This is an odd favorite for me, since I much prefer stories with a high level of continuity and plot complexity. (There are a few short plot arcs; the one about the two girls who happen into minus’ washroom kingdom is my favorite part of the archives.) But the artwork is really pretty, and the individual episodes are charming and inventive enough to keep me interested.
It's possible that this book would be a lot more enjoyable if I'd read its predecessor, Castle Perilous, but it would still not be a good book. The characters are dull and it has, like many bad books, episodes with no plot function, the print equivalent of meanwhile figures. (Monster, monster, attempted coup, set to your partner, allemande.)
Goodness. There appear to be six more in the series after this one. Someone liked them, anyway.
An older Le Guin which I'd never gotten to. George Orr's dreams affect reality, and his psychologist uses him to remake the world, through a series of progressively weirder changes. A decent, short read; the Aldebaranians are the best part.
The plot involves the Wild Hunt, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Cherokee myth. The Cherokee elements take the back seat, though not by very much, in this book--partly because the Wild Hunt is driving the plot, and partly because Joanna was raised partly in Cherokee culture and doesn't, as narrator, spell out a lot of things she's internalized. (The immediate sequel is called Thunderbird Falls, which makes me wonder if it focuses more on Native American elements. That would be nice; given the number of urban fantasies that emphasize that their assorted supernatural beings are the older inhabitants of the land and have been encroached on by humans, you have to wonder about when and how the Seelie Court got to Wisconsin...)
I liked the book. It's not one I'm going to reread soon, but I enjoyed it enough that I'll track down the sequels. It appears to be an open-ended series, which is I think partly why I'm not more enthusiastic about it; some elements were pretty clearly only there for use in later books, like the suggestion that Joanne and her boss may wind up in a romantic relationship. Which is fine, but it helps if you're less obvious when inserting later plot handles. There's also some slight mis-cluing; enough attention was called to Gary's random and convenient store of knowledge that I expected something more to be going on with his character. He was, alas, exactly what he seemed. Overall, the book has what I think of as a low-density plot. Stuff happens, but just about every scene is part of the main plot arc; there's relatively little incident, side plot, or random bits stuck in just for fun. And the plot bits tend to involve extensive descriptions of out-of-body experiences, which are relevant but take up a lot of pages. But the book still moves along fast enough, and I think a lot of this is the compacted problems inherent in the first book in a series and an open-ended series; there's lots of setup, in other words, which could pay off well in later books, and no overarching series plot to keep things tight. It's also a first novel.
All in all, a really good read. Amanda, I know you don't like first-person narrators, but borrow this sometime and read the first two pages. Joanne doesn't like flying either.
On a side note: While the cover is attractive and appropriate to the book, the 20-something woman with a skimpy top and the suggestion of an Attitude posed in a slightly fantastic urban background is rapidly becoming a cliché. If the title font didn't suggest "this is a fantasy novel, Celtic elements likely" I might well have pegged it as paranormal romance.
Not a complaint. Just an observation. Amazing what a difference a font can make.
Stuff for urban fantasy project:
It's set in Seattle, and there's a definite sense of place without many recognizable locales being used. There's one major scene at the Seattle Center, but what interests me is the gratuitousness of it; the setting isn't reimagined in any way[1], and there's no reason the scene couldn't have taken place somewhere else. There does seem to be a tendency in urban fantasy to throw in famous settings for the hell of it.
The city as a source of concentrated power, which someone with the appropriate talents can tap into, is a recognizable trope in the books I'm reading.[2] Particular cites are often described as themselves magical, either literally or metaphorically. (Something that drove me batty in the Larbaleister books, which I also need to write up...)[3] Not surprising, when you've got authors using their hometowns or their favorite places as settings. What interests me is that there's a similar attitude in the Augustan poets, that Rome is just so damn cool.[4] I'll need to think about that some more.
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[1] Which is the closest I've gotten to explaining what I'm interested in for this project--famous locations reimagined, reinterpreted and reused through fantasy.
[2] When I'm looking for this again later, I'm thinking particularly of pp. 209, 244, 300-302, 339, my copy (trade pb, 2005).
[3] Ha. Just did. Ought to post these things when I write them, not leave them sitting around on the computer for ages.
[4]Laddie.
I've got nothing else worthwhile to say at the moment; there was nothing for my specific urban fantasy needs, and nothing else that I feel moved to comment on. Just a fun book.
This is a really interesting YA trilogy. The premise is that magic runs in families--but using it will eventually kill you, and not using it will drive you mad. The story starts with teenaged Reason Cansino, who has spent her life with her mother Sarafina on the run from her grandmother, who Sarafina describes as a witch. [1] Sarafina is a great believer in science, and while Reason has never been to school, she knows large amounts of math and science from her mother, and has a good practical knowledge of the Australian outback. When the book opens, Reason has just been left with her grandmother after Sarafina has tried to kill herself.
Sarafina is crazy, and Esmerelda is a magic user, and the dillemma of balancing the two choices is what drives the series. Also involved are two other magic users Reason's age, Tom and Jay-Tee, and a handful of other characters.
I really enjoyed these books, but found them frustrating in a few respects. For one thing, the time frame was too short. I no longer remember exactly how long the action of the three books takes, but it can't be more than two weeks, which didn't feel long enough to me for the amount of action packed in. The pacing of the books was fine; the pacing of the internal timeframe just felt way too compressed. I'm not sure why this bothers me, but it always does when authors do this. The scale of things is off.
But my main frustration with the books had to do with the setting. This has some tangential relevance for my urban fantasy paper, so it's probably going to get an inordinate amount of space here, and I should reiterate first that I thoroughly enjoyed this trilogy and recommend it highly. The books start off in Sydney, and I was thrilled. Larbaleister's descriptions of Australia are evocative and have good details picked out. But Esmerelda has a door in her kitchen that, when opened, will let a magic user through into New York City. Larbaleister seems fascinated by New York--it's described as having its own kind of magic[2], the Australian characters tend to find it interesting (if baffling, in Reason's case), and Jay-Tee, the native New Yorker, is massively homesick when she leaves. There's a fair amount of localization, especially in and around the East Village. And the characters tend to head straight for New York at the earliest moment the plot lets them.
I read the first two in February, in Michigan, with a rather bad cold, so I was not the best audience for this--Australia in the summer sounded much more interesting at the time than New York in winter did. But it's an interesting choice. Larbaleister (who is Australian) gets her characters out of the familiar setting and into the more interesting foreign city as fast as possible; and it brought home to me how much setting can matter, and, in urban fantasy, how much you need the audience to go along with the feeling that the city is an appropriate setting for the story. If you're setting a story in your favorite city, it's easy to forget that not everyone will know why you think it's such a great place; if you expect the setting to be evocative on its own, it's not going to work for people who don't know the area. Which isn't what Larbaleister does--she describes New York, sometimes in loving detail. But it was interesting to me that of two cities, described with roughly the same levels of detail, I was much more willing to accept the foreign (to me) one as an appropriate setting. I found Larbaleister's descriptions of Australia to have a much more liminal feel to them than my slush-inundated home state, while the Australian authors and characters react the same way in reverse. In that respect, I do think the setting is something of a shortcut here, a way of taking the characters out of a familiar setting and sending them someplace more interesting, more appropriate for a story about magic. It's a shortcut that simply didn't work for me.
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[1] My grasp on the details is hazy now, since I read the first one about six months ago. Sarafina definitely describes Esmerelda as a witch, but is also very adament that magic doesn't exist. (Her daughter's name should give you an idea of her outlook.) I can only reconcile these by thinking that by witch, Sarafina means something more along the lines of cultist. It didn't bother me at the time, so I assume I just can't remember how this fit together.
[2] In urban fantasies, the city tends to be either the enemy, encroaching on a countryside which is usually equated with tradition and magic, and those in which the city is a source of power, magic, and support for the characters. I can't tell whether there's a distinct shift in attitude depending on when the books were written, but there does seem to be more of the second kind around these days. Though Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons was an early urban fantasy, and definitely of this type.
The story takes place in Toronto, and does refer to specific locations, including streets and parts of the University campus, but there's no particularly interesting reimaginings of places. There's a troll under a bridge. I'm beginning to think that trolls under bridges are required for urban fantasy.
There's very short scene involving two police hitting a unicorn in their squad car. In an otherwise tightly-plotted book, this scene doesn't have much story function. I do sort of wonder if it was in there purely to allow a picture of a unicorn in an urban setting to go on the cover (which, indeed, it is).
Actually, now that I'm looking more closely at the cover, it's kind of fun--the cover artist, Dean Morrissey, has gone into a fair amount of detail. He did an accurate rendition of a Toronto police car, complete with motto and crest, and there's even a tiny little "TPW" on the manhole cover in the street, and there's a highway sign that seems to be accurate. There's a clock tower in the background that I'm guessing belongs to the University of Toronto. And on a street sign, he's named crossing roads after the Light and Dark Adepts.
I've been enjoying Armand's other comic, minus., and it's fun seeing him do something less frenetic but with more continuity.
Most of the book takes place at an sff convention in a fictional town called Wantchester, so no help there as far as my real-places-in-urban-fantasy needs go. But some early sections take place near Cambridge and in Bristol. It's the Bristol parts that I wanted to look at again, because one of the characters, Nick, has made up a game based on the geography of Bristol, which becomes Bristolia. Places like the zoo and a big red school become the Cliffores of the Monsters and the Castle of the Warden of the Green Waste [1]. Although we don't get much detail, Nick has invented histories to go along with the places. Nick and Maree spend much of an afternoon driving around Bristolia on his directions; and once they get to Wantchester, Nick starts constructing a similar map for that city. It's not a straightforward mapping of real places onto their fantastic equivalents, but is more imaginative. (I'm particularly fond of the bus station, which becomes "Glass Maze with Monsters".) Nick's games are mostly just background detail, provided for characterization (both of Nick and other people, in how they react), I find it interesting because it's a true fantasy world mapped onto the fictional world of the book. While it's common in urban fantasy to have a world that most people don't notice, having the characters invested in a world that even within the book is fictional is less common. (I saw someone comment recently that people in sf books never seem to read sf, an interesting point.) It works out well for them; Nick and Maree occasionally import logic from the stories they tell each other into their reality--for instance, they periodically do the Witchy Dance for luck, which does turn out to be efficacious. (The Witchy Dance is unrelated to Bristolia, but does come out of Nick and Maree's private reality from when they were kids.)
Riffs on perception and reality crop up throughout the book, for which the setting--an sf convention at which bizarre things really are happening, but can be passed off as con weirdness--is perfect. When a bleeding centaur shows up, con attendees think he's dressed for the ball ("Fantastic costume! Never thought of hiring a horse!"); some rather vicious sorcerers host classes in a conference room; and so on. The convention is a world of its own, which makes all the slipping between different realities in the book work really well [2].
[1] My copy, 1997 hardcover, p. 86.
[2] Which reminds me that I need to finish the Secret Country trilogy.
Danny Holman, a young EMT who has just left his hometown for
In this world, the elves who once inhabited earth returned in the mid 80's, and a number of gateways are open to their world; close to them technology breaks down and a demi-monde operating on magic and barter takes over. Mid-caste elves tend to join or form rival households on the earth side, toting guns and leather trenchcoats; one named Cloudhunter is employed by Patrise (the names in this are delicious). Another, Whisper Who Dares the Word of Words in Darkness, is trying to gain power in the Levee. Most of the
This is a wonderful book, in which just enough of the worldbuilding is spelled out that you can follow it, but with a great deal unelaborated. I've seen other people comment that it's very similar to the Borderland series of shared-world books; whether it should be considered as part of that universe or not seems to be debatable. The plot is slippery enough that I need to reread it to understand exactly what, in the end, happened.
Comments for urban fantasy project. Aside from the first few pages, the book takes place entirely in Chicago, but a Chicago that's been radically altered by the presence of the gateway to the Shadow world. Much of it was destroyed in a massive fire when the gates opened, and from the outside, the Levee seems surrounded by a perpetual orange light, so that from a distance the city still seems to be burning. Inside the Levee, the ambiance is that of the Prohibition era, from nightclub singers in beaded dresses to men with tommyguns to theatres that play black and white films because the elves prefer them to technicolor. The familiar physical
There are some possible, very oblique suggestions to why the Levee seems to be recreating the '20s. Patrise at one point explains that the elves have to follow the dominant thinking of a group--"slaves to fashion", as he puts it, and this lies behind their highly rigid, hierarchical society, a pattern which they also imposed on humans in the distant past. When the elves withdrew, humans kept the tendency to follow group trends, but also tended to change their taste and their rules rapidly. This habit baffled and frightened the returning elves, who found that humans were impossible to dominate the way they once had; "They were no longer the arbiters; they were just one more designer label." And the elves found that they were susceptible to human trends themselves; human fashions and taste forced themselves upon them, and they were left to try to outdo humans at the game.
So what exactly is going on here? Is the Prohibition-era ambiance pure glitz for the setting (and it is glitzy; this is a very stylish book), or is it meant to imply that the elves latched on to what they found most alluring in the historical styles of
I’ve been deliberately avoiding this book for several years now, despite multiple recommendations, because as soon as you say elves in rock bands I feel myself break out in hives. I finally read it because I clearly needed to for the urban fantasy project, as it’s a classic of the genre. And, once I got pastone or two pages of overwritten prologue, it turned out to be fantastic. It’s generous with its characters and funny without trying too hard, and thoroughly grounded in the local details of
The story revolves around Eddi McCandry, a singer in a Minneapolis rock band, who in one evening breaks up with her boyfriend, quits his band (“InKline Plain, the most misspelled band in Minneapolis”), and gets chased down Nicollet Mall by a man who’s also a big black dog.[1] The local Seelie Court has decided to make their ongoing war against the Unseelie Court more serious, and wants Eddi on the battlefield; the presence of a mortal will make wounds serious and death possible for the usually immortal fair folk.[2] Eddi is unwillingly recruited, and saddled with the Phouka, the dog man, who is her bodyguard-cum-watcher as they wait for the first battles to begin. Meanwhile, she’s trying to start a band.
It’s a heavily character-driven book, with the main relationships being the one between Eddi and the Phouka, neither of whom are wild about being stuck with the other, and between Eddi and her band members. Emma Bull writes her characters with sympathy, and is mercifully free from preachiness. The Phouka, in particular, is a great character [3]:
Eddi finally noticed the amber color of the stuff in the glass, and smelled the brandy fumes. “That’s for medicinal purposes.”
“I’m not surprised. I have been consuming it steadily for the last hour, and I can assure you, it was not made for the sake of pleasurable drinking.” He spoke more slowly than usual, but just as clearly.
“Then why, Eddi asked carefully, “have you been drinking it?”
“Perhaps because I needed physicking, my heart. Or perhaps not. Tell me, what do you keep it on hand to cure?”
“Head colds.”
“Ah, that’s the problem, then. I haven’t got one.”
“Who writes your dialogue, Lewis Carroll?”
The thing I was most wary about, the music element, is actually really well done. Bull was (and is) part of the Minneapolis music scene (some of the groups she’s been part of, like Flash Girls and Cats Laughing, have played songs she wrote for War for the Oaks). Although she sprinkles band and song names liberally through the book, including lyrics in places, and although the book does seem richer where you happen to know the music, it’s not a prerequisite; instead of relying on the music references to create atmosphere, Bull describes the music, whether the sound or the sensation of playing, any time that the effect is important. This made a huge difference (especially since the book is almost 20 years old now, and people reading it now, like me, are not necessarily going to know a lot of the bands mentioned, even when they weren’t purely local ones).
Notes on urban fantasy and places. War for the Oaks has a wealth of local references, most of them quite casual—local clubs, supermarkets, streets and newspapers are mentioned in passing, Eddi and the others play in real
Both Eddi and Bull are clearly fond of their city. (Less so
The faeries are mostly placed in the parks, the least urban of the urban spaces, and although they will dress like humans and blend in when they chose to, they are clearly still nature spirits. Cars make the Phouka sick, and some of the faeries Eddi runs across are quite wild. The Unseelie court has walking willow trees (willows again!). Several of the parks have otherwoldly qualities to them.
Eddi is an agent of this tangling of faerie and human. She links the two worlds; they tend to interact more when she is around. She is involved in order to enable the faerie folk to die like humans, and she tends to draw them into the human world—they come to clubs where her band plays (with various intentions), and in the the final battle, the outcome of the war is explicitly made her responsibility. While the city’s fate is tied to the outcome of the war, the outcome for the faerie courts is linked to the city and to everything that Eddi finds good and exciting and full of energy about it.
Ultimately, the book implies another, magical world that exists in
Out on Hennepin, the evening had begun. Cars cruised—little imports, shiny pickup trucks, and big American cars with lots of rear suspension and very little muffler. Dance music beckoned from the open door of Duff’s. A boy with an enormous mohawk and a girl in a torn jean jacket and engineer boots were arguing with an earnest young man in front of the
“I love this street,” said Eddi.
Willy shot her a quick look. “You mean that?”
“Too grungy for you?”
“Not quite, no, but love?”
Eddi stuffed her hands in her pockets. “At night,” she said at last, “this is the heart of
Eddi’s band, which inhabits the real spaces of local clubs and bars the way that the faeries do the parks, embodies the energy of the city. The local music scene acquires a mythology of its own.
[1] I remain baffled as to why the back cover blurb says that Eddi is dumped by her boyfriend. She emphatically does the dumping. And good riddance, too.
[2] As I somewhat expected, urban fantasies in which the local Seelie and Unseelie Courts duke it out over territory seems to be a standard variant.
[3] And made infinitely funnier, to me at least, by the fact that he’s firmly lodged in my head as Artie from Narbonic.
[4] My copy, p. 129; pages numbers are purely for my own later use.
“I remember when the sea was full of fish with mysterious names; Mudrake, Cornsweat, Yasmuda, and there wasn’t much to do in a day.”
Bones of the Moon is a wonderful book, full of sharp griefs and wonderments. Cullen, an unhappy young
While she’s pregnant with their first child, Cullen starts to have a series of connected dreams about a country called Rondua, populated by fantastic animals and people with names like Fire Sandwich. She has a son there, and friends who seem to know her; and Cullen gradually realizes that she has been to Rondua before. The Rondua sections of the book are told in linear but fragmentary fashion, and why Cullen is there and what they are trying to do is only slowly revealed. As seems to be typical of Carroll’s work, the fantastic and the mundane seep into each other. Parts of Rondua are recognizable from Cullen’s waking life—a bit of sea glass, the Greek word for pinecones, Cullen’s 6th grade teacher—and several characters assume that Cullen’s dreams are just catharsis of a sort. Meanwhile, the dreams start to affect the waking world.
I read Jonathan Carroll’s first book, The Land of Laughs, just before starting this log, but didn’t include it because I didn’t have much to say—the writing was nice enough, but I found the plot rather predictable. Like Bones of the Moon, it has a main, real-world narrative, with secondary stories—in this case, snippets from children’s books written by a character—woven in, with increasingly blurry lines between the real and the fantastic. In
The book made me realize that I really like stories where the main character has been part of something, in some alternate or earlier life, that they are only starting to remember. Apparently the Game of You arc of Sandman, another of the type, was influenced by Bones; I have a feeling that I’ve read another example or two that I can’t bring to mind right now.
There’s nothing much useful to say here as far as my urban fantasy project goes.
The adult life that Cullen achieves is in many ways a tamer version of her dream world; the good and bad parts are not as beautiful or terrifying as the extremes of Rondua, but Cullen is deeply conscious of the life she’s made for herself through both luck and courage. Danny stands almost wholly outside the Rondua narrative, but is at the heart of the story; he’s the reason Cullen has changed enough to do what she has to in both worlds.
I simply don’t like Charles de Lint’s work, which is a pity, since he’s both prolific and important to the urban fantasy subgenre. Most of his books are set in either
Jack the Giant Killer was part of the series of novel-length fairy tale retellings that came out in the 80’s.[1] Jacky, having just broken up with her boyfriend, who thinks she’s boring, accidentally stumbles into the faerie world which coexists with Ottawa. There’s a wizard living in his “tower”, a ramshackle house; the Wild Hunt drives around on Harleys; giants have taken over the Civic Center for their court, and so on, all unseen by most humans. The daughter of the lord of the local Seelie court has been kidnapped, and Jacky impulsively decides to find her.
I enjoy urban fantasy, but my reading of it has been spotty. I'm trying to get through the most important books for the genre, whether or not they're doing anything interesting with geography, for background; and as many of the books that do make use of famous places as I can.
My reading list, which I'm adding to as I go:
To read:
Emma Bull: Finder
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
C.E. Murphy: Urban Shaman
Adam Stemple: Singer of Souls
Kim Wilkins: Autumn Castle
Tad Williams: The War of the Flowers
Elizabeth Bear: Blood and Iron
Jim Butcher: The Dresden Files
Kelley Armstrong: Women of the Otherworld
Fritz Leiber: Conjure Wife
James D. Macdonald: The Apocalypse Door
Changeling, Delia Sherman
Ilona Andrews: Magic Bites
Mieville: Un Lun Dun; King Rat
Terri Windling: The Wood Wife (Fairy Tales)
Matt Ruff: Fool on the Hill
Tim Powers: Last Call
Bordertown anthologies
S. Andrew Swann: The Dragons of the Cuyahoga
Jim Butcher: The
Mark Del Franco: Unshapely Things
Kim Harrison: Dead Witch Walking
Rob Thurman: Nightlife
Vicki Pettersson: The Scent of Shadows
Kat Richardson: Greywalker
Carrie Vaughn: Kitty and the Midnight Hour
Patricia Briggs: Moon Called
Molly Cochran: The Forever King
Ellen Datlow, ed.: The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm
Martin Millar: The Good Fairies of New York
Julie Kenner: Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
Gael Baudino: Gossamer Axe
Richard Bowes: Minions of the Moon
Lisa Goldstein: Dark Cities Underground
Viido Polikarpus and Tappan King:
Wen Spenser: Tinker
Lisa Tuttle
Mark Helprin: A Winter's Tale
To reread:
Holly Black: Tithe; Valient; Ironside
Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere; American Gods; Anansi Boys
Pamela Dean: Tam Lin
Stephan Zielinski: Bad Magic
Emma Bull: War for the Oaks
Jonathan Carroll: Bones of the Moon
Diana Wynne Jones: Deep Secret
John M. Ford: The Last Hot Time
Jonathan Carroll: The
Robin Hobb: Wizard of the Pigeons
Justine Larbalestier: Magic or Madness; Magic Lessons; Magic's Child
Although the urban fantasy project is the immediate reason I started this, I'll also be keeping notes on other books, anime, webcomics and movies. I have a few other long-term reading projects in mind, anyway.
