Easily the best Novik book I've read, and that's coming from someone who generally dislikes both YA and romance and has some serious issues with BeautEasily the best Novik book I've read, and that's coming from someone who generally dislikes both YA and romance and has some serious issues with Beauty and the Beast, one of the book's fairy tale motifs.*
In Uprooted, I think Novik has really come into her own. Her style fits nicely into the Russian-inspired high fantasy tone, and she deftly weaves fairy tales into her plot in a way that enriches the story without coming across as heavy-handed.
The threat of the woods, too, is extremely effective. I've never noticed it in the Temeraire books--I'm generally rather meh about them, and dropped out after three or so-- but Novik is a masterful writer of suspense. She's less strong with characters and characterization, but with the fairytale backdrop, this feels less important. Uprooted has an interesting world, a thoroughly creepy threat, and a satisfying ending.
If you want to read a Novik book, this should be the one.
*that hostile abusive guy is really a handsome prince deep down, I promise!...more
Turnip princesses, louse-headed heroes, and dung-beetle princes...not quite your traditional fairy-tale fare.
Once upon a time, a collection of five huTurnip princesses, louse-headed heroes, and dung-beetle princes...not quite your traditional fairy-tale fare.
Once upon a time, a collection of five hundred fairy tales were quietly locked away in an obscure archive. And there they languished, forlorn and forgotten, for over a century and a half, until one day, a brave historian ventured deep into the dusty depths of the Regensburg archives and brought them into the light of day.
Although the Grimms themselves praised his skills, Von Schonwerth’s collections never gained his contemporary collectors’ fame. Many of his stories eventually vanished from the public sphere. Which is why the discovery of five hundred previously forgotten tales is such a boon for historians.
The collection includes new versions of such old familiars as “Tom Thumb,” “Simple Hans,” “The Glass Mountain,” and one of my personal favourites, “Seven with One Blow.” The motifs--the search for a lost husband, the poor achieving victory over the nobility, the jealous mother-in-law trying to oust her son’s wife-- are all familiar, but many of the stories have new twists. “Ashfeathers” is a Cinderella tale in which the protagonist finds her love at a church service rather than a ball. One labor contract story features a priest as the villain rather than the standard fare of a devil, an ogre, or a giant. “Lousehead” (yes, that type of louse) is an interesting variation on the more standard beast disguise tale.
Maria Tatar includes a short commentary on each story, and she repeatedly points out the nontraditional gender roles of the protagonists. While Schonwerth’s tales may include more variety than the Grimms' 1857 collection or the later Disney versions, I don’t think the distribution of damsels of action and women in distress is much different than the Grimms’ original 1812 collection. Many of Schonwerth's stories still involve wicked mothers and the punishing of troublesome wives. Heroes and heroines are almost always beautiful--and in the one case where the protagonist is hard-working and plain, her reward is to be magically blessed with beauty. All the same, at least one of the stories was thought-provoking. The “Pearl Tears” involves a protagonist who has pearls and roses dropping out of her mouth, but rather than using her questionable mouth issues to find her prince, she is “blessed” with a disinterest in men and gets her happily-ever-after by running her castle solo.
Schonwerth’s stories contain many more sexual elements than the more prudish Grimms. Several of the heroines have out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and even more involve sex before marriage as the “heroic” action the protagonist must undertake. An odd Bluebeard-like tale involves seven princesses married to the same man and a bevy of mermaids whose sexual wiles enchant the hapless prince. One particularly crass story has a village woman moon the protagonist, only to have him respond with a hot poker in an uncomfortable area. Even more intriguingly, one happy ending involves the heroine giving her unwanted fatherless baby to the wood sprites-- an outcome many women of the day might have desperately desired. Another story ends with the impoverished mother cheerfully selling her daughter to the ice giants for seven golden apples, an outcome the daughter seems to accept with aplomb.
In Schonwerth’s collection, not all curses get broken, and not all stories have a happy ending. In one story, the mermaids steal and graphically devour a baby. In another, they abduct and murder a young child. In “The Snake’s Treasure,” the protagonist is told to follow a series of Tam Lin-like instructions, but is distracted by greed, leaving the princess enchanted and un-rescued.
Fairy tales aren’t the easiest reads. The characters tend to be caricatures, the stories repetitive and abrupt. The morality see-saws between pious moralizing and burlesque gallows humour. For each tale with a happy-ever-after achieved by simple-minded kindness, there is another that celebrates the protagonist’s savage trickery. Fairy tales are the bones of stories, sharp and sometimes ugly, stripped clean of subtlety and logic, but these archetypes support and shape even the fiction of today.
I received this ebook through Netgalley from the publishers, Penguin Classics, in exchange for my honest review. Thank you!...more
When I saw the title, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of the Fairy Tale, I knew I had to give the book a try. I had recently finished Jack Zipes~2.5
When I saw the title, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of the Fairy Tale, I knew I had to give the book a try. I had recently finished Jack Zipes’ translation of the 1812/1215 Grimms’ Fairy Tales and had been very intrigued by the forward, in which Zipes detailed the origins and histories of the Grimms’ tales and the reason for the stories’ evolution. Because this book calls itself a history, I rather expected an expansion of this theme, a history detailing the stories’ transcriptions and an attempt to trace the evolution of the fairy tale archetypes. Unfortunately, I think the title is somewhat misleading: this book is less a history than a literary analysis.
Warner’s definition of “fairy tale” is not the same as mine. Her focus is almost entirely on Western fairy tales (the only real exception is the Western retellings of world fairy tales) and spends just as much on present-day “fairy tales” as on the original stories, from Angela Carter to Philip Pullman to movies like Maleficent and Brave. In my opinion, most of the book is made up of literary criticism rather than ethnography or history.
Although I’m not particularly fond of literary analysis, some of the aspects that Warner discusses, such as Bettelheim’s psychoanalytical analyses of the stories, was quite interesting. However, while I know this is more of an indictment of me than the genre, I tend to dislike the way that literary criticism tends to bolster claims with anecdotes rather than fact. For example, Warner claims that
“Bluebeard’s afterlife in literature and other media divides sharply along gender lines: male writers see themselves in the role, with varying degrees of self-scrutiny and complacency, whereas for women, the Bluebeard figure often embodies contradictory feelings about male sexuality, and consequently presents a challenge, a challenge that they meet in a variety of ways.”
Given the provocative nature of this statement, I would have expected that it would be backed up by some sort of census of stories, or at least a collection of examples in which male authors use the tropes that Warner claims for them. Instead, the only “evidence” is an example from one of Angela Carter’s stories and a rather fanciful interpretation of the low-budget, female-directed art house film Barbe-bleue (2009). Warner also makes other similar statements such as
“Female protagonists are mutilated more often than male heroes.” “Females dominate fairytale evil.” “The Latin Americans, broadly speaking, do not undermine the structure of the magic they create, whereas the North Americans and Europeans make a show of their scepticism (superiority).”
I don’t necessarily doubt these rather sensational claims, but given that both are quantitative statements, both could be demonstrated in absolute terms. Warner doesn’t even try. This pattern of grandiose claims backed by at most a few anecdotes is a general trend in the book.
Warner makes her preference for “literary” fairy tales--and Victorian phrasing-- quite clear in her praise of the heavily edited and adulterated 1857 version of the Grimms’ fairy tales:
“Comparison of the 1812 versions with the fuller, patterned 1857 final, now standard, edition shows that Wilhem had a fine sense of narrative dynamics, and that the tales benefited hugely from his multiple interferences.”
Personally, I disagree completely, but given Warner’s own writing style, I’m not precisely surprised by her attitude. The book’s structure is overblown, with the sentences often lasting a half a Kindle page or more. A randomly-chosen example sentence:
“Scholars who refute popular, unlettered participants in the tales’ history are staking too much on the literary record; the latter is interwoven in the dissemination of the story, in manuscript and print, and helps crystallize its features, but the case for the invention of an entire story, ab ovo, by an individual writer, flies in the face of evidence--Plato mentions old women going down to the harbour to comfort the victims bound for the Minotaur’s table by telling them stories, and Apuleius places his marvellous ‘Tale of Cupid and Psyche’ on the lips of an old and disreputable bawd.”
Maybe it's just me, but I thought that Warner injected rather too many personal details into her descriptions. I don’t really care that The Bloody Chamber gave Warner “new, vital carnal knowledge” or about her early fearful memories of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations.
I have a certain amount of difficulty determining the target audience for the book. If you know much of anything about fairy tales, you’ll already know most or all of the history and theories that Warner describes. However, if you aren’t familiar with the tales, the arbitrary examples that Warner pulls to support her arguments will be difficult to comprehend. Maybe it simply shows my lack of scholarly interest, but I found Sondheim's Into the Woods an equally acute exploration of the nature of the fairy tale. At the same time, there were still a few interesting details that I hadn’t encountered before. For example, Warner briefly details the life of Mother Bunch, the first author to describe her stories as “fairy tales.” Some sections of the book did meet my original expectations, such as the interlude in which Warner describes the theory that Gilles de Rais was the inspiration for Bluebeard, or that Snow White’s story can be attributed to the life of either Saint Ludmila or Margarete von Waldeck. Warner also details how the French Bete de Gevaudan became intertwined with the story of Red Riding Hood, and the ways that dictators such as Hitler and Stalin harnessed the fairy tale to inspire a sense of national identity. Overall, while I don’t precisely regret reading the collection, I think it would be better served by a subtitle that described it as a literary analysis rather than a history.
Note: The quotes in this review are taken from an ARC provided to me by the publishers and may not be reflected in the final version. It is also worth noting that in my ARC, the entire text of the book was actually provided twice in a row. I skimmed the second iteration and the versions looked identical to me, but I only read the first instance of the book, so it is possible that some of my complaints don’t apply to the second copy.
~~I received this ebook through NetGalley from the publisher, Oxford University Press, in exchange for my honest review. ~~
Excerpted from my review on BookLikes, which contains additional quotes and comments that I was too lazy to copy over....more
Matthew Swift, partially deceased sorcerer, symbiotic host to the electric blue angels of the wires, Midnight Mayor and protector of the city, is not Matthew Swift, partially deceased sorcerer, symbiotic host to the electric blue angels of the wires, Midnight Mayor and protector of the city, is not an entity to be summoned lightly. But when he disappears in a blink and awakens in a conjuring of blood, it looks like someone has taken the chance. One perilous rescue, one fight to the death, and one burning building later, Swift's troubles have only begun. Oda, his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally, has been stabbed through the heart, but she seems determined not to go gentle in that good night. Lady Neon, queen of the newly reinvented urban faeries, and the Tribe, self-mutilating individualists, are calling for one another's blood, a sinister darkness is waiting at the end of every alley, parts of the city are vanishing from reality, and everyone seems to be expecting Matthew to Do Something about the situation.
As always, Griffin's imagination is breathtaking. From the giant eagles that Matthew summons to rescue him from the fiery abysses of Sidcup, to the metal god of the underworld, to medical history reporting magical treatments from the NHS, Griffin's creativity is astounding. This is my fourth book in Griffin's London and I'm still floored by how many quirky, entertaining magics Griffin manages to introduce. One of the most marvelous aspects was the Neon Court:
Once upon a time, in that old time when life was still magic and life was lived in the trees and forests and rivers and hills, in the old time of wild, ivy-tangled, rain-dropped magic, before the lights burnt and the spells flickered with electric fury, there existed the Faerie Court...But alas, the Faerie Court did not move with the times, and did not predict how a steam train could carve the landscape, or how a factory could discolour the sky, and, as the times changed, so did the magic, migrating with the people to the cities and becoming rich with smoke and stone and the sound of metal. And so the Faerie Court declined, and those who sought its blessing dwindled, until there was nothing more than a dusty hollow in the carved-out heart of a wood, crumbling with the fall of autumn leaves..[until] an enterprising princess...declared the founding of a new court: the Neon Court, whose heart was in the heart of the cities...And in time Lady Neon herself became little more than a myth: a figure only ever seen by the shadow of a street light, moving between city after city, forever chasing the night and avoiding the sun, a reveller whose lips could seduce any creature they touched.
Those in the eternal quest for light and music and superficial beauty are contrasted with the Tribe, people who, seeing themselves as different from the rest of the world, seek to accentuate this divide via self-mutilation and self-augmentation until they are no longer recognisably human:
"Once-humans, or humans that had cut away every outward sign of humanity, skin and flesh, in the hope that when they no longer looked human, they'd no longer have to obey human rules."
Griffin explores the very human attempt to reshape the exterior in an attempt to redefine the self. As Matthew notes, both "thought the key to being perfect was to cut away the bad things." As both the Tribe and the Fey demonstrate, ripping away facets of one's exterior, whether in a quest for beauty or uniqueness, can mutilate and warp the interior as well until all humanity is gone.
The plot follows the pattern of the other books in the series: Swift, aided by an (unfortunately all too disposable) snarky female sidekick, is pursued by an implacable supernatural foe. With the clock ticking and the city at risk if Swift cannot destroy the foe stalking him, he is forced into an alliance with distrustful, threatening, and morally ambiguous supernatural groups. The standard witty banter is still present, as Dees, Swift's Alderman ally, and Penny, his apprentice, are practically slot-in replacements for Oda and Vera. Several characters make their usual cameo appearances, including Sinclair, Charlie, and the inimitable and ever-entertaining Dr Seah. Griffin again tends to interject third-person interludes into the story, but despite the potentially dramatic content, I found these to be exposition-heavy and emotion-lite. The plot itself is quite twisty and satisfying, and the malevolent magic is genuinely shivery.
Three books in, I'm still fascinated with Swift's character and the conflict between electric angel and dead sorcerer. In Neon Court, Griffin delves even deeper into the darker aspects of this peculiar fusion of personalities. While the brooding, sarcastic, depressive Matthew is reasonably typical for the genre, the electric angels are something else altogether, a heady mixture of wonder and delight and blazing passion and pride and fury. The electric angels are inherently amoral; they would destroy a city just to watch the dance of flames amongst the ashes. Griffin does a fantastic job in creating these dual aspects; the moments in which the angels take control are palpable, and not only because of the pronoun switch. When Matthew is overcome by strong emotions--pain, weakness, or bewilderment--the angels tend to step in with a ruthless simplicity. As he explains,
I've got two kinds of magics. I've got the nice, sitting-at-home-not-troubling-anyone kinda magics...and we have the magics of fire and death, of destruction with no chance of return, of blood aflame and flesh turns to dust...which of us do you want to meet? ... When you're a sorcerer, and Midnight Mayor, and burning fire runs through your veins, you've only really got two modes. You've got diplomatically passive, and you've got apocalyptically destructive. Finding that middle ground--you know, breaking someone's kneecaps without actually causing them to spontaneously combust--can be a delicate business.
There is only one aspect that the two personalities truly share: a tangible affection for the life within the city.
Although dark throughout, the book is sprinkled with Griffin's trademark creativity and wit. Dees, Swift's new assistant, is particularly entertaining, as she manages a riposte in all of her verbal duels with Swift. Take her response to his attempt to angle for a complement:
'Mr Swift, if it's any comfort to you, I can promise you that were I not a happily married woman with a husband I love well,' sighed Dees,'you would definitely be in my top two genders of choice.'
Of course, not all the snark and quixotic imagination in the world can lighten the tone when the blood starts flowing. Almost every named character dies, and by now, this shouldn't be a spoiler. In my opinion, Griffin's bloodbaths have hit saturation point: the deaths have become predictable, an aspect to be expected and endured. In every book, at least one of Matthew's female allies will be spectacularly murdered, conveniently driving Swift over the edge and allowing the angels to take control. As he notes in reference to the death of his friend Madness, "[Her death]..made complex things simple." This trick to send the villains over the Moral Event Horizon does indeed make things simple, at the cost of all the complexity and depth that might otherwise be explored. It takes more courage to keep your characters alive, to let their personalities and relationships develop and grow, to maintain the suspense without resorting to cheap tricks. Yet no matter how inured I was to my favourite characters' deaths, no matter how accurately I predicted their demises, events still left me with an aching throat.
One unexpected delight of the book was the way in which it re-examined the events of A Madness of Angels. I've had Swift pegged as an antihero for a while, but it was interesting to see him try to reconcile his own motivations for pursuing Bakker.
One of the other subplots of the book, the exploration of the "chosen one" trope, fits neatly into this theme. I have always been fascinated by the struggle between what is right and what is necessary, the extents and limitations of responsibility, and the role of choice and guilt in maintaining humanity. As one character remarks bleakly, "One has to prioritise when it comes to big feelings. One can only feel big feelings for so many people, otherwise one has to feel lots and lots of little feelings for lots of little people, and then frankly you'd stop being the hero." Perhaps this is the ultimate theme of the book: the struggle to define the line between hero and monster when both do what they think must be done.
Overall, I cannot recommend this series too highly. Although I'm not thrilled with Griffin's decision to repeatedly re-isolate her hero and increase character turnover, there are too many wonderful aspects to these books to resist, from Griffin's incredible imagination to her laugh-inducing humour to her vibrant depiction of London. I've seen Griffin's writing aptly described as a "Marmite style", but if you happen to be a fan of her rather quirky, dialectic and dialogue-heavy stream-of-consciousness, please give these books a try.
Macabre (adj,noun). From the French Danse Macabre. 1. Characterized by or suggestive of the gruesomeness of the danse macabre; grim, h**edited 11/28/13
Macabre (adj,noun). From the French Danse Macabre. 1. Characterized by or suggestive of the gruesomeness of the danse macabre; grim, horrific, repulsive, bizarre, grotesque. 2. The Book of Lost Things.
The Book of Lost Things is what you might get if you locked Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro into a dank, windowless room, forced them to read through the complete output of Andrew Lang, Charles Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm, and then told them to rewrite The Chronicles of Narnia.
Why? Because I strongly disapprove of GoodReads' new policy of censorship. (The link brings you to a summary of The Story So Far, which has facts and links so you can make up your own mind about the GR debacle.)...more
Richard is an ordinary man with an ordinary past and an ordinary life, a man who takes comfort in the mundane and is content to be or**edited 12/04/13
Richard is an ordinary man with an ordinary past and an ordinary life, a man who takes comfort in the mundane and is content to be ordered about by his domineering fiancée. But when a terrified and injured girl stumbles into his path, Richard makes what might be his first independent decision, his first resistance against the ordinary flow of his life: he makes the choice to rescue and protect this unknown girl. Immediately, his reality begins to shatter, and in the cracks between the mundanity of his past life, he begins to discover the peculiar world of London Below. Catapulted into strangeness, Richard begins a quest into the magical and often grotesque environs of London Below to find the girl who shattered his peace and to regain his old life.
Neverwhere is an exploration of the fantastic, an adventure, an escape into the creative and bizarre and dangerous, and, perhaps above all, the story of a man discovering himself.
Aislinn has always had the Sight. She has always known that no matter how lovely the Fae may be, they are unpredictable. Dangerous. D**edited 01/27/14
Aislinn has always had the Sight. She has always known that no matter how lovely the Fae may be, they are unpredictable. Dangerous. Downright wicked. So when a fairy suddenly expresses interest in her, she's far more frightened than flattered. But how can a highschool girl escape when the Summer King of the fae is after her?
My enjoyment of this book really surprised me, because I generally detest romances. For me, even the shortest lovey-dovey moment of any book, is either mind-numbingly dull or embarrassingly squicky. And yet, despite its general YA/romance vibe, I found myself really enjoying Wicked Lovely. Maybe it's the way I felt this book broke the stereotypes. The typical romance plot channels a mixture of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Yes, I know they tend to think they're channeling Austen's Pride and Prejudice; they're not, but that's another rant for another day.
When I started the story, I was absolutely thrilled. The prose and the world itself had the feel of a Loreena McKennitt album: dreamy**edited 12/04/13
When I started the story, I was absolutely thrilled. The prose and the world itself had the feel of a Loreena McKennitt album: dreamy, full of old world music, but with a fully new age tone. The main character, Toby, is on the track of mysterious kidnappers who capture and enchant her for 14 years. Finally escaping her bonds, she returns to an alien world and must again find her place in it. If that is not enough, an old sometime-friend-sometime-enemy is murdered and forces Toby to find her killer. Unfortunately, the beginning was the high point of the book for me, which seemed to grow progressively weaker from that moment forward.
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