It has been a few weeks (I know, that is now practically the byline of this blog), but I recently read Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, and enjoyed it very much. There seem to be conflicting ideas out there about whether it's young adult fiction or not, but though it shares similar elements with YA, like a 17-year-old heroine and a fantastical storyline, I think it's more in the realm of regular fantasy, which also often has younger protagonists.
In this tale of wizards and an evil Wood, Agnieszka has a penchant for tangling with nature. Leaves, dirt, and other messes all seem to gravitate to her, and she can find plants others can't. But in her corner of the world, nature is not something one wishes to tangle with. Agnieszka's village is near the Wood, where poisonous plants and evil creatures can taint and destroy you with your smallest intake of breath or the barest scratch. A wizard called the Dragon keeps the Wood at bay and protects the nearby villages at the price of one maiden every ten years, and it's time to pick again. He chooses girls with talent and beauty, so Agnieszka knows she is safe. He will not pick her.
The Dragon is old in years and temperament, but youthful in appearance. He is shallow and petty when it comes to beauty, but powerful in magic. Preferring solitude, he avoids the politics of the kingdom as much as possible until the prince seeks the Dragon's help to find his mother, whose loss to the Wood fueled a war. When Agnieszka is thrown into the midst of the kingdom's politics, between war and the Wood, she finds herself surrounded by danger on all sides, her only hope lying in the most dangerous path of all.
I enjoyed this detour from my normal reading, more detailed than young adult and less angsty. Agnieszka is a bit of an old soul, certainly mature for her age, and even more so by book's end. I don't really mind angsty teenage stories all that much (I do read a lot of them), but this one just has an edge to it that keeps it out of that category. Maybe it's the grown-up romance (which actually wasn't my favorite part of the book; more on that in a bit). Maybe it's that the world is not so narrowly focused on the heroine, not all about meeting her needs. Maybe the thought processes are more mature or the story is darker. (Though, have you read young adult lately? I'm doubting the latter.) In any case, it was interesting to read this kind of story without some of the young adult conventions I'm used to seeing.
Speaking of conventions, a big staple of YA fiction is romance. Uprooted does have an element of romance, but it is underplayed and untraditional. And maybe that's why I didn't like it. I think underplaying the romance is an interesting way to go, but making it untraditional, as well, may upset reader expectations too much. (SPOILERS follow!) Agnieszka falls in love with the Dragon, no surprise there. But it's far from a healthy relationship. He's rude and crotchety-mean and much, much older (though YA, too, messes around with age differences--Twilight, for instance). It might help if his mind retained youthfulness, but no, he's pretty much an old fogey who's conceited and vain about his looks. While you could say he warms up to Agnieszka, he never really gets nicer. There's something good to be said for loving someone despite their flaws, of course, but in this case, the relationship borders on abusive. And a bit unbelievable...this naive, innocent girl willingly pushes past all his defenses, literal and figurative, to sleep with him? Granted, the lead-up to it is rather realistic: a certain situation causes them to become more emotionally intimate, and that bridges the gap to the physical side of things. The book has one and a half sex scenes, which I am both impressed by and annoyed with: impressed by the restraint, annoyed because I'd rather not see any sex at all.
After going that far physically, a YA book would be all about the relationship for the rest of the story. Again, this one differs in that you'd almost think they had a one-night stand and went their separate ways. In fact, I believed that nearly to the end of the book. Then, strangely, when romance had been a subplot the whole time, it got the last say. I would have liked more romance (with a better emotional response from the characters) or none at all. What there was just didn't work for me, though it was not bad to try for that kind of originality.
Where the book's romance doesn't phase some, its darkness might--its dealings with magic and witches and evil. In the realm of fantasy, those things don't bother me so much. I make a distinction between witches in fantasy (where the word implies some sort of magic-wielder, neither good nor bad by default) and Halloween or Disney witches (meant to be scary and mean and evil by default). I don't like the latter at all, but this book falls more into the first category, where the witches actually fight evil.
The darkness of this book has more to do with evil creatures and beings who poison and corrupt the good, which is an apt illustration of how good and evil correlate in the real world. In a Christian worldview, we are born sinful. It's innate. Left to our own devices, lazy about our eternal well-being, evil thrives. Thinking more scientifically, the world tends toward entropy. Either way, left alone, the world is bad. Things fall into disorder. It takes work to make things good, to make things beautiful. Disney says that Belle tames the Beast; it's a lie. In real life, pardon me saying so, the Beast would eat her heart out. All this to say that the Wood in Uprooted acts like evil really acts. It's aggressive. If you aren't keeping it out, be sure it is trying to--and it will--get in. I appreciated the truthfulness of this story's take on evil. But be warned, it's dark and heavy stuff. People in the story are corrupted or die or both. It's not for impressionable minds.
Despite the romance and the darkness, I enjoyed the style of storytelling, the magic of the world, and the way the story broadened in scope as it went on, adding layers and depth, taking the reader to surprising places by its end. I enjoyed the friendship between Agnieszka and her best friend Kasia (she's awesome!), which has more substance than the romance. I give the book four out of five stars.
Uprooted is available mid-May.
Showing posts with label witches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label witches. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Carnival of Souls
By the title Carnival of Souls, you can imagine that this young adult novel, by popular author Melissa Marr, is a bit gritty, indulging in sensationalism and sensuality. But it could have been much worse. For a novel with a carnival where you can buy and sell murder or pleasure, this story is not as graphic as it could be. The main characters do not have sex within this particular story, though they have before, and we're not talking about sex strictly between lovers but also about sex for money. The violence is slightly more graphic with fights to the death.
As far as I know, Carnival of Souls is the beginning of a new series and is not part of the Wicked Lovely books or any other series of Marr's. It tells the intertwining stories of several characters on the cusp of adulthood. Mallory is a 17-year-old, raised by her adoptive witch father in the human world and trained to fight an evil she barely understands to protect something the witch once stole. Aya is a ruling-class daimon, so she could have an easy life, if she wishes, as long as she is willing to breed. But Aya's most terrible secret would be revealed in her child; therefore, the only option left open to her is entering the fights in the hopes she can win a place in The City's governing body. Kaleb is a cur, almost the lowest caste of daimon, forced to hire himself out as assassin or lover just to feed himself and his pack. In the fights, he has a chance to raise his station in life or at least die on his own terms. He's also falling in love with the girl he's been contracted to kill. Daimons rule The City. Witches have been exiled to the human world, where their power remains strong. And these three characters, among others, have been raised on one side or the other to fight a war begun long before their time.
Melissa Marr is quite the storyteller. Her stories are rich in detail and full of life. She mixes fantasy with the real world in a way that fits more into contemporary fantasy than the trendy paranormal genre. But this particular story was, for me at least, a little over-the-top. It's hard to root for a character who kills for hire and prostitutes himself, even if the world is such that he has no other choice. (I think there's always a choice. Isn't death better than selling your soul that way?)
Part of it comes down to there being not enough internal struggle over these big moral questions. It bothers me when so many young adult books are full of questions but no solid answers or no strong delineation between right and wrong. The gray area is dangerous because there are clearly things that are wrong in the real world that may or may not be wrong in fiction, but then there are things that might be wrong in both but that are portrayed in such a way as to be appealing to readers. I'm not saying books make people evil. I think, rather, that our books reflect and support our culture. If sex outside of marriage is okay in our culture, no one thinks twice about it in a book. But reading about it in a book reinforces the idea that it's okay. (Have you read other reviews by me? Big soapbox.) Anyway, I can't recommend a book, even if it is well-written and I enjoyed parts of it, if there's too much moral gray area. If this book were a movie, I'd probably have to give it an R rating.
Moving on...as you know, if you've read past reviews, I'm not a fan of witches. I tolerate them better in fantasy because there, a witch is just another creature of the world. In some cases, though, the use of witches toes the line between fantastical creature and something out of the real world. Again, I don't like the moral gray area. This book is more fantastical than not, but some elements are borderline. If that was the only thing I didn't like about the book, though, it wouldn't keep me from recommending it.
By the way, it seems to be a trend lately for fantastical beings to take credit for real historical events, for instance, the Salem witches. The first time I read something like that, it was kind of cool, smudging the line between fiction and that which we can't explain in the real world. But it's been used enough (say, in the last three books that I've read) that it's not clever anymore.
One last issue I had with the book has to do with the romance, but I don't want to spoil too much. I think it will get better as the series progresses, but at this point, it's a love based on deception and animal attraction. There's also an annoying sexism in The City, where females are viewed as property for breeding. I'm certain the author will have more to say on this subject, as she already has, but readers will have to wait for future books to get any satisfying resolution there.
So, I don't recommend this book for the average young adult fiction reader. But, having given you fair warning, if none of the above bothers you in fiction, I'll just say Melissa Marr knows how to hook a reader. Though I likely won't get a chance to read the rest of this series, I'm still interested in knowing how it turns out.
This first installment is available in September.
As far as I know, Carnival of Souls is the beginning of a new series and is not part of the Wicked Lovely books or any other series of Marr's. It tells the intertwining stories of several characters on the cusp of adulthood. Mallory is a 17-year-old, raised by her adoptive witch father in the human world and trained to fight an evil she barely understands to protect something the witch once stole. Aya is a ruling-class daimon, so she could have an easy life, if she wishes, as long as she is willing to breed. But Aya's most terrible secret would be revealed in her child; therefore, the only option left open to her is entering the fights in the hopes she can win a place in The City's governing body. Kaleb is a cur, almost the lowest caste of daimon, forced to hire himself out as assassin or lover just to feed himself and his pack. In the fights, he has a chance to raise his station in life or at least die on his own terms. He's also falling in love with the girl he's been contracted to kill. Daimons rule The City. Witches have been exiled to the human world, where their power remains strong. And these three characters, among others, have been raised on one side or the other to fight a war begun long before their time.
Melissa Marr is quite the storyteller. Her stories are rich in detail and full of life. She mixes fantasy with the real world in a way that fits more into contemporary fantasy than the trendy paranormal genre. But this particular story was, for me at least, a little over-the-top. It's hard to root for a character who kills for hire and prostitutes himself, even if the world is such that he has no other choice. (I think there's always a choice. Isn't death better than selling your soul that way?)
Part of it comes down to there being not enough internal struggle over these big moral questions. It bothers me when so many young adult books are full of questions but no solid answers or no strong delineation between right and wrong. The gray area is dangerous because there are clearly things that are wrong in the real world that may or may not be wrong in fiction, but then there are things that might be wrong in both but that are portrayed in such a way as to be appealing to readers. I'm not saying books make people evil. I think, rather, that our books reflect and support our culture. If sex outside of marriage is okay in our culture, no one thinks twice about it in a book. But reading about it in a book reinforces the idea that it's okay. (Have you read other reviews by me? Big soapbox.) Anyway, I can't recommend a book, even if it is well-written and I enjoyed parts of it, if there's too much moral gray area. If this book were a movie, I'd probably have to give it an R rating.
Moving on...as you know, if you've read past reviews, I'm not a fan of witches. I tolerate them better in fantasy because there, a witch is just another creature of the world. In some cases, though, the use of witches toes the line between fantastical creature and something out of the real world. Again, I don't like the moral gray area. This book is more fantastical than not, but some elements are borderline. If that was the only thing I didn't like about the book, though, it wouldn't keep me from recommending it.
By the way, it seems to be a trend lately for fantastical beings to take credit for real historical events, for instance, the Salem witches. The first time I read something like that, it was kind of cool, smudging the line between fiction and that which we can't explain in the real world. But it's been used enough (say, in the last three books that I've read) that it's not clever anymore.
One last issue I had with the book has to do with the romance, but I don't want to spoil too much. I think it will get better as the series progresses, but at this point, it's a love based on deception and animal attraction. There's also an annoying sexism in The City, where females are viewed as property for breeding. I'm certain the author will have more to say on this subject, as she already has, but readers will have to wait for future books to get any satisfying resolution there.
So, I don't recommend this book for the average young adult fiction reader. But, having given you fair warning, if none of the above bothers you in fiction, I'll just say Melissa Marr knows how to hook a reader. Though I likely won't get a chance to read the rest of this series, I'm still interested in knowing how it turns out.
This first installment is available in September.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The Wee Free Men (Audio CD)
I recently took a long car trip and needed something wonderful to hurry the tedious miles away. Of course, I had my wonderful children needing something every other minute, but that's not exactly what I mean. When I wasn't attending to my children (and when they would let me and not try to compete for volume), my husband and I listened to The Wee Free Men, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. If you've ever read any Terry Pratchett, then you know this was a perfect choice. If you haven't read him, stay tuned.
The Wee Free Men stars a little girl of nine years of age, a much younger protagonist for once in Pratchett's fantastical Discworld. Tiffany is the youngest daughter of a shepherd, but she wants to be a heroine in a novel, or if she can't be that (because her hair and eyes aren't the right color), she wants to be a witch. Witches are always misunderstood in books, she thinks. Why are they so wicked? Just because they look old and funny and do odd things? The thing is, Tiffany is a witch, and she's about to find out. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil queen, Tiffany discovers she is the only one who can do anything about it...well, she and the little blue warrior men with brilliantly funny names who speak in a deep brogue and fear only anything written on paper.
As my sister-in-law who lent me the audio book pointed out, The Wee Free Men may be better listened to than read. The narrator, Stephen Briggs, has a delightful accent, both for the normal narration and for the dialect of the Wee Free Men, called Nac Mac Feegles. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, you can't even understand the Nac Mac Feegles, but then again, neither can Tiffany. An interesting voice always helps an audio book and adds something regular reading can't. I prefer to read books, but if you have to listen, you need a good narrator.
Unfortunately, this is another story with witches. I'm just not fond of witches. I'd be more comfortable if they were called something else and especially didn't have the trappings of real-world witches: pointy hats, broomsticks, etc. But from what I know of Pratchett, he enjoys taking real-world things and turning them on their heads, whether it's evil or good, witches or religion. Not much is sacred or out of bounds to him. This makes him a good comedian but not a good conversationalist on theology.
(Very minor SPOILERS in this paragraph.) Other than the witches, the only thing I had trouble with in the book was the muddled dream-like world Tiffany goes to for the climax. I won't say more than that, but let me just tell you, when it's midnight and you've been sitting in a car all day and your eyes keep falling shut (my husband was driving!), it's particularly odd to listen to a book about a dream. You don't know if you've missed something because the book's jumping around like a dream does anyway. So, I can't say for sure that I actually listened to every word of this book, though I desperately tried. And perhaps that's why I liked that portion of the book less than the rest.
However, as far as good storytelling and humor goes, this audio book gets a solid three stars. The reading level is for middle schoolers though this novel takes place in Pratchett's established Discworld and will appeal to anyone familiar with Discworld.
The Wee Free Men stars a little girl of nine years of age, a much younger protagonist for once in Pratchett's fantastical Discworld. Tiffany is the youngest daughter of a shepherd, but she wants to be a heroine in a novel, or if she can't be that (because her hair and eyes aren't the right color), she wants to be a witch. Witches are always misunderstood in books, she thinks. Why are they so wicked? Just because they look old and funny and do odd things? The thing is, Tiffany is a witch, and she's about to find out. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil queen, Tiffany discovers she is the only one who can do anything about it...well, she and the little blue warrior men with brilliantly funny names who speak in a deep brogue and fear only anything written on paper.
As my sister-in-law who lent me the audio book pointed out, The Wee Free Men may be better listened to than read. The narrator, Stephen Briggs, has a delightful accent, both for the normal narration and for the dialect of the Wee Free Men, called Nac Mac Feegles. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, you can't even understand the Nac Mac Feegles, but then again, neither can Tiffany. An interesting voice always helps an audio book and adds something regular reading can't. I prefer to read books, but if you have to listen, you need a good narrator.
Unfortunately, this is another story with witches. I'm just not fond of witches. I'd be more comfortable if they were called something else and especially didn't have the trappings of real-world witches: pointy hats, broomsticks, etc. But from what I know of Pratchett, he enjoys taking real-world things and turning them on their heads, whether it's evil or good, witches or religion. Not much is sacred or out of bounds to him. This makes him a good comedian but not a good conversationalist on theology.
(Very minor SPOILERS in this paragraph.) Other than the witches, the only thing I had trouble with in the book was the muddled dream-like world Tiffany goes to for the climax. I won't say more than that, but let me just tell you, when it's midnight and you've been sitting in a car all day and your eyes keep falling shut (my husband was driving!), it's particularly odd to listen to a book about a dream. You don't know if you've missed something because the book's jumping around like a dream does anyway. So, I can't say for sure that I actually listened to every word of this book, though I desperately tried. And perhaps that's why I liked that portion of the book less than the rest.
However, as far as good storytelling and humor goes, this audio book gets a solid three stars. The reading level is for middle schoolers though this novel takes place in Pratchett's established Discworld and will appeal to anyone familiar with Discworld.
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