The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.60 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.19 / 5.00

When Maggie Black was a student she fell in love with the writings of reclusive, but acclaimed, poet Davis Cooper. The pair exchanged letters for many years but never met in person. As Copper fell further and further in to alcoholism after the death of his young lover, artist Anna Naverra, Maggie gave up writing poetry so that she could support her husband as he built his music career. Unwilling to accept his infidelity she divorced him several years ago, although he still tries to control her life. She is about to sell their house and move away when fate intervenes: Cooper dies in mysterious circumstances and leaves his house and all its contents to her.

Maggie moves to Cooper’s home in a canyon Tucson, Arizona, where she meets his friends, reads his papers and experiences the desert that was such an inspiration to him. However, she is surprised to discover that the land and its inhabitants are not as simple as they seem and she gradually uncovers the wild spirits that live there. As she becomes more at home in the desert she begins to see what really lives there and comes to understand how Cooper could have drowned in the middle of a dry creek bed.

I chose this book as the Folklore title for the Once Upon A Time VI Challenge because I had seen some reviews of it that suggested that it was an interesting choice for the category.

This is one of those books where are I need to be purposefully careful about the magical elements that inhabit its pages because I do not want to spoil the surprises that it contains. Some books are so much better if you can explore them without too much knowledge of what to expect, and this is definitely one where that sense of wonder needs to unfold naturally.

The beginning of the book was somewhat disorientating as we are presented with a Prologue with several vignettes from the night of Cooper’s death. After this, the story is mostly laid out from Maggie’s point of view, although we do follow several other characters’ viewpoints as well. We follow Maggie as she encounters the various humans and spirits in the area, with the other perspectives adding information or offering tantalizing hints of what is really happening. Maggie is a well-drawn, likeable character with a great deal of sense and empathy that make her an intriguing protagonist. The other characters are interesting and fit well into the roles that they fulfill, although few of them are explored in very much detail as we concentrate on Maggie and her story.

The story unwinds elegantly and slowly, with suggestions and hints carefully placed so that there are few true surprises as the truth is revealed. However, this adds to the feeling of revelation and growing understanding that we share with Maggie and it works very well. We usually ‘see’ things before Maggie, as if our eyes are being opened to the magic around her slightly before hers, or she is seeing the same things as us but her mind is discounting them as impossible. This makes the magic seem real and solid as if the curtain that normally hides it is gradually fading until we see the total truth.

The world that we discover is built upon the ancient mythologies of the Mexicans, Celts and Native Americans, so it is very grounded in nature. Grace at Books Without Any Pictures feels that American culture does not have this type of mythology and so appreciates that this book creates one. This is not the magic of Harry Potter, but the inherent power of the land itself, with aspects of nature personified and able to act to influence the environment. There is a timeless quality to these ‘spirits’ that results in them being totally different to us, with concerns and morals that we cannot comprehend. This ‘otherness’ is captured beautifully and resonates well with the indifferent majesty of the natural world. The desert is inspiring and breath-taking, but it is also dangerous and can lead to insanity and even death. I like how the desert acts as a muse, inspiring so many people to creative and artistic expression, although they all react in different ways.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.13 / 5.00

Perseus Jackson is called Percy by his friends, not that he has many. He is what they call a ‘troubled’ twelve year old, diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Add in serious impulse control issues and a very bad temper, and it is easy to understand why he never lasts more than a few months in any school before he is expelled. It is almost the same at Yancy Academy, only this time he has found a friend, Grover, and a teacher that he actually likes, Mr Brunner, who teaches Latin. However, during a field trip to a museum, Percy’s pre-algebra teacher, Ms Dodds, turns into a large, winged creature and attacks him. Percy vividly remembers Mr Brunner throwing him a pen that becomes a sword, which causes Ms Dodds to disintegrate when he hits her. This is strange enough, but when he gets outside no one else remembers Ms Dodds at all, not even Mr Brunner.

At the end of the year, Percy returns to the apartment that he and his mother, Sally, share with his horrid stepfather, Gabe. Sally decides that she and Percy should take a brief holiday in Long Island, but then Grover turns up, shows them that he is in fact a satyr and warns them that the Furies are coming. As they race towards a safe place called Camp Half-Blood, they are attacked and Sally disappears in a golden shower of light as the Minotaur strangles her. In his fury, Percy kills the Minotaur so that he and Grover can get to the safety of Camp Half-Blood. Once in the Camp, Percy discovers that he is the son of a god, as are all the other children there and Mr Brunner is actually the centaur Chiron. As if that were not shocking enough it soon becomes clear that the gods hold Percy responsible for stealing Zeus’ lightning bolt, so he has to go on a Quest to find it before returning it to its rightful owner.

I chose this book as my ‘Mythology’ title for the Once Upon A Time VI Challenge. I found it difficult to find an interesting title in that genre but I had heard that the Percy Jackson books were very good. I did see the film adaptation, which I thought was pretty poor. However, I know that it is very difficult for films to recapture what makes a book great: the Harry Potter novels are far superior to their film counterparts. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised, and I was.

Percy has a cynical, world-weary tone of voice and we immediately sympathize with the unwarranted persecution that seems to follow him from school to school. He seems to have nothing going for him, what with the ADHD and dyslexia, and I can understand his frustration with trying to cope in classes. I found the later explanation of his dyslexia a little forced, although I have studied ancient Greek myself and I could never get the hang of the different letterforms, so it did make sense to me. This does bring me to one minor criticism though: I was confused as to why the phrase “Di immortales!” was used so much. This is the Latin for “By the immortal gods!” but I thought that they were hard wired for Greek, not Latin. I was also a little confused as to why Mr Brunner / Chiron was a Latin teacher but included Greek mythology in the course: I can only assume that this is an aspect of the American education system, with which I am not familiar, as Mr Riordan thanks a Classicist for his input.

The other characters were also appealing, although I felt that they were not given much room to show any complexity. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that Percy is the narrator or not. I particularly liked Grover and his habit of munching on tin cans. Chiron was suitably fatherly and wise, while Mr D made an excellent camp leader: totally disinterested in his charges and ever so put-upon. I liked Annabeth, the Hermione clone, but it would be so nice to see a girl who was not the brains of the operation, but the brawn instead. I also thought that her Cap of Invisibility was a rather blatant nod to Harry Potter’s cloak and provided an overly easy answer to many of their problems. I would have preferred to see more examples of quick thinking like that in the scene with Cerberus, which was actually rather cute.

As Ellie at Musings of a Bookshop Girl comments, the action is face paced with the mythology nicely integrated into modern America. It is also nice that the gods behave more like petulant children than all-powerful beings. They have their petty disputes and, as the Little Red Reviewer notes, they have not changed since ancient times, even if they now wear beautiful Italian suits or Hawaiian shirts. Refreshingly, Percy is untrusting of the adults he meets and so he avoids that starry-eyed, too-good-to-be-true vibe that YA characters can have. I guess my other criticism is that the book definitely seems to read as if it is aimed at the YA audience, which is something I did not feel whilst reading The Hunger Games recently, or remember from the Harry Potter novels or those in the His Dark Materials trilogy. However, I will try the next book in the series.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.20 / 5.00

William Goldman presents an abridged version of the classic novel by S. Morgenstern, that great Florinese writer. Having loved the book as a child, when his Florinese father read it to him, Mr Goldman was appalled to discover as an adult that it was full of really boring bits. In an effort to make the book more interesting for his son, he has pulled together all the ‘good parts’ and produced a much slimmer volume.

The book follows the adventures of the most beautiful woman in the world, Buttercup and Westley, her True Love. She declares her love for him and he runs away to America to make his fortune, but is lost at sea, killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts. After being given the choice of death or marriage, she agrees to marry Prince Humperdinck, who loves hunting so much that he has a ‘Zoo of Death’ filled with an assortment of deadly creatures. As the wedding approaches, she is kidnapped by Vizzini, the cunning Sicilian, Inigo Montoya, the Spanish fencing Wizard, and Fezzik, the monumental Turkish wrestler. However, their plan is interrupted by the Man in Black, who pursues them towards the Cliffs of Insanity.

What follows involves fighting, cunning, strength, determination, death, rodents, poison, deception, friendship, love, hate, revenge, a miracle and an albino with a wheelbarrow.

The film version of this book has a special place in my young adulthood, so I have to get a few things off my chest before I start:

As you wish . . . Inconceivable! . . . Rodents of Unusual Size . . . Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam . . . Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Right, back to the review . . .

As I began to read the beginning of the book I was completely confused. I had assumed that the film’s use of a story within a story, with the Grandfather reading the book to his ill grandson, was a clever invention by the film makers, but that is how the book is written. However, the film’s version of it is slightly more successful, mainly because it is more concise and is a conversation between two people, rather than one man’s recollections. We are presented with a short biography for Mr Goldman outlining the books role in his youth, but it goes on rather too much and is not as funny as it should be. The asides that litter the book are sometimes funny, but often rather dull as they criticize the supposed original book for its long lists of details. I am not sure how I would have reacted to these as a person who had not seen the film, but I would not have missed them if they had been deleted.

One problem I always had with the film is that Buttercup is almost totally unsympathetic. At the beginning she is just horrible to poor Westley, then she is forced to agree to the marriage and is just a baggage of uselessness that gets handed around and provides a reason for all the action. As a character she is rather uninteresting and stereotypical, which is always disappointing for me, as I prefer female characters to have some agency. She is supposed to be pretty stupid, which I fail to find endearing, and the book does not really add anything else to her character. Indeed, many of the characters are pretty dull and show no progression. The Prince and the Count are mostly one-note cardboard cutouts of ‘EVIL!’ with nothing particularly interesting about them to provide a reason for their behavior. Westley fairs little better, although he does get some good lines, but he is basically the stereotypical hero, with no character arc that I could discern. Indeed, the only characters that actually have a journey through the story are Inigo and Fezzik, who have interesting back-stories and are profoundly changed by their experiences. This makes them seem like the only ‘real’ people in this fairy tale and they remain my favorites, especially Inigo.

The story is entertaining enough, making unexpected turns and presenting ‘inconceivable’ (sorry: I just had to!) solutions to the problems that our heroes encounter. They neatly escape from seemingly impossible danger in ways that seem casually obvious, which is both thrilling and funny. The twist of taking two of the ‘villains’ and making them heroes is excellent, especially as they are presented as such sympathetic characters from the beginning. However, the final effect is a little too light and fluffy for my liking. The book was originally published in 1973 and YA novels have evolved a great deal since then. When compared to the works of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Suzanne Collins this book is sadly lacking in depth and darkness, but it will still make you laugh out loud and have you shouting “Inconceivable!” at every opportunity.

This is the Fairy Tale that I chose for the Once Upon A Time VI Challenge.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.20 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.24 / 5.00

In the city of Camorr, the plague known as the Black Whisper is a disaster, killing everyone over eleven years old. However, this provides an opportunity for those who like to ‘adopt’ orphans. Slavers take most of them, but those who seem talented are apprenticed to the Thiefmaker and put to profitable work in the streets, markets and houses of the city. One particularly talented apprentice is tiny Locke Lamora, who displays a massive talent for the noble arts of theft and conman-ship. Unfortunately, young Locke doesn’t always foresee the outcomes of his schemes and drives the Thiefmaker to pass him along to Father Chains, a blind priest who spend his days begging outside his temple. I don’t want to provide any more background for the plot because it progresses in two timelines: one follows the training of Locke and the other apprentices that Chains molds into the Gentleman Bastards, while the second follows the adult Bastards as they relieve a nobleman of vast sums of money.

I can hardly express how much I loved this book: we are talking ‘Garden  Spells’ good here. I will be pushing it very hard at the next book group meeting because I enjoyed it so much, so NYOBG members have been warned! I read it as part of a Read Along online, so my review has been influenced by the reactions of the twenty or so other bloggers to the questions we answered each week. 

  

So, why do I love this book so much? Is it the characters? The plot? The setting? The dialogue? The writing style? I have to answer “YES!” to all of these. It is rare that I read a book that I do not want to change in any way, but this is one of them. OK, I realize I am gushing a bit here, but as Readhead says at the Little Red Reviewer: “Scott Lynch turns me into a blabbering fan girl.” Trying to restrain myself a little, I will try to provide a more reasoned set of arguments for why you have to read this book.

  

This is Scott Lynch’s debut novel, but you would never know that from his skill with dialogue and descriptive writing. His voice is very engaging and witty, giving us memorable quotes and laugh-out-loud descriptions of events. His characters are well drawn and fully realized. Indeed, we come to love some of them very quickly: there are few ‘throw away’ place fillers in evidence. The setting is expertly drawn and we are given enough detail to leave us wanting more: it is similar to Elizabethan Europe, but different enough to tick all the required Fantasy boxes. The plot has enough originality to keep us off balance and surprised, with bold moves that will have you shouting angrily at the author because you do not want him to do THAT to the characters.

Locke and the other Bastards are all engaging characters even though they are thieves. Their choice to rob from the rich makes their profession a little easier to accept, though they don’t seem to do much wealth distribution, so we know that they are not all that noble. As Kristen at Fantasy Cafe notes: it is very nice to have characters that are slightly less than the usual perfectly good heroes that litter Fantasy novels. Although Locke is the brains of the outfit, he is dependent upon his support crew, especially Jean Tannen. Jean is the gentle giant type who has his special hatchets, ‘The Wicked Sisters’, but who wears glasses and reads Romance novels. He and Locke are supported by the Sanza twins, when they can be kept away from gambling and wenching, and Bug, the latest apprentice to join the team. As Grace says at Books Without Any Pictures, one of the appealing things about Locke is that he really needs his crew: he is hopeless at fighting for a start! The secondary cast is also well crafted. Father Chains deserves several books all to himself, because I want to read his entire life story. The nobles ensnared in the Bastards’ trap are not your usual idiot nobility, but more than capable of some plotting of their own. One particularly wonderful character is Dona Vorchenza, an incredibly elderly noble who has an entirely unexpected role in the story: the consensus of opinion was that Dame Maggie Smith was born to play her, if that helps to convince you. The antagonist of the piece, The Gray King, is a suitably shadowy figure for most of the book, but his history and motivations are unusual and logical, if a little extreme.

The world that Mr Lynch creates is full of wonderful touches and hints. Shara at Calico Reaction picks out his use of alchemy in everyday life as the detail that really placed this into a true fantasy setting. Unlike many Fantasy writers, who bury you in a massive pile of details and histories, he keeps to the bare minimum. As Logan says at Rememorandom, this is frustrating in some ways, but it does stop the exposition from getting in the way of the story and it is a testament to Mr Lynch that I left the book wanting more. He uses an interesting technique of interweaving the main plot with Interludes from the past, which either add color to the characters or explain or support aspects of the story or world. Some people found this irritating during certain sections of the book, but I found that it provided quiet moments to breathe in some of the most frantic action sequences and also gave more context to the world and its inhabitants. Sarah at Bookworm Blues notes that it also allows us to miss out on a prolonged introduction to the Bastards. I could go on at length describing the many unusual aspects of this world, but I would rather leave them for you to discover on your own.

The plot is like one of the great caper movies mixed with a dash of Mafia politics: think Oceans Eleven meets The Sopranos with more grime and some magic thrown in for good measure. There are bluffs within bluffs, political maneuvering and random violence at every turn, but our heroes are destined to rise above it all with their mythical hero aura, right? Nope, this is a cruel, brutal world, so nothing is certain. Our heroes get beaten, stabbed, drowned, poisoned, bitten and they bleed real blood: when they finish a fight you would have trouble finding bits that aren’t black, blue or red. There is a real sense of danger, which ratchets up the tension for most of the second half of the book as our heroes stagger from one danger to the next. Rose at Rosesthingamajig describes it as a ‘twisty and turny novel’, but I agree with her that Mr Lynch manages all these unexpected moves beautifully, making sure that everyone behaves in ways that fit their characters. There was some criticism about a lack of female characters, but the city of Camorr seems to be very politically correct, with no obvious division of professions along gender lines and the females we do meet are all strong and feisty. 

There are a couple of things that I do want to mention though. Firstly, this is not necessarily a book for the weak stomached. There are some scenes of unpleasant violence that might be difficult for some people to read, though there is surprisingly little description of what is really happening. Secondly, there is quite a lot of profanity in the dialogue. If you look at Amazon or Goodreads, you will see plenty of one star reviews that are due to this. I do not want to debate the suitability of giving a low star rating to a book because of its choice of language, but I do think that the language is suited to the environment being described in this case. It is not used inappropriately and is not there for shock value: it is simply an accurate reflection of how I would expect criminals to speak.

One thing that impressed me during the Read Along was the number of people who had already read the book several times, but were still happy to read it again. Elfy at Travels Through Iest claims that she reread it straight after reading it the first time. As you can see from the number of reviews I have mentioned, this is a well-loved book, and I will always be grateful that someone reTweeted Readhead's invitation to join the group.

I have counted this book as my Fantasy choice for the Once Upon A Time VI Challenge. You can see other people's choices here.

Once Upon A Time VI Challenge

After a busy weekend trying to contain my husband's desire to own vast numbers of tortoises, turtles and now crested geckoes (it's his version of a mid-life crisis), I have finally had a chance to select my titles for the challenge. It was difficult to narrow down my choices, but I finally found some good recommendations from my blogging friends, which made life a little easier. Here are my choices, feel free to give me some feedback! :D