two, and this is what I really hate, so often the random stock photos pasted together are totally inappropriate: I read one book not too long ago that's supposed to take place in Tibet and the cover featured 3 stock photos blended together: 1) a soaring turkey condor, copied in different sizes, 2) an indigenous Bolivian woman, and 3) a mountain valley so generic (and so distant! Making the human figure out of scale on top of everything else) that I couldn't even begin to guess what continent it was on. Advertizers' stock-photo-happy designs can get even more ridiculous than this, as in an ad Dad saved from the Honolulu Advertizer many years ago now, that said "Visit New Zealand!" and had a picture of none other than Mount Moran reflected in the Oxbow!* But perhaps nothing tops in badness the alligator with muppet hair on the cover of Allison Goodman's Eona. :P
So, looking at Holly Black's Curseworkers series... It's not that I was so in love with the original covers--indeed I think the new art is pretty cool--but that now I will have the trilogy on my shelf and the third book in the series will look like it doesn't fit or belong with the others, because it's in such a different style. The old covers feature photographs of models, while the new ones have highly stylized drawn faces--uh, so stylized that it took me a while of looking at the book to figure out it was more than just a pattern of random dots. At first I thought they'd only changed the cover of White Cat, which got me thinking about photographic covers and The Male Gaze--Do boys not want books with pictures of good-looking boys on them? Or just not grumpy looking ones holding fluffy animals? Whereas 'girl-books' (read: YA romance with a female hero) seem to almost universally get good-looking-but-objectified girls on the cover--furthering girls' training to accept The Male Gaze wherein girls and women are only acceptably "beautiful" when either dead or overly sexualized, and usually both at once. Which is not to say that the model on the cover of the original Red Glove (taken by one Michael Frost) looks like a corpse. Taken at face value it looks like Lila is about to be kidnapped by a menacing smoking glove--which has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the book. But taken as part of our overarching culture, it says "Attractive blond girl menaced and frightened by mysterious grabby villains = scary sexy exciting fantasy!" Which is not a message I care for ever, and especially not for impressionable young people. (The original cover to White Cat on the other glove looks like that guy is about to murder that poor fluffy cat... which isn't so very far removed from the plot after all.) So, in that way, I actually like the new covers better, but at least the original photos looked like they could be characters in the world as written, unlike the people on the covers of Malinda Lo's books--though at least (thank goodness!) those young women are neither dead nor objects.
Ultimately, my favorite cover of the six books I'm reviewing today is for Thirteenth Child (art and design by one Christopher Stengel). It's very boring, but it gives a good sense of the atmosphere of hte story--Western motifs--though perhaps Gothic lettering wasn't the perfect choice...--and a little dragon to hint at the magic. Not sure if it draws in the Middle Grade readers, but I suppose at least it doesn't put them off.
But I'm not actually here to talk about Judging Book Covers today! I want to talk about Worldbuilding! Which is not the strength of any of the fantasies in question. But does it matter?
I recently had a small Ack! (that's a technical term, for instances of minor and short-lived panic) the other day as I considered that L&W is not 100% accurate! No, not in that everyone can alter matter through magic, but in that I have chosen to create a world where the wildlife and climate patterns closely resemble (but do not exactly reproduce) certain Real Earth regions but the geography Does Not. On one hand, I've only done this to make writing this thing easier on myself, so that Plot Can Happen with the minimum of contrivance of navigation--whole swaths of land are ignored because they are not settings for the story. On the other hand, I think this is Totally OK--I mean, it's called verisimilitude, not veri-exactitude. But how little is too little? Would someone who, say, lives in a seasonal tropical dry forest be super-annoyed by something in the book that makes it clear that I don't? Or is the fact that it's set in a Fantasy World enough to just go with it? I think my conclusion is that if something is Obviously Wrong, there has to be a good reason for it, and not just authorial ignorance and/or laziness (hence the Ack!), but what is Obviously Wrong? What is Obviously Wrong to one reader won't be obvious at all to another (and obviously not obvious to the author!) Can a fantasy world affecting verisimilitude have, for example, a river that flows uphill without overt magical explanation or reason for it, just the sense that the author actually never considered that rivers must flow downhill? I daresay some readers will be much more annoyed by that than others.
As for things that are only obvious in certain parts of the world--there also comes a time when a writer simply HAS to STOP RESEARCHING, and she must ask herself two things 1) Is it important to the book to know when jackfruit** flowers in this kind of climate? 2) Would I, the author, be annoyed when someone says, "You terrible author! Fully One Billion People know that jackfruit only flowers under X weather conditions!"? The choices before the author are: a) do the research because it actually is important to the book and I don't want Fully One Billion People to think I'm an insensitive, lazy ignoramus, b) cut the blooming jackfruit because it's only there for atmosphere anyway and at worst Fully One Billion People will simply think I'm an ignoramous (but not necessarily lazy!!) for leaving out a food as vitally important in the everyday lives of everyone who lives in Real Earth Equivalent Climate as jackfruit, or c) Leave the jackfruit in one bare sentence of the novel as atmosphere and don't do the research because it's just not worth it, since Fully Six Billion People (approximate number) will just say, "Ooh! Atmosphere!" and Fully One Billion People can go ahead and call me a lazy author (but not ignorant!), and say, "She did research, just NOT ENOUGH." (There is also d) leave it in, but call it a smeerpfruit so that Fully One Billion People can say, "Smeerpfruit is clearly jackfruit--why not just call it jackfruit?", and Fully Six Billion People will say, "Wow, Smeerpfruit! How original! How fantastical! What a creative Genius our author is!" But frankly, I find that approach rather silly.)
Of course, the choices a, b, c, and d do not exist in a vacuum. A USian audience will be comprised mostly of people who have no clue when jackfruit flowers (and a large percentage who'll think jackfruit is made-up anyway), and will see it as just a piece of Exotic Atmosphere without caring that Fully One Billion People see it as an important food source (at least I found one person saying she loves it on the internet). But the problem is that fruits that grow in Real Earth Equivalent Climate are always (OK, most of the time) presented as Exotic Atmosphere, along with the people and animals who eat them. In the way that, say, blueberries are not. I mean, you never see prose like this:"Cat'ethelweena found the smeerpfruit shrub in the lush temperate bog-marsh, where twigs scratched her bare vanilla-milkshake-colored legs where her fanciful native costume of shorts and flipflops did not cover them. Pausing now and then to swat away the clouds of vicious blood-sucking insects who carried deadly temperate diseases in their bites, she filled her traditional hand-made plastic bowl--covered with exotic patterns symbolizing native plants and flowers--with ripe smeerpfruits. Their skins were of a strange deep bluish purple color, with a silvery grey bloom over them, and a star-shaped dimple on the flower-end--the whole fruit a symbol of the cold and silent Temperate Night. She popped one in her mouth to test its ripeness; as she bit down the tough skin burst, sending a tiny taste of the exotic sweet-tart flavor (reminiscent of jackfruit) over her tongue. Then, when her native-style plastic bowl was only half-full, she heard a loud 'whuff!' and smelled a pungent smell, like the first bite of bittermelon made scent. It was the fearsome Black Smeerp! Cat'ethelweena had seen many, since they feed primarily on smeerpfruit, but this one still filled her with terror, with its five 3-cm-long talons on each of its feet, and its massive slavering jaws which could exert over 200kg of force. This most fearsome and dangerous animal of the temperate bog-marsh was standing not half the width of a polo field away! One wrong move and Cat'ethelweena would be easy prey..."
Which brings me to Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. Back in 2009, Wrede got some flak because her fantastic United States of Columbia had no native humans living on it.The problem was not in the concept of people settling a New World populated only by dangerous magical beasts, but that in Real Life (that pesky thing again!) the U.S., thanks to genocidal policies of its government, very nearly didn't have native people living in it (today Native Americans make up barely 1% of the total U.S. population). Perhaps it wouldn't have been so offensive if the rest of the Northern Hemisphere had likewise been affected by dragons and spectral bears and sphinxes? Because one wonders how humans ever colonized Eurasia with all those creatures running around. Or, if they are uniquely North Columbian, how did they evolve? We do have a few native North American animals that evolved here after all, and one--the puma--is a fierce predator who can and will eat humans.
But over all, the worldbuilding is fairly superficial. Change a few names--Avrupan, Hijero-Cathayan, Aphrikan, Columbian--move a few dates (There's a Secession War in 1838, but I don't recall it being clear if there was slavery, nor is it said why some of the states wanted to secede in the first place.), but keep all the good stuff--Washington Crossing the Delaware, Lewis and Clark (no wonder they died without Sacagewea!), land-grant colleges. I'm not saying its bad--because it's not; it's fun the way Wrede does it--but that I'm not entirely sure it makes sense: there are Rationalists who want to live without magic in a world where everyone does magic and it's completely normal. I like the conflict, but I'm not sure why anyone would think of Rationalism in the first place. Likewise, of course they call the Not-Mississippi the Mammoth River. Almost like they mapped how big it was and then decided to name it. Nor is it clear why there were not dragons and sphinxes and sabertoothed cats on the eastern side of the Mammoth River--but there were mammoths, we are told, which were killed by the Avrupan settlers.
These things didn't actually bother me so much while reading--the magic Wrede came up with is such that I can just accept magical explanations for the animals, and since the story follows a child, the politics didn't need to be very fleshed out. I found it quite easy to suspend my disbelief for the duration of the story, and I liked it well enough that I'm interested in the sequels. As I said, I took the worldbuilding lightly and could enjoy the fun of it without being taken out of the story by the parts that didn't seem to quite be plausible. But, as they say on the internet, Your Mileage May Vary.
As for the story, it's episodic and feels more like the setup to a story than the actual story, but I enjoyed the main character Eff Rothmer and her voice a lot. I liked how she grew and changed, and how her relationships matured--with her twin brother (the seventh son of a seventh son), and her father, and her friend William especially. She's definitely a girl who spends all her time with boys, but doesn't put down girlishness to feel better about herself, and as she ages, she develops more subtle understandings of her mother and her sister Rennie (who gets pregnant and then elopes with her boyfriend off to the wilderness). I also really like her relationship with her teacher Miss Ochiba. Despite everything, the book does have diversity--Miss Ochiba and Wash are of Aphrikan extraction (how, I'm not sure), and are also among the most interesting characters--and the knowledge of Hijero-Cathayan magic hints at more that may come. The book is about Eff's whole childhood, however, so it's full of much summarizing that by nature tends to drag, and the events that happen inform character, but don't necessarily lead naturally one to the next. I found the book slow-going until the last fifth or so of the book, when Eff finally comes into her own and has something important to do. So, I don't know. I liked it; I'll keep it for now and check out the sequels, but I wasn't super excited about it. Since it's a children's book, I'll add that I don't recall anything that would put off an 11- or 12-year-old. In tone it's very reminiscent of LIttle House on the Prairie, but not as good.
Speaking of not as good... Malinda Lo said in an interview that she pictured the characters in Ash as looking vaguely Chinese... that's why so many of them have blond hair, green eyes, and almost all have Irish names. /sarcasmIn fairness, she may mean the people native to the land, like Ash, while many of the blondest characters have come from Concordia, er, "a desert country in the Far South"*** Well, anyway, people in Ash's country have been interbreeding with fairies for some time now, so that must explain it. Anyway, Lo wanted to return to The Kingdom and write a prequel to improve on the worldbuilding. Huntress is precisely the book I was thinking of when I asked my questions above about Obviously Wrong thing. Lo doesn't have any rivers flowing upstream, but she does have a river that splits in two on its way downstream, a new moon that appears in the East at sunset, horses that run like small cars, and, what made me really mad, ravenous wolves who appear in packs of hundreds to kill everything in sight without stopping. Sigh. This is something that Does Not Happen In A Vacuum either. The horses-as-cars thing I really don't care about, since it's really not important to the story and is a very small thing, but the wolves--speaking of genocidal policies of the U.S. Government--this is inaccurate animal behavior that plays into the very anti-science gun-happy virulent ignorance that leads to large groups of people actively trying to extirpate (AGAIN!) a keystone species in a fragile wild environment. I mean, I have a personal love for wolves of a spiritual nature, but cold, objective Science says this species is vital to the health and stability of the entire ecosystem, and using implausible, inaccurate behavior just feeds into the irrational bigotry that is quite literally killing my backyard--which, by the way, thanks to Evil Genocidal Policies of Wyoming's Government, is not sacrosanct. Did you know that a gun-toting a-hole has the right in this state to trespass all over my property for the sole purpose of murdering the very creatures I moved here to get close to? He does. So, this makes me angry, because I live in the vacuum this happens in. Just as I'm sure an indigenous American might be really angry about Thirteenth Child in a way I, viscerally, am not.
There could be magically explanations for these things, but there aren't. These items are part of the verisimilitude, because they were not Obviously Wrong to the author... nor apparently anyone else who read the book before it was published. With Ash, these problems simply don't appear because the story is more vaguely set. Having the Generic TImeless Western European Fantasy Setting means the verisimilitude is already subconscious to most readers in our culture, and it doesn't need to be explained. The Hunt feels real because it is real (oh, except bloodhounds wouldn't be used for the actual chasing part; staghounds would be). The Fairies feel real because they are real--they've been like that since Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and before. Even the story is familiar--even if it seems Lo's primary version of Cinderella was the movie Ever After. So the reader can ignore the hand-waves and focus on the good parts of Lo's version: the character of Ash, the beautiful, sensuous writing style, the believable and sweet love story between Ash and Kaisa (even if Kaisa herself isn't so fully fleshed out--but she has hints of uniquity!^). Also, perhaps because they are not new, I love love love Lo's fairies. :)
Huntress actually does improve on the worldbuilding. This time the atmosphere is less Ever After-y and more Chinese-y, but once again I don't think the atmosphere is the important part--except for the atmosphere in Taninli, the fairy city, and on Elowen's island. The plot is much more original, though still standard heroes and companions go on road trip, solve supernatural mystery, save the world. But it worked, mostly. What didn't work is that the story didn't tell how the position of King's Huntress came to be--it hinted at it at the end--and then there's the whole ending, but I'm not sure I'd call that a failing. I don't know what Lo intended, but I actually kind of liked that the unicorn's judgement is subjective and pragmatic (though it would have been nice to have shown how "no one's ever innocent in those stories", instead of just saying it and then showing only two unicorn judgements in both of which cases the judged is found innocent.), and I liked that the fate of Elowen was necessary, and also that it had the effect that it did. (I'm being vague, because the details are a spoiler, and I enjoyed the book enough to want to preserve that for anyone who might read it.) I found the Fairy Queen's story moving.
What Huntress doesn't improve on is the romance. In this book, there is the sense that the love between Taisin and Kaede is Fated, and both of them spend most of the book trying to suppress their feelings for no apparent reason. I mean, I do understand Taisin's fear, but Kaede's reluctance didn't make sense to me (especially given that in this world same-sex relationships are totally accepted--though people still always seem to assume heterosexuality first...), and the whole relationship felt artificial, contrived. But Lo still managed to write their later scenes when (uh, mild spoiler) they do let their feelings for each other show, and by the end of the book, I was comfortable with the idea that they loved each other... though there was still the inexplicable mystical connection to them... and [Spoiler!] I thought Taisin's testing out her mental connection to Kaede without permission was creepy, but [Major Spoiler!] I did like how Taisin brought Kaede back after Kaede confronted Elowen. [end spoilers] Also I liked the other romance in our group of travelers, but the deaths felt a little gratuitous, especially since only one related to the plot, and it didn't get resolved.
The pace of Huntress is slow, but despite the denouement being on the long side, I wanted to know what happened after. I wasn't unhappy with how we left Kaede and Taisin, necessarily, since [spoiler!!] I was imagining them reuniting after a few decades [end spoiler], but I wanted to know 1) Who Mona was, 2) What the Sages knew to answer Taisin's questions, 3) How the office of Huntress worked and how Kaede established those traditions, 4) If the Huntress is somehow magically selected, since they all seem to fit some particular criteria, 5) How the relationship between the fairy and human courts worked out, how the two peoples got along, and 6) how they fell out again. Basically, Huntress was a good story, but it didn't actually explain the world of Ash. Also, I theorize that the cloak Sidhean (also I sort of assume that name is a joke/wry pseudonym... is it?) gave Ash was made of a unicorn skin. Oh, so 7) What happened to the unicorns? Oh, and 8) In Ash the fairy world has gone sort of Avalon-ish, and has faded into a different dimension; how did that happen?
So, Plot and Worldbuilding are decidedly not Lo's strong suits, but I like her characters, and her writing is lovely, and I still love her fairies. So I'm keeping them for now.
Holly Black' Black Heart, on the other hand was the best of its trilogy; I devoured it and loved every minute. Black's worldbuilding in these books is not that logical--the world is almost identical to ours, complete with our movies, our cell phones, our YouTube, but with magic. The glove motif requires you to believe that in a world where few people are magical, and doing any magic is illegal (except when it isn't, apparently), people would adopt the clothing that allows curseworkers to blend in to regular society, instead of flaunting their bare hands as proof of their moral superiorityBut I suspend my disbelief. ;) I seem to have forgotten almost the whole plot of Red Glove, and I feel like many of the supporting cast's strengths were ignored--Is Lila a curseworker? I know why Daneca won't use her power, and having Sam always use his only useful skill (for criminal activities) would make him a bit side-kick-y, but it seems like they could have done more in the story.
On a more spoilery note: I think it worked in the book, since it's told from Cassel's point-of-view, but I'm not sure how I feel about The Feds Are Just As Bad As The Mob. I feel like we're supposed to believe killing is OK if people you like (or the Feds) kill people you don't like (or the Feds, cough), and Gage is the one losing teeth, but Zacharov seems suddenly toothless--I mean, he's a Really Bad Guy, but he spends the book being all nostalgic and sitting at home with, uh, Cassel's mom. And speaking of toothless--Barron actually has a really good plot-related reason for being nicer now, and I like that his ambitions have not really changed, but the whole subplot with Daneca (and how Cassel "fixes" the situation)... I don't know. If Cassel's wrong about Barron, it seems kind of hard to ask readers to side with Cassel... The moral of the story is, er, If you're a born criminal, then you'll only regret it if you try to go straight.
The Bad: I'm not convinced how brilliant Cassel's solution to the Big Problems of the book really were. I'm not convinced of the story he told us about Mina, but I guess he did help her as much as he could. And the solution to the Patton problem... I'm not sure that would really work. Also, however much we dislike Agent Jones, his actions at the end seemed a bit contrived. The Ugly: Sam using the gun seemed a tad contrived too. Gage added a modicum of diversity, but he appeared for all of two scenes, and in the second he was basically a walking stereotype (though I have to say, part of me wonders if he doesn't intend to be that way--he seems to like artifice, what with the different clothes he wears for different purposes, etc. (On that note, Ms. Black: What kind of antelope? Topi, say it's a topi. Definitely a topi.)). Ah well, at least he was a killer. I mean, er... The Very, Very Good: The second scene with Dr. Doctor, the entire scene from the moment he walks in the door to the moment he walks out, is the Best Scene I Have Read In Any Book This Year And Possibly In My Whole Life. Absolutely perfect. I think it's Cassel's voice that makes it. I do like this series a ton, and the narrative voice is a big part why. First person, present tense, immediate, distinctive, smooth, emotionally right where it needs to be. I don't mean Cassel; I would use other words to describe Cassel. No, I am praising Holly Black's skill here. It was a very well-written book.
And briefly, for something completely different: Margaret Powell's memoir Below Stairs. I've been faithfully watching Downton Abbey--which I won't talk about, except to say I think it's very contrived and very pro-aristocracy, but I'm still enjoying watching it very much--and DA allegedly takes some inspiration from Powell. Powell's narrative voice can be petty, but mostly she's an engaging storyteller. The book is interesting, but it's more of a brief window into an alien world than an in depth study a writer could delve into again and again for research purposes. I can't help but wonder, though, what it would be like to read a story from a servant in a great house in an earlier era. Powell, after all, has a steady ambition for upward mobility, which she ultimately achieves, which, along with living in a culture that evolved to encourage it, gave her the opportunity to retire and write this memoire, knowing that people were interested in her life. A century before, though? I can't imagine a kitchen maid could afford such dreams, nor that she could write her story and get such a wide audience. Almost as interesting a book for how it makes you reconsider life today than for how it describes life back then.
Love, Susie
*For readers unfamiliar with my homeland, Mt. Moran reflected in the Oxbow is an iconic image from my backyard, taken by thousands of tourists every year from a parking lot on the main road through Grand Teton National Park.
**What the hay is jackfruit? My (limited) understanding is that it's like a big breadfruit that people actually like to eat. (My understanding is that people only eat breadfruit for nostalgic reasons. But I've never had any, so what do I know--it's smeerpfruit to me.)
***Australia??
^That should totally be a word. Sounds so much lovlier than uniqueness, don't you think?