Booky Ooky!

Ok, here’s the deal. I did it again. Stress, a job hunt, pride weekend, a brief illness, an Internet outage, and a consuming desire to escape and not think about anything has caused me to disappear.

The Internet outage was the worst because Thursday when I got home from work, I was going to report on my successfully finishing the Once Upon a Time Challenge, but I couldn’t. Very frustrating. Friday, I didn’t go to work, so no free Internet there, plus I was busy, so no quick trip to the public library (which, yes, would be where I work, but I’d pick a different branch, duh). Then I was out of the house from Saturday morning until Monday at 1 a.m. (and that’ll be 37 hours) which led to Monday’s illness.

Today I remain tired and have been doing the job hunt thing for 3 hours.

So, while I was not eligible for any fabulous prizes because I could not get my last 2 reviews up on time, I still have the personal satisfaction of finishing the challenge. The final list:

• Ramayana / retold by William Buck
• The Onion Girl / Charles de Lint
• Peter Pan in Scarlet / Geraldine McCaughrean
• Outfoxing Fear: Folktales from Around the World / edited by Kathleen Ragan — I read this because my original Folktales of Ireland turned out to be too dry to get through. This is one that I was going to review Thursday but couldn’t, but I’m going to do it tomorrow or the next day because this book was mind-blowingly good, and I want you all to know.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream / William Shakespeare — This was also going to be written up Thursday (I thrive on last minute deadlines.) But I’m not going to bother now because, hell, it’s Shakespeare. What could I possibly add? It was as good as the first 3 times I read it.

As it happens and like many others, I can’t stick to a reading list. I read more than 5 books during the time this challenge was taking place, and even though I didn’t write them all up, I made most of my selections in the spirit of reading books that were or that were about fantasy/fairytale/folklore/etc. Relevant selections include:

• Alice in Sunderland / Michael Talbot
• The Black Cauldron and The Castle of Llyr / Lloyd Alexander
• Peter Pan / J.M. Barrie
• The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Equal Rites / Terry Pratchett
• The Neddiad / Daniel Pinkwater
• The Tombs of Atuan / Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Great Snape Debate / Amy Berner, Joyce Millman, Orson Scott Card
• The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy and The Morning Star Trilogy / Nick Bantock
• The End of Harry Potter? / David Langford
• Sir Thursday and Lady Friday / Garth Nix
• Go Ask Malice / Robert Joseph Levy

So see, I have been active and loving it, just not always writing it up what with vacation and all those important lame excuses I discussed above. Anyway, even though the ending didn’t work out, I gotta say the challenge was a ton of fun, and I made some super new blog friends.

Also–and this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me–before I left my house for the Neverending Saturday this past weekend, I found on my microwave a surprise gift card to Barnes and Noble for $100! It was from my parents as a Hannukkah gift, and I somehow managed to convince myself that I used it back in January. Shows you how much I clean my kitchen.

So today when I went shopping to take my mind off my crappy job, I got 9 books for 85 cents. (I estimated $100 + tax - B&N member discount to within $1. I’d say I’m a math genius, yes?) Then I went to The Strand and got one more book at low low Strand prices because I needed the number to be 10. ONE MORE BULLET POINT LIST! I promise you only have to look at 10 more of these insufferable pink squares and then I’ll be done. Oh, and before you ask: Yes I am male, and yes I have hot pink sheets. What exactly are you going to do about it?

• The Field Guide / Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black — Anyone read these? I’ve been eyeing them for a long time.
• Mort / Terry Pratchett
• The Hoboken Chicken Emergency / Daniel Pinkwater — I’m reading another by Pinkwater because I like the guy. He’s good people. Also, no book in all literary history has so amazing a title. (It just stole first place in the My Bookshelf Awesome Title Competition from P.S. Your Cat Is Dead by James Kirkwood.)
• The Dirty Job / Christopher Moore — Bringing the number of books on this list in which the main character is Death to two.
• Edition 69 / Vítěslav Nezval and Jindřich Štyrský — 1930’s surrealist Czech erotica. I don’t know why I picked this book up. And when I opened it, I don’t know why I didn’t put it back down. It’s illustrated with penises of terrifying dimension. There are some photographs at the end too that look like Georges Méliès meets Alex de Renzy.
• The Mists of Avalon / Marion Zimmer Bradley — Another I’d like to hear your thoughts on before I get started. I’ve heard mixed things, and it’s like a zagillion pages long, which is why I never bought it before. Today it was free, so I figured it was now or never. I’m gonna do it…. I swear. Right after Jonathan Strange.
• Un Lun Dun / China Miéville — I am so excited about this book I can hardly stand it. I don’t even know why except the awesome cover. I can hardly stand it.
• In the Night Kitchen / Maurice Sendak — Bringing the number of books on this list in which there is depicted a hand-drawn penis to two. I wonder how this book would have fared in the controversy department if it were released in Uptight Today instead of 1970. But seriously, this is a great picture book that I’ve wanted to own since I wrote a paper on it in library school.
• Viking Warrior / Judson Roberts — I bought this book because the guy on the cover is really hot. Like seriously lunchable. I hope the book is good because he looks even hotter on the sequel.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible / Austin Grossman — This is the one I got at The Strand. It’s been getting a lot of press (at least where I look) and I guess I like superheroes enough, so I’m optimistic. I’m jealous of the author’s job and education, though, so we’ll see if I can quell my resentment long enough to judge his work fairly.

Anyway, thanks for taking 9 hours to read my little big update. I’ve made good progress on the job hunt, so I think I can calm down and take it at a more casual pace now. This means consistent updates and hopefully something substantial like an actual book review or something weird like that.

Peter Pan in Scarlet / Geraldine McCaughrean
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2006 - 1416918086 (hardcover)

I’m not going to spend a lot of time with this review because, while I found Peter Pan in Scarlet assuredly pleasant and charming, it didn’t leave me with much to say. I read this for the Once Upon a Time reading challenge.

In 2004, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom J.M. Barrie had donated the rights to Peter Pan so they could benefit from all the royalties, decided to commission a sequel to the story to raise money for their cause. Interested authors submitted plot synopses and sample chapters, and out of around 200 contestants, Geraldine McCaughrean was selected to undertake this daunting task.

There are many ways in which an author can botch a job like this: trying too hard to imitate his style and caricaturing Barrie’s world, straying too far from his vision, subverting the themes of the original, or so many others. After reading just 20 pages of Peter Pan in Scarlet, I breathed a sigh of relief that McCaughrean was clearly not going to make these mistakes, yet as I read the book, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction, not borne from the story itself, but from the spectre of Peter Pan the original.

The plot is easy to sum up. Wendy and the Lost Boys are grown and working their adult careers, as detailed in the epilogue of Barrie’s novel. But they start having dreams of Neverland. Objects from place start appearing in their bedrooms. Somehow, this means that something is horribly wrong, so they decide to return to Neverland and investigate. Inducing a baby to laugh, they create the fairy Fireflyer. And apparently, they reason correctly that putting on their children’s clothes will make them children themselves, so they do so and fly back. Neverland has changed. It’s autumn (not good in a land of eternal summer), the lagoon is a mess, the mermaids are skeletons. Unpleasant. They meet with a bunch of little adventures, Captain Hook as a sort of living dead man who can’t keep himself together, imaginary dragons, some warring fairy factions. The whole thing becomes a bit unfocused, and I felt like this wasn’t really Neverland at all. There was just too much.

The novel tells a fine story, but one of the largest themes is all about “the clothes make the man,” illustrated through Wendy and the Boys’ transformations through clothing as well as Peter wearing Captain Hook’s scarlet jacket throughout the book and slowly turning into him. The problem is that a) it’s way heavy-handed and b) it doesn’t make any sense. Sure, it was taken from a little paragraph in Barrie’s book, but the thing is, nobody believes in anything like that. The clothes make the man? Well, no, the man makes the man. Peter’s becoming the brash, arrogant and callous Hook (honestly, I saw little change as Peter, in case you haven’t noticed, is kind of a dick) just because he’s wearing a coat?

The other disappointing thing about this book is something that eluded me. I couldn’t describe it, and I still can’t, but it is stated perfectly in this review from The Guardian, which is just spot on in my opinion. To quote:

Perhaps the most satisfactory side effect of this brilliant failure of a book is that it sends one curiously back to the original (the one safe way of returning to Neverland) and it is then that one sees exactly what is awry and why any sequel is a doomed enterprise. It is JM Barrie’s strangeness that makes Peter Pan the book it is. The writing is often offhand, irritable, unpredictable. It is a voice no one could parody (and it would be a mistake to try). Yet without it, you are lost. Hardest of all to reproduce is JM Barrie’s ambivalent attitude to his characters, his mixed messages about them. He had a way of making us insecure about who - and how - to love.

A repeated phrase from Barrie’s novel sticks firmly in my mind and informs my entire reading of the his story. It is the phrase with which he ends the book: “… and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” It was this — the cynicism, the dismissal of love and motherhood, the careless way children can be so hurtful — that was missing from McCaughrean’s work. Still, I find it difficult to make my meaning clear. If you care to know more about this book, I highly recommend the Guardian article.

And so, Peter Pan in Scarlet was a bold endeavor, one into which McCaughrean leaped bravely with a strong voice to back her up. Alas, the result falls a little flat. I don’t hold this against McCaughrean, though. As it happens, I have a huge amount of respect for the work she’s done, and she’s now an author I wish to know. I believe the problem here lies that the story of Peter, Wendy and Neverland is one that resists an honest sequel. This author did admirable work.

More info:

• Peter Pan in Scarlet Official Homepage
• Wikipedia site
• Geraldine McCaughrean’s official site

Other reviews:

• The Guardian (the one I like best)
• Kidsreads.com
• Another from The Guardian

The Onion Girl / Charles de Lint
Tor, 2001 - 0765303817 (pbk.)

This is about The Onion Girl. It’s by Charles de Lint, and it’s the first book I’ve ever read of his. I read it for my Once Upon a Time reading challenge.

My emotional nerve ends seem to be a lot closer to the surface of my skin than they ever were. Too often everything and anything is a big deal. It can be from the way my coffee tastes in the morning to the way Goon might look at me; everything’s a major emotional experience.

It drives me crazy.

That quote sums up my opinion of this book.

Ok, that’s not entirely fair. Let’s start at the beginning.

The Onion Girl is a a novel from de Lint’s well-loved Newford series, Newford being a fictional American city where the magical and otherworldly creatures of fairy tales seem to have an easy time going from their world to ours. As a result, they interact with the lives of a group of friends who are either magical themselves or have been touched by it in some way. These stories are de Lint’s series, and The Onion Girl is one of them. From the middle.

It is the story of Jilly Coppercorn, an artist specializing in portraits of fairy creatures inhabiting the more unpleasant areas of the city. As the book opens, Jilly wakes up from a coma, a newly paralyzed victim of a hit-and-run. She is told that if she is ever to recover physically from the accident, she first has to recover from the trauma of her childhood (sexual abuse, running away, living on the streets, drugs, prostitution, you name it). Alongside this narrative is the story of Raylene, a hickish (the accent gets tiresome) young woman with a similarly sordid childhood who you discover hates Jilly.

The story itself is solid, if a weenie bit predictable. It’s a nice meditation on recovery and forgiveness. The author has a keen sense of relationships and how different people can respond to the same experiences depending on how they’ve grown up and who their friends are. This was the greatest appeal of The Onion Girl. Though the story switches perspectives with a dizzying frequency, the number of angles can actually help you reexamine some of the things in your own past with a fresh eye. That is, if you can keep up.

Picking up this series in the middle is supposed to be easy because the novels aren’t serial, but it turns out there are way too many characters to get to know really quickly. I couldn’t tell the difference between Sophie and Wendy for the entire novel. Also, it was difficult to determine the way de Lint’s faerie world (The Dreamlands, Manido-Aki, whatever, there are a number of names) works. There were no strict rules. “Oh, I get there by walking through walls.” “I get there by sort of astral projecting.” “I get there by dreaming I’m a wolf.” It’s as though he uses whatever convenient devices he needs to tell the story and let’s it slide with “Oh, yeah, it’s magic so that can happen.”

Ok, now we’re here. My major gripe. I know Jilly’s paralyzed. I know Raylene was molested. I know everyone’s life has seriously sucked on an epic scale. But man, sometimes I just wanted to knock these girls out. De Lint overdid it with the self-pitying. Part of it was because he has this tendency to shove meaning into your face when it would have been better left implied. Jilly especially says everything she feels and lays it out with no sublety at all as if you wouldn’t be able to understand. And she keeps calling herself “the Broken Girl” and says how she hates being the Broken Girl. Very annoying. Everything that happened in this book was part of some huge emotional catharsis, and even though that’s what the book’s about, catharsis, it got kind heavy-handed.

I complained more than I intended. This really isn’t a bad book. De Lint can write, his prose flows, his characters are unique (except for my Sophie/Wendy trouble). So I’m going to recommend that you check him out, but perhaps a different book. Widdershins is supposed to be pretty good.

Then again — and this is something you should keep in mind with this website — I have a bias against highly-emotional books and movies, and “heavy-handed” is a term I often use for them. Maybe I’m emotionally stunted, but the melodrama and saccharine “finding magic and goodness in everything” stuff irk me. I do see the appeal of this book for people who aren’t me. It might be right up your alley. How’s that for inconclusive?

More info:

• Wikipedia - Charles de Lint
• Charles de Lint’s homepage

Other reviews:

• Honeyed Words
• SF Site
• Challenging Destiny
• Pop Matters