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corrielle2. Sabriel by Garth Nix
This was an exceeding dark young adult fantasy, but it was also richly textured. The world had grit to it.
Sabriel and her father are descendants of the bloodline of the Abhorsen. If a necromancer is one who can wake the Dead and make them walk again in Life, the Abhorsen is the one who can undo what a necromancer has done and send the Dead back again. The world that Sabriel inhabits is full of all sorts of interesting opposites. The Old Kingdom, where magic is real and the Dead can pass into Life again, is divided by a heavily guarded wall at its southern end from Ancelstierre, a country that resembles turn of the 20th century England. Ancelstierre has electricity and motor cars and radios and guns... all of which start to work less reliably as one approaches the Wall. The two types of magic are Charter Magic, governed and controlled by carefully prescribed marks, and Free Magic, which is dangerous and overpowering (precisely because it isn't part of the Charter, one is led to believe...).
Anyway, Sabriel has to navigate all of this in order to find her father and defeat a terrible evil that has come back from Death, and she comes of age as she learns to come into her power as an Abhorsen.
The conception of Death here as a gradual process of letting go (there are nine gates, after all...) is fascinating, and the book plays into all sorts of old, deeply held folk beliefs about the spirits of the Dead being closest to Life just after their passing. It also plays with the idea of bells as means of protection and binding when used against the Dead. Sabriel has seven bells, actually, each with its own unique power and danger to the user.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Sabriel is likable, Mogget the cat-who-is-more-than-a-cat is cantankerous and lovely, and Touchstone is an interesting puzzle of a young man, even when he turns out to have the last bit of Royal blood in the entire Old Kingdom, which is exactly what was needed to repair the Charter Stones.
3. Lirael by Garth Nix
Lirael is the sequel to Sabriel, and it picks up where the story left off, though several years have passed by now...
In this book, the world that was outlined in Sabriel is developed more fully. For instance, we only get to see the Clayr for a brief moment at the end of Sabriel, and we get the idea that they are Important, but we don't know much about them. So, it was nice that the first third or so of Lirael was all about them. The Clayr, as it turns out, are a group of people (mostly women) with The Sight, though none of them see the future completely. They see possibilities, tiny slivers of what might be. However, when they gather together and focus their power, they can see more clearly, which was something I don't remember seeing done before with prophetic people in other fantasy novels.
At first, I was sad that so many years had passed since the end of the first novel, and the Sabriel and Touchstone are now king and queen, distant from the main action of the narrative. However, I came to like Lirael quite a lot very quickly. Lirael is a Daughter of the Clayr, but has yet to have the Sight awaken in her. This makes her an outsider in her own family, and is a source of pain and embarrassment, which Nix is uncomfortably good at getting across. She is also an orphan in the midst of a large extended family, which makes things even harder for her. At one people, she considers throwing herself off the high point of the glacier-covered mountain where the Clayr make their home, and actually starts to do it, once again reminding me that "young adult" doesn't mean "pulling punches." Lirael discovers that while she doesn't have the Sight, she is quite good at Charter Magic, and ends up as an assistant in the Clayr library, which is a wonderful, terrifying place. (New librarians get a knife and a whistle to blow in case they're in danger on their very first day. There are Old Things That Should Not Be Disturbed in the library.)
Along the way, she gains some measure of self-worth by being good at getting into places and performing magic that should be beyond her, including creating a dog companion out of Charter Marks that is much more than she bargained for, but a great companion to have around.
At the same time that Lirael is being uncomfortable in the Clayr glacier, Sabriel and Touchstone's son Sameth is uncomfortable being Abhorsen-in-waiting... he doesn't like Death, doesn't like going into it, and doesn't like the idea that it is his destiny to take up Sabriel's bells one day. Through a series of circumstances, the two of them meet, find out that who they thought they were isn't exactly who they are, and have to work together to stop an even worse evil than Kerrigor (the Greater Dead from the first novel) from breaking out of its prison and threatening both the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre. One of the things that was really neat about this second book is that we get to see how events on the "normal" side of the wall and the "magical" side are intertwined. There's a lot more fluidity there this time. We get to see an Ancelstierran boarding school cricket team beating off the Dead who have risen on their side of the wall with bats under the capable direction of Prince Sameth, and the one the evil force is using to free itself and touch the world is one of Sam's school friends who has no idea what's going on and doesn't even believe in magic...
I'm in the middle of Abhorsen, the third book in the series and a direct continuation of Lirael right now, and it's a wild ride.
4. Midnight Assassin by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf
This is a book about a real murder in a tiny Iowa farming community that took place in 1900. I got interested in it because my literature class read a play inspired by the case.
This past week, my Intro to Literature class has been looking at the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell. The play takes place in an Iowa farm kitchen in the aftermath of a murder of a man for which his wife has been arrested. Two men have come to investigate and look for clues, and two women have come to get some things to take to the wife in prison. What the women find, the conclusions that they come to, and the decisions that they make at the end of the play come together and make for some interesting commentary on the question of women's rights in the early 20th century and just how much women were judged by the degree to which they met certain standards of "true womanhood."
While the play is worth a read, I was fascinated just as much by the real case of Margaret Hossack (the woman accused of killing her husband with two blows to the head with an ax while five of her children were asleep in the house...), and by the fact that Susan Glaspell was one of the only women reporters to write about the case when it happened. (She wrote the play about fifteen years later.)
What happened was this: Margaret Hossack and her husband John had a history of arguing, and all of their neighbors knew that she was afraid of him. They argued terribly one Thanksgiving, and she nearly left him, but neighboring men convinced her to go back to her husband, and told her and her children they shouldn't share their family troubles with outsiders, and they all needed to learn to live together peaceably. A year later, John Hossack was murdered in his bed in a very bloody fashion, and Margaret claimed to have slept through the whole thing.
She was arrested eventually, and the bulk of the book is based on documents that survive detailing her two subsequent trials. Reading the transcripts of interviews and of newspaper articles from the time was, by turns, fascinating and chilling. Today, a woman who killed an abusive husband would have a defense attorney jumping at the chance to use the abuse as a mitigating factor. Not in this case. In this case, it was the prosecution who jumped to call every neighbor Margaret had ever talked to about her family problems to the stand in order to explain the "deep rage" necessary to take an ax to a man's head. The defense was doing everything it could to convince the jury that she and her husband had reconciled after their deep disagreements, and she had no reason to be angry at him.
The other thing that really struck me was the scrutiny given to her status as a woman. I know that today there is an intense amount of attention to how high-profile defendants "appear" in court, but this was different. At the beginning of the trial, she was described as hard, stoic, and unfeeling, though she had certainly been upset at her husband's bedside (he lingered for nine hours after being attacked... and talked during that time, which was pretty amazing considering the extent of his injuries). Anyway, there was a consistent trend by newspapers and the prosecution of describing her as "mannish," and lacking the softer qualities a woman was supposed to possess, making her capable of such a physical murder. (There was even an undercurrent of "why didn't she just poison her like any other weak little woman would have?" in some of the talk going around.)
There were all sorts of peculiarities about the stories that everyone told... there were neighbors who thought they had seen a man on a horse, and there was the question of the hairs and blood found on the family ax, which, lacking modern forensic science, could barely be conclusively proved to be human, much less from a specific human.
She was convicted once by a jury of men who had known and respected her husband, but a year and a half later, after her lawyers pointed out to the State Supreme Court that her first jury had heard some rather sketchy evidence and that it had been pretty impossible to find unbiased jurors, she got a new trial in a different town that resulted in a hung jury, and she went free, with public sentiment very much on her side the second time around. (Mostly because the trial and being in prison for a year had aged her and made her look frail and weak...) The role that public sentiment also played in this case was... huge, especially considering that the jurors were in no way kept from discussing the case or reading newspapers outside of the courtroom.
To this day, no one really knows who did it. People who don't think Margaret did it think one of her sons might have, and that she was covering for him, and most of them certainly think she knew who the real murderer was. And, as the years have passed, it seems that most people, if they don't approve, at least understand. Her youngest son, when his granddaughter asked him about the case many years later, said of John Hossack, "He died of meanness." And he refused to say anything else. If that's not telling, I don't know what is.
People (and I am one of these) like to talk about the past in affectionate terms, lamenting the things we've lost with industrialization, the rise of technology, and other modernizing influences. However, a community-wide policy of silence and willful blindness in the face of pretty obvious domestic abuse is not one of those things.
This was an exceeding dark young adult fantasy, but it was also richly textured. The world had grit to it.
Sabriel and her father are descendants of the bloodline of the Abhorsen. If a necromancer is one who can wake the Dead and make them walk again in Life, the Abhorsen is the one who can undo what a necromancer has done and send the Dead back again. The world that Sabriel inhabits is full of all sorts of interesting opposites. The Old Kingdom, where magic is real and the Dead can pass into Life again, is divided by a heavily guarded wall at its southern end from Ancelstierre, a country that resembles turn of the 20th century England. Ancelstierre has electricity and motor cars and radios and guns... all of which start to work less reliably as one approaches the Wall. The two types of magic are Charter Magic, governed and controlled by carefully prescribed marks, and Free Magic, which is dangerous and overpowering (precisely because it isn't part of the Charter, one is led to believe...).
Anyway, Sabriel has to navigate all of this in order to find her father and defeat a terrible evil that has come back from Death, and she comes of age as she learns to come into her power as an Abhorsen.
The conception of Death here as a gradual process of letting go (there are nine gates, after all...) is fascinating, and the book plays into all sorts of old, deeply held folk beliefs about the spirits of the Dead being closest to Life just after their passing. It also plays with the idea of bells as means of protection and binding when used against the Dead. Sabriel has seven bells, actually, each with its own unique power and danger to the user.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Sabriel is likable, Mogget the cat-who-is-more-than-a-cat is cantankerous and lovely, and Touchstone is an interesting puzzle of a young man, even when he turns out to have the last bit of Royal blood in the entire Old Kingdom, which is exactly what was needed to repair the Charter Stones.
3. Lirael by Garth Nix
Lirael is the sequel to Sabriel, and it picks up where the story left off, though several years have passed by now...
In this book, the world that was outlined in Sabriel is developed more fully. For instance, we only get to see the Clayr for a brief moment at the end of Sabriel, and we get the idea that they are Important, but we don't know much about them. So, it was nice that the first third or so of Lirael was all about them. The Clayr, as it turns out, are a group of people (mostly women) with The Sight, though none of them see the future completely. They see possibilities, tiny slivers of what might be. However, when they gather together and focus their power, they can see more clearly, which was something I don't remember seeing done before with prophetic people in other fantasy novels.
At first, I was sad that so many years had passed since the end of the first novel, and the Sabriel and Touchstone are now king and queen, distant from the main action of the narrative. However, I came to like Lirael quite a lot very quickly. Lirael is a Daughter of the Clayr, but has yet to have the Sight awaken in her. This makes her an outsider in her own family, and is a source of pain and embarrassment, which Nix is uncomfortably good at getting across. She is also an orphan in the midst of a large extended family, which makes things even harder for her. At one people, she considers throwing herself off the high point of the glacier-covered mountain where the Clayr make their home, and actually starts to do it, once again reminding me that "young adult" doesn't mean "pulling punches." Lirael discovers that while she doesn't have the Sight, she is quite good at Charter Magic, and ends up as an assistant in the Clayr library, which is a wonderful, terrifying place. (New librarians get a knife and a whistle to blow in case they're in danger on their very first day. There are Old Things That Should Not Be Disturbed in the library.)
Along the way, she gains some measure of self-worth by being good at getting into places and performing magic that should be beyond her, including creating a dog companion out of Charter Marks that is much more than she bargained for, but a great companion to have around.
At the same time that Lirael is being uncomfortable in the Clayr glacier, Sabriel and Touchstone's son Sameth is uncomfortable being Abhorsen-in-waiting... he doesn't like Death, doesn't like going into it, and doesn't like the idea that it is his destiny to take up Sabriel's bells one day. Through a series of circumstances, the two of them meet, find out that who they thought they were isn't exactly who they are, and have to work together to stop an even worse evil than Kerrigor (the Greater Dead from the first novel) from breaking out of its prison and threatening both the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre. One of the things that was really neat about this second book is that we get to see how events on the "normal" side of the wall and the "magical" side are intertwined. There's a lot more fluidity there this time. We get to see an Ancelstierran boarding school cricket team beating off the Dead who have risen on their side of the wall with bats under the capable direction of Prince Sameth, and the one the evil force is using to free itself and touch the world is one of Sam's school friends who has no idea what's going on and doesn't even believe in magic...
I'm in the middle of Abhorsen, the third book in the series and a direct continuation of Lirael right now, and it's a wild ride.
4. Midnight Assassin by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf
This is a book about a real murder in a tiny Iowa farming community that took place in 1900. I got interested in it because my literature class read a play inspired by the case.
This past week, my Intro to Literature class has been looking at the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell. The play takes place in an Iowa farm kitchen in the aftermath of a murder of a man for which his wife has been arrested. Two men have come to investigate and look for clues, and two women have come to get some things to take to the wife in prison. What the women find, the conclusions that they come to, and the decisions that they make at the end of the play come together and make for some interesting commentary on the question of women's rights in the early 20th century and just how much women were judged by the degree to which they met certain standards of "true womanhood."
While the play is worth a read, I was fascinated just as much by the real case of Margaret Hossack (the woman accused of killing her husband with two blows to the head with an ax while five of her children were asleep in the house...), and by the fact that Susan Glaspell was one of the only women reporters to write about the case when it happened. (She wrote the play about fifteen years later.)
What happened was this: Margaret Hossack and her husband John had a history of arguing, and all of their neighbors knew that she was afraid of him. They argued terribly one Thanksgiving, and she nearly left him, but neighboring men convinced her to go back to her husband, and told her and her children they shouldn't share their family troubles with outsiders, and they all needed to learn to live together peaceably. A year later, John Hossack was murdered in his bed in a very bloody fashion, and Margaret claimed to have slept through the whole thing.
She was arrested eventually, and the bulk of the book is based on documents that survive detailing her two subsequent trials. Reading the transcripts of interviews and of newspaper articles from the time was, by turns, fascinating and chilling. Today, a woman who killed an abusive husband would have a defense attorney jumping at the chance to use the abuse as a mitigating factor. Not in this case. In this case, it was the prosecution who jumped to call every neighbor Margaret had ever talked to about her family problems to the stand in order to explain the "deep rage" necessary to take an ax to a man's head. The defense was doing everything it could to convince the jury that she and her husband had reconciled after their deep disagreements, and she had no reason to be angry at him.
The other thing that really struck me was the scrutiny given to her status as a woman. I know that today there is an intense amount of attention to how high-profile defendants "appear" in court, but this was different. At the beginning of the trial, she was described as hard, stoic, and unfeeling, though she had certainly been upset at her husband's bedside (he lingered for nine hours after being attacked... and talked during that time, which was pretty amazing considering the extent of his injuries). Anyway, there was a consistent trend by newspapers and the prosecution of describing her as "mannish," and lacking the softer qualities a woman was supposed to possess, making her capable of such a physical murder. (There was even an undercurrent of "why didn't she just poison her like any other weak little woman would have?" in some of the talk going around.)
There were all sorts of peculiarities about the stories that everyone told... there were neighbors who thought they had seen a man on a horse, and there was the question of the hairs and blood found on the family ax, which, lacking modern forensic science, could barely be conclusively proved to be human, much less from a specific human.
She was convicted once by a jury of men who had known and respected her husband, but a year and a half later, after her lawyers pointed out to the State Supreme Court that her first jury had heard some rather sketchy evidence and that it had been pretty impossible to find unbiased jurors, she got a new trial in a different town that resulted in a hung jury, and she went free, with public sentiment very much on her side the second time around. (Mostly because the trial and being in prison for a year had aged her and made her look frail and weak...) The role that public sentiment also played in this case was... huge, especially considering that the jurors were in no way kept from discussing the case or reading newspapers outside of the courtroom.
To this day, no one really knows who did it. People who don't think Margaret did it think one of her sons might have, and that she was covering for him, and most of them certainly think she knew who the real murderer was. And, as the years have passed, it seems that most people, if they don't approve, at least understand. Her youngest son, when his granddaughter asked him about the case many years later, said of John Hossack, "He died of meanness." And he refused to say anything else. If that's not telling, I don't know what is.
People (and I am one of these) like to talk about the past in affectionate terms, lamenting the things we've lost with industrialization, the rise of technology, and other modernizing influences. However, a community-wide policy of silence and willful blindness in the face of pretty obvious domestic abuse is not one of those things.