Author: cherylmahoney

I'm a book review blogger and writer. I have published four novels, The Wanderers; The Storyteller and Her Sisters; and The People the Fairies Forget; and The Lioness and the Spellspinners. All can be found on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. In my day job, I'm a Marketing Specialist. Find me on Twitter (@MarvelousTales) and GoodReads (MarvelousTales).

Beauty (Maybe) and Her Beast

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews, Young Adult6 Comments

Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favorite fairy tales–probably because the retellings are so good.  If you go back to the original story, it’s almost as flawed as any other traditional fairy tale.  But the retellings…are SO good.  Beauty by Robin McKinley is a particular favorite of mine.

The basic story is familiar, if you’ve read the original or even if you’ve seen the Disney movie.  From the Disney movie you’ll recognize the part about the terrifying Beast living in the castle in the woods.  A lost traveler spends the night and, upon offending the Beast, agrees to bring back his daughter, Beauty, to stay at the castle.  From the original story you’ll recognize the part about Beauty’s father being a rich merchant who lost his fortune, forcing them to move out to the country.  And Beauty had two sisters as well, and it was Beauty’s request for a rose when her father began his ill-fated journey that, in a way, put everything else in motion.

I think I read Beauty before I read the original fairy tale, so when I did read the original, I kept thinking, “oh, now I see where McKinley got that detail or this part from!”  But, like any great fairy tale retelling, McKinley has taken the slender original story and embroidered and expanded upon it, bringing the characters to life and explaining the bits that never quite made sense.

Beauty’s father and two sisters are very real characters, and the tragedy of going to the Beast’s castle is as much about leaving them as it is about going to an unknown fate with a monstrous Beast.  How a rich merchant family makes their way in a country village is a detailed and developed part of the story.

Beauty and the Beast are my favorite characters though.  Beauty, like the original and the Disney version, loves to read.  She’s also ugly, or at least considers herself so (not something from either version).  I LOVE that element.  If you read enough fairy tales, breathlessly beautiful heroines get very old.  They’re all very much the same, sweet-tempered and beautiful and sickeningly good.  So I love McKinley’s scrawny, mouse-haired, stubborn-minded Beauty–a name she picked up as a child and has been too embarrassed to request dropped.  The Beast is charming, sometimes unsure of himself, and really rather sweet.  I thought the romance was very cute.

My other favorite part is probably the castle itself.  It’s enchanted, of course, but there’s a wonderful practical side to the magic.  Beauty has a couple of enchanted breezes (sort of) attending to her, and in personality they’re quite fussy and straight-forward and focused on common sense.  And I’m so very, very amused by enchanted candles that light themselves–and sometimes have to admonish each other, “Hsst–wake up, you” when one of them doesn’t light.

Robin McKinley wrote another retelling of Beauty and the Beast called Rose-Daughter which, despite following the same basic plotline, is quite different (a lot more roses, for one thing).  It’s very good also, but much more surreal.  The magic, and even the non-magical characters, like the two sisters, feel less real-world to me–not unrealistic, exactly, but not so realistic either.  I recommend it too, but personally I prefer the more grounded Beauty.

But by all means, read both.  Or either.  Or pretty much anything else by Robin McKinley, because I can’t honestly say I’ve met a book by her I didn’t like.  Beauty may be my favorite, though.

Author’s Site: http://www.robinmckinley.com/

Quotable Hollywood

On By cherylmahoneyIn Quotable2 Comments

“She was helping people become whoever they were going to be.  Because when you read a book as a child it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading does.”

–Kathleen Kelly, character played by Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, speaking of her mother, who ran a bookstore

Through the Wardrobe

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews8 Comments

Narnia has been coming up a lot for me lately.  I went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader…my book club book pick was inspired by Narnia…the series was referenced on a blog I follow…  I decided the universe was telling me something (and that book club book especially made me want to go back to the original) and I decided to re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.

I say “re-read” because I know I read it before, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how long ago it was.  Years and years, although the story is so familiar that in some ways it doesn’t feel that long.  For those who somehow don’t know the story (side-note–I once overheard a woman tell a librarian she’d never heard of the series, so it’s possible), it’s the story of four children who go through a wardrobe and find themselves in the magical country of Narnia.  There they meet the great lion Aslan and fight an epic battle against the White Witch.

It’s a wonderful story on many levels.  It’s a lovely children’s fantasy with dashing heroes, not too much blood, magical creatures like Mr. Tumnus and Mr. and Mrs Badger, and several stern admonitions that it’s very foolish to shut oneself inside of a wardrobe (I honestly think Lewis was worried about this, he repeats it so many times).  On a more symbolic level, there’s a clear Christ story enacted.  But it works on both levels, for however you want to take it.  I’ve always thought that was the mark of the best kind of book–a good story and a good message where neither one gets in the way of the other.

I enjoyed Lewis’ style very much.  Things happen so quickly.  Lucy, the first child into Narnia, gets there by page six.  As the adventures continue, they go on at a tumblingly-quick rate.  There’s even a point where Lewis writes, of an unpleasant night journey by sledge, “This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.”  Thankfully, he doesn’t bother, concluding, “But I will skip on to the time when the snow had stopped and the morning had come and they were racing along in the daylight.”

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were in the same writing group.  I’ve heard that Tolkien spent years and years on The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a matter of weeks (something that I’ve also heard annoyed Tolkien no end).  I have to say, it shows for both of them.  Different viewpoints on writing could consider that a plus or a minus to either one, but my preference would have to be with Lewis.

Lewis begins the book with a lovely dedication to his goddaughter, the real-life Lucy.  In somewhat contradiction to the story that he wrote the book in a few weeks, he says that he wrote it for her but she grew up faster than it did and she’s now too old for it, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”  Lewis clearly understood about the cross-age appeal of the best children’s stories.  We may go through an age where we think we’re too grown-up for “kids books,” but eventually we get old enough to realize we can come back to them.

St. Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11).  C. S. Lewis added, “Including the fear of being thought childish.”  We don’t have to “think like a child or reason like a child” (paraphrasing Corinthians) to appreciate a story written for children.  We can enjoy it with new eyes, new understanding, and hopefully some of the old magic too.

Ensign Jones and the Orange Juice

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday6 Comments

Having recently written about my recurring character, Sam Jones, I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts featuring Jones from a very old Star Trek story I wrote.  This was a long Star Trek serial, and Jones frequently appeared as a supporting character.  It leaned toward a parody, so sometimes very odd things happened–often to Jones.

If you’re not familiar with Star Trek, all you really need to know here is that Kirk is the captain of the Enterprise, Spock is the eternally calm Vulcan first officer, Jones is a security guard aboard said-Enterprise, the Klingons are the villains, and the replicators are these fairly awesome machines you can walk up to and request food, and it’ll appear.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work…

********************************

           It was coming on towards ship’s night, and the Mess Hall was deserted as Ensign Jones walked over to the replicators to order his drink.

            “Orange juice, please.”

            “Specify quantity,” the computer said crisply.

            Jones shrugged.  “Oh, lots of orange juice, lots and lots.”

            Orange juice began gushing out of the replicators at an alarming rate.  And kept gushing.  And gushing and gushing and gushing.  Jones began to feel alarmed, as the orange juice spread rapidly across the floor.

Continue reading “Ensign Jones and the Orange Juice” →

Tribute to That Man in the Red Shirt

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations3 Comments

Today I decided to write a bit about one of my favorites of the characters I’ve created.  In some ways, he’s the least important–but only because he’s written to be that way.

Richard Samuel Jones is one of my earliest, longest enduring and certainly most suffering characters.

It began when I wrote Star Trek fanfiction.  For those not familiar with Star Trek, there’s a concept among Trek fans of a redshirt.  You see, the redshirts are the men who beam down to the planet with Captain Kirk and don’t come back.  It’s very typical on the original series for Kirk, several regular characters, and one or two crewmembers no one has seen before to beam into a dangerous situation.  Three guesses which one is going to get killed.  Both according to legend and according to statistics, the man who gets killed will most often be wearing red.  (This actually makes sense–security guards aboard the Enterprise wear red uniforms, and it’s logical to bring them into dangerous situations.)

In my Star Trek stories, Jones was my redshirt.  I never killed him off (because that would end the story) but whenever I needed something dreadful to happen, it would happen to Jones.  That sounds awful, but it might help to note that I don’t write bloody stories.  So usually Jones would end up attacked by carnivorous plants, or swept away in a flood of orange juice when the food replicators malfunctioned, or turned invisible when chemical beakers fell on him.

Jones is the quintessential redshirt.  He’s nondescript in every physical appearance.  He’s clumsy, hapless, and prone to accidents, of course, as well as nervous and beset by large numbers of phobias.  He is eternally well-meaning, and, though pessimistic in the moment, generally optimistic in his larger world-view.

His full name is Richard Samuel Jones.  Jones because it’s the nondescript, common sort of name you’d expect a redshirt to have.  Richard Samuel because R. S. can also abbreviate to Red Shirt, and because Sam Jones (which he goes by) is another very nondescript and common name.  Obviously I over-thought this!

I put a lot of Star Trek stories up on Fanfiction.net, and Jones actually became quite popular with my readers.  I think the haplessness was endearing.  I got attached to him too.  So when I went on to write non-Trek stories, I decided to take Jones with me–he is, after all, an original character.  He stopped being a security guard aboard the Enterprise, and simply became a nondescript, hapless, well-meaning man, usually in a red shirt, who turns up with at least a cameo in all of my major writing projects.

So far, Jones has been chased by a swarm of angry rabbits near Port Royal, Jamaica for my Pirates of the Caribbean novel (it was an odd story).  He has also been a scene changer at the Paris Opera; he went with a mob below the Opera and fell into the Phantom’s torture chamber, but was pulled out unharmed.  He’s also been a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy, sailing with Captain Red Ballantyne aboard the Ocean Rose for my original pirate novel.  Most recently, Jones has been working at the Nightingale, an inn in the magical country of Perrelda.

Sometimes when I look at my stories, I feel like they’re all really the same story, in that they all have the same themes, whether I intended it or not.  Freedom comes up a lot.  So does chasing dreams.  The People the Fairies Forget is largely about realizing that everyone, even those people in the corners of the story who are rarely paid attention to, has a story to tell too.  But I think that’s been Jones’ message all along.

So this post is for Richard Samuel Jones.  And for all those men who beamed down with Captain Kirk, and had the misfortune to not be wearing blue.