Terry Pratchett: Tiffany Aching series
This is less an actual book review, and more a story of my life, and why these books were written JUST FOR ME. It covers The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and maybe the first 2/3 of Wintersmith. Argh, scratch that, looking at the time and the amount of stuff I still need to do today, AHFoS will have to get a separate post.
I started out of order, with Wintersmith. I had to drive to Springfield for work (3+ hour drive), and I just grabbed the first audio book at the library that looked interesting. This was my first exposure to Pratchett, other than Good Omens, and The Colour of Magic (which I read because everyone kept saying Discworld was good, and I always read things in order when I can, and boy did I not see what all the fuss was about -- until the ever-helpful internet informed me this was the one time you should just skip the first book).
Anyway, it was February, and about half of my drive was on the soulless interstate. But the other half was on country highways, through tiny towns, past struggling farms. The leaves were off the trees, but there was no snow, and around here there are always some weeds and grasses that stay green. There are strips of woodland along the road, too, and low marshy places. It was a fitting place for listening to Wintersmith. I don't have great auditory processing, so something that I hear doesn't have nearly the reality of something that I read, but bits of the book stuck to bits of the landscape, and now every time I drive that route I recall images from the story overlaid on the turns of the road where I first heard them: green vines sprouting from a wooden floor, or a bonfire holding back impossible snow. I had to turn the CDs back in before I finished them, and I still haven't bought or borrowed the book to get the end of the story. But I liked it pretty well. It was clear-sighted and thoughtful.
I didn't fall in love with the series, though, until just last month, when I was most of the way through TWFM and it finally became clear just how much the story was a love letter to Granny Aching, Tiffany's late grandmother who had roamed the hills in her shepherding hut, and could do anything with sheep. Here are some things to know about *my* grandmother: she was magic with animals. She had dogs and cats and ducks and geese and chickens, and a pond full of peeping, croaking frogs. She would catch bumblebees in the garden in her bare hands and slowly open her hands to show them to me. The bees never stung her. Every time she came to our house, our dog would go into a wiggling frenzy of joy that was easily double what the dog ever did for us. She also had a knack for raising orphaned and injured birds -- but for some reason never succeeded with orphaned rabbits.
She liked to make up stories. She told me there was an ogre in the utility shed in her woods (following the long-standing Latvian tradition of creating monsters to keep kids away from dangerous places), but she couldn't quite bring herself to make him mean. She had a giant fork and spoon made of wood decorating her kitchen wall, and she told me that the ogre used those when he came to visit her for dinner. On some level, I believed her.
When she remarried and moved back to the city with her second husband, she sold her house in the country, but built a tiny cabin on a piece of property next door. "Cabin" is way too fancy a word: it was a shed just big enough for a cot, a bunkbed, a table and chair, and a wood stove. There was a latrine in the woods, and a hand pump for water, and she cooked on the wood stove or on an open fire outside. She spent weekends alone there, writing a book she never finished, and I loved it when she let me stay there with her. She absolutely radiated love for my sisters and me. She was magic.
If you've read TWFM, I think you can see why a love letter to Granny Aching brings me to tears every time I think of it. In fact, I am crying right now. There are artistic things to like about the book. I love the ocean, the way that it is far away and impossible, so dimly understood, just a picture on a familiar tobacco pouch... yet it is under their feet all the time, part of their bones and their lives and their power. I love the way that the book is so grounded in a particular place, how it captures the beauty and frustration of living somewhere that is so spare, so dependent on just a few elements. But those things are really beside the point. BECAUSE GRANNY ACHING IS FUCKING MAGIC AND SHE WILL KICK THE QUEEN OF FAERY'S ASS, even though she's already dead. And so is my grandmother, but I know that if I ever need her help to defeat any astral powers, she will be there.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/436617.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.
I started out of order, with Wintersmith. I had to drive to Springfield for work (3+ hour drive), and I just grabbed the first audio book at the library that looked interesting. This was my first exposure to Pratchett, other than Good Omens, and The Colour of Magic (which I read because everyone kept saying Discworld was good, and I always read things in order when I can, and boy did I not see what all the fuss was about -- until the ever-helpful internet informed me this was the one time you should just skip the first book).
Anyway, it was February, and about half of my drive was on the soulless interstate. But the other half was on country highways, through tiny towns, past struggling farms. The leaves were off the trees, but there was no snow, and around here there are always some weeds and grasses that stay green. There are strips of woodland along the road, too, and low marshy places. It was a fitting place for listening to Wintersmith. I don't have great auditory processing, so something that I hear doesn't have nearly the reality of something that I read, but bits of the book stuck to bits of the landscape, and now every time I drive that route I recall images from the story overlaid on the turns of the road where I first heard them: green vines sprouting from a wooden floor, or a bonfire holding back impossible snow. I had to turn the CDs back in before I finished them, and I still haven't bought or borrowed the book to get the end of the story. But I liked it pretty well. It was clear-sighted and thoughtful.
I didn't fall in love with the series, though, until just last month, when I was most of the way through TWFM and it finally became clear just how much the story was a love letter to Granny Aching, Tiffany's late grandmother who had roamed the hills in her shepherding hut, and could do anything with sheep. Here are some things to know about *my* grandmother: she was magic with animals. She had dogs and cats and ducks and geese and chickens, and a pond full of peeping, croaking frogs. She would catch bumblebees in the garden in her bare hands and slowly open her hands to show them to me. The bees never stung her. Every time she came to our house, our dog would go into a wiggling frenzy of joy that was easily double what the dog ever did for us. She also had a knack for raising orphaned and injured birds -- but for some reason never succeeded with orphaned rabbits.
She liked to make up stories. She told me there was an ogre in the utility shed in her woods (following the long-standing Latvian tradition of creating monsters to keep kids away from dangerous places), but she couldn't quite bring herself to make him mean. She had a giant fork and spoon made of wood decorating her kitchen wall, and she told me that the ogre used those when he came to visit her for dinner. On some level, I believed her.
When she remarried and moved back to the city with her second husband, she sold her house in the country, but built a tiny cabin on a piece of property next door. "Cabin" is way too fancy a word: it was a shed just big enough for a cot, a bunkbed, a table and chair, and a wood stove. There was a latrine in the woods, and a hand pump for water, and she cooked on the wood stove or on an open fire outside. She spent weekends alone there, writing a book she never finished, and I loved it when she let me stay there with her. She absolutely radiated love for my sisters and me. She was magic.
If you've read TWFM, I think you can see why a love letter to Granny Aching brings me to tears every time I think of it. In fact, I am crying right now. There are artistic things to like about the book. I love the ocean, the way that it is far away and impossible, so dimly understood, just a picture on a familiar tobacco pouch... yet it is under their feet all the time, part of their bones and their lives and their power. I love the way that the book is so grounded in a particular place, how it captures the beauty and frustration of living somewhere that is so spare, so dependent on just a few elements. But those things are really beside the point. BECAUSE GRANNY ACHING IS FUCKING MAGIC AND SHE WILL KICK THE QUEEN OF FAERY'S ASS, even though she's already dead. And so is my grandmother, but I know that if I ever need her help to defeat any astral powers, she will be there.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/436617.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.