The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Recommended.

If you’re a fan of young adult literature, you’ve probably seen Sady Doyle’s In Praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series. Lovingly detailed, this feminist critique cut Harry Potter down to size a little. In Doyle’s reimagining, he’s nothing more than a privileged jock—though certainly even in our own universe charges of privilege could be leveled against him. Harry is the chosen one, special as much for reasons of birth as effort, while hardworking Hermione toils away to earn her rather narrower slice of the pie.

It seems that Lev Grossman is all-too-aware of the pitfalls of writing about a male, white, chosen hero. And why shouldn’t he be? Quentin Coldwater, hero to 2009′s New York Time’s bestselling The Magicians is certainly male, white, and special. He arrives on the scene of magical academy Brakebills in a show of spectacular and unusual magic. Unlike most students, his gifts can’t be easily classified. And, though it’s not his efforts that help him reach Fillory, a Narnia-like land in another universe, he shares a special connection with this country—a country where he eventually becomes king.

But unlike Harry, Quentin is truly a young adult—emphasis on the adult. Because he’s meandering toward his twenties over the course of the novel rather than through his teens, he’s lost a little bit of Harry’s heroic, intrinsic appeal. Quentin is harder, more aware of the tensions that exist between his rich fantasy life and the slightly less fantastic (though undeniably magical) world around him. He’s mourning the magic that was lost to him as a teen. And this renders him quite insufferable. In fact, that’s the biggest criticism I’ve encountered of The Magicians–that Quentin is unlikeable, privileged, whiny. Why should he be so special, readers seem to ask, that I should have to spend time with him?

Grossman neatly answers this question in two ways in The Magician King, next month’s highly anticipated sequel to The Magicians. The first way is the simpler: he lets Quentin grow. If Quentin of The Magicians was a heartbroken high school boy who has begun to fear that magic does not exist, then Quentin of The Magician King is one who has accepted that it does, and now must begin to carve out a meaningful life of his own in spite of this. There’s still a lot of introspection in this volume as Quentin travels across the oceans of Fillory, between the outer islands, and all around the coastal areas of Earth. But Quentin’s grown in self-awareness. Though some of his romantic choices are a bit eye roll-worthy, they’re easily understood within the context of Quentin’s internal life. And, having faced loss, he’s kinder now, too. It’s hard to hate someone who is so good with children.

The language during Quentin’s portion of the novel is captivating, nearly hypnotic. Rich setting is abundantly described—Fillory is still beautiful, and Grossman manages to weave allusion so seamlessly into his text that you’re never quite sure if he’s trying to create something original or to simply conjure images from the collective unconscious. That might sound like a slight, but it’s not meant to be; this is a book for genre lovers, and it’s perfectly evocative of all those books you read over and over again as a kid until the spines cracked and the glue dried and the pages fell out. There’s an adult sensibility to his approach, but not a cynical one. It’s as if Grossman is trying to keep his tongue firmly in cheek, but can’t because he’s smiling too hard—I suspect he loves Fillory just as much as Quentin does.

(And just as much as I do. I must confess that in reading both The Magician King and its predecessor, I had a distinct feeling that I was reading a book written just for me. I understand why Quentin might seem unpalatable to many readers—I understand how his problems are the problems of the privileged, the blessed, the bored. Like Quentin, I was a bright, imaginative kid whose dreams nudged her increasingly toward lands that should have been out of her reach—not only nonexistent fantasy lands, but academia, too. In a way, I would have been happy forever there, but it’s intrinsically a transient space. And you can’t go back to the world of the lower middle class after living in the Ivory Tower and not see it through changed eyes—you can try to be happy in your desk job, but you won’t. What’s left for you? Making your own worlds, your own adventures. But what does that even mean? Quentin is happier in Fillory; I’m happier working from home and writing books. But are we happy? Can we ever be? Does our unhappiness arise out of our situations, or our natures?

But I digress, severely.)

The other way that Grossman tackles the problem of Quentin’s fundamental privilege is by shifting the focus through half of the book to someone who has not been so lucky—to Julia, the Hermione of this universe, a hard working hedge witch who was denied access to Brakebills. Her storyline parallels Quentin’s life through most of the first book—depression and unhappiness grow within her like a dark pearl after she fails her entrance exams. But she refuses to tolerate not being chosen. She works. Eventually a world of magical flophouses and three-ringed binders full of spells open to her. The references here are perfect–of course there would be magical chatrooms and computer BBSes—and of course these lands would be filled with characters much like Penny of the first novel. Punk, scruffy, and terribly earnest.

If Quentin had everything handed to him—if he’s a little bit of a Harry—then Julia’s story is one of sacrifice and pain. She labors. And Grossman is keen enough to reward her for that. Within The Magician King is a nearly self-contained novel about a magician queen who earns her title. It’s wholly satisfying, and a nice counterpoint to Quentin’s perpetual lack of fulfillment.

(Speaking of, the novel ends perhaps predictably on an open-ended note. It seems we’ve yet to be promised a third volume. This upsets me. This should be—no, needs to be—a trilogy. I understand that Quentin is a fundamentally unhappy sort, that he won’t ever attain nirvana. But I want resolution, if not for my own life, then for Quentin’s.)

There’s a lot here—in fact, my biggest problem with The Magician King was that there is sometimes too much. The journey twists and turns and then turns again. The result is breathless and exhausting. I’d be loath to suggest Grossman tame his sprawling story, but I do wish he’d let himself luxuriate in it. A bit more time spent in any of these lands (Fillory, Venice, Connecticut) would have been fine; it’s a rare thing when a fantasy novel could be almost double its length and not feel bloated. This one could. But really, I loved the journey—the characters, the setting, the details, the themes. And so I’d be remiss if I did anything but whole-heartedly recommend it.

A review copy of this volume was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes.

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A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Um. Duh. Recommended.

I can’t really claim that this will be a “review,” not really. Reviews require a certain degree of (admittedly sometimes false) objectivity, and I suspect that I’m physically incapable of being objective in regards to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and my favorite book ever. I’ve read it at least a dozen times in the past decade and a half. I own multiple copies (all with the same cover, with Charles Wallace in bell bottomed jeans with feathered hair). In middle school, when I played Japanese RPGs on my Super Nintendo, I always named my characters Gaudi and Anand, because Gaudior and Ananda would not fit. In fact, were I to ever have a daughter, I would name her Ananda, except my husband says that you can’t name a girl after a dog, even a fictional dog. Fine then. But, you know, I love this book—it’s an integral part of my internal narrative, my history. So keep in mind that any analysis or criticism you find here is forced. I just really adore it. I keep expecting to reread it and suddenly find it less magical, to finally be totally over unicorns and witch hunts and Chuck, old dear Chuck. But that never happens. I hope it never will.

Last night’s spontaneous rereading—in the face of all these ARCs—was inspired by a conversation with Sean, who asked me yesterday to tell him what my favorite book was at age fourteen. Then I saw this post from Sam at parenthetical.net asking which authors are best remembered for the wrong book. The answer, to me, is one and the same, and had me reaching for my bookshelf, for that old well-worn paperback with the green-edged pages. Madeleine L’Engle is best known for her first volume in the series, A Wrinkle in Time. While I appreciate many things about that book, it’s slight, both in terms of length and concept. Sure, I adore awkward Meg, Fortinbras, spooky little Charles Wallace Murry and redheaded genius hottie Calvin O’Keefe. But that novel only hints at the complexity you’ll find here, the atmospheric depth, the danger and the magic. By the time it all wraps up—too quickly, I think—with a floating, talking brain and the power of love, my interest totally wanes. No matter how many peaceable singing aliens L’Engle crams into the denouement.

In fact, my feelings range from lukewarm to pretty awful about the other three books in the Murry saga. A Wind in the Door has never managed to rouse any emotion in me at all. I’ve never done more than skim Many Waters (I’m really not a fan of the twins). And when I finally got around to reading An Acceptable Time during an independent study in graduate school, both my professor and I agreed that it was entirely too focused on what made the other books in the series bad—stereotyped portrayal of native “pagan” populations, and ham-fisted conversations about the applicability of Christianity in a pre-Christ era.

But this book. Oh, this book.

I guess it has its flaws. There’s that embarrassing scene where an American Indian rides a dolphin. L’Engle’s language, though generally beautiful, can be a bit driving and repetitive. And this is the book where Meg starts to suck—she spends most of it beslippered and pregnant, at home while Charles Wallace goes on adventures. In fact, both Murry kids are fairly passive vessels for a more interesting plot, though I’ll discuss why that’s not precisely problematic shortly.

I think the way that this book first won me over as a teen was via its language. I was a sucker for setting even then, and the Murry homestead is an absolutely gorgeous, perfectly realized place, the kind of house I still seek out now (hmm . . . I currently live in a house built in 1780. I wonder if the Murrys have something to do with that). Their warm, ramshackle home is filled with musty smells and dusty descriptions: threadbare curtains in Meg’s attic bedroom, the scents of a Thanksgiving feast cooked over a Bunsen burner.

And the Murry family is really quite perfect—the twins, irritating though they are, are perfectly brotherly, teasing and yammering and brilliant. Charles Wallace and his father sit on the sidelines putting together a model of a tesseract. And Meg frets over the presence of her mother-in-law, who was introduced in the first novel as an abusive, hideous wretch. The woman is silent through most of the meal, right up until Meg’s father receives a phone call from the president, warning him of impending nuclear war.

Suddenly, something changes in Mrs. O’Keefe. She recites a rune, a poetic incantation meant to ward off evil spirits. As the house is wracked by winds, and as the electricity goes out, the scientifically-minded Murry clan regards her with skepticism. But not Charles Wallace.

Charles was mostly a cipher in earlier books, a bit creepy, somewhat otherworldly. His fatal flaw is his pride, and we still see hints of that here, though he’s grown to be a touch more grounded in his adolescence. Still, he’s more open to the forces of the unknown than his siblings. He and Meg share a psychic link, for one thing. And he’s seen so many unusual things in his fifteen years. He hardly seems to blink when, later that night, he goes outside, recites the rune, and a unicorn appears to help him travel through time.

Oh, I know. A unicorn But Gaudior isn’t like that. Though he’s beautiful, and magical, this isn’t a wishy washy Lisa Frank kind of creature. This is a guardian of the light—he’s stoic, sarcastic, wise. Unicorns are serious business in L’Engle’s universe. And this book takes them seriously even when they’re drinking moonlight and hatching out of enormous eggs.

This gravity is there at the outset, clearly transmitted through L’Engle’s stunning prose. Like here, when Charles Wallace first summons the creature:

There was no moon, but starlight touched the winter grasses with silver. The woods behind the rock were a dark shadow. Charles Wallace looked across the valley, across the dark ridge of pines, to the shadows of the hills beyond. Then he threw back his head and called,
“In this fateful hour
I call on all Heaven with its power!”

The book proceeds from there, taking the same epic, mythical, and utterly poetic tone as the premise is established: Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior travel through time. Gaudior helps Charles Wallace go “Within,” jumping into the bodies of various members of one genetic line to help gently nudge the timeline away from nuclear destruction on a global scale.

These stories initially build slowly. The first two really just establish place, and premise. Charles Wallace goes Within, and Meg stays at home, psychically linked with her brother in her attic bedroom. But then Charles Wallace enters the body of Brandon Llawcae, and the story suddenly grows in both scope and depth. Each of the three tales that follow could almost stand on their own—the story of a Pilgrim family and a witch hunt; the tale of Mrs. O’Keefe and her mid-century family broken by poverty; and the saga of Matthew Maddox and his twin brother Bran, whose actions will ultimately decide the fate of the world.

These tales are short, but deep—rich with emotional intensity, darkness, and stirring thematics. None of them are particularly YA, though some feature an adolescent character. Characters are stunningly well-defined, despite their great number and often-similar names. The story of Mrs. O’Keefe—Beezie, as she’s known as a girl—and her brother Chuck is particularly tragic and, despite shades of psychic ability (all of the magic here is obscure in origin and precise detail; for a story with a unicorn, it’s really more of a surreal mix of magical realism and sci-fi than fantasy), it’s really very grounded in real life. And it’s heartbreaking. Whereas in the early books in the Time Quintet, Mrs. O’Keefe is really only present to provide a convenient tragedy to prove Calvin’s depth, A Swiftly Tilting Planet forces us to empathize with her, to see her heroism and tragedy despite the fact that she’s also later an old hag who beats her kids.

And she’s really, truly our hero, as clearly explained by the novel’s conclusion. It would be easy to cite this volume as the beginning of L’Engle’s failure as a feminist writer. This is where Meg buckles down, becomes domesticated. Later, we’ll learn that she’s given up a career entirely for fear of making her daughters jealous as her own beautiful, successful mother did to her. But Meg’s still vital in this book, and, more, the entire thesis of the novel seems to be that no matter the tragedy or pain or ordinariness that defines the bulk of your life, it’s really the small acts of heroism which define you. And in that light, I don’t doubt for a second that L’Engle thought Meg—and even Mrs. O’Keefe—truly heroic.

Moreover, Charles Wallace finally truly grows in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. His character and flaws are fairly static in the earlier books in this series. He’s spooky, prescient, precocious, and entirely too proud. He begins the novel this way, too, but his relationship with Gaudior, and the trials they face, teach him to be humble. It’s a very Taoist book in this way—Charles Wallace’s journey is all about learning to be passive, to accept the whims of the forces of good, to resist acting out of pride. I can understand how this message might frustrate modern readers of YA, who are more accustomed to heroes spurred to action, but I can’t deny that I feel there’s a valuable lesson about a different type of heroism here—or deny that I pretty much adore Charles Wallace as a character.

Which is one of the reasons I’ll never forgive Madeleine L’Engle. Charles is absent from subsequent novels. He’s gone off to work for the government, as his father once did—by An Acceptable Time, he seems to be gone for good, which once seemed true for her father, too. Before her death, L’Engle implied that he was alive somewhere–she just didn’t know where. I’m not surprised in that. One of the features I most love about the Time Quintet generally is that they’re from disparate points in the family’s narrative. This makes them feel a little bit more like slices out of someone’s real life than preconceived stories. But that makes me worried, in a very real, childish way. L’Engle didn’t write about Charles Wallace’s fate before she died. Does that mean he was lost the the Echthroi? I sure hope not. Instead, I’d like to imagine—and hope—that he’s still out there somewhere, fighting the darkness.

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Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

I’ll come right out and say it: I’ve been a bit jelly-brained recently. Between revisions of my novel, moving, and a stack of review books several feet tall, I’ve resorted to doing anything mindless to lighten the pressure on myself. Playing video games, watching Degrassi reruns on TeenNick . . . reading Charlaine Harris’s Dead to the World.

If the reviews of my goodreads friends are any indication, it’s typical to begin reviews of Harris’s works with these sorts of apologies. That’s because we all know these books are essentially fluffy wish fulfillment—and Dead to the World seems particularly, self-evidently so. It’s the plot thread under current rotation on True Blood, the tightened-up, television adaptation of Harris’s work, where sexy Viking Eric Northman is cursed by witches to lose his memory, holes up in psychic waitress Sookie Stackhouse’s ancestral abode, and schtups her.

But I don’t really feel like making any apologies for reading this, even if I can’t deny the bubblegum nature of the book, either. Why, wish fulfillment novels aimed at men—dirty little screeds like JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man are seen as real literature, no matter how many inappropriately-exposed phalluses they contain. So I think that there’s no reason why Dead to the World shouldn’t be evaluated on its own merits, either.

And Harris really nails women’s wish fulfillment. Sookie’s plight—chronically and fundamentally alone, despite her many romantic prospects—renders her a truly sympathetic character. While her actions are sometimes a bit ridiculous when we see them played out on TV, Harris’s strong, first-person narration renders her, instead, empathetic. She’s really a lower-class everywoman; bright, but not brilliant. Her anxieties over money, over the gossipy nature of her small town, over her irascible brother are really needed to understand her sometimes inscrutable romantic behavior. Though Sookie’s been treated as a pariah because of her psychic abilities in her town of Bon Temps, she’s really just looking for the prince charming she was promised as a girl—someone who will step in and take care of her. And, in light of her rather deep and unrelenting solitude, well-reflected in her colloquial, vividly-voiced narration, it’s difficult to fault her in this.

As you might suspect in a book that, just beneath the surface, under a slightly jumbled plot filled with supernatural creatures, is really about solitude, it’s in the scenes were Sookie connects with Eric that the story has the most resonance. Sure, it’s lightly porny wish-fulfillment (Sookie refers to her own anatomy as a “nub”), but it’s also very affecting, as Eric and Sookie find one another despite the significant losses they’ve faced. The rather human scenes at the novel’s conclusion, featuring Sookie and brother Jason, are also fairly strong—the emotional connection between Sookie and these male characters is certainly deep.

Less effective are Sookie’s romantic flirtations with Alcide and bartender Sam, and her hollow reunion with ex-boyfriend vamp Bill Compton. The way the menfolk of Bon Temps are all drawn to Sookie was a little eye roll-worthy even by romance novel standards, and the treatment of romantic rival Debbie Van Pelt felt shrill and ill-justified even in light of attempts on Sookie’s life.

And the larger plot surrounding Sookie’s story with Eric was just a touch too epic for my tastes, featuring weres and witches and panthers and a cast of characters which would easily rival any high fantasy in sheer numbers. There’s a two-pronged mystery at the heart of Harris’s plot—Eric’s memory loss, and the disappearance of Jason Stackhouse—but I didn’t find either prong particularly compelling.

I suspect this is because Harris was really stretching her storytelling abilities here. She’s nowhere more successful than when her story is small—intimate. In scenes were the conversation (or the, ahem, action) is limited to two participants, it was an enormously successful book—believable, despite the fact that one of the characters in question is an ancient Viking vampire.

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A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Recommended.

I’ll be reviewing Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls in greater depth for Strange Horizons a bit closer to its publication date, but I wanted to collect a few thoughts here.

Conor’s mother has cancer. His dad is busy overseas tending to his new family. That leaves just Conor, his mum, and the yew tree in the backyard. And then Conor’s mom’s health takes a turn for the worse, his grandmother comes to visit, and a monster comes to call.

This is a very difficult book for me to approach or even discuss. My own father died when I was eight after protracted illness, both mental and physical. He took a trip to visit his brother in Tennessee and never came back. I have a letter from him from one of his stints in the hospital. He said when he got out, we’d plant a tree together, watch some cartoons. That never happened.

My mother was lost in her grief. My sister, thirteen, plunged into her own personal darkness. For years, it seemed like I stayed afloat pretty well. I cried a bit, sure, but mostly I was a sunny kid, who comforted the other grieving members of my family and went about my own business, drawing pictures, reading books, playing in the backyard until the sun faded.

Until puberty struck with a vengeance. I hadn’t even known how angry I was until I began to break things. Kicking the vacuum cleaner. Tossing my mother’s flower pots on the ground, shattering the terracotta. Punching holes in the wall. Hitting my head against the brown grubby carpet in my bedroom over and over again.

My story isn’t Conor’s story. That’s the thing about grief. Even though it’s universal–we’ll either die first ourselves (and then, what’s the use of worrying?), or we’ll all face the death of a parent someday. We will all feel that loss, how it cuts to the bone. We’ll be left to rage against the dying of the light no matter how gently those we loved slipped away from us.

But it’s so deeply personal, too. No two stories about grief can ever be the same. Because grief is a greedy, selfish monster. It makes you so aware of yourself, of how your own body remains vital even when everything falls apart. And when a family is grieving, even together, it becomes impossible to really reach out through the interminable black, to make contact, to find commonalities. Because no matter how much you share with them, you are yourself, indivisible, and alone.

This is quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read about grief. Yes, it’s a simple book. But it’s not a simplistic book. It’s an honest book, a true book, a hard book; it made me sob, hiccuping great big tears. If you’ve ever lost someone you cared about, you need this book. And if you haven’t yet? Well then, lucky you. But just you wait–someday, you’ll need it too.

A review copy of this volume was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes.

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