Category Archive

I really like Neil Gaiman; I probably can’t articulate why quite as well as Nymeth has in her recent post, but I have never read anything that he has written that I didn’t enjoy, and that includes his blog. So you won’t be surprised that I loved Odd and the Frost Giants, which was written for World Book Day.

Odd lives with his mother and stepfather, and has walked with a crutch since he injured himself soon after his father died at sea. At a time when winter doesn’t seem to want to end, Odd runs away from home to fend for himself in his father’s hut in the woods. There he comes across a bear, a fox and an eagle who have a bit of a problem (and then some), so he decides to help them.

If you know anything about Norse mythology you will enjoy this story. There are interesting little details, for example the eagle only has one eye, which point you in the right direction as to who the animals really are. And once these three are identified as Thor, Odin and Loki, who have been thrown out of Asgard, the question is will a 12 year old really be able to help?

How he manages to solve everyone’s problems. start the thaw and build a future for himself is really enjoyable. It’s a short book but Gaiman packs a lot into it; much hinges on whether you like Odd or not and I really did. Another triumph for Mr G.

This has been my third read for the Novella Challenge.

I’m sure I must at some point have read Poul Anderson, possibly sci-fi rather than fantasy, but if I have it hasn’t been for ages and obviously didn’t leave a huge impression. So when looking for fantasy works to read as part of a challenge, I scoured our bookshelves and came across Three Hearts & Three Lions. I don’t consider myself a shallow person (who does?) but I will confess that what first drew me to this book was the very lovely cover (by Paul Gregory). It has a knight in shining armour. It has a rather handsome horse. Most importantly, it has what appears to be a dragon. How could I resist?

This is the story of Holger Carlsen, who, while fighting the Germans on a Danish beach in the middle of WWII, suddenly finds himself transported to a completely different world. He quickly finds the above mentioned horse, handily supplied with clothing and weaponry, and sets off to find his way home. He comes across a variety of mythical characters, including a witch, a dwarf (with a suspiciously Scottish turn of phrase if you ask me) and a young woman who can turn into a swan. He also discovers that a Saracen may be looking for him…..

This is good fun. Holger’s search for a way home becomes a quest of an entirely different sort as it becomes clear to him that he may not be quite who he thought he was.  It is humourous in places (my favourite line = “Big women had no business acting kittenish” – which I shall try to keep in mind), and I enjoyed the protrayal of the tricksy Faerie Court very much.

It is simply a great story, and certainly one I plan to re-read it at some point in the future. The Book God has several other Poul Anderson books so don’t be surprised if you see the name again.

This has been my third read for the Once Upon a Time II challenge.

I knew a little about Julia Strachey from some of my Bloomsbury reading, especially the reminiscences of Frances Partridge, but had never read any of her fiction. So I was interested to see what I would think of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, in its lovely Persephone edition. 

The word that kept on springing to mind as I read this was brittle; not a criticism as such, but the story struck me as being one of those bright and witty pieces produced by many in the twenties and thirties, some of which were much more successful than others.

Although there was much to enjoy in the story of a wedding party with undercurrents, I felt that a lot of the humour was lost on me, being perhaps too much of its time. But there were pleasures; the bride’s mother was a remarkable character, and one of the lasting images for me is of the bride herself drinking more or less discreetly from her bottle of rum as she prepared for the rigours of her big day.

What did really catch my interest was the introduction by Frances Partridge, and sure enough after rummaging in the bookshelves I found her memoir of Julia, made up of her recollections alongside Julia’s own words. Having dipped into it I think I will find more of interest in the real life than the fiction, which is a shame.

This was my second read for the Novella Challenge.

This is my hundredth post, and I am so glad that I can use it to write about a book I enjoyed very much. The Dreaming Place is the second Charles de Lint book that I have read; I think I mentioned in a previous post that he is an author fairly new to me, but I have been really impressed by what I have read so far.

This is the story of Ashley (known as Ash) and Nina, cousins thrown together after Ash’s mother dies and she comes to live with her aunt and uncle. Inevitably, the two teenagers do not get on; their styles are too different, they resent each other, and Ash is consumed with her feelings of grief and abandonment. But magic enters their lives as Nina begins to experience vivid dreams of inhabiting the bodies of other creatures and Ash gets involved in the world of the spirits. Can Ash save Nina, and what will it mean for their relationship?

I haven’t read much young adult fiction, at least not knowingly, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but as I’ve already said I thoroughly enjoyed this. I love the way de Lint weaves the various mythological traditions into the story, and I really liked the book’s construction, as each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the girls, and they alternate throughout the book. In my copy, the blurb inside the back cover quotes de Lint as saying that the only real difference between writing for a teen audience is that the protagonists should be younger, and by inference everything else should be approached as if writing for adults and that seems absolutely right to me. Heartily recommended.

This is my first read for The Novella Challenge.

I have found this a difficult book to review, because once I started reading it I realised that it isn’t really a fantasy; in fact Ryman himself in his afterword (which some reviewers have seen as a part of the novel itself) says that he is “a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism”, in as much as some of the events which make up his story didn’t really happen, or might have happened in a world that is slightly different to our own.

Was tells the story of three people, all of whom have an involvement with The Wizard of Oz. Jonathan is an actor dying of AIDS who was due to play the Scarecrow in a stage adaptation of Oz when he discovered how ill he was, and whose childhood in Canada was affected deeply by seeing the first TV broadcast of the Oz film. Frances Gumm is a child singer who will grow up to become Judy Garland with all that entails. Dorothy Gael is an orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas in 1875, where she leads a harsh life including being abused by someone close to her, and has an encounter with a young teacher called Frank Baum which provides some of the inspiration for his children’s story.

The structure of the novel is very similar to that of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, but very different in tone and more unbalanced. What I mean by that is that the novel is really about Dorothy, and Jonathan’s search for her at the end of his life, and there really isn’t that much about Frances. The blurb on my copy describes this as “an epic fable of lost innocence” and I that feels right to me.

As I said at the beginning, whether this is really a fantasy novel in the traditional sense I’m not sure, but I found it very powerful; I became totally gripped about a third of the way through and wanted to know how things were going to turn out. The bleakness of Dorothy’s life in particular will be difficult for some to read, but I’m glad that I had the experience.

This is my second read for the Once Upon a Time II challenge.

Another book about a murder, but this takes a very different approach from my previous read.

Julie Myerson’s Something Might Happen plunges you directly into the story. A woman is horrendously murdered near her home in a small seaside town, and this is the starting point for a novel about grief, and the effect that such traumatic events can have on the people they touch. The main character in the novel is Tess, the murdered woman’s best friend, and we see the unfolding events through her eyes as the police arrive and carry out their investigation, and the questions they must ask start to expose complex feelings. Tess herself becomes drawn to one of the other characters, but then another tragedy strikes and makes her reassess her situation.

It’s quite difficult to describe this book without giving too much away, not that it’s a mystery in the conventional sense at all, but the developing emotional situation that Tess finds herself in is so well written and beautifully paced that it would be a shame to examine it too much and spoil the effect for other readers. All I can say is that I found it very moving; it’s really compelling, and for that reason is the first book for some time that I have effectively read in a sitting. Towards the end I found myself close to tears, though not quite as embarrassingly so as with another novel (about a time-traveller’s wife) that I had to stop reading on the bus in case I totally lost control.

This novel it makes very clear that real life is a mess and things are never tied up as neatly as we might like to think. Very, very sad but well-worth reading.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide is, I suppose, best described as a police procedural, a type of crime fiction which I enjoy very much (as long as it is done well). The novel is set in the early 1930s and involves John Madden, a former police inspector who, following a harrowing case described in Airth’s previous novel River of Darkness, has given up his career to settle in Surrey with his wife and children and become a gentleman farmer. His connections with his former colleagues are still very alive, and when he assists with a search for a missing child which results in him finding her mutilated body he inevitably gets drawn into the investigation of what appears to be a serial killer at work.

That’s the bones of the story but what I enjoyed about this novel was the tone, which is rather melancholy; Madden had some terrible experiences in World War One and these colour his attitude to life. This makes Madden a genuinely sympathetic character, to my mind, and gives the novel a moral centre which is there even when we are following the activities of the other characters. I also found the backdrop of growing unease about what is happening in Europe, particularly in Germany, gave the story some depth. Unfortunately it looks like Rennie Airth has only written these two John Madden books which is a shame as I would have liked to see what happened to him. If I’m wrong and there are others in this series I would love for someone to let me know.

So I have managed to complete the first of my five books for the Once Upon a Time II challenge and what a book it was! Forests of the Heart is the first Charles de Lint book I have ever read, and it certainly won’t be the last. I loved the mix of Celtic and Native American mythology which he has used for the foundation of this genuinely magical story, and will be trotting off to look up more background information on some of the figures and traditions he uses.

The novel is set in his fictional town of Newford, with a thriving artistic and musical community partly based in a house called Kellygnow. It’s within this community that we find the beginnings of a struggle between the spirits of the native peoples and those that have travelled across the sea with newcomers, in this case the Irish. Drawn into this story are two women, Bettina, who is Mexican/Native American and a healer with strong magic, and Ellie, a sculptor who doesn’t realise that within her too is magic, and who has taken on a commission which will set something ancient in motion.

As I said at the beginning, I loved this novel, I thought the human realtionships were realistically complicated, and that issues around the place of magic in the modern world were convincingly addressed. I can see now why so many love de Lint’s work, and would recommend it to anyone as a good place to start.

By the way, I’ve decided to start using larger pictures in the blog, as the lovely detail of so many of them gets lost in a thumbnail. Let me know what you think.

My admiration for Joyce Carol Oates knows no bounds, and I am always stunned by quite how prolific she is, both in her own name and under the pseudonyms she uses for her suspense fiction. So I was very interested to try one of her Lauren Kelly books, and the Book God kindly presented me with Blood Mask.

I actually finished this a few days ago, but I wanted to think about it before posting, as I found it quite an unsettling novel. This is the story of Marta, who after some major family problems (father sent to jail for embezzlement, mother in rehab) is taken in by her Aunt Drewe, a gallery owner and patron of the arts. Drewe left her home town many years before and has reinvented herself in the art world, carrying on with her late husband’s interests and establishing an artists’ colony at Chateauguay Springs on the Hudson River. She sets about trying to reinvent her niece as well (Marta’s real name is Annemarie), with limited success.

Drewe has taken up with a Scottish artist who creates sculptures using the blood of the sitter, and this has provoked a reaction from certain groups who vandalise the exhibition. So when Drewe disappears from her home after a struggle, and Marta is found drugged and beaten in the woods, the search begins for the perpetrators.

This is a very dark story which I admired more than I enjoyed; the ending is very ambiguous, but that fits with the tone of the novel. I found Marta a frustrating character, though I came to sympathise with her as a young woman in the thrall of a much stronger personality. It is , as you would expect, extremely well written and I will certainly look out for more Lauren Kelly.

So after what seems like most of this year so far I have finally finished Matter by Iain M Banks, and what a triumph it is! The novel tells the interconnected story of Djan Seriy Anaplian (a Culture Special Circumstances Agent), her two brothers Ferbin and Oramen, and the events that take place after the murder of their father on the planet Sursamen. But of course, being Banks, it’s so much more than that – inter-galactic politics, lots of SF techspeak, spaceships with wonderful names (my favourite was It’s My Party And I’ll Sing if I Want To) and battles, though it never loses the personal element. I became very attached to all three of the main characters and desperate to know how things were going to turn out. I’m not sure I can give a terribly coherent description of the impact the book had on me, except to say that it started off really well, got better, got even better, got really, really good and ended brilliantly. Worth every minute of the time it took me to finish it.

If you would like a more sensible review, look no further than here. And the same site has more information on the Culture, and a good interview with the man himself.

If you enjoy really satisfying science fiction, this needs to be on your reading list.