Reserved for the Cat

Ninette Dupond's father vanished when she was a child, and her mother has recently died.  A moment of glory on stage, dancing the title role of La Sylphide when the prima ballerina is unexpectedly injured, turns into disaster when one review is a little too good, and Ninette loses her position with the Paris Opera Ballet at the insistence of the star.  Then the tabby cat that hangs around her house speaks in her mind, and tells her he can make her a star if she just does what he tells her.

This is the latest in Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series, a set of historical fantasy novels retelling fairy tales in early 20th-century settings.  The common thread is a theory of magic based on the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water.  I like all of these, and the ones where the base fairy tale is not immediately obvious are my particular favorites.  I was almost at the end of this one before I realized what tale it was, though once I'd guessed it I could see there were earlier episodes that should have tipped me off.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/13/07

Becoming Jane

Jane Austen never married.  When she was about twenty, she had a flirtation with one Tom Lefroy, an Irish relative of her (much older) friend Mrs. Anne Lefroy.  He couldn't afford to marry her, and at the end of his visit to his relatives they went their separate ways.

From these sparse facts a movie has been spun, with Anne Hathaway doing a creditable English accent as Jane (though I didn't see this one with my British friend, as I did Miss Potter, so I'm not sure what her verdict on the dialect would be) and James McAvoy as Tom, depicting their flirtation as extremely similar to the courtship of Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, starting in mutual disdain and coming around to a passion that can't be denied...except that, as we know from history, Jane Austen never married Tom Lefroy or anyone else.

It's the kind of movie that makes me want to find a  book that'll tell me the real story, because I know that wasn't it.  But it was pretty to look at, well acted all around, and adequately entertaining for a Sunday matinee.

Originally posted at MySpace 9/16/07

The World Without Us

An article on animal and plant life in the vicinity of Chernobyl--unexpectedly thriving in the absence of humans in spite of the radiation level--led author Alan Weisman to expand the question to what would happen if people disappeared everywhere.  Assuming we didn't destroy ourselves in some messy way that would affect the rest of the planet, but were just quietly removed from the picture as of now, what would come next? 

Some of the speculation is optimistic, some not so much.  Talking about what might happen to landscapes or species without any further human interference requires a good deal of background on what we've done to them already, and some of that made difficult reading.  The prospect of what's likely to happen next assuming that humans carry on as we've been doing lately is mostly outside the scope of the book, though the author did have an interesting (and, I think, extremely unlikely) suggestion for how not to screw up the world even more.  Very interesting book.

Originally posted at MySpace 8/16/07

Empire of Blue Water

Henry Morgan hated being called a pirate.  As far as he was concerned, he was a privateer, and his attacks on Spanish settlements were all part of his patriotic service to his own country, first under Cromwell and later under the restored King Charles.  The fact that they also made him fabulously wealthy was a side benefit, secondary to the fact that his successes against Spain led to his being knighted and appointed deputy governor of Jamaica--at which point he turned around and worked on eliminating his former buccaneering colleagues.  It was all part of serving his king.

Empire of Blue Water, by Stephan Talty, takes an interesting tack in tying Captain Morgan's career to the rise and fall of Port Royal, Jamaica, at one time the wickedest city in the Western Hemisphere.  Unfortunately, the author also chooses to create a composite character to illustrate the experiences of a typical pirate of the time, and the interjection of Roderick into Morgan's documented campaigns adds a disorienting note of fiction to the proceedings.  It's a readable and interesting book, but I wasn't always sure the author was taking it seriously.

Originally posted at MySpace 6/23/07

The Children of Hurin

I've been reading the new book by J.R.R. Tolkien, who has been dead for 34 years.  It's a story I'm familiar with from its iterations in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The Lays of Beleriand: Húrin, the lord of the (human) House of Hador in the First Age of Middle-Earth, is an ally of the Noldor Elves in their interminable war against Morgoth, the force of evil, until he is captured in battle.  When he still refuses to knuckle under, Morgoth curses him and his whole family, and Húrin's son Túrin and daughter Niënor grow up under the curse unbeknownst to them.  The book is mostly about Túrin and how everything he ever does turns out badly for him and those who love him...and, really, for everyone around him whether they love him or not.

It's a story that must have been close to Tolkien's heart, seeing as how he spent pretty much his whole adult life writing and rewriting it in prose and in intricate alliterative verse.  It's also bloody depressing, without a paragraph or even a line of redemption for anybody in it.  The emphasis on man's inability to escape his fate is very strong.

But I think it works better as a standalone tale between its own covers than it does as a chapter in a longer book.  The illustrations by Alan Lee are great as well.  Far be it from me to argue with Christopher Tolkien, who has been editing his father's papers almost as long as I've been alive, but I disagree with his decision to end the tale rather abruptly after the death of Túrin, then append an awkward epilogue about the parents; either leave them out entirely, or give them their own chapter! But I'd love to see the other two of Tolkien's three "Great Tales" given the same treatment, though I don't know if that's possible given the extant variations.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/27/07

Miss Potter

An unmarried woman in her thirties in early twentieth-century England could have a pretty hard time.  At 36, Beatrix still lived at home with her parents.  She couldn't go anywhere without a companion to maintain the proprieties.  But she had written a story, illustrated with her own paintings, that she thought would be worth publishing, and publishers Frederick Warne and Co. agreed that The Tale of Peter Rabbit was thoroughly charming. Her parents disapproved of her association with a family "in trade," but Beatrix Potter found that she approved of the youngest Warne brother Norman more and more.

I have to admit I've never really read anything about the life of Beatrix Potter, so I can't say how historically accurate this movie was.  I saw it with a British friend, who said all the lovely Lake District scenery made her very homesick; she also said Renee Zellweger's accent was pretty believable.  I enjoyed the movie enough that I'll probably look up a biography of Beatrix now.  It's a very quiet film, playing out mostly in drawing rooms and gardens, but I like that kind of thing.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/17/07

Fables, vol. 1: Legends in Exile

Centuries after being driven from their individual magical homelands by an unknown Adversary, various characters from folklore and fairy tales (and a few classic children's books for good measure) are living in relative peace and quiet in New York, in a community they call Fabletown.  The Big Bad Wolf (now in human form) is the Sheriff; King Cole is the mayor; Snow White (long since divorced from Prince Charming, who turned out to be all style and no content) is the deputy mayor who actually gets all the work done.  In the first collection of this ongoing comic book series, Bigby Wolf is dismayed when Snow White inserts herself into his investigation of a Fable's disappearance and possible murder, but even he has to admit she has reason to take a special interest; the victim is her sister, Rose Red.

I love this series.  I used to be a minor comic book geek: I collected a couple of superhero titles (in mylar bags with cardboard backing), but I had pretty pedestrian tastes.  It really wasn't until well after I got thoroughly X-Menned out and gave up on superhero comics that graphic novels as a format really took off in this country.  They're doing amazing things in graphic storytelling these days, in every genre from the traditional superhero fantasy to tell-all memoirs.  This series is straight fantasy without the superheros (though Bigby Wolf gets to save the day in dramatic fashion a few times) and it's great stuff: Brilliantly written and excellently drawn.

Originally posted at MySpace 3/30/07