Tag: Robin McKinley

Favorites Friday: Author Blogs

On By cherylmahoneyIn Favorites Friday4 Comments

Somehow it never occurred to me to look for author blogs until I started writing a blog myself.  One of the best parts of all this has been reading other people’s blogs, and it’s been so fun to find that several of my favorite authors have blogs.  Today, here are some favorite ones from favorite authors, with links if you want to check them out.

Patricia C. Wrede has a very valuable writing-focused blog.  She posts Sundays and Wednesdays, and discusses both the craft of writing and the complexities of publishing.  Most often I feel like I see either the art OR the business, so this is a great place to get information on both.  She offers solid advice across a range of writing topics, gives funny examples at times, and makes references to her own books, which is always fun too.

Gail Carson Levine also writes about writing, mostly the craft.  I think her target age group is middle school, but her advice is good regardless of your age.  The middle school aspect mostly comes out in that her writing prompts revolve around school or parents or topics like that.  Levine posts every Wednesday, and while her topic is sometimes more basic than Wrede’s, she still drills into great areas and often gives me a new idea or a new angle on something (say, Point of View) that I felt like I already knew a lot about.  She also makes frequent references to her own books and writing process; I’m fascinated by how writers write, so I love knowing that background to her books.

Robin McKinley posts every day; her blog requires a certain amount of wading.  She tends to write stream-of-consciousness about whatever is going on in her life, and some of it seems like it would have, er, niche appeal.  I usually read her posts a week at a time, and I skim until I find a section that looks good.  On the so-so (for me, at least) days, she talks about her knitting, her singing lessons, and the intricacies of bell-ringing.  On better days, she talks about her garden, her hellhounds, and her fights with recalcitrant technology.  On the best days, she talks about her writing.  And then there was the Great Bat Catastrophe (my name for it) last spring, when she had bats nesting in her attic and finding ways through into her house…terrible for her, I’m sure, but so funny to read about.

The thing with McKinley’s blog is–when she’s dull, she’s very dull (unless you’re interested in bell-ringing, perhaps).  But when she’s good, she’s VERY good.  The thing about reading blogs by favorite authors is that they’re good writers.  McKinley can be very funny and very engaging, and once you’ve been reading for a while you get used to the groove of her life and it’s fun to stroll through.  Then when I read her book Sunshine, I felt like I could see her personality coming through in the book, which added a whole new layer to it.  And it’s great to be up on the key events in her writing–I knew about it when she switched the book she was working on, and I got to order a personally signed (and doodled) copy of Beauty when she had an auction!

Other favorite authors with blogs include Gordon Korman and Geraldine McCaughrean, but they post very rarely, and Tamora Pierce, who posts sporadically, usually about news items.  I also hear good things about Neil Gaiman’s blog, though I haven’t followed him regularly.

Who are your favorite authors who blog?  Or favorite blogs that are by authors?  Almost the same thing…but maybe not always.

Favorites Friday: Romantic Couples

On By cherylmahoneyIn Favorites Friday14 Comments

In honor of Valentine’s Day next week, I thought I’d do a list of some of my favorite romantic couples in books.  The funny thing is, many of my favorite books have a romance somewhere in them, but that’s not really what it’s about for me.  And I almost never read Romances.  However, I do enjoy a sweet romantic story.  I went strolling past my bookshelves (they’re big, it requires strolling) and seized on more than enough couples whose romances I’m very fond of.

I don’t think any of these are big surprises within their books, but if you’re really particular about spoilers, this post will give away everything about who ends up with who.  I warned you.

Tan Hadron and Tavia, A Fighting Man of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I like stories about heroes who are chasing after the wrong girl, only to finally realize that the girl Friday was the right one for them all along–especially if the wrong girl is annoying and beautiful, and the right girl is smart and capable.  I don’t know if I like this book because I like that kind of story, or if I like that kind of story because of this book.  Either way, it’s wonderful.  Burroughs is great at writing heroes who will go the ends of the Earth (or whatever planet is relevant) for the woman they love, but this was one of the few times that dedication was actually based on something real and compelling.

Arabella and Turnip, The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig

This is the most Romancey book in the group, but it has spies and Jane Austen to add adventure.  And it has a really sweet romance between two people who don’t, at a glance, seem like the types to be romantic leads, but turn out to both be much more than other people realize.

Jena and Costi, Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier

Just adorable.  Predictable, but adorable.  I’ve read the book once, but I’ve read the final romantic scene three times, because it’s just that cute.

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Thursey and Gillie, Silver Woven in My Hair by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

There’s a lovely gossamer magic to this story, and I just love it so much.  It has all that Cinderella magic about the person who matters most seeing the heroine for how special she really is, and it has a heroine who falls in love with a person, not a handsome man in a crown who can dance.  This Cinderella isn’t interested in some mythical prince, she’s in love with a very real goatherd, and then…well, it does all work out in fairy tale fashion.

Valancy and Barney, The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

Most of this book is about Valancy’s growth, and her relationship with Barney is only one aspect to that.  But the last couple of chapters are romantic.  I think my very favorite Montgomery romance, though, is Esme and Francis in “Fancy’s Fool,” a short story in The Road to Yesterday.  As a girl, Esme meets Francis in a mysterious, ghost-filled garden, and then wonders if he really–or ever–existed.

Beauty and the Beast, Beauty by Robin McKinley

I think this is my favorite romance in McKinley’s books.  Maybe it’s that I really like both characters–or because they bond over books!

Your turn–what romantic stories do you like?  Any suggestions on ones I should read?

Robin McKinley’s Very Dark “Sunshine”

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews9 Comments

I think I should begin this post by saying that I love Robin McKinley’s books.  You’ve probably seen her referenced around here as one of my favorite authors.  That said, now I can tell you why I didn’t love Sunshine.

Sunshine was very nearly the last McKinley book I hadn’t read (the only other one is Pegasus, and a friend tells me it has a cliffhanger so I’m waiting for the sequel to come out first).  The funny thing is, I used to know why I hadn’t read Sunshine.  See, it’s her vampire book, and I’ve never been a vampire fan.  It’s also darker, and has a more modern setting.  So I just wasn’t that interested.

But all of my friends had read Sunshine, and they all really loved it (possibly because they are vampire fans), and it was the last one (more or less) that I hadn’t read…so I kind of forgot why I wasn’t reading it.

I finally read Sunshine recently.  It wasn’t a bad book, but I did have problems with it, and it very much was not my kind of book.

Sunshine is set in a world much like ours, but the creatures of gothic novels are real: vampires, werewolves, demons.  Humanity is in an ongoing war, and losing.  The book centers on Rae, nicknamed Sunshine, whose life revolves around her family’s coffee house, where she’s the head baker and cinnamon roll queen.  Life takes an unexpected turn when she drives out to the lake one evening, and ends up captured by vampires.  They chain her up in an abandoned house, an offering for their other prisoner–a vampire named Con.

Con, for reasons more mercenary than merciful, doesn’t drain Sunshine’s blood immediately, and the two of them end up working together to escape.  Sunshine gets back to her normal life, but can’t shake the experience.  She starts discovering that she has strange powers, and that she’s still tied somehow to Con and his enemies.

I liked Sunshine (the character).  The book is in first person and we spend a good chunk of the book reading her thoughts and memories.  She’s pulled in an interesting way between two lives–her ordinary baker life, and this dark world of vampires.  She’s a reluctant hero who just wants to go back to her cinnamon rolls, but finds the other world thrust on her, and with it strange powers and plenty of danger.  She’s a strong character, and I liked following her journey.

I didn’t like Con.  It may not have helped that my friends set me up to expect him to be a great romantic hero, and then…it didn’t come out that way in my reading.  Quite apart from the blood-drinking aspect of things, I didn’t find him likable and I didn’t get any chemistry between Sunshine and him.  She keeps describing him as ugly, for one thing (and yes, sometimes I like the ugly characters because of that–see the Phantom of the Opera–but not in this case).  The larger problem is that he never expresses emotions.  I like Vulcans and I like the occasional mysterious enigma, but I just couldn’t get any sense of Con, or whether he cared at all about Sunshine, because he wouldn’t express anything, ever.

I didn’t much like Mel either.  Notice Mel wasn’t mentioned in that summary up there?  That’s how irrelevant he is, even though he’s Sunshine’s boyfriend and theoretically the other point on the romantic triangle.  Somehow, despite being a tattoed, former biker turned chef, he’s an incredibly bland character.  I think the clincher for me was when Sunshine asked him, sort of rhetorically, who he was, and he answered, “I’m your friend.”  That doesn’t really feel like the right response from a long-time boyfriend and narrative love interest…

I actually liked the more minor characters better.  There’s a whole family of people who work or are regular customers at the coffee house, and some of them are quite interesting and entertaining–like Sunshine’s stepfather Charlie, one of the “big good guys” of her universe, or a customer who turns out to be part demon and can turn himself blue.

My problems with Con and Mel may be me–anecdotally I can tell you that I have three friends who love them, so take from that what you will.  The plot of the story is exciting, and the world is intriguing, although it takes some time to get a proper picture of it.  That’s normal for McKinley, who sometimes makes things mysterious at first, and you gradually start putting pieces together.  This is a dark book, with a lot of blood in it–not too graphic, mostly, but there’s a lot of it.  That’s what makes this not my kind of book, so you’ve been warned…  Also, definitely an adult book, not YA.

It does make me impressed with McKinley in a way, though.  For most of my favorite authors, most of their books are similar (which in a way is nice, because I know what I’m getting).  McKinley has impressive range to write very different books: Dragonhaven, Beauty and Sunshine read like they were written by three different authors.

One more point to address–a sequel.  There isn’t one, but fans have been asking for one for years.  McKinley has said that she’ll write one if she has an idea for one, which says to me that she has, for now at least, no intention of writing one.  (If you ever meet her, don’t ask about a sequel–based on her blog, I guarantee she won’t like it!)

I have to say I agree with McKinley.  I don’t think the book needs a sequel.  I may think that in part because I just don’t care which man Sunshine ends up with…  But the larger point is that I think the book came to an ending.  There’s plenty of plot room for a sequel, and questions left unanswered.  However, I think the book really was about Sunshine’s growth, and her acceptance of herself, both the baker and the monster-fighter.  She comes to a realization at the end, and for me, that is the end.

Final analysis: if you like vampires, read Sunshine.  If you don’t like blood, read Beauty or Spindle’s End instead.

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

Other reviews (including some who loved the book far more than I did!):
Suite 101
Angieville
Writegray
Bookshelf Bombshells
There are many more–want to tell me about yours, or one you enjoyed?

Sleeping Beauty, Awake and Fighting

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews, Young Adult2 Comments

What if Sleeping Beauty didn’t turn out the way all those fairies at her christening intended?  That’s one element–and my favorite–of Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley.

There’s a line in The People the Fairies Forget when Tarry wonders what christening-gifted people would be like without the enchantments.  How does it change a person to be enchanted to be compassionate?  In my book, Sleeping Beauty is only a minor character, and is about what you’d expect her to be like if you’ve ever read Charles Perrault.

But Rosie isn’t.  Rosie is Sleeping Beauty in Spindle’s End, and is wonderfully NOT what she’s supposed to be.  She has long eyelashes and fair skin and golden hair, but she keeps the hair cut short so it doesn’t have the chance to fall into ringlets (and ends up a fuzzy, curly mass).  She hates dancing and embroidery, so it doesn’t matter that she’s enchanted to be good at them.  Her laugh may resemble a bell, but it must be a very large and unusual bell.  And most importantly, she is wonderfully, obstinately, stubbornly herself.  She’s not at all sure she even wants to be a princess, and she’s not going to just take a curse lying down.

McKinley does in Spindle’s End some of my favorite things about retold fairy tales.  We all know this story–princess cursed to prick her finger and die, fairies carry her off into the woods to keep her safe, spindles get destroyed, etc.  But she’s retold it with lots of clever, unexpected, practical twists.  What was Sleeping Beauty’s relationship with those fairies, considering they’re the only family she’s ever known?  Does she have her own plans for her life?  What’s it like to get princess-ness dropped into your lap one day?  And how do all those christening gifts turn out?

The gifts are wonderful, Rosie is wonderful, and the fairies–very practical fairies who are human-sized, don’t shed sparkles, don’t have wings, but do some impressive magic–are wonderful too.

I hate to say it, but one reservation here–I’ve never found the romance wonderful.  There is one, but it’s never felt right to me.  I’ve read this at least twice, so the most recent time I knew the romance was coming.  I really, really tried to see it coming, to anticipate it and wrap my head around it, but…while there are one or two cute moments, on the whole it just didn’t feel right.

It may be me.  It’s the kind of romance I often have trouble with.  Sometimes books like to create a friendship between a girl and an older man, which then turns into a romance when the girl grows up.  Once in a while it works for me.  Usually it doesn’t.  (On that subject, as a minor spoiler to the unwritten sequel of Red’s Girl, Red and Tamara are never going to be romantically involved.  Ever.)

But don’t let this turn you off the book.  Because honestly, I think Rosie’s relationships with her “aunts” (the two fairies) and her best friend are the more important ones than the romance, and they’re all very good.

And I love practical fairy tales.  The book opens with some lovely pages about how magic works in this country, and it’s this fantastic combination of total fantasy mixed with practical details about how people go about living their lives with this magic around them.  Magic sort of accumulates around cooking pots, for example, and fairies have to disenchant them every so often, by laying a finger on them.  Absent-minded fairies tend to have burn-scars on their fingers.  And when the evil fairy’s curse goes out, a decree is issued to lop off the tips of the spindles on all the spinning wheels.  How much more reasonable than burning every spinning wheel, and decimating the cloth industry!

My particular fairy tale retold is all about pulling out the most absurd bits of fairy tales and having more practical-minded characters try to work around them.  But I love retold fairy tales that work around those more absurd bits and make them make sense.  And I so enjoy McKinley’s rational, funny, sweet retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” that is the original story…but not quite the way Perrault told it.

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/