May books
May, apparently, was children’s fantasy month.
Heriot by Margaret Mahy
Heriot is a much more traditional princes-and-wizards-and-nobles fantasy than I was anticipating from Mahy, but I definitely enjoyed it. The inclusion of a woman with daddy issues who is consumed by a fiery urge for sword-wielding revenge in the finest Inigo Montoya tradition made me happy. It’s got some nice lines and imagery:
Dysart felt he was made of paper and ink, made out of stories, and not all of them his own.
...silken poppies, delicate as tissue, but tough enough to survive thw harsh winds. They survived because they knew how to bend. But the mountain, rather than the flower, was Linnet’s chosen sign - an unyielding cone with fire at its heart
“I’m not honourable,” Betony Hoad replied. [the crown prince] “I don’t have to be. I’m noble.”
Plus the nation’s set-up and the relationship between the land and its Magician and between the ruler and the ruled was really interesting to me, because if I hadn’t fuckled up my degree I would be trying to do a Master’s where I talked about children’s fantasy and magic and inheritance and legacy and the land, so it was fascinating to me and my super-specific interests.
Fly By Night by Frances Hardringe
This is so great. I have mad love for adventure-romp type things (if I could have written one book in this world, it would be The Wind Singer by William Nicholson) especially when there’s ~something more involved. This is a story about a twelve-year-old girl whose father taught her how to read and love books before dying, who runs off from her miserable little village with a con artist type and a terrifying goose. This is secondary-world fantasy but it’s very Enlightenment-flavoured; it’s about daring escapades and being little people on the edge of big events and radical free-thinkers and atheists in coffeehouses and political intrigue, but it’s also about
dangerous books, gunpowder books, books that could burn away the castles of the mind and change the colour of the sky.
So yeah. Mosca, the girl, runs off with Clent who is both a Dodgy Character and a poet. They end up in Mandelion, a big city, and get caught up in big events - there are various factions fighting for control of the city, none of them Designated Good Guys, and Clent and Mosca don’t trust each other either. There are coffeehouses which are actually very slow-moving rafts, basically, and young idealists trying to teach street kids to read, and Mosca is trying to survive and do well out of things and maybe read a bit if she can.
It is great, and does a nice job of not having our scruffy lower-class protagonists become suddenly Significant.
Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardringe
This is a very different sort of fantasy but I enjoyed it just as much. It’s set in our world, with this great premise: three kids (all about eleven) nick coins from a wishing well for a bus home, and find they have taken on the binding responsibility of granting the wishes in question. The responsibility comes along with sort-of-powers, each appropriate to the personality of the protagonists. Nice set-up for hijinks and adventure and learning something, yes? Only the wishes have a darker, truer element underneath them, and that gets them and their town into a pretty scary place; there’s some real darkness here. Appealingly, it’s not dark-man-dark; it’s one of those things where the fantasy set-up works to magnify the dynamics and personalities that were already in play.
The three main characters and their relationship feels true; the pov character is Ryan, and his best friends are Chelle and Josh. Josh is a year older, saved them from being bullied nobodies at school, is one of those kids with charm and verve who somehow gets into scrapes and out of them and you don’t know how he gets away with it. Hardringe is almost a successor to Anne Fine in her ability to evoke playground politics, although she’s not quite there yet.
Ryan, as you might expect, admires Josh enormously, and fears him a little. Chelle admires Josh too; she is the low man on their totem pole, always talking and rarely listened to, and Hardringe shows Ryan not listening to her when he should’ve, shows the guilt but also how that doesn’t necessarily translate into change. Ryan and Chelle, when they’re alone together, usually talk about Josh; seeing their slightly empty friendship become something more solid is one of the pleasures of the book, along with a lovely secondary cast.
FYI: if you are going to be bothered by adoptive parents being a bit neglectful and definitely not good at parenting, maybe give this one a miss, although it’s never suggested Josh would be better off with his biological parents.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/265265.html. Comment wherever you like :)
Heriot by Margaret Mahy
Heriot is a much more traditional princes-and-wizards-and-nobles fantasy than I was anticipating from Mahy, but I definitely enjoyed it. The inclusion of a woman with daddy issues who is consumed by a fiery urge for sword-wielding revenge in the finest Inigo Montoya tradition made me happy. It’s got some nice lines and imagery:
Dysart felt he was made of paper and ink, made out of stories, and not all of them his own.
...silken poppies, delicate as tissue, but tough enough to survive thw harsh winds. They survived because they knew how to bend. But the mountain, rather than the flower, was Linnet’s chosen sign - an unyielding cone with fire at its heart
“I’m not honourable,” Betony Hoad replied. [the crown prince] “I don’t have to be. I’m noble.”
Plus the nation’s set-up and the relationship between the land and its Magician and between the ruler and the ruled was really interesting to me, because if I hadn’t fuckled up my degree I would be trying to do a Master’s where I talked about children’s fantasy and magic and inheritance and legacy and the land, so it was fascinating to me and my super-specific interests.
Fly By Night by Frances Hardringe
This is so great. I have mad love for adventure-romp type things (if I could have written one book in this world, it would be The Wind Singer by William Nicholson) especially when there’s ~something more involved. This is a story about a twelve-year-old girl whose father taught her how to read and love books before dying, who runs off from her miserable little village with a con artist type and a terrifying goose. This is secondary-world fantasy but it’s very Enlightenment-flavoured; it’s about daring escapades and being little people on the edge of big events and radical free-thinkers and atheists in coffeehouses and political intrigue, but it’s also about
dangerous books, gunpowder books, books that could burn away the castles of the mind and change the colour of the sky.
So yeah. Mosca, the girl, runs off with Clent who is both a Dodgy Character and a poet. They end up in Mandelion, a big city, and get caught up in big events - there are various factions fighting for control of the city, none of them Designated Good Guys, and Clent and Mosca don’t trust each other either. There are coffeehouses which are actually very slow-moving rafts, basically, and young idealists trying to teach street kids to read, and Mosca is trying to survive and do well out of things and maybe read a bit if she can.
It is great, and does a nice job of not having our scruffy lower-class protagonists become suddenly Significant.
Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardringe
This is a very different sort of fantasy but I enjoyed it just as much. It’s set in our world, with this great premise: three kids (all about eleven) nick coins from a wishing well for a bus home, and find they have taken on the binding responsibility of granting the wishes in question. The responsibility comes along with sort-of-powers, each appropriate to the personality of the protagonists. Nice set-up for hijinks and adventure and learning something, yes? Only the wishes have a darker, truer element underneath them, and that gets them and their town into a pretty scary place; there’s some real darkness here. Appealingly, it’s not dark-man-dark; it’s one of those things where the fantasy set-up works to magnify the dynamics and personalities that were already in play.
The three main characters and their relationship feels true; the pov character is Ryan, and his best friends are Chelle and Josh. Josh is a year older, saved them from being bullied nobodies at school, is one of those kids with charm and verve who somehow gets into scrapes and out of them and you don’t know how he gets away with it. Hardringe is almost a successor to Anne Fine in her ability to evoke playground politics, although she’s not quite there yet.
Ryan, as you might expect, admires Josh enormously, and fears him a little. Chelle admires Josh too; she is the low man on their totem pole, always talking and rarely listened to, and Hardringe shows Ryan not listening to her when he should’ve, shows the guilt but also how that doesn’t necessarily translate into change. Ryan and Chelle, when they’re alone together, usually talk about Josh; seeing their slightly empty friendship become something more solid is one of the pleasures of the book, along with a lovely secondary cast.
FYI: if you are going to be bothered by adoptive parents being a bit neglectful and definitely not good at parenting, maybe give this one a miss, although it’s never suggested Josh would be better off with his biological parents.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/265265.html. Comment wherever you like :)