Friday, January 31, 2020

2020 read #3: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
359 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 24 to January 31
Rating: 2 out of 5

I have a weakness for books with beautiful covers. Lush woods, striking imagery, more abstract compositions suggesting magic in the depths between the covers—I get hooked every time. This book’s cover, with its arcane objects arranged in gilt patterns to suggest infinity, earned it a spot in my must-read list the moment I saw it displayed in a chain bookseller. Further, the jacket flap summary alluded to a childhood spent growing up on the road, on the run from magical enmity. How could I resist something like that?

Unlike Albert, who mentions her own happy childhood in the acknowledgments, I really did grow up on the road, raised by a single parent. Unlike Ella Proserpine, who spirits her daughter Alice from place to place to stay one step ahead of supernatural stalkers out of fairy tales, my father shoved me into the car while he attempted to flee from his own schizophrenia. Magic and mental illness have been linked since the putative days of shamans, of course, so I really wanted to like this book, even if it did step on the toes of a story that should have been mine to tell.

Sadly, I don’t think I was the intended demographic for this story.

The vast “Young Adult fantasy” field of modern times, from what I’ve read and reviewed over the years, often seems directed less at current tweens and teens and more at the Millennials (now pushing 40 in some cases) who imprinted on Harry Potter as kids, and never stopped craving snack-food fantasy. YA fantasy today seems designed around a drive-thru menu of ass-kicking suprahuman action heroes like those you'd find in Marvel movies or pulp novels of yore, except not so numbingly straight, white, and male. This isn’t meant maliciously; I’d far rather chat books and hang out with someone who swears by The Invisible Library than someone who still reads Terry Goodkind or John Ringo in 2020. The Hazel Wood seems to run counter to this "YA is for thirtysomethings" trend: it seems to be a YA novel actually written for teens.

Alice, our narrator and hero, is an angry person. Everything and anything will set her off: people hindering her, people helping her, people trying to get to know her. But pretty much everyone around her is almost equally short with everyone else. It reminded me at times of one of my least favorite books, The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. The narration is flippant and sarcastic and sometimes just flat-out bad, especially in its descriptions: "like someone sewing a sweater onto my skin at the speed of sound.” Or my favorite: "[the statues] glared impassively." How can anything, even a statue, glare impassively? Impassive and glaring are mutually exclusive.

The first two-thirds of The Hazel Wood is next door to unreadable, a journey narrative where the momentum gets killed every couple pages for the characters to try to talk and develop and spell out exposition, but then that too stalls as they get pissed at each other and fall into snarling instead. Deprived of any real development, every character aside from Alice feels more like a plot device than a person. If I had to pick one line from the book to summarize the experience of reading its first two hundred pages, it would be this: "He started to say something, but shrugged instead."

The last third of the book sees a slight improvement, suggesting far more interesting narratives than the one we just labored through, but even at its best, The Hazel Wood reads like a not very good imitation of Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series. The ending is all right, again bringing to mind a much better book (Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway), but that isn't enough to save it or make the experience worthwhile.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

2020 read #2: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
323 pages
Published 2017
Read from January 20 to January 24
Rating: 4 out of 5

I can’t seem to resist comparing this book to Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child. Both are novels centered on girls growing up with an uncanny connection to the northern wildwood; both are based on Russian folktales; both make a central character out of the taiga landscape itself. Unlike The Snow Child, which squanders its magic and mystery with mundane explanations in order to preserve its literary fiction credentials, The Bear and the Nightingale is explicitly fantasist in conception and outlook, its magic and mystery rooted in the narrative rather than used as cheap set dressings to discard when no longer needed—and is altogether better for it.

It took a while for Nightingale to click into place for me. Most of that has to do with the attention problems that have hindered my reading pace for the last few years; the novel was lovely and evocative from the first page. What I expected from this book, however, was not the story Arden had set out to tell. Nightingale is largely a domestic drama about a feudal landowning family in northern Rus'. The fantastic elements emerge gradually, little touches here and there, enriching the story without commandeering it until the second half or so. A central theme is the lack of choice facing women in this feudal society—growing up, girls know they're destined to be married off, either literally to some man as a "mare for his pleasure," or figuratively to the church as an inmate in a convent. This would have been a fascinating thread had Arden done more with it. As it is, only our hero Vasilisa (or Vasya) seems aware of the unfairness of this arrangement, and only her stepmother Anna is shown to suffer from it. Once Vasya makes the choice to, well, make sure she always has a choice in her life, the shackles of centuries of misogynistic tradition vanish and she finds herself free. If only things were ever that simple.

The best part of Nightingale was its rich, immersive depiction of the seasonal round of the Land of Forests. Cramped, famished winters lead to springs of eager growth and languid summers of lingering twilight. The magic of Arden's Rus' is in the land itself. The imagery of the Winter-King's domain scarcely matches the pure beauty of the forests around Vasya's village. At times, the more fantastical imagery of the feud between the Winter-King and his brother Medved feels like an intrusion from a less beautiful, less interesting book, though thankfully those moments don't last for long. The climax veers from rousing to corny to heartbreaking, ultimately a fairly satisfying cap on a lovely story.

Without spoiling too much, however, I can say that the coda—in which our hero Vasya, gifted with a mighty supernatural steed and ready to ride to all the corners of the world now that she's free of the expectations of late medieval womanhood—feels like a tacky sequel hook from a forgettable YA fantasy.

Friday, January 10, 2020

2020 read #1: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
343 pages
Published 1948
Read from December 26 to January 10
Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the first book that I can recall that was hard to read because I liked the narrator so much.

I requested it from the library after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially re-read last year). The continuity between the two narrators' styles is immediately evident, which no doubt added to my instant liking for Smith's Cassandra. At first Castle is a tale of the Mortmain family's poverty and fallen fortunes in the romantic ruins of Godsend Castle, which touched the same Anglophile nerve that made me feel so at home reading about Walnut Tree Farm. (Just as an aside, I believe my Anglophilia took root from reading so much Wells and Conan Doyle in my youth. I may detest the nation's current politics, but a romantic notion of England and its countryside grows rampant in my imagination.) They barely eke out an existence on garden vegetables and the occasional egg spared by their hen. When the family's fortunes begin to rise again in the first half of the novel, all I wanted to do was keep reading of Cassandra's enthusiasm for ham suppers and full bellies. I know what it feels like to have to scrape together something, anything at all to eat—and then to go from that to having small, satisfying luxuries again.

Unfortunately, the book isn't content with describing our young hero's lunches. It quickly builds into a complex structure of people falling in love with someone who is in love with someone else, what Cassandra herself sums up as "a follow-my-leader game of second-best we have all been playing." Cassandra's emotional turmoil and growing anguish made me long for those simple pleasures of ham and tinned salmon—and made me put down the book repeatedly whenever the poor girl poured out her broken heart, or made a decision that made it all worse.

Written in the 1940s and set in the 1930s, Castle has its share of uncomfortably dated notions, especially on gender and relationships. Cassandra's father James is a writer who turned out one famous early modernist novel and then withdrew into a long period of stagnation and reading detective novels alone at his desk; her stepmother Topaz is a former artist's model who longs to be the muse of and longsuffering wife to this "genius," believing he will turn out further works of brilliance under her ministrations, while Cassandra, her older sister Rose, and their younger brother Thomas all look after themselves as best as they can. James' emotional abuse and neglect toward his family is excused by Topaz (and later by Cassandra) as an essential ingredient of his authorial genius. When Cassandra falls head over heels for an older man who takes advantage of the moment to kiss her "impulsively," our girl blames herself for "permitting" him, condemning herself as "wicked"—and then pines after him for the rest of the book.

Despite that, the winsomeness of its narration does wonders to elevate Castle—earnest without sounding forced, charming without apparent effort, honest and analytical and frustrated with the inadequacies of the language. Cassandra is the best part of Castle, and I'm happy to have spent so much time in her head.