Tag: Fiction

A Magical Retelling of Cinderella

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews6 Comments

When I reviewed Ella Enchanted, I said it was “one of the best retellings of Cinderella I’d ever read.”  There was actually a very specific reason I didn’t just say it was the best retelling.  That reason is Silver Woven in My Hair by Shirley Rousseau Murphy.

I read this originally from the library when I was…maybe nine?  I don’t really remember.  Young.  I read it several times, and then it somehow disappeared off the shelf.  But miraculously, I remembered the title.  I usually don’t.  I usually remember something like, there was a bit in there where the girl is watching the royal family come back from the island and she sees the goatherd, and then she invites him into the kitchen at the inn to have dinner and it makes her stepfamily mad but he just laughs so it’s all right…oh and then they had a picnic later on in the book, and there was that really good part about the owner of the sword.

And that’s not going to help anyone find the story they’re looking for.  But fortunately I remembered the title, and by the time I was in high school the wonderful world of online booksellers existed and I was able to buy Silver Woven in My Hair for my very own, and I spent an entire afternoon rereading the whole book.  It was lovely.

It’s one of the best retellings of Cinderella I’ve ever read.  It’s a story about Thursey, and her terrible stepfamily.  The royal family was coming back from that island because they were there while the queen and the prince recovered from being captured in a war.  Thursey’s father went to the war and never came back, so this Cinderella actually has a reason to stay where she is–even though she knows he’s probably never coming back, she can’t bring herself to leave, just in case.

Thursey doesn’t have a sparkly fairy godmother, but she does have friends who want to help her go to the ball at the palace.  There’s Anwin the monk, and there’s Gillie the goatherd, who’s funny and charming–and pretty far from a sparkly fairy godmother.  🙂

One part of the story I love is that Thursey is a Cinderella who loves Cinderella stories.  Her family runs an inn, and she collects stories from the travelers who pass through–all the different Cinderella stories from different cultures, Cendrillon and Aschenputtel and Catkin and so on.  Even though Thursey’s life isn’t very good, she never stops dreaming.  The ball is one aspect of the story, but Thursey’s dreams have a lot more substance than dancing a single night at a ball.

The characters, from Thursey to Gillie to the nasty stepfamily, are well-drawn and life-like.  The story is very grounded in reality, in a practical world where dishes have to be washed and goats have to be fed and there’s none of the impossible and imcomprehensible leaps that the original fairy tales often make.  Yet there’s also something whimsical about the tale.  For some reason the word “gossamer” keeps coming to mind, and I think it has to do with the writing style.  Murphy has kept some of the poetry of the old tales, while giving us characters and a plot that are more tangible.

Silver Woven in My Hair isn’t exactly a fantasy…or it could be.  Murphy leaves it up to the reader to decide whether some elements are really magic or not, and I’m not entirely sure what I think.

But even if you decide it’s not a fantasy, it’s definitely a magical story.  And a marvelous tale.

A Multiplicity of Jacks, and One Tom

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews1 Comment

I really, really wanted to love The Secret History of Tom Trueheart by Ian Beck.  But I didn’t.  My feelings were much more mixed.

I really do love the premise.  Tom has six older brothers named Jack, who all go on adventures in the Land of Stories.  How fun is that?  First, the idea that you can walk through a gate and enter a magical land where fairy tales happen to you, and that there’s a family where they have this tradition of going off on adventures…love it!  And I love the idea of gently poking fun at the way fairy tale heroes (non-princes, at least) are always named Jack.

Tom is the youngest (making him the seventh son–very fairy tale proper, that) and the smallest, and he’s convinced that he’s the least brave.  He’s the only one who hasn’t gone off on adventures, but when all his older brothers mysteriously disappear, then it’s up to him to find out what happened.  I’m not going to try to claim that that’s terribly original, but it’s from the children’s section, and I like stories about characters who don’t think they’re brave and have to find qualities in themselves they didn’t know they had in order to save the day.

So far we’re doing great.  But.  (And you knew this was coming.)  But…we have to read what happened to go wrong with each Jack.  And we have to read what happens when Tom ultimately helps them.  Don’t forget, the Jacks are in the Land of Story to embark on fairy tales.  So what this ultimately turns into is a lot of retelling of fairy tales.

We get the first half early on in the story: Jack gets halfway into Sleeping Beauty’s castle (or whatever) and gets into some kind of trouble.  The book goes on, Tom has his adventure, we come back later, and Tom helps Jack rescue the princess.  (Sorry if that was a spoiler, but I doubt it surprised anyone).  The trouble is, nothing all that original happens to the fairy tale itself.  Tom is thrown into it, but it’s not really that different.

Tom’s story is original, when we’re following him, but when we’ve also got six Jacks to get through, I felt like I spent way too much of the book just reading stories I already knew.  This might have been better with about half as many Jacks, and only half as many fairy tales.

That points directly to my other problem: while I love that idea of six characters named Jack, they do run together.  Beck tried to distinguish them, by giving them all a nickname like Jacques or Jackson or Jake, but I was still getting them mixed up.  I’m not very good with character names though, so that might just be me.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings on this book.  I love the premise.  However, I’d only recommend reading it if you’re also in the mood to reread the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, because that’s more or less what you end up doing, in between Tom’s adventure.

I recently found out there are two sequels, and since the premise is so good, I just might investigate them.

Author’s site: http://tomtrueheart.com/

The Strangest Family in England

On By cherylmahoneyIn Juvenile, Reviews2 Comments

Some of my favorite characters live inside of Ordinary Jack by Helen Cresswell.  Ordinary Jack is Book One of the Bagthorpe Saga.  The Bagthorpes are a family of geniuses, each with a precise number of “strings to their bows.”  That is, a number of talents.  All except for Jack, who is ordinary, and politely disdained because of it.  Jack is complaining about it to his Uncle (by marriage) Parker one day, who hits on a scheme to convince the rest of the family that Jack is in fact a gifted psychic who can see visions and predict the future.  Chaos, to a degree unusual even for the Bagthorpes, ensues.

Jack and Uncle Parker are a fairly rational pair, who will chart you through the madness of the rest of this cast of truly hilarious characters.  There’s Mr. Bagthorpe, a TV writer who loudly and frequently complains that everyone is disrupting the delicate vibrations he needs to write.  There’s Grandmother, who cheerfully starts an argument with everyone, and is in years-long mourning for her beloved pet cat Thomas, who everyone else remembers as the worst-tempered animal who ever lived.  There’s Uncle Parker’s daughter Daisy, who is four years old and likes to write on walls and set fire to things, often with literally explosive results.  There’s one scene involving a birthday party and a box of fireworks hidden beneath the table…  Daisy’s mother, Celia, is a poet and far too ephemeral and dreamy for this world.  She thinks Daisy’s spirit shouldn’t be restrained.   For reasons Jack never quite understands, Uncle Parker is madly in love with her.

That’s only a sampling.  They are all people I would never want to know in real life, and would definitely never want to let into my house (especially Daisy!) but they’re enormous fun to read about.

There are ten books in the series, of which I’ve read the first nine.  For reasons I can’t explain book number ten is extremely obscure and only available for very high prices.  The later books do vary in quality somewhat–they’re all fun, but at some point Cresswell stops having plots and just starts throwing the characters together and letting them react off of each other, and some of the books are better than others.  But the first few are excellent.

And Ordinary Jack is worth the read if only for the scene about the birthday party and the fireworks.

Getting Your Ears on Straight

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews2 Comments

I’ve been having a bad run lately of books with bland characters.  Even some books I’ve enjoyed have had flat, not very memorable characters.  Golden and Grey by Louise Arnold, however, has been a glorious exception to the rule.

It may just be that Grey Arthur can’t get his ears to line up.  It really may be as simple as that.  But I think that’s just part of it.

Let me back up a little.  I don’t usually like to spend large swathes of time explaining plots, but this one has a particularly complicated premise, so here goes.  Golden and Grey is the story of Tom Golden and Grey Arthur, the story of the world we know, and the world of ghosts.  Ghosts are not what you think they are.  They aren’t the spirits of humans who have died; they’re simply another kind of people who exists side by side with humans, only back when people got very scientific and logical and realized that ghosts didn’t fit their scientific and logical rules, they decided it was easier not to see ghosts–and they haven’t ever since.

Grey Arthur is a young-seeming ghost who has been trying for 300 years to figure out what he is.  He tried to be a Poltergeist, but he kept feeling bad and returning the socks he stole, so that didn’t work out very well.  When he tried to be a Sadness Summoner, his attempts at depressing poems kept turning out to have happy endings…and so on like that.

Tom Golden is a perfectly ordinary and normal human boy, who nevertheless has found himself labeled Freak Boy and picked on by bullies at his new school.

When Tom Golden and Grey Arthur both mutter “Life isn’t fair” at the same moment, a connection is formed and Grey Arthur has a revelation.  His role is to be Tom’s Invisible Friend: pulling “Kick Me” signs off of Tom’s back, putting Tom’s forgotten lunch into his locker for him, and sitting with him in the cafeteria so he won’t be alone, even if Tom doesn’t know he’s there.  And then an accident occurs and Tom becomes able to see ghosts…and things really become crazy.

This is a delightful book on so many levels.  The ghost world is elaborate and varied.  Every kind of ghost from legend seems to be represented here, from funny to scary, each neatly labeled and categorized as a type, from Headless to Faintly Real to Screamer to Thesper (you don’t want to meet a Screamer, but a Thesper would be all right).

I think it’s a good element that Tom is normal but still a social outcast–because isn’t life just that irrational and inexplicable and unfair sometimes?  If he had a weird habit or a shadowy past it would be easy to explain but not as real somehow.  He becomes much more relatable by being normal.

The plot is a good one, with twists and turns that I didn’t even get into here.

And as I started out by saying, there are excellent characters in this story.  They’re memorable, fun, and vivid.  It’s even more impressive that they’re vivid, when you consider that a lot of them are invisible.  There’s cheery Grey Arthur with his mismatched ears and his host of ghostly friends; Tom and his parents (who are just quirky enough to be interesting but stay normal); and a handful of human characters at school.  I can bring most of their names to mind, which doesn’t sound impressive, but I’m bad at remembering names, so it actually does say a lot.

There are at least three books in the series, of which I’ve read the first two (and I plan to pick up the third!)  Arnold keeps up the quality and the interest in the second by introducing a new group of very amusing characters, as well as a new threat.

Whole-hearted recommendation for these books.  Funny, entertaining, well-worth the read.

Author’s site: http://greyarthur.com/

UPDATE: I recently read the third book (and added its cover picture), and was glad to see the high quality maintained.  Arnold continues with the characters she introduced in the second book, and raises the stakes for the conflict to keep things exciting.  And of course I LOVED some very funny references to Grey Arthur’s mismatched ears.

Following Scott Through Antarctica in 2083

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews, Science Fiction, Young Adult3 Comments

As you may know from reading past posts, I’ve developed a small obsession with Antarctic explorers lately.  So when I was doing some writing at the library and my eye caught the word Antarctica blazing (freezing?) out of the fiction section, I had to investigate.  I found Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 by Andrea White.

The story is set in 2083, where five fourteen-year-olds are on a reality TV show recreating Captain Scott’s historic trek to the South Pole.  But in this dystopian future, reality TV has reached a whole new level of realism–where no one interferes, even when that means people die.  And when you’re sending kids to recreate a journey where five men did die…well, that guarantees some good adventure programming, right?

Scott and his men at the South Pole

They had me at Scott.

I admit I was in it for the Antarctic explorers side of things, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a fascinating dystopian society too.  In this future, the government has gone broke.  Since they can’t afford anything, like scientific research and schools, they’ve decided that the way to keep the people complacent and uncomplaining is to provide better entertainment, and keep them watching television all the time.

It’s a disturbingly insightful idea.  Over 97 million people voted in the most popular American Idol vote.  About 106 million people voted in the 2004 presidential elections.  Sure, this would be more impressive if those numbers were reversed…but that’s not a big gap when you’re talking about two things as different as a TV show, and deciding the leader of the country.

So between looking ahead to a disturbing potential future and looking back to a fascinating past, you’ve got something good here.

About that past–my particular Antarctic obsession (if you’ll let me go a little poetic about it) swirls directly around the bundled and slightly frosted (but still charming) figure of Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates.  I think Andrea White’s interest in Antarctica would shift left a little to bring fellow explorer Birdie Bowers into more direct focus.  Titus, sadly, does not come up by name until 160-odd pages in.  But I respect her interest and bring this up not as a criticism and only as a comment on my personal preferences.  I’m sure Birdie was very nice too.

Ultimately I think the concept of this was more interesting than any individual characters, although the five kids (plus one not on the mission) were all good enough characters in their way.  But it’s mostly the ideas in this book that make it work, rather than the individuals, or even the plot.  The individuals are fine, and it’s a good plot, but it’s more about the ideas.  It’s a thought-provoking book.  It might make you think about your television, or about reality TV.

It also makes me wonder if I’m going to be able to hunt down any more novels set in Antarctica.

Author’s site: http://www.survivingantarctica.com/