Kate McDowell on Storytelling

I promised myself some real fantasy escape time this holiday season, and I got it with the help of Terry Pratchett and his 4-book series that starts with The Wee Free Men.  Tiffany Aching is our heroine who becomes the witch of the chalk after a series of adventures that have her defeat enemies ranging from the fairy queen to winter himself.  Her last battle is with with a long dead sorcerer whose hatred for witches seethes out in vile stench across the ages.  Pratchett is at his best when he's most inventive, and pairing of the peculiarly verbally intelligent Tiffany Aching with her hilarious little blue defenders, the Nac Mac Feegle--whose curses are as blue as their tattoos--is highly inventive and leavened with humor throughout.  Don't tell the Feegles they're hilarious, though, or they're liable to drink and fight you to death.  Although they're easily defeated by the Pursing of the Lips and the Tapping of the Feet, at least if you're their kelda. Persona...

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/392/252 This is an editorial, and so of course hard to read out of context, but you get a good intro to article in this issue as well as a broad swath of a lot of cultural studies theory that is just now being productively mobilized to get at issues of race in fantasy media contexts.  There are some gaps; you get a sense that "Racefail '09" involved a lot of people, but it's hard to tell exactly what motivated them or what they did; then again, cultural events that are an "imbroglio" is by definition tough to do.  Still the cases of whitewashing are interesting specifics to visit, and the range from Avatar the Last Airbender to World of Warcraft makes this a fine touchstone piece. JM, thanks for the heads up!

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler  It's 1996, and when Emma gets a computer, something weird happens.  Within her AOL account she finds a strange place called Facebook.  In it, there's a page showing that she is fifteen years older and in trouble.  So, along with her neighbor and lifelong friend Josh, she starts to change the future, to write a better ending for herself. And things really begin to change.  She and Josh have been estranged ever since he tried to kiss her a few months back, and of course that changes dramatically.  Josh is perfectly happy with his future, but when Emma changes hers it impacts his as well and causes renewed tensions in their relationship.  Somehow, Asher and Mackler manage to stay on the relatively light side of how decisions today impact one's fate tomorrow, and it makes for a fun and engaging read. Although marketed to young adults, this is a book best suited for my generation, for people who came o...

I was told. I was told to read this by folks in the last iteration of the fantasy class. It came up on multiple bibliographies. Ben said it too. Finally, I read it, and I sit here (having to go to a reception in 15 mins) in quiet awe. This is a great book, and though I can't add it to the reading list for this fall, I've just added it to the list for next year's iteration of Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth. What can I say. A near-future version of San Francisco is hit by a terrorist attack, and Marcus and his 3 closest friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are taken and held for questioning by the Department of National Security (DNS), and Marcus's friend Daryll disappears. It's a dizzying start, but it's only the beginning. Marcus gets out after being threatened that he's being watched. Everything, meaning everything, he does is being tracked. He hacks a free X-box machine, a promotional give-away, to run ParanoidLinux, a ...

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is the author of this fantasy novel about Zahrah, a girl who is born dada. Meaning she has plants growing in her dreadlocks, or at least that's what it appears to mean, at first. But strange things start happening to the shy Zahrah, among them that she begins to be able to fly by controlling the air around her, and it becomes clear that the real meaning of being dada has been lost. Okorafor-Mbachu creates an engaging fantasy world, where humans have shunned the Jungle in favor of their "culture," a culture that involves bending many kinds of plants to their own technological purposes. Zahrah only really comes out of her shell when her best friend Dari is bitten by a snake. Then she realizes that she has to go into the jungle, alone, and face down its most ferocious beast in order to save her friend's life. It's a good read, and one that would work well alongside Farmer's The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm . The world it portrays is inter...

but not the book. The movie. The Tim Burton production, to be exact. This is not a movie of the book at all, but an imagined extension of the book, if Alice had come back to Wonderland at 20 instead of only once at 7. As such, its main similarities are in the use of characters that resemble those in the original Tenniel illustrations. Johnny Depp features prominently, if almost unrecognizably in digitally-altered form, as the Mad Hatter. Aside from a rather long middle section where the Hatter gives a bit too much backstory on why the Red Queen is bad, the movie is an enjoyable romp-turned-quest. Though the words from Jabberwocky also feature prominently, gone is all of Carroll's logic games, puzzles, trickery. Alice instead takes on the hero's role; her quest foretold in a scroll and carried out when she dons armor and picks up the vorple sword. All in all, it's a fun DVD to watch. But that's not really what I wanted to blog about. What strikes me is that, ov...

by Isabelle Carmody is a series book that, I can tell, really requires reading the whole series to "get." It was recommended highly, so I'm going to try book 2, Farseekers, as well. While Penguin published it in Australia, here it's under the auspices of the publisher Tor, which is usually home to more adult stuff in the states. It's a post-nuclear-holocaust world, we think, although the forbidding of all things from before has made it difficult to tell exactly what happened. Some of the children born since the disaster known as The Great White have unusual mental powers. However, the religious sect that is the current law of the land has forbidden all such powers, condemning people who have them to death or banishment to Obernewtyn, a place rumored to do experiments on those banished. Our young heroine, Elspeth Gordie, is unsure about the powers she has, and her process of finding out what she can do also becomes the reader's process. This bogs down oc...

...is not an instruction for any blog readers that may be out there. No, it's the title of Parker Blue's teen vampire novel. This is more Buffy than Twilight, and in fact heroine Val references Buffy in her own vampire-slaying adventures, as a fictional story (whereas hers is the real thing, of course). Val is a tough heroine who becomes sympathetic right away when, on her 18th birthday, her mother and stepfather kick her out of the house. This really isn't her fault, however. It has to do with the fact that her father was a part-incubus, and Val is part-succubus. Val's vampire-slaying has been, primarily, a way to slake her inner demon's lust. But Val's mother only sees the bad influence on her other, non-demon daughter Jen. The drama here isn't her survival, which is assured relatively quickly and easily due to the interventions of other part-demons who have been watching out for her. And, luckily, she lands a job with the San Antonio police, who ...

Juliana just let me know that she's heard through the blog-grapevine some sad news about Diana Wynne Jones, which is that she has recently opted to cease chemotherapy ( http://www.locusmag.com/News/2010/06/diana-wynne-jones-health-update/ ). Here's a blog post about sending fan mail, which now would indeed be a good time to do: http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/488911.html I sent my own little heartfelt note today. However, it seems to me that anytime is a good time to send fanmail to Diana Wynne Jones! In my note, I pointed to The Lives of Christopher Chant and Dark Lord of Derkholm as my two personal favorites, the former because it details a situation in which a child has to learn to be skeptical of adult motives and the latter because it offers metal-level commentary on the tropes of fantasy while also being emotionally engaging and having a rousing good plot. I also love having almost-too-many characters to keep track of, as long as the author gives us good reason to ca...

I have always been a fan of wacky tales of bunches of kids together. I am also a long time fan of stories of kids with Special Powers, among them the original Witch Mountain books by Alexander Key (the movies were just ok). What I enjoy about this sequel to The Mysterious Benedict Society is that it combines both of these features. Four kids with extraordinary (and complementary) talents have to save the world, this time by saving Mr. Benedict himself from his evil twin. Author Trenton Lee Stewart writes in self-consciously unrealistic style, which always helps me with the suspension of disbelief (that I was complaining about in reading City of Ember). Because, if the author knows it's just a story, somehow I get very free and easy with belief/disbelief. And the kids are fun to read about. The four stunningly gifted characters are back, again, and if the first book was Reynie's book, this one belongs to Sticky if it belongs to anyone. Reynie is still the central probl...

What is it called when you try to suspend disbelief, but whatever you're suspending it with just isn't strong enough, and disbelief keeps crashing down on your head? That was my feeling about Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember , especially the premise that the citizens of the City of Ember have, over the centuries, forgotten the secrets of electricity. Electric lights make the place work, and they know how to fix plumbing (or "pipeworks"), but they can't figure out electricity. Maybe I've watched too many home improvement shows, or maybe I just married a spouse whose astounding technical competency causes electrically powered machines to, apparently, fix themselves in his presence... whatever the reason, I just couldn't buy this one. And the ending is just the setup for the sequel, which always bugs me. Still, Lina and Doon are fine 12-year-old heroes. The best part is the opening, when Lina and Doon swap the jobs to which they are assigned, just aft...

These three books share a world as a setting, and have a few characters in common, but they are not a conventional series like the Harry Potter books or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The relationship is a bit like that of The Hobbit to The Fellowship of the Ring. We begin with a story of Orrec Caspro as a boy, but years are lost between the first and second books; the next book shows him as an accomplished and renowned poet. It's like The Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones, which skips Christopher Chant's middle years entirely, showing him only as boy and then as master. Gifts High on desolate, rocky hills live lonely peoples whose supernatural gifts allow them to unmake, sicken, or injure one another. These small bands do constant battle for the scant resources that are there. Orrec and Gry have been friends all their lives, and they hope to marry, but their families each have planned other marriages in order to increase their wealth. Orrec struggles with blindnes...

And yet another source of info on fantasy books... http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=2719491 Quick list of the titles: 1. Book of a Thousand Days 2. Tunnels : Book 1 3. Cherry Heaven 4. The Golden Dreams of Carlo Chuchio 5. Red Spikes 6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 7. Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat 8. Powers 9. Exodus 10. The Land of the Silver Apples I just finished Powers by Le Guin, and I'll blog that loosely-connected trilogy separately.

This is not the place to complain, but the holidays could have been better this year. Fortunately, I devoted much of my time to the escapist reading of these great books: Rita Gelman, Tales of a Female Nomad Not the best written book in the world, in that there's not a strong narrative binding her wanderings together, but I was in the mood to read about someone else's wandering and it was perfect for that. Gelman has built a life around moving from place to place while also making deep attachments while she's in a place. Her tricks for gaining entree include wearing the local dress and cooking with the groups of women, wherever groups of women are cooking. The author is made of iron, which I envy, but when all's said and done I'd rather be an armchair traveler. She takes us to Mexico, Nicaragua in the '80s, Bali for 8 years, New Zealand, and on various trips back to the states as she maintains ties to her own family even as she builds deep relationships els...

The Magic or Madness series by Justine Larbalestier Magic or Madness , Magic Lessons , and Magic's Child Any book reviewer knows that talking about trilogies is tricky... How much does it matter if you've read the other books? What will you lose if you treat them as one enormous narrative rather than three distinct books? So the short answer is, you could read these separately, but you won't want to once you start the first. Reason is the child of Sarafina, who has kept them on the run all of their lives from Reason's grandmother, Esmerelda. Esmerelda is magic, uses magic, and drained young Sarafina of her magic as a child. This is a world where people who are born magic but die young, and the choice is this: either they use their magic and live to maybe 30 (unless they feed off the young) or they don't use it and go insane. The story begins when Sarafina has finally succumbed to all her years of resisting magic by losing her mind. Reason, who was raised to ...

Part of why I keep this blog is my fascination with the process of reading, how reading engrosses readers, how I see myself in books (and assume others do the same). My interest in reading was cemented at a young age; my mother told me that, when I was about 6 or 7, I told her I wanted to be a reader when I grew up. Not a writer, mind you, but a reader. I did get interested in writing later, but in truth if someone would pay me to read all day, I'd do it. I'm good at it. I'm observant and easily hit fiction speeds of well over 100 pages per hour. Admittedly, as I write this, I see that my careers to date--librarian, professor--may be as close as I'll ever come to well-paid work that requires me to read. My reading preferences change continuously, but occasionally I find a book that reminds me that there are landmarks in my tastes, like the following 2007 release.... The Game by Diana Wynne Jones Whenever I see a new book by Diana Wynne Jones (despite her being ...

(David, your post is the next one down.) I decided to treat myself to re-reading an old favorite over the holidays by one of the best sci-fi-fantasy writers for children in the world. And it was as delightful as before. Jones creates a world replete with groups of creatures, politically motivated wizards, and a multi-species family of children and griffins. The premise is that someone from a non-magical world has found a portal to this magical world and is exploiting it for tourism. But it's not enough to tour a magical world. Mr. Chesney, head of these tours, demands that his customers be given a scripted set of typical fantasy story experiences, in which good triumphs over evil. The best part is the way the women of the world band together to educate the tourists (called "pilgrims") in the exploitation of their world. So much is topsy turvy. The eventual person who shuts it all down in the head of the thieves guild, who is angry because Mr. Chesney is stealing ma...