Somewhere in the H section...
Nov. 17th, 2008 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI have a clutch of about ten books I rather liked and did not write about at the time waiting for me to catch up with them, which as I don't own them will be somewhat challenging in terms of actual details. I may have to settle for making up the protagonist's name and other minor trivialities. Anyway, for things I have read and have handy...
Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl. I remember picking this up when it first came out, for the title (one of the creepier fairy tales, with the talking horse's head and all) and then putting it down again, because I wasn’t in the mood for yet another fairy-tale retelling, as at the time they were a glut on the market. Fortunately, the market has now moved on to supernatural romance. Unfortunately, the bits I liked about this were the bits where it moved away from the fairy tale, or at least messed with it (princess groomed for the succession not actually all that good at ruling), and although this did happen in the middle, at the end it all collapses back. The man she tells off for riding badly and who falls in love with her competence turns out to be the prince (in casual clothes), the things her family rejected her for turn out to be her special powers (apparently, hardly anyone in this world gets one of these, and she gets two), and she gets a brand new kingdom anyway. I’m more bitter about this because I actually rather liked the middle chunk, which managed to do a believable goose-girl in the big strange city without lurching too far towards either martyrdom and humiliation, or special powers and everyone as your best friend. I’d like to see if she’s done a non-fairy tale structure book.
Cynthia Harnett, The load of unicorn. I used to constantly run into this on the shelves on the children’s library, but after discovering that it didn’t actually refer to a unicorn felt too betrayed to persist with it (I was very young!). As I am (mostly) over such issues now I figured it was time to give it another go, largely because I am absent-mindedly working through Newbery winners (or is it the Carnegie?) in a very unsystematic fashion. Bendy, a scrivener’s apprentice, is caught between the traditional, handwritten methods favoured by his brothers, who run the business, and the new printing press that Caxton is trying to set up, despite ongoing sabotage. Bendy also has a partial manuscript, won at dice, of tales of King Arthur, written by Thomas Mallory, which he reads obsessively…
It’s a competent, if obvious, story, and Harnett is good at having people behave in manners consistent with the times rather than present day (Bendy, who’s 13 or so, is drunk when he wins the manuscript). For me, it errs too far on the side of overdoing the history & setting – Caxton, in particular, is fond of lengthy descriptions of where everything is and how it came to be there; “There is the great west gate of the Abbey; facing down Tothill Street. It is a prison, you know; and, strangely, the King’s prison, not the Abbot’s; which means that the prisoners have to be brought to it from the outside; if they set foot inside they could claim sanctuary.” (it’s also written in 1959, if you’re wondering about all the semi-colons). There’s also an author’s afterword, which is just slightly too concerned with making sure you know exactly what was real, and going to have a look at it if at all possible. And this is the strength of the books, but I would have liked more on plot and character.
Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl. I remember picking this up when it first came out, for the title (one of the creepier fairy tales, with the talking horse's head and all) and then putting it down again, because I wasn’t in the mood for yet another fairy-tale retelling, as at the time they were a glut on the market. Fortunately, the market has now moved on to supernatural romance. Unfortunately, the bits I liked about this were the bits where it moved away from the fairy tale, or at least messed with it (princess groomed for the succession not actually all that good at ruling), and although this did happen in the middle, at the end it all collapses back. The man she tells off for riding badly and who falls in love with her competence turns out to be the prince (in casual clothes), the things her family rejected her for turn out to be her special powers (apparently, hardly anyone in this world gets one of these, and she gets two), and she gets a brand new kingdom anyway. I’m more bitter about this because I actually rather liked the middle chunk, which managed to do a believable goose-girl in the big strange city without lurching too far towards either martyrdom and humiliation, or special powers and everyone as your best friend. I’d like to see if she’s done a non-fairy tale structure book.
Cynthia Harnett, The load of unicorn. I used to constantly run into this on the shelves on the children’s library, but after discovering that it didn’t actually refer to a unicorn felt too betrayed to persist with it (I was very young!). As I am (mostly) over such issues now I figured it was time to give it another go, largely because I am absent-mindedly working through Newbery winners (or is it the Carnegie?) in a very unsystematic fashion. Bendy, a scrivener’s apprentice, is caught between the traditional, handwritten methods favoured by his brothers, who run the business, and the new printing press that Caxton is trying to set up, despite ongoing sabotage. Bendy also has a partial manuscript, won at dice, of tales of King Arthur, written by Thomas Mallory, which he reads obsessively…
It’s a competent, if obvious, story, and Harnett is good at having people behave in manners consistent with the times rather than present day (Bendy, who’s 13 or so, is drunk when he wins the manuscript). For me, it errs too far on the side of overdoing the history & setting – Caxton, in particular, is fond of lengthy descriptions of where everything is and how it came to be there; “There is the great west gate of the Abbey; facing down Tothill Street. It is a prison, you know; and, strangely, the King’s prison, not the Abbot’s; which means that the prisoners have to be brought to it from the outside; if they set foot inside they could claim sanctuary.” (it’s also written in 1959, if you’re wondering about all the semi-colons). There’s also an author’s afterword, which is just slightly too concerned with making sure you know exactly what was real, and going to have a look at it if at all possible. And this is the strength of the books, but I would have liked more on plot and character.
