The Crystal Stair; The Starstone, Grace Chetwin (365 Books, Days 147 & 151)

I am starting to have some review brain back, but only very slowly, so I'm going to be hopping around chronologically a bit with my reviews from the last nearly-a-week. I will get to them all eventually, but some books take more time and thought to write about than others.

The Crystal Stair and The Starstone are the final two of the Grace Chetwin series beginning with Gom on Windy Mountain; I've read all four of them while visiting B., as they are books he liked very much when he was younger.

And I do indeed recommend this series for younger people, though I'm not really sure it holds up for an adult. As I said about the earlier two books, they're much better than they have to be. But the last two books have a problem that I can only describe as galloping madly off in all directions at once. One of the virtues of the first book was that after it, you can't tell where the series is going; and after the second book, you still can't tell where the series is going; and the reason for this turns out to be that it is going to throw everything possible in.

Which is fun, in some ways. The third and fourth books have an interesting fusion of science fiction in with the magic-- Gom's world is very classic fantasy pseudo-medieval with vaguely Earthsea-style magic, but the plot turns out to be tangled up with some people from another set of planets entirely, who are using his world as a jumpoff point for a stargate. I always enjoy seeing people do things that are not quite expected for the genre they appear to be writing in.

But there is so much plot and so many things that fifty pages from the end of the last book I was wondering whether there was actually yet another book afterward that no one had mentioned, because I simply could not see how it was all going to wrap up. And the answer to that is 'kind of satisfactorily, but very very abruptly'.

So I think these would be good for middle-grade fantasy-lovers, because they do stretch genre boundaries, they do have thought in them, they're not extruded trendy book-product. But, unless you are as tired and ill as I've been this last while, that's as far as my recommendation goes.

The Crystal Stair; The Starstone, Grace Chetwin (365 Books, Days 147 & 151)

I am starting to have some review brain back, but only very slowly, so I'm going to be hopping around chronologically a bit with my reviews from the last nearly-a-week. I will get to them all eventually, but some books take more time and thought to write about than others.

The Crystal Stair and The Starstone are the final two of the Grace Chetwin series beginning with Gom on Windy Mountain; I've read all four of them while visiting B., as they are books he liked very much when he was younger.

And I do indeed recommend this series for younger people, though I'm not really sure it holds up for an adult. As I said about the earlier two books, they're much better than they have to be. But the last two books have a problem that I can only describe as galloping madly off in all directions at once. One of the virtues of the first book was that after it, you can't tell where the series is going; and after the second book, you still can't tell where the series is going; and the reason for this turns out to be that it is going to throw everything possible in.

Which is fun, in some ways. The third and fourth books have an interesting fusion of science fiction in with the magic-- Gom's world is very classic fantasy pseudo-medieval with vaguely Earthsea-style magic, but the plot turns out to be tangled up with some people from another set of planets entirely, who are using his world as a jumpoff point for a stargate. I always enjoy seeing people do things that are not quite expected for the genre they appear to be writing in.

But there is so much plot and so many things that fifty pages from the end of the last book I was wondering whether there was actually yet another book afterward that no one had mentioned, because I simply could not see how it was all going to wrap up. And the answer to that is 'kind of satisfactorily, but very very abruptly'.

So I think these would be good for middle-grade fantasy-lovers, because they do stretch genre boundaries, they do have thought in them, they're not extruded trendy book-product. But, unless you are as tired and ill as I've been this last while, that's as far as my recommendation goes.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Lois Lowry; James White (365 Books Days 148 -149)

When I'm sick, I do a lot of rereading, and I particularly do a lot of rereading of the books I read as a kid; it's comforting, familiar, and doesn't require much brain. So I went back this week and reread almost all of Lois Lowry's Anastasia books. They hold up pretty well, actually. Anastasia Krupnik, the not-quite-teenage protagonist, lives with her parents and brother in Boston (a Boston I realize as an adult is recognizable; as a kid I didn't care) and gets into the sort of gently humorous situation that happens to intelligent, well-loved, interesting children. There are many books out there that try to do this sort of thing, but most of them are painfully twee. Lowry's succeed for me because, as a kid, they caught something about how I thought. For example, when Anastasia's parents tell her that she doesn't need to see a psychologist because she's not badly adjusted, she's just being a teenager (they're right, by the way), her response is to buy a plaster bust of Freud at a yard sale and start trying to use it as an analyst. This made total sense to me at thirteen, and there are levels on which it still does now. Since these were written in the eighties, some things about these have dated-- the technology, of course, but also the way that people treat Anastasia's mother for working, and some of the social things at Anastasia's school-- but basically they continue the same pleasant, funny things they've always been, only now I understand the parents better.

Anyway, after writing several books about Anastasia, Lowry switched audiences and main characters and started writing about Anastasia's younger brother Sam, who is in nursery school. I generally don't like the Sam books as well because I do think they veer into twee, and because that age of child is much less interesting and much less relatable to me. But I did include them in the reread, and found to my surprise that there was one I'd never read at all, namely Attaboy, Sam.

The plot of this one centers around Sam's mother's birthday, for which she has announced she wants homemade presents. Anastasia tries to write a poem, their father tries to paint an oil portrait of his wife, and Sam attempts to make perfume by combining all of his mother's favorite smells, such as yeast from freshly baked bread, and geranium clippings, and ash from his father's pipe, and you see the problem. I enjoyed this because I do vividly remember the desperation of realizing that a homemade present is not only not the spectacular thing it was intended to be, but is in fact a total and complete disaster, and watching that desperation times three is pretty impressive. And of course it works out all right in the end. If you like gently funny, short, naturalistic kids' books, this is the sort of thing you will like.

Then the next day I read another Sector General book by James White-- Code Blue: Emergency, which I gather is a fix-up of several short stories about its principal character. The protagonist here is a fully qualified surgeon for her own species, who winds up at the interspecies Sector General hospital for diplomatic reasons and turns out to be idiosyncratically useful but totally incapable of working with others because of some of her cultural tenets. The thing that amazed me here was how very much this resembled the previous White I'd read, The Galactic Gourmet; the books have precisely the same structure (misfit comes to hospital, does some good things while messing up spectacularly, is shifted through various niches in search of the right one, is eventually sent out on an ambulance ship-- it's even the same ambulance ship). It's just that the main character here is a surgeon, not a chef. The knowledge of which characters are recurring explains to me some of the idiosyncrasies of the previous, because of course the recurring people have more narrative weight. The recurring characters here pretty much do and say exactly what they do and say in The Galactic Gourmet, even.

However, despite the repetitiveness, this was still very entertaining and readable, and I don't think adhering to its formula hurt it at all. What one wants of this sort of book is problem-solving with an sf-medical bent, and that's very present and none of the medical mysteries repeat or are similar to one another, so far. And the arc of how the characters interact may be completely predictable, but honestly it isn't the point. So I still recommend this if you like the medical-sf thing conceptually, although I should note that this book is not as good at gender as the previous, though it didn't make me want to throw it across a room or anything.

Lois Lowry; James White (365 Books Days 148 -149)

When I'm sick, I do a lot of rereading, and I particularly do a lot of rereading of the books I read as a kid; it's comforting, familiar, and doesn't require much brain. So I went back this week and reread almost all of Lois Lowry's Anastasia books. They hold up pretty well, actually. Anastasia Krupnik, the not-quite-teenage protagonist, lives with her parents and brother in Boston (a Boston I realize as an adult is recognizable; as a kid I didn't care) and gets into the sort of gently humorous situation that happens to intelligent, well-loved, interesting children. There are many books out there that try to do this sort of thing, but most of them are painfully twee. Lowry's succeed for me because, as a kid, they caught something about how I thought. For example, when Anastasia's parents tell her that she doesn't need to see a psychologist because she's not badly adjusted, she's just being a teenager (they're right, by the way), her response is to buy a plaster bust of Freud at a yard sale and start trying to use it as an analyst. This made total sense to me at thirteen, and there are levels on which it still does now. Since these were written in the eighties, some things about these have dated-- the technology, of course, but also the way that people treat Anastasia's mother for working, and some of the social things at Anastasia's school-- but basically they continue the same pleasant, funny things they've always been, only now I understand the parents better.

Anyway, after writing several books about Anastasia, Lowry switched audiences and main characters and started writing about Anastasia's younger brother Sam, who is in nursery school. I generally don't like the Sam books as well because I do think they veer into twee, and because that age of child is much less interesting and much less relatable to me. But I did include them in the reread, and found to my surprise that there was one I'd never read at all, namely Attaboy, Sam.

The plot of this one centers around Sam's mother's birthday, for which she has announced she wants homemade presents. Anastasia tries to write a poem, their father tries to paint an oil portrait of his wife, and Sam attempts to make perfume by combining all of his mother's favorite smells, such as yeast from freshly baked bread, and geranium clippings, and ash from his father's pipe, and you see the problem. I enjoyed this because I do vividly remember the desperation of realizing that a homemade present is not only not the spectacular thing it was intended to be, but is in fact a total and complete disaster, and watching that desperation times three is pretty impressive. And of course it works out all right in the end. If you like gently funny, short, naturalistic kids' books, this is the sort of thing you will like.

Then the next day I read another Sector General book by James White-- Code Blue: Emergency, which I gather is a fix-up of several short stories about its principal character. The protagonist here is a fully qualified surgeon for her own species, who winds up at the interspecies Sector General hospital for diplomatic reasons and turns out to be idiosyncratically useful but totally incapable of working with others because of some of her cultural tenets. The thing that amazed me here was how very much this resembled the previous White I'd read, The Galactic Gourmet; the books have precisely the same structure (misfit comes to hospital, does some good things while messing up spectacularly, is shifted through various niches in search of the right one, is eventually sent out on an ambulance ship-- it's even the same ambulance ship). It's just that the main character here is a surgeon, not a chef. The knowledge of which characters are recurring explains to me some of the idiosyncrasies of the previous, because of course the recurring people have more narrative weight. The recurring characters here pretty much do and say exactly what they do and say in The Galactic Gourmet, even.

However, despite the repetitiveness, this was still very entertaining and readable, and I don't think adhering to its formula hurt it at all. What one wants of this sort of book is problem-solving with an sf-medical bent, and that's very present and none of the medical mysteries repeat or are similar to one another, so far. And the arc of how the characters interact may be completely predictable, but honestly it isn't the point. So I still recommend this if you like the medical-sf thing conceptually, although I should note that this book is not as good at gender as the previous, though it didn't make me want to throw it across a room or anything.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Habitation of the Blessed, Catherynne Valente (365 Books, Day 152)

I read this on B.'s Kindle, as paper copies seem difficult to find, so I wound up reading part of it in the National Gallery of Art, next to that lovely and odd semi-triangular waterfall they have in the basement concourse between the wings. I think it was a good setting. It is a book that also contains much of the lovely and odd.

This is a reworking and rethinking of the legends of Prester John, that mythical Christian monarch who sent a letter to Constantinople in the late 1100s describing his vast empire somewhere near India and the monsters and wonders which inhabited it. Although the letter was demonstrated to be a forgery fairly early, parties of Christian explorers spent several centuries on and off looking for the land of Prester John, who after all combined the traits of a religion friendly to them and existing in the parts of the world where wonders could occur. I haven't seen as much of Prester John in fantasy as I might have expected-- his empire turns up in Umberto Eco's Baudolino, but that's about all I can think of. Valente's book takes the letter as its source text and is largely set in the empire, with its cyclops and gryphons, its Fountain of Youth, its anthropophagi and talking red and white lions.

Well, when I say largely set in the empire, I mean that on a meta level, because the frame story is that of a group of monks who are searching for the tomb of St. Thomas and the land of Prester John; they find a tree that sprouts books, and the tales we get of the empire are copied from the books they pick, fragmentary sometimes and disintegrating as the books rot like fruit. It's fairly obvious that the stories are true, but there is that small element of doubt, of textual play, which is quite characteristic of Valente if one looks at her previous work. As a result, there are multiple threads going on here which are not privileged over each other-- there's the story of how the man who would be called Prester John came into a land of marvels, and the story told by a blemmye (a person who has no head, but eyes for nipples and a navel for a mouth) who will become his wife, and the bedtime stories told by a nursemaid to royal children of the empire some thousands of years earlier, and, of course, the monks reading, with their wonder and doubt.

Prester John is not a very sympathetic character. He is Christ-ridden, unable to see out of the context of his god, to a degree that is frightening and tragic. But Hagia, the blemmye, is a joy to read, as are all the other denizens of her country, free and powerful, wise and interesting, loving and intelligent and deeply, deeply odd. And the threads tie together in the ways that they should, not always overtly, and the whole hangs together.

The one thing that did not ring true to me is that the party of reading monks are supposedly set in 1699. They simply don't come across as being that late. Their mindsets would have made more sense in men from two or three hundred years before that-- not from the post-Renaissance, from the dawning of the Enlightenment. But that is the only caveat I have.

I believe there are supposed to be more of these, though where they would go from the end of this one is not obvious. If so, I look forward, as this is some of the more unusual and colorful fantasy I've read in a while, and I enjoyed its portrait of a truly different realm of wonders.

The Habitation of the Blessed, Catherynne Valente (365 Books, Day 152)

I read this on B.'s Kindle, as paper copies seem difficult to find, so I wound up reading part of it in the National Gallery of Art, next to that lovely and odd semi-triangular waterfall they have in the basement concourse between the wings. I think it was a good setting. It is a book that also contains much of the lovely and odd.

This is a reworking and rethinking of the legends of Prester John, that mythical Christian monarch who sent a letter to Constantinople in the late 1100s describing his vast empire somewhere near India and the monsters and wonders which inhabited it. Although the letter was demonstrated to be a forgery fairly early, parties of Christian explorers spent several centuries on and off looking for the land of Prester John, who after all combined the traits of a religion friendly to them and existing in the parts of the world where wonders could occur. I haven't seen as much of Prester John in fantasy as I might have expected-- his empire turns up in Umberto Eco's Baudolino, but that's about all I can think of. Valente's book takes the letter as its source text and is largely set in the empire, with its cyclops and gryphons, its Fountain of Youth, its anthropophagi and talking red and white lions.

Well, when I say largely set in the empire, I mean that on a meta level, because the frame story is that of a group of monks who are searching for the tomb of St. Thomas and the land of Prester John; they find a tree that sprouts books, and the tales we get of the empire are copied from the books they pick, fragmentary sometimes and disintegrating as the books rot like fruit. It's fairly obvious that the stories are true, but there is that small element of doubt, of textual play, which is quite characteristic of Valente if one looks at her previous work. As a result, there are multiple threads going on here which are not privileged over each other-- there's the story of how the man who would be called Prester John came into a land of marvels, and the story told by a blemmye (a person who has no head, but eyes for nipples and a navel for a mouth) who will become his wife, and the bedtime stories told by a nursemaid to royal children of the empire some thousands of years earlier, and, of course, the monks reading, with their wonder and doubt.

Prester John is not a very sympathetic character. He is Christ-ridden, unable to see out of the context of his god, to a degree that is frightening and tragic. But Hagia, the blemmye, is a joy to read, as are all the other denizens of her country, free and powerful, wise and interesting, loving and intelligent and deeply, deeply odd. And the threads tie together in the ways that they should, not always overtly, and the whole hangs together.

The one thing that did not ring true to me is that the party of reading monks are supposedly set in 1699. They simply don't come across as being that late. Their mindsets would have made more sense in men from two or three hundred years before that-- not from the post-Renaissance, from the dawning of the Enlightenment. But that is the only caveat I have.

I believe there are supposed to be more of these, though where they would go from the end of this one is not obvious. If so, I look forward, as this is some of the more unusual and colorful fantasy I've read in a while, and I enjoyed its portrait of a truly different realm of wonders.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.