Either a book I've already read or a book of short stories is what I prefer on my nightstand, for reading right before I go to bed. For the last couple of weeks I've been enjoying one story each night from Holly Black's and Justine Larbalestier's collection entitled (pictorially) Zombies Vs Unicorns. I preferred the nights I could go to sleep after a unicorn story (go Team Unicorn!), but the zombie stories weren't that bad, either.
My favorite story is Naomi Novik's "Purity Test," about a unicorn who appeals to a skeptical girl for help:
"So there's this wizard--"
"Wow, of course there is," Alison said.
"--and he's been grabbing baby unicorns," the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.
"You know," Alison told her subconscious, "I've got to draw the line somewhere. Baby unicorns is going too far."
"No kidding," the unicorn said. "You don't think I'd be wasting my time talking to a human otherwise? Anyway, wizard, baby unicorns, where was I--Oh, right. Probably he's trying to make himself immortal, which never works, except wizards never listen when you tell them that, and we would really prefer if he got stopped before he cuts off the babies' horns trying."
"Let me guess,"Alison said. "Is his name Voldemort?"
"No, what freakish kind of name is Voldemort"? the unicorn said.
What happens when Alison asks where the unicorn comes from is fun, at least for a ailurophile:
"we're always here, you idiots just don't notice anything that doesn't shove itself in your faces. You've never spotted the elves, either, and they're taking up half the tables at Per Se every night."
"Hey, Belcazar," a cat said, walking by.
The unicorn very slightly flicked his tail. "Social climbers, cats," the unicorn said with a sniff after they had passed farther on.
"Belcazar?" Alison said...."So, if I help you get the baby unicorns back, this is all going to stop, right? I don't need to be hearing cats talking."
"Who does?" the unicorn said evasively.
The climax of the story, involving the titular "purity test," is great fun--such fun that I really don't want to spoil it by saying any more.
My second favorite story from this collection is Diana Peterfreund's "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn," which is set in a world in which unicorns are known to be dangerous creatures.
If I have to pick a favorite zombie story--ew--I think it might be Maureen Johnson's "The Children of the Revolution," which includes a celebrity caricature, or Scott Westerfeld's "Inoculata," in which he presents an interesting solution to a zombie "plague."
Truthfully, though, all of these stories are favorites in the sense that I savored the chance to read one--just one--each night. It was a nice little treat at the end of the day. I highly recommend rationing your reading of the Zombies Vs Unicorns stories so they'll last as long as possible.
Showing posts with label Holly Black. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holly Black. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
White Cat
When I saw a book by Holly Black on the shelf of new books in the YA section at the library, I picked it up even though it says it's book one of a series called The Curse Workers, and I've gotten a bit leery of anything that advertises itself as the first of a series. But I like her YA series Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside enough to try almost anything else she writes. I haven't read the Spiderwick books, for younger readers, but I did see the movie and thought it was mildly entertaining.
Anyway, this new book is entitled White Cat; it begins with the first-person narrator, Cassel Sharpe, in a number of tight spots, and proceeds to rapidly tighten them and sharpen your curiosity about how he got into them until you've read the whole short book in one quick gulp.
Cassel is like Sam in Hold Me Closer, Necromancer in that he is horrified to think that he could have the power to do evil. He's like Artemis Fowl in being born into a family situation that requires him to be underhanded and sly, and often on the wrong side of the law. He's like any good YA hero in being able to find his own way with the help of some friends, and to assert his own will in opposition to the will of some of his family members. And that's about all I can tell you about this novel, because it's full of secrets, and one secret is built on top of another, and they're fun to discover.
Just be warned--little that Cassel thinks he knows about the world turns out to be true, in the end. He warns you early on that
"I spend most of my time at school faking and lying. It takes a lot of effort to pretend you're something you're not. I don't think about what music I like; I think about what music I should like. When I had a girlfriend, I tried to convince her I was the guy she wanted me to be. When I'm in a crowd, I hang back until I can figure out how to make them laugh. Luckily, if there's one thing I'm good at, it's faking and lying."
One of the delights of reading the novel is how true that turns out to be, and how sometimes, especially for a young adult, faking and lying is how you can begin to fulfill your potential for greatness.
Haven't you ever faked your way towards becoming as confident and brilliant as you wanted to appear?
Anyway, this new book is entitled White Cat; it begins with the first-person narrator, Cassel Sharpe, in a number of tight spots, and proceeds to rapidly tighten them and sharpen your curiosity about how he got into them until you've read the whole short book in one quick gulp.
Cassel is like Sam in Hold Me Closer, Necromancer in that he is horrified to think that he could have the power to do evil. He's like Artemis Fowl in being born into a family situation that requires him to be underhanded and sly, and often on the wrong side of the law. He's like any good YA hero in being able to find his own way with the help of some friends, and to assert his own will in opposition to the will of some of his family members. And that's about all I can tell you about this novel, because it's full of secrets, and one secret is built on top of another, and they're fun to discover.
Just be warned--little that Cassel thinks he knows about the world turns out to be true, in the end. He warns you early on that
"I spend most of my time at school faking and lying. It takes a lot of effort to pretend you're something you're not. I don't think about what music I like; I think about what music I should like. When I had a girlfriend, I tried to convince her I was the guy she wanted me to be. When I'm in a crowd, I hang back until I can figure out how to make them laugh. Luckily, if there's one thing I'm good at, it's faking and lying."
One of the delights of reading the novel is how true that turns out to be, and how sometimes, especially for a young adult, faking and lying is how you can begin to fulfill your potential for greatness.
Haven't you ever faked your way towards becoming as confident and brilliant as you wanted to appear?
Friday, April 3, 2009
City of Glass
Cassandra Clare's City of Glass came out last week, and everyone in my household was pleased to hear that it's a wonderful ending to a great YA trilogy. We bought it at a bookstore in the train station in Chicago, and Eleanor read it all the way back to my brother's house in the suburbs, and then every moment she could snatch the next day. There were parts that made her exclaim out loud, and when she handed it to me, she said I should hurry up because she wanted to talk about it with someone. Well, I've been doing my best to hurry up with it all week, because Eleanor left for a band trip in the wee hours of this morning, giving me a deadline in the busiest part of the week, before I could have any free time to read. But City of Glass is a novel you make time to read.
Eleanor and I laughed and I cried out loud while reading this book. At one point I even got angry. I slapped the book shut (with my finger marking my place) and said to her "if I find out Sebastian is Clary's brother, I'm going to be so mad! I mean, listen to this: 'she went numb with an icy shock of wrongness. Something was terribly wrong...' I just can't stand it when somehow a character 'just knows' that it's WRONG to kiss her brother." Eleanor assured me that the feeling of wrongness was not merely about family ties. Eventually, I settled in and learned to trust the storyteller. In the end, I found that the trilogy is about more than just "the importance of being nephilim." In fact, the treatment of the "Downworlders" reminds me of the treatment of house elves, goblins, and other non-wizarding magical creatures in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. I wouldn't say that Clare's fiction is derivative, but rather that her magical world intersects with other fictional magical worlds (most notably Holly Black's, whose characters watch Clare's characters go by, at one point). I especially like the way the Seelie Queen is left flat-footed at the end of this novel; it's immensely satisfying to see someone finally stand up to her. As Captain Jack Sparrow would say, it's all about leverage.
City of Glass brings most of the things I enjoyed in the first two books to satisfying conclusions: the humor, the characterizations of evil, and the love story. In addition, (to Eleanor's quite vocal delight on first reading) it provides a nice little reply to fans of Stephanie Meyers' forever-seventeen vampire Edward in the musings of Clare's vampire Simon:
"Young forever, Simon thought. It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he'd never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity."
There's less humor in this final book, but Magnus Bane still gets a few good lines, including another one about how old he is:
"'I'm seven hundred years old, Alexander. I know when something isn't going to work. You won't even admit I exist to your parents.'
Alec stared at him. 'You're seven hundred years old?'
'Well,' Magnus amended, 'eight hundred. But I don't look it.'"
And even though Magnus promises to play a crucial role in the events of this novel, we're still no more sure we can trust him than Clary is--"she wondered why she'd ever thought trusting someone who wore that much eyeliner was a good idea."
Simon also gets some of the humorous lines in this final novel. Our favorite is:
"Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn't die a horrible death?" he wondered aloud. "It's like being the drummer in Spinal Tap."
The issues involved in how to fight for good and against evil are nicely nuanced, even in the title City of Glass. The vampire looks "faintly green" at the idea of drinking blood from a cat, because he has a pet cat at home. Clary finally gets to tell her mother that it's not a mother's right to protect her child from who and what she is. And, more importantly, Clary comes up with a clever way to use her magical talents and help her friends, and she succeeds in convincing the entire community of adults that they need her to do it. Valentine meets the end he richly deserves, but not as an entirely black and unlamented villain.
And the love story. It's a good one. Clary won't give in to her own urge to love Jace, early on, because she thinks, as she says to him, he only wants "something else you can hate yourself for." Jace finally tells her "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there's a life after that, I'll love you then." And Clary is finally able to say yes to Jace, a sort of Molly Bloom eternal yes that goes a long way towards reconciling me to the angel ex machina way Clary and Jace reach their happy ending.
Once Walker has gotten a turn to read this book, I'm pretty sure Eleanor and I will be rereading it. Because now that our anxiety over what happens is assuaged, we'll want to sit back and enjoy these characters some more.
Eleanor and I laughed and I cried out loud while reading this book. At one point I even got angry. I slapped the book shut (with my finger marking my place) and said to her "if I find out Sebastian is Clary's brother, I'm going to be so mad! I mean, listen to this: 'she went numb with an icy shock of wrongness. Something was terribly wrong...' I just can't stand it when somehow a character 'just knows' that it's WRONG to kiss her brother." Eleanor assured me that the feeling of wrongness was not merely about family ties. Eventually, I settled in and learned to trust the storyteller. In the end, I found that the trilogy is about more than just "the importance of being nephilim." In fact, the treatment of the "Downworlders" reminds me of the treatment of house elves, goblins, and other non-wizarding magical creatures in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. I wouldn't say that Clare's fiction is derivative, but rather that her magical world intersects with other fictional magical worlds (most notably Holly Black's, whose characters watch Clare's characters go by, at one point). I especially like the way the Seelie Queen is left flat-footed at the end of this novel; it's immensely satisfying to see someone finally stand up to her. As Captain Jack Sparrow would say, it's all about leverage.
City of Glass brings most of the things I enjoyed in the first two books to satisfying conclusions: the humor, the characterizations of evil, and the love story. In addition, (to Eleanor's quite vocal delight on first reading) it provides a nice little reply to fans of Stephanie Meyers' forever-seventeen vampire Edward in the musings of Clare's vampire Simon:
"Young forever, Simon thought. It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he'd never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity."
There's less humor in this final book, but Magnus Bane still gets a few good lines, including another one about how old he is:
"'I'm seven hundred years old, Alexander. I know when something isn't going to work. You won't even admit I exist to your parents.'
Alec stared at him. 'You're seven hundred years old?'
'Well,' Magnus amended, 'eight hundred. But I don't look it.'"
And even though Magnus promises to play a crucial role in the events of this novel, we're still no more sure we can trust him than Clary is--"she wondered why she'd ever thought trusting someone who wore that much eyeliner was a good idea."
Simon also gets some of the humorous lines in this final novel. Our favorite is:
"Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn't die a horrible death?" he wondered aloud. "It's like being the drummer in Spinal Tap."
The issues involved in how to fight for good and against evil are nicely nuanced, even in the title City of Glass. The vampire looks "faintly green" at the idea of drinking blood from a cat, because he has a pet cat at home. Clary finally gets to tell her mother that it's not a mother's right to protect her child from who and what she is. And, more importantly, Clary comes up with a clever way to use her magical talents and help her friends, and she succeeds in convincing the entire community of adults that they need her to do it. Valentine meets the end he richly deserves, but not as an entirely black and unlamented villain.
And the love story. It's a good one. Clary won't give in to her own urge to love Jace, early on, because she thinks, as she says to him, he only wants "something else you can hate yourself for." Jace finally tells her "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there's a life after that, I'll love you then." And Clary is finally able to say yes to Jace, a sort of Molly Bloom eternal yes that goes a long way towards reconciling me to the angel ex machina way Clary and Jace reach their happy ending.
Once Walker has gotten a turn to read this book, I'm pretty sure Eleanor and I will be rereading it. Because now that our anxiety over what happens is assuaged, we'll want to sit back and enjoy these characters some more.
Monday, June 23, 2008
How Modern These Faeries Be
Ironside, by Holly Black, is subtitled "A Modern Faery's Tale," like the two volumes that precede it (Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale and Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie). The modernization is interesting and amusing; it only occasionally fails to be true to the tradition of fairy stories.
Ironside is well plotted and a fast read. Although I can imagine someone enjoying it without reading the first two, a big part of its pleasure is how well it weaves threads from the previous stories. In Tithe, Holly Black introduces her characters and brings their first adventure to a full and satisfying close. In Valiant, she introduces different characters and tells what seems to be a separate story, but it is not as compelling and doesn't come to a satisfactory end. The third book demonstrates that these stories are meant to work as a trilogy.
The faeries are as heartless and beautiful and compelling as traditional fairies should be, with an additional layer of appealing-to-teenagers coolness, a la Jane Yolen's updated fairy tales (Pay the Piper is the latest one I've read). They're clever, too, although this is the main area in which the updating falls short. It's amusing when Corny the mortal boy says, in Tithe, "I woke up outside the hill this morning. I figured that you'd ditched me and I was going to do a Rip Van Winkle and find out that it was the year 2112 and no one had even heard of me," but why didn't it happen? How can he also eat the fairy food and be able to return to the moral world with no problems (other than an isolated vomiting episode in Ironside). Black attempts to explain a little of how her modern magic works in Valiant, with the plotline about "never," an addictive-to-humans faery glamour tonic, but it all seems a little easier than usual for the mortals to overcome the magic of the fairy realm.
There's a lovely bit of traditional fairy trickery in Tithe, when Roiben is ordered to seize Kaye and "he grabbed her hair in a clump, jerking her head back, then just as suddenly let her go" because he hasn't been ordered to hold on, but this isn't developed any further in Ironside. In fact, the final play on words is so funny and infuriating that it made me scream with laughter and kick the book across the floor in annoyance. Luckily, that bit of trickery is not integral to the plot; it's just a revelation after the action has already taken place.
What is clever about the ending of Ironside is the way the heroine saves herself. She needs the hero's help and he needs hers, but the actual saving of her own skin is up to her. There's no cheap ending where anything is resolved by magic. There's no easy happily ever after. The ending isn't as tidy as it could have been. Early on, my daughter and I were both amused by this dialogue:
"You can't date the Lord of the Night Court."
"Well, I'm not. He dumped me."
"You can't get dumped by the Lord of the Night Court."
"Oh yes you can. You so completely can."
And despite various annoying (to me, anyway) descriptions of this Lord's black leather outfits for going out into the mortal world, the ending of the book is letter-perfect in its blend of traditional and modern:
Kaye groaned. "You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?"
He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance."
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons."
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad."
An additional pleasure of reading these books is the epigraph for each chapter, drawn eclectically from the writings of people like Pablo Neruda, Andrew Wyeth, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Czeslaw Milosz. Some of them might even interest young readers in casting their net wider, as Cornelia Funke's epigraphs drawn from the writing of Michael de Larrabeiti for her chapters in Inkheart caused my family to seek out and enjoy The Borrible trilogy.
Ironside is well plotted and a fast read. Although I can imagine someone enjoying it without reading the first two, a big part of its pleasure is how well it weaves threads from the previous stories. In Tithe, Holly Black introduces her characters and brings their first adventure to a full and satisfying close. In Valiant, she introduces different characters and tells what seems to be a separate story, but it is not as compelling and doesn't come to a satisfactory end. The third book demonstrates that these stories are meant to work as a trilogy.
The faeries are as heartless and beautiful and compelling as traditional fairies should be, with an additional layer of appealing-to-teenagers coolness, a la Jane Yolen's updated fairy tales (Pay the Piper is the latest one I've read). They're clever, too, although this is the main area in which the updating falls short. It's amusing when Corny the mortal boy says, in Tithe, "I woke up outside the hill this morning. I figured that you'd ditched me and I was going to do a Rip Van Winkle and find out that it was the year 2112 and no one had even heard of me," but why didn't it happen? How can he also eat the fairy food and be able to return to the moral world with no problems (other than an isolated vomiting episode in Ironside). Black attempts to explain a little of how her modern magic works in Valiant, with the plotline about "never," an addictive-to-humans faery glamour tonic, but it all seems a little easier than usual for the mortals to overcome the magic of the fairy realm.
There's a lovely bit of traditional fairy trickery in Tithe, when Roiben is ordered to seize Kaye and "he grabbed her hair in a clump, jerking her head back, then just as suddenly let her go" because he hasn't been ordered to hold on, but this isn't developed any further in Ironside. In fact, the final play on words is so funny and infuriating that it made me scream with laughter and kick the book across the floor in annoyance. Luckily, that bit of trickery is not integral to the plot; it's just a revelation after the action has already taken place.
What is clever about the ending of Ironside is the way the heroine saves herself. She needs the hero's help and he needs hers, but the actual saving of her own skin is up to her. There's no cheap ending where anything is resolved by magic. There's no easy happily ever after. The ending isn't as tidy as it could have been. Early on, my daughter and I were both amused by this dialogue:
"You can't date the Lord of the Night Court."
"Well, I'm not. He dumped me."
"You can't get dumped by the Lord of the Night Court."
"Oh yes you can. You so completely can."
And despite various annoying (to me, anyway) descriptions of this Lord's black leather outfits for going out into the mortal world, the ending of the book is letter-perfect in its blend of traditional and modern:
Kaye groaned. "You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?"
He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance."
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons."
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad."
An additional pleasure of reading these books is the epigraph for each chapter, drawn eclectically from the writings of people like Pablo Neruda, Andrew Wyeth, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Czeslaw Milosz. Some of them might even interest young readers in casting their net wider, as Cornelia Funke's epigraphs drawn from the writing of Michael de Larrabeiti for her chapters in Inkheart caused my family to seek out and enjoy The Borrible trilogy.
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