Review of The Seven Towers, by Patricia C. Wrede

Adventure, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Seven Towers

by Patricia C. Wrede

Firebird, 2008. Originally published in 1984. 324 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s another book I bought as soon as I heard about it, because I love the author and everything she writes. Then I didn’t get it read because it’s a library book and doesn’t have a due date. When I decided that really shouldn’t stop me from reading wonderful books, I finally got this read. I was not surprised to find it delightful.

The book begins with Jermain on the run. He falls off his horse and wakes up to find a very interesting woman named Amberglas. Then the Border Guard that has been chasing him rides up and asks the lady to step aside while they execute Jermain. But Captain Morenar doesn’t know who he’s dealing with:

“The woman looked critically down at Jermain, then back at the Captain. ‘Not at all,’ she said firmly. ‘He does not look in the least dangerous. I’m quite willing to believe he is extremely foolish, but a great many people are, and I have never heard of anyone being executed for it, though I couldn’t say for sure that it’s never happened. Of course, if he continues to run about with that wound bleeding all over everything and making such a mess, you won’t have to.’

“Morenar frowned and tried again. ‘Lady, we have been chasing this man for four hours; I assure you there is no mistake.’

“‘Well, it is certainly rude of you to contradict me, and I don’t believe you at all,’ the woman said flatly. ‘At least, I believe you have been chasing him, but not for four hours, and certainly he’s not a criminal. Though I can understand why you say so; it would probably be very awkward for you to explain. So many things are; awkward, I mean. Large kettles, for instance, and carrying three brooms at once, and those fat brown birds with the red wings whose names I can’t remember just at present. They waddle.'”

Jermain was formerly the Chief Advisor to King Marreth of Sevrain, but after she saves him, he explains to Amberglas what went wrong:

“‘Terrel and His Royal Highness Prince Eltiron convinced Marreth that I was guilty of treason. As a result, Marreth stripped me of my lands and position and awarded them to Terrel. Isn’t that enough?’

“‘I do see that you might think so,’ Amberglas said. ‘Were you?’

“‘Was I what?’

“‘Were you guilty? Of treason, I mean; there are a great many other things you could be guilty of, but since you weren’t accused of any of them, they don’t really matter. Well, no, they do matter, certainly, but I’m not particularly interested in them at the moment, though if you happen to think of anything else you want to mention, it’s quite all right with me.’

“‘I am no traitor,’ Jermain said stiffly.

“‘I didn’t think so. But of course, you could still be guilty of treason. That’s why I asked about it,’ Amberglas said.

“‘No, I was not guilty,’ Jermain said after a moment. ‘Unless it’s treason to believe an old friend’s warning, and counsel that preparation be made.’ Absently, he fingered the place where the short scar on his left arm was hidden by his sleeve.

“‘That doesn’t sound much like treason,’ Amberglas said. “Of course, it would depend on the friend. And the warning. Telling someone that his dinner is burning isn’t treason, at least, not in most places, though I couldn’t say for certain about Navren. The King there has made such extremely peculiar laws that one never knows what is treason in Navren. Or what isn’t,’ she added thoughtfully, and looked at Jermain.”

Meanwhile, back in Sevrain, Prince Eltiron gets his father angry by mentioning Jermain. And his father insists he marry Princess Crystalorn. Then Princess Crystalorn shows up at Amberglas’s tower saying she does not want to marry this prince she knows nothing about.

There are plots and counterplots, treachery and the appearance of treachery. There’s also a looming magical danger over the land. Jermain and Eltiron and Crystalorn need to know who they can trust and how to stop the magic.

Seven kingdoms with seven towers are involved in the magic and the danger. This book has an intricate plot with suspense and danger and even some romance. Though there are many characters to keep track of, like Amberglas they are all distinct personalities, and that only makes it more interesting.

This is an interesting and entertaining fantasy tale from a true master of the form.

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Source: This review is based on my own book, ordered from Amazon.com.

Review of Cloaked in Red, by Vivian Vande Velde

Children's Fiction Review, Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Humorous, Short Stories 0

Cloaked in Red

by Vivian Vande Velde

Marshall Cavendish, 2010. 127 pages.

I loved Vivian Vande Velde’s The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, so I made sure to snap up Cloaked in Red when I heard about it.

In both books, she takes a fairy tale you thought you knew, and casts it in a very different light. Okay, several different lights. She looks at the story from many different perspectives.

Her Author’s Note at the beginning makes some fun points:

“There are different versions, but they all start with a mother who sends her daughter into the woods, where there is not only a wolf, but a talking, cross-dressing wolf. We are never told Little Red Riding Hood’s age, but her actions clearly show that she is much too young, or too dimwitted, to be allowed out of the house alone.”

Or how about the heroine’s unusual name?

“And what happened later in life, when Little Red Riding Hood was no longer little? Did she shift to ‘Medium-Sized Blue-Beaded Sweater’? Did she eventually become ‘Size-Large and Yes-That-DOES-Make-Your-Butt-Look-Enormous Jeans’?”

I love the way she points out how unlikely it all is. Here’s Red in the cottage:

“I don’t like to criticize anyone’s family, but I’m guessing these people are not what you’d call close. Little Red doesn’t realize a wolf has substituted himself for her grandmother. I only met my grandmother three times in my entire life, but I like to think I would have noticed if someone claiming to be my grandmother had fur, fangs, and a tail.

“But Little Red, instead of becoming suspicious, becomes rude.

“‘My,’ she says — as far as she knows — to her grandmother, ‘what big arms you have.’

“Big she notices. Apparently hairy and clawed escape her.”

Vivian Vande Velde concludes her introduction with these words:

“However you look at it, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a strange and disturbing story that should probably not be shared with children.

“That is why I’ve gone ahead and written eight new versions of it.”

The eight stories that follow are amazingly varied, even though you can see how they relate to the fairy tale. These ones seemed darker to me than the ones in The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, but then “Little Red Riding Hood” is a quite dark and violent tale.

We’ve got one from the perspective of pretty much every one in the story. I like the one where Jakob and Wilhelm, the dimwitted Grimm brothers, sons of a woodcutter, misunderstand when Grandma’s talking about making a wolf draft-stopper for her granddaughter. My favorite is probably the one about the nice wolf who is trying to be helpful after an annoying little girl steps on his tail, screams, and drops her basket.

“The wolf inhaled deeply the tantalizing smells of meat and baked goods, and was strongly tempted to gobble everything up. But his mother had raised him better than that.

“‘Little girl!’ he called after the fleeing child. He could no longer see her, though her shrieks trailed behind her like a rat’s tail. ‘You forgot your food!’

“Apparently the little girl could not understand wolf speech any more than the wolf could understand human speech, since she didn’t come back.

“If the wolf hadn’t had such a deeply held moral belief system, he could have convinced himself that by leaving the basket behind, the girl had forsaken her rights to it. But, instead, he picked up the basket in his teeth, then loped through the trees, following the trails of wailing, crushed forest vegetation and human scent.”

Reading this book makes me want to try my hand at rewriting fairy tales. Above all, all the variations are clever and inventive and a nice exercise in how point of view changes a story.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own book, ordered from Amazon.com.

Review of The Wizard of Dark Street, by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Mystery 0

The Wizard of Dark Street

by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

Egmont USA, New York, 2011. 345 pages.

This is a fun and clever middle-grade fantasy. We’ve got that old fantasy stand-by — a girl with a gift of Natural Magic, the like of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years — but she doesn’t want to be her uncle the Wizard’s apprentice. She wants to be a detective.

So, her uncle needs to find a new apprentice. When they’ve got the apprentices assembled to try out, something awful happens to her uncle, and Oona has a case to solve.

One thing I love about this book is that it doesn’t try to tell how Oona first became a detective, but starts us just after some outrageous action has happened, implying that what we’re about to hear is even more dramatic. Here’s a paragraph on the third page:

“‘You’ve got to be more careful!’ That had been her uncle’s advice on the subject of her nearly getting her head chopped off. His words had been direct, and his tone uncharacteristically stern. ‘I will only agree to this detective business of yours if you promise not to go getting yourself into such terrible trouble. I mean it, Oona! Igregious Goodfellow was a scoundrel, a thief, and a homicidal maniac all rolled into one. You’re incredibly lucky that it was your hair that got caught in that horrible man’s guillotine. You should never have followed him to his secret hideout. The moment you discovered he was the Horton Family Jewelry Store thief, you should have left matters to the police.'”

The author keeps up the tone of the book throughout, and, yes, the things Oona encounters in the rest of the book are even more dramatic.

“Presently, she turned her gaze north, and before her lay all of Dark Street, the last of the thirteen Faerie roads, connecting the World of Man to the fabled Land of Faerie. A broad cobblestone avenue more than thirteen miles long, the street stretched out in a continuous line, a world unto itself, unbroken by cross streets or intersections. The buildings rose up from the edges of the sidewalks like crooked teeth crammed into a mouth too small to fit. They listed and leaned against one another for support, giving the impression that if one of the buildings should ever fall down, then all of the others would quickly follow, toppling one by one like dominoes.

“She considered the street for a moment, this ancient world between worlds, with its enormous Glass Gates at one end and the equally vast Iron Gates at the other. And yet of these two gateways, only the Iron Gates ever opened, and then only once a night, upon the stroke of midnight, when the massive doors would swing inward on hinges as big as houses, opening for a single minute upon the sprawling, ambitious city of New York. For the amount of time it took a second hand to travel once around the face of a clock, the Iron Gates remained open to any who should choose to venture across their enchanted threshold. Few ever did. Few ever even noticed.

“In a city such as New York, even at midnight, the people were too busy getting from one place to another to observe anything out of the ordinary. And those who did see the street suddenly appear out of nowhere might simply pretend that it was not there at all. They might turn their faces, and when they looked again, the street would be gone, and they would tell themselves that it had been a trick of the light. Nothing more. The children of New York would surely have been more apt to see the street than adults, but of course, at midnight most good little children were tucked safely away into their beds, dreaming of stranger places still.”

Shawn Thomas Odyssey keeps the story inventive, fast-paced, and clever. We’ve got detective novel elements like a locked room and a bumbling police chief and a super villain behind the scenes, but it’s set in this magical world and the fate of even the World of Men may be at stake.

I read this book on the airplane flying from New York to Seattle, and it was a nice light-hearted yarn for the flight. It has some amusing elements like a clock that tells bad Knock-Knock jokes. I was inordinately pleased with myself when I figured out the riddle Oona needed to solve in the process of looking for her uncle. A lot of things that seem scary at first, like witches and goblins, end up being quite humorous. And some things you might not be afraid of, like a faerie servant, end up rather scary. This has the puzzles of a detective story, with some Fantasy tropes twisted and thrown in.

I love that the book has the subtitle, An Oona Carte Mystery, because that implies there will be more. This will be a mystery series for kids I can get excited about!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/wizard_of_dark_street.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Review of Heir to Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Heir to Sevenwaters

by Juliet Marillier

A Roc Book (Penguin), 2008. 398 pages.
Starred Review

The Sevenwaters books showed all the signs of being a trilogy. So reading a fourth book feels like a wonderful bonus. Again, we’re looking at another generation of the people of Sevenwaters, in ancient Ireland. Again, the story has echoes of myths and fairy tales.

This book features Clodagh, the daughter of Sean and Aisling. She must go into the realm of the Fair Folk first to save her brother, then for the sake of the man she loves. This book is romantic and mythic and an incredibly good adventure. The worst thing about these books is how hard it is to stop reading them.

“Finbar made a little sound. My whole body stiffened in alarm. His voice was different; wrong. It was not the cry of a healthy, hungry baby but a curious, painful rasp. No normal child made a sound like that. Finbar must be sick. He was choking, he couldn’t breathe . . . I sprang up and hastened to the basket, my heart racing. I looked down, an image of my baby brother still fresh in my mind — the delicate fingers, the soft eyelids, the peachy skin and rosebud mouth. My heart gave a single thump and was still. Now I was cold all over. Finbar was gone. All that lay in his little bed was a curious jumble of sticks and stones, leaves and moss.”

Once again, despite the title, this is the story of a young woman. A young woman who has dealings with the Fair Folk, who is strong beyond her years, and who will risk everything for those she loves.

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Source: This review is based on a book I purchased from Amazon.com.

Review of Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Bitterblue

by Kristin Cashore

Dial Books, 2012. 563 pages.
Starred Review

The cover explains how this book fits in to Kristin Cashore’s other work: “Sequel to Graceling, Companion to Fire.” I reread Graceling before reading Bitterblue, and reread Fire immediately after. Both books were even better the second time around. Kristin Cashore writes books with richness and depth.

Bitterblue is different from the first two books. Bitterblue is now Queen of Monsea. She is not graced, like Katsa in Graceling, though there are many Gracelings around her, including Katsa and Po. She is not a Monster, like Fire, though Fire does come into this story.

This book is the story of Bitterblue coming of age and learning to be a good queen. She does some visiting her city incognito. She finds some writings both her mother and her father left behind. Mostly, she’s trying to help her kingdom come to terms with the horrors her father subjected it to. She’s figuring out how to carry on.

Meanwhile, there’s unrest in many of the other kingdoms. Katsa and Po are still active on the Council, trying to help victims of injustice.

Bitterblue is trying to rule well, but along the way, she needs to uncover many secrets. She also needs to come to terms with the horrors that her father carried out.

All of that sounds a little dry and dull summed up like that. It is anything but dry and dull. We still have Kristin Cashore’s rich language and vivid imagination as we read about an ordinary girl who has become queen. Can she become a good one? And what does that mean, in a world where the people are rising up against their rulers?

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/bitterblue.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Review Copy I got at ALA Midwinter Meeting and checked against a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Black Heart, by Holly Black

Alternate History, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Black Heart

The Curse Workers, Book Three

by Holly Black

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2012. 296 pages.
Starred Review

Ah! Holly Black has done a magnificent job tying up her trilogy! I was reading this book while waiting for an appointment with a neurology specialist. I had quite a bit to go, but I read straight to the end. Then I looked up. Oh no! It was an hour after my appointment time! Had I been so absorbed in the book, I hadn’t heard them call my name? That definitely could have happened, because I certainly hadn’t noticed the time pass. No, it turned out that this particular doctor was known for spending all the time with patients that they needed (and he did this for me, too).

I don’t want to say much about the plot, because I might accidentally give away things that happened in the earlier books. And yes, this is definitely a trilogy you want to read in order. It’s an alternate world where people can curse you by touching you. Curse Workers come in many different kinds, like luck workers or memory workers. Even death workers and transformation workers. But there’s always some kind of blowback that affects the curseworker himself.

Cursing people is illegal — so families where many are born with the ability end up as crime families. The girl Barron loves is the presumptive heir to one of the biggest crime families. So it’s still an issue for Barron which side of the law he should be on. And meanwhile, a governor who was cursed by Barron’s mother is trying to institute mandatory testing and make it illegal even to be able to curse someone.

These books all have some kind of clever caper that culminates all the threads of the book. Must. Say. No. More. Since they are clever, and since Holly Black manages to surprise you each time, these books definitely make great rereading as well. One thing I particularly liked is that she made me like the second book better by the way she had things go in the third book.

This is a brilliant series. I will try to listen to books two and three in audio form to get to enjoy them again. (I’ve already both read and listened to the first book.)

So how’s that for a review that says almost nothing about the actual book? But I don’t want to give anything away from the first books! So I’ll leave you with a paragraph from Black Heart:

“Plenty of people get conned because they don’t know any better. They’re just gullible. But lots of people are suspicious at the start of a con. Maybe the initial investment is small enough that they can afford to lose it. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they’re hopeful. But you’d be surprised how many people start a con knowing there’s a good chance they’re being conned. All the signals are there. They just keep ignoring them. Because they want to believe in the possibility of something. And so, even though they know better, they just let it happen.”

thecurseworkers.com
TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/black_heart.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Renegade Magic, by Stephanie Burgis

Alternate History, Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review 0

Renegade Magic

by Stephanie Burgis

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, New York, 2012. 329 pages.
Starred Review

I loved Stephanie Burgis’s first book, Kat, Incorrigible, a marvellous blend of Jane Austen-type society with magic and an incorrigible, irrepressible heroine. So I was delighted when I found an Advance Reader Copy of the second book about Kat at ALA Midwinter Meeting. It went directly on the top of my pile to read after the conference, and I was not disappointed.

I do recommend reading the first book first. I think you can still enjoy the second book without it, but you’ll understand better what’s going on with the Order of the Guardians who protect England and the enemies Kat has already made.

At the start of this book, Kat’s older sister Elissa is going to be married. Her sister Angeline’s beloved, Frederick Carlyle, is the best man. But when Frederick’s mother interrupts the ceremony and accuses Angeline of ensnaring Frederick by witchcraft, with the word of a member of the Order of the Guardians as her evidence, the happiness of the younger sisters is seriously set awry.

Stepmama decides to take them away from the scene of their humiliation, fleeing to Bath, along with Kat’s brother Charles, who always seems to be getting into trouble with gambling.

At Bath, Kat can sense a strange, wild magic, a magic that goes back to the Romans who founded the baths. Someone is trying to stir up a magic that can disrupt all of society. Can Kat fix things, as well as her own family’s happiness? All while learning to use her own powers without proper training? The process is quite an adventure!

These books are outstanding middle grade fantasy with plenty of humor, lots of action, some actual history, lots of suspense, and people you enjoy knowing. I wouldn’t want to be Kat’s Stepmama, but I would definitely like being Kat’s friend.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Midwinter Meeting and checked against a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness

Fantasy, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

A Monster Calls

by Patrick Ness
Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd

Candlewick Press, 2011. 105 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Battle of the Kids’ Books Contender

This is a novel about a thirteen-year-old boy named Conor whose mother is dealing with cancer. His father recently left them, so they live alone. At least for as long as his grandma stays away. At school, Conor has to deal with bullying. He acts out at times, and everyone, teachers and kids, tiptoes around him because of what is happening with his mother.

“The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.”

The monster comes over and over again. No one else can see the monster. But it leaves yew leaves in Conor’s room. It damages Conor’s house.

The monster tells him three tales. Three tales that Conor doesn’t like. Three tales that pack a punch. When those are done, what is the truth that Conor needs to tell, and will he have the strength to tell it?

The illustrations in this book are atmospheric and creepy, pulling the reader into the dark, sinister setting. Everything about this book works.

However, let me just say that if you’re a recently divorced mother living with your teenage son and you’re experiencing strange medical symptoms, this book is not a good choice. This fact makes me think the book might not be a great choice for someone whose mother actually has cancer. It’s great for building empathy in kids who are not going through something similar right now, but it might be too discouraging if the situation feels at all like it’s matching life. Let’s just say the outcome for the mother is not good.

For me, I had a stroke last July, and thought I’d come off very lucky, with no permanent disability and the stroke never touching my higher thinking. Then in October, I had a weird setback, feeling like I did right after the stroke again. After another setback, I saw the neurologist. He wasn’t very impressed by my low-grade dizziness and feeling “funny,” but then he did a neurological exam. When he saw I was seeing double if I looked up and to the right (my left eye not tracking with my right eye), he told me I’d probably had another stroke! This was December 23rd. He told me to get an MRI done the next week and see him the week after that. I tried to make an appointment to see him, and they gave me January 25th.

Now, I’d been laboring under the belief that the fact I was on Coumadin would keep me from having a second stroke. After this appointment, I had some days off because of Christmas. After Christmas, at work I noticed that now I was seeing double if I looked up and to the left. I called the neurologist’s office and they told me to go to the ER, but the ER didn’t find anything new wrong. I had more days off for New Year’s and felt awful but just wasn’t sure what the symptoms meant.

Then I read A Monster Calls for Heavy Medal blog’s shortlist. Can I just say this was really bad timing? When I originally had the stroke, I wasn’t very scared because I had no idea what was going on and I hadn’t read about all the bad things that can happen as the result of a stroke. It was a holiday weekend, I felt awful, and my neurologist’s office was closed. And I’m reading a book about the recently divorced mother of a teenage son dying. Is it so surprising that I freaked out? (Actually, after I thought about that connection, I decided to blame my freaking out directly on A Monster Calls, and then I felt much better.)

So, all this is to say: This book is outstanding. It’s atmospheric, powerful, well-written and hard-hitting. But be careful when you read it.

www.candlewick.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss

Adventure, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Wise Man’s Fear

The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day Two

by Patrick Rothfuss

DAW Books, New York, 2011. 994 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 Fantasy Fiction

I already talked about what motivated me to read The Kingkiller Chronicle. This is not a book that stands alone. This is the second part of one story, or rather one epic saga. You should definitely read The Name of the Wind first. And those who read The Name of the Wind will be compelled to read this next book just as soon as they are able.

The annoying part? The story is by no means finished. Not only does this book not stand alone, it doesn’t even break at a very natural place. The frame is that Kvothe is telling his story to the Chronicler over a period of three days, and this is what he told on the second day. I’m a little skeptical that a story of almost a thousand pages could really be spoken aloud in one day’s time, but I wouldn’t want it to be any shorter. Anyway, like any good storyteller, Kvothe breaks at a place that leaves you wanting more.

But the writing and language are still outstanding. The story is still gripping. We cover a few more of the things Kvothe foreshadowed when he introduced himself. In this book, he has more adventures at the University, but then needs to go out to get some money. Along the way, he learns about sex and about making war. Everything he does, he does well.

I admit, I felt pretty cynical about his adventure with Felurian, one of the Fae who drives men mad with her sexuality. However, Patrick Rothfuss is masterful in keeping that part mythical and wondrous. He doesn’t give graphic descriptions, but instead imaginative names (like “Birdsong at morning”) for the things Felurian teaches Kvothe.

And all the adventures along the way are momentous.

Right now, I’m a little disgruntled from having to wait for the third book. But unless Patrick Rothfuss suddenly gets much worse, this trilogy will be right up there with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. If you like fantasy at all, I highly recommend this trilogy. Of course, the one catch to reading it now is that the third book hasn’t been written yet. However, this will give you the delightful excuse to read the first two books again when the third one comes out.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book I purchased from a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

Review of The Snow Queen, by Mercedes Lackey

Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Romance, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

Luna, 2008. 331 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4 Fantasy Fiction

Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms are exactly the sort of books I thoroughly enjoy. I don’t think it’s necessary to have read the earlier books to enjoy the current one, but characters from previous books are mentioned, and if you’ve read them you already understand the key to that world: The Tradition.

The Tradition is a powerful magic woven through that world, molding people’s lives into fairy tale format. It falls to a league of Godmothers to bend the Tradition to good results and avert tragedy.

I never really liked the story of the Snow Queen. I love the way Mercedes Lackey twists it. In this version, the Snow Queen is the heroine. She’s a Godmother who saves selfish and spoiled boys from ruining their lives completely.

Here’s the Snow Queen, Aleksia, thinking about Kay, the latest boy to come to her Ice Palace:

“He could be redeemed — he would not be here, in the Palace of Ever-Winter, the home of the Ice Fairy, if he was not capable of redemption. The Tradition had made that part clear enough by building such an enormous store of magic about him that, if Aleksia had waited until Winter to fetch him, he would have found his initials written in frost on the windowpane, snowmen having taken on his features when he passed, and the cold having grown so bitter that wildlife would have been found frozen in place. Even so, things had gotten to the point that Ravens had taken to following him, which was a very ominous sign had he but known it. Presumably if Aleksia had done nothing, and no other wicked magician had discovered him and virtually eaten him alive for the sake of that power, he would have gone to the bad all by himself. He was too self-centered and arrogant to have escaped that particular fate — and most likely, given his turn of mind, he would have become a Clockwork Artificer, one of those repellant individuals who tried to reduce everything to a matter of gears and levers, and tried to imprison life itself inside metal simulacrums. While not usually dangerous to the public at large the way, say, the average necromancer was, Clockwork Artificers could cause a great deal of unhappiness — and in their zeal to recreate life itself, sometimes resorted to murder.

“Judging by the Ravens, Kay would have become one of that sort.

“The only cure for this affliction was a shock, a great shock to the system. One that forced the youngster to confront himself, one that isolated him from the rest of the world immediately, rather than gradually. He had to lose those he still cared for, at least marginally, all at once. He had to learn that people meant something to him, before they ceased to.”

And I love the lesson Aleksia has for the other character in the story:

“It took two to make this dance, and Kay’s little friend Gerda, the girl who loved him with all her heart, who was currently trudging toward the next episode in her own little drama, was the coconspirator in The Traditional Path that ended in a Clockwork Artificer. Her nature was as sweet as her face, her will as pliant as a grass-stem and her devotion to Kay unswerving, no matter how much he neglected her. She needed redemption almost as much as Kay did. Such women married their coldhearted beloveds, made every excuse for them, smoothed their paths to perdition, turned a blind eye to horrors and even, sometimes, participated in the horrors themselves on the assumption that the Beloved One knew best. Gerda required a spine, in short, and an outlook rather less myopic than the one she currently possessed. And this little quest she was on was about to give her one.”

But Kay and Gerda’s story is on the beginning of this book about Aleksia, the Snow Queen. Because someone else is impersonating her. Someone else is calling herself the Snow Queen and abducting promising young men. Aleksia needs to find out what is going on. She’s not used to having adventures of her own, living alone in the Ice Palace. But this time, setting things right means Aleksia has to get involved herself.

Mercedes Lackey spins a good tale! I love her cleverness in weaving in all the ways the Tradition works. I read lots and lots of fairy tales when I was a little girl, and Mercedes Lackey brings up themes and tropes I’d all but forgotten. I love the whole concept of godmothers bending the Tradition to go the way they want it to — having to know what sorts of things work. That amounts to a vast knowledge of fairy tales.

And as well as inventive use of fairy tale themes, since there are five hundred kingdoms, each book presents a different culture and heritage. This one deals with the Sammi, a people of the far North. We also get new characters in each book (with some mentions of previous characters), and I love looking at the aspect of what life would be like for a powerful Ice Fairy. It would indeed most likely get lonely. There’s always a touch of romance in these books, too.

This book was one that simply made me smile. It was precisely the type of light-hearted reading I was looking for at the time. I had actually purchased the book when it first came out, but then never got it read because it didn’t have a due date. Well, I recently made myself a rule to alternate between library books and books I own. Then I heard that Mercedes Lackey’s next book was coming out, so I thought I really should read this one I bought some time ago. I was so glad I did!

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.