Book Reviews: some fantasy, some sf, and one macabre history
I've been trying to work through my huge "to-read" pile. I have made some progress. And have culled out far more books than I've acquired. Really, I swear!
The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente
baleanoptera already reviewed the first volume here, so I won't retread that ground. Er, much. But I will still squee about a lot the characters being women! All sorts of women! Who do stuff and talk to each other about things other than men!
I love the subversions of fairy tales, too - not just the ones with the Witch grumping about men and their quests or the Prince figuring out that lots of questing is actually walking, but also the bits about the stepmother and her stepdaughter loving each other, and the girl in the tower not being rescued because guys don't like her appearance (so she gets rescued by the Witch and Beast!). And an all-female pirate crew! Yay! I also love how in the frame narrative, the boy's older sister seems like a typical evil older sister who likes bossing people around, but turns out to have a lot more depth.
The second volume is also awesome. Some of the stories are just so imaginative, and they can swing from beauty to horror in an instant. Like in the story of Marrow - Vhummin's descriptions of the silk awnings and jewel/fruit juice and spices and rose dome is gorgeous, even if we know it's corruption masked with decadence, and then when you find out what the kids are making in that mint... *shudder* Things like the Tale of the Hungry Lord who eats all his serfs' food and then his wife lead to some interesting discussion, too. (You can go for political structures or gender or both with that one.) You really have to pay attention to follow these tales, interconnected and nested inside each other like Russian dolls, but it's well worth it.
Last, I'd just like to recap the beginning of one tale because it's so cool. Once there was a woman who wasn't a mermaid, but was sea-serpent on bottom and woman on top, so close enough to see The Little Mermaid parallels. She yearned to see what was above the water, and one day went up and looked around. She found a shipwrecked human man and stared at him for a while.
Then, being a fish and therefore practical, she ate him.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
This is a slender volume - I was trying to knock off a lot off books at once, so I went for the short ones :D At first, I was indifferent toward it. So this psychic girl with white hair inherits a menagerie of strange and magical beasts from her father and grandfather, and she's kind of a loner on a mountain, and then some guy shows up and drops a baby on her doorstep. So? She's not going to be forced into one of those plots where the woman learns love and softness and femininity when she sees a cute, helpless baby, is she?
Well, kind of. She does grow to love the kid, and the witch down the road who acts as her surrogate mother. Even the random guy. But! This is not the end! Even her wedding to the guy is nowhere near the end! She is still emotionally stunted, not magically cured, and uncertain about how love actually works. And then she uses her new in-laws to embark on a horrible course of vengeance that could wreck two kingdoms and lose her the love and trust of her husband and adopted son - which she knows, but continues anyway. She even has a good cause for being angry rather than "because the author said she should." This was much more interesting than I expected. And it all wraps up organically and believably for the most part without any threat of endless sequels, because the story is done.
Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
Yet another book I loved. This one also had a gripping mystery, and I couldn't put it down until I knew what was really going on. The main character is a historian who does research for a novelist who writes books set during the American Civil War. He spends a lot of his time running around between cemetaries and libraries and such, searching for things like the bill of sale for Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller. The novelist is interested in Lincoln's dreams - especially the one two weeks before he died, wherein he heard weeping in the White House, saw a coffin in the East Wing, and asked who died ("The President" - ack!) - so he wants to consult the historian's old college roommate, who is a sleep expert. The roommate has a patient/girlfriend (yes, it's dodgy) who is having horrible nightmares - which the historian immediately recognizes as having details from Robert E. Lee's life. And she doesn't know anything about Lee...
So most of the book is these two trying to evade the roommate, who is trying to tranquilize the woman against her will to stop the nightmares, and figure out why the hell she is having Lee's dreams. Meanwhile, the novelist is still trying to figure out what Lincoln's dreams meant... Okay, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this, but trust me. It's exciting.
My only reservation is with the woman having the nightmares. She keeps getting described as fragile-looking, and she's in peril (sleepwalking and standing in the cold and possibly in danger of dying somehow), and the guys can't help loving her, and that sort of thing. However, she's also strong and makes an incredibly brave decision about the dreams, so it might balance out.
One of the best parts is the continuing thread of Lee and Traveller, his faithful horse. Throughout the book, the historian tells us details of their time together - when Lee first saw Traveller, some of their campaigns together, how well their energy matched each other's. It's nice, and adds a counterpoint to the horrible images the woman sees in Lee's nightmares with corpses of young soldiers and such. It also supports the question raised elsewhere in the book: if Lincoln and Lee were such nice guys who cared about their men (and horses), how could they live with themselves after sending so many to their deaths? Then, at the very end, Willis suddenly ties the Traveller theme together with the main plot and the characters in one of the most effective punches to the gut I've ever experienced in fiction. I'm still reeling.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
I was looking forward to this one, because I've heard of it for so long. It's a classic of the genre and all that. I love the premise: everyone who has ever lived is mysteriously reincarnated on the banks of a great river. And how can you not love the title? With all of humanity to choose from, the author picks some unexpected characters, like Alice Liddell (aka Alice in Wonderland).
But. The protagonist is a smug bastard, a misogynist, and a rapist. I have no idea if he was historically like this, but if he was... CHOOSE A DIFFERENT PROTAGONIST, DAMMIT!
So. Asshole Protagonist occasionally muses that chaos is sure to break out once everyone gets over their shock, because people always fight over resources and women. (Hmm, if "people" and "women" are separate groups, what does that tell us?) Sure enough, soon mass rape breaks out. Not that Asshole Protagonist cares. Alice Liddell is being sulky and unreasonable just because they had sex after chewing some narcotic gum, and now she won't sleep with him again, the bitch! He might have to go without companionship, and that's just wrong! Lucky for him that ex-prostitute just joined the group, and that her claims that she only did it out of economic necessity and her huffiness at being sloppy seconds were just her playing hard to get. She really does want him.
Meanwhile, Asshole's group has come to include a random little girl they picked up to prove they were Good People, a Jewish couple Asshole insults (but they stick around because they want protection), a young guy who picked up a woman of his own after Alice didn't respond to his flirting, an alien, and a caveman. They decide to build a raft and go on a Quest, because clearly that's the best thing to do in this situation, and then... well, then I quit.
Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear
Histories about premature burial are so much less horrifying than books that go, "Whee! Mass rape! But who cares when I'm horny and we have a Quest because I'm an adventurer!" This book had lots of fun tidbits on German security coffins and waiting mortuaries, pamphlets with horror stories urban legends true case reports of people buried alive, the anti-premature-burial activist movement and its connections to spiritualism and anti-animal-vivisectionists, and the old legends that never die. I recognized "The Careless Anatomist" from an episode of Lost, for instance. ("My God, she's not dead! Stop the autopsy!") The author also talks about nineteenth-century authors who used premature burial as a literary theme to talk about alienation, oppressive societies or families, obsession and control, etc.
Oh, and he also mentioned modern cases of people being mistakenly diagnosed as dead. His advice? Don't overdose on barbituates while out in freezing weather. Fortunately, with modern embalming techniques, there's little danger of waking up after you're buried!
The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente
baleanoptera already reviewed the first volume here, so I won't retread that ground. Er, much. But I will still squee about a lot the characters being women! All sorts of women! Who do stuff and talk to each other about things other than men!
I love the subversions of fairy tales, too - not just the ones with the Witch grumping about men and their quests or the Prince figuring out that lots of questing is actually walking, but also the bits about the stepmother and her stepdaughter loving each other, and the girl in the tower not being rescued because guys don't like her appearance (so she gets rescued by the Witch and Beast!). And an all-female pirate crew! Yay! I also love how in the frame narrative, the boy's older sister seems like a typical evil older sister who likes bossing people around, but turns out to have a lot more depth.
The second volume is also awesome. Some of the stories are just so imaginative, and they can swing from beauty to horror in an instant. Like in the story of Marrow - Vhummin's descriptions of the silk awnings and jewel/fruit juice and spices and rose dome is gorgeous, even if we know it's corruption masked with decadence, and then when you find out what the kids are making in that mint... *shudder* Things like the Tale of the Hungry Lord who eats all his serfs' food and then his wife lead to some interesting discussion, too. (You can go for political structures or gender or both with that one.) You really have to pay attention to follow these tales, interconnected and nested inside each other like Russian dolls, but it's well worth it.
Last, I'd just like to recap the beginning of one tale because it's so cool. Once there was a woman who wasn't a mermaid, but was sea-serpent on bottom and woman on top, so close enough to see The Little Mermaid parallels. She yearned to see what was above the water, and one day went up and looked around. She found a shipwrecked human man and stared at him for a while.
Then, being a fish and therefore practical, she ate him.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
This is a slender volume - I was trying to knock off a lot off books at once, so I went for the short ones :D At first, I was indifferent toward it. So this psychic girl with white hair inherits a menagerie of strange and magical beasts from her father and grandfather, and she's kind of a loner on a mountain, and then some guy shows up and drops a baby on her doorstep. So? She's not going to be forced into one of those plots where the woman learns love and softness and femininity when she sees a cute, helpless baby, is she?
Well, kind of. She does grow to love the kid, and the witch down the road who acts as her surrogate mother. Even the random guy. But! This is not the end! Even her wedding to the guy is nowhere near the end! She is still emotionally stunted, not magically cured, and uncertain about how love actually works. And then she uses her new in-laws to embark on a horrible course of vengeance that could wreck two kingdoms and lose her the love and trust of her husband and adopted son - which she knows, but continues anyway. She even has a good cause for being angry rather than "because the author said she should." This was much more interesting than I expected. And it all wraps up organically and believably for the most part without any threat of endless sequels, because the story is done.
Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
Yet another book I loved. This one also had a gripping mystery, and I couldn't put it down until I knew what was really going on. The main character is a historian who does research for a novelist who writes books set during the American Civil War. He spends a lot of his time running around between cemetaries and libraries and such, searching for things like the bill of sale for Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller. The novelist is interested in Lincoln's dreams - especially the one two weeks before he died, wherein he heard weeping in the White House, saw a coffin in the East Wing, and asked who died ("The President" - ack!) - so he wants to consult the historian's old college roommate, who is a sleep expert. The roommate has a patient/girlfriend (yes, it's dodgy) who is having horrible nightmares - which the historian immediately recognizes as having details from Robert E. Lee's life. And she doesn't know anything about Lee...
So most of the book is these two trying to evade the roommate, who is trying to tranquilize the woman against her will to stop the nightmares, and figure out why the hell she is having Lee's dreams. Meanwhile, the novelist is still trying to figure out what Lincoln's dreams meant... Okay, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this, but trust me. It's exciting.
My only reservation is with the woman having the nightmares. She keeps getting described as fragile-looking, and she's in peril (sleepwalking and standing in the cold and possibly in danger of dying somehow), and the guys can't help loving her, and that sort of thing. However, she's also strong and makes an incredibly brave decision about the dreams, so it might balance out.
One of the best parts is the continuing thread of Lee and Traveller, his faithful horse. Throughout the book, the historian tells us details of their time together - when Lee first saw Traveller, some of their campaigns together, how well their energy matched each other's. It's nice, and adds a counterpoint to the horrible images the woman sees in Lee's nightmares with corpses of young soldiers and such. It also supports the question raised elsewhere in the book: if Lincoln and Lee were such nice guys who cared about their men (and horses), how could they live with themselves after sending so many to their deaths? Then, at the very end, Willis suddenly ties the Traveller theme together with the main plot and the characters in one of the most effective punches to the gut I've ever experienced in fiction. I'm still reeling.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
I was looking forward to this one, because I've heard of it for so long. It's a classic of the genre and all that. I love the premise: everyone who has ever lived is mysteriously reincarnated on the banks of a great river. And how can you not love the title? With all of humanity to choose from, the author picks some unexpected characters, like Alice Liddell (aka Alice in Wonderland).
But. The protagonist is a smug bastard, a misogynist, and a rapist. I have no idea if he was historically like this, but if he was... CHOOSE A DIFFERENT PROTAGONIST, DAMMIT!
So. Asshole Protagonist occasionally muses that chaos is sure to break out once everyone gets over their shock, because people always fight over resources and women. (Hmm, if "people" and "women" are separate groups, what does that tell us?) Sure enough, soon mass rape breaks out. Not that Asshole Protagonist cares. Alice Liddell is being sulky and unreasonable just because they had sex after chewing some narcotic gum, and now she won't sleep with him again, the bitch! He might have to go without companionship, and that's just wrong! Lucky for him that ex-prostitute just joined the group, and that her claims that she only did it out of economic necessity and her huffiness at being sloppy seconds were just her playing hard to get. She really does want him.
Meanwhile, Asshole's group has come to include a random little girl they picked up to prove they were Good People, a Jewish couple Asshole insults (but they stick around because they want protection), a young guy who picked up a woman of his own after Alice didn't respond to his flirting, an alien, and a caveman. They decide to build a raft and go on a Quest, because clearly that's the best thing to do in this situation, and then... well, then I quit.
Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear
Histories about premature burial are so much less horrifying than books that go, "Whee! Mass rape! But who cares when I'm horny and we have a Quest because I'm an adventurer!" This book had lots of fun tidbits on German security coffins and waiting mortuaries, pamphlets with horror stories urban legends true case reports of people buried alive, the anti-premature-burial activist movement and its connections to spiritualism and anti-animal-vivisectionists, and the old legends that never die. I recognized "The Careless Anatomist" from an episode of Lost, for instance. ("My God, she's not dead! Stop the autopsy!") The author also talks about nineteenth-century authors who used premature burial as a literary theme to talk about alienation, oppressive societies or families, obsession and control, etc.
Oh, and he also mentioned modern cases of people being mistakenly diagnosed as dead. His advice? Don't overdose on barbituates while out in freezing weather. Fortunately, with modern embalming techniques, there's little danger of waking up after you're buried!