[Lisa’s Take] The Stepsister Scheme (Jim C. Hines)

The Stepsister Scheme is book number 12 for me this year, and has the dubious honor of being the first book I’m putting down without finishing. A couple of months back I picked up the second book in this series (The Mermaid’s Madness) without realizing it was a sequel. The description was intriguing; a continuation/retelling of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, only with all the princesses being ass-kicking bad-asses. I started on The Mermaid’s Madness, quickly realized it was Book 2, and stopped to backtrack and pick up book 1. Don’t get me started ranting about how much it pisses me off when publishers don’t list on the cover or spine that a book is part of a series.

The only reason I gave The Stepsister Scheme 150 pages of my time is because I was stuck on a plane and had nothing else to read. The characters are stereotypical and hackneyed, the plot is incredibly pedestrian, and the jokes and attempts at humor made me roll my eyes every time. The book reads like something aimed at 13-year-old girls, except that from time to time it throws in some adult themes and dirty language. I dog-eared 10 pages out of the first 100 that had contradictions or repetitive language. I really have absolutely nothing positive to say. Oh – and the cover was embarrassing to be witnessed holding, just to add insult to injury.

I won’t wax poetic on this one – just skip it. If you’re looking for books that take a fairy tale or fantasy basis then twist it and add hilarity, pick up Company of Ogres or Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez.

[Lisa's Take] The Magicians (Lev Grossman)

Hoo boy am I ever behind on reviews. Work got quite busy for a while, so that plus traveling means I have been unabashedly slack about keeping my various blogs up to date. So! Let's see if I can remedy that.

Before I start gushing about The Magicians, I need to get one thing out of the way: I had a problem with the end of this book. After how excellent and solid the rest of the story was, the ending kind of rubbed me wrong for reasons I can't go into without spoiling.

However! Ending quibbles aside, The Magicians was an absolutely excellent book and I enjoyed it immensely. It will definitely be in hot contention for "Lisa's Top 5 of 2009." The setup is this: Quentin is a smart kid, late high-school, a bit geeky and shy. Like many smart kids, he has a big place in his heart for a childhood book series featuring swords and sorcery. Quentin is also about to head off to college, and on the day he has an interview for Princeton he's thrown off course by a mysterious package and instead ends up in another world taking an entrance exam for a school that teaches magic.

I know, it sounds a bit "Harry Potter" but please don't lower it to that level. This book is so much more.

Here's the thing: The Magicians does "magic school" without being trite. So very many books just don't pull that off. Even Name of the Wind - which was excellent overall - had moments of triteness when it came to magic school. Grossman has none of that. Everything about the characters, worlds, and situations he builds is real and visceral and moving. He touches on themes that everyone has to deal with between age 20 and 30, and he does so with poignant insights and cutting realism. Magic school is just a vessel for a much deeper investigation about character, personality, and learning what the "real world" is like.

I won't say more about the plot lest I spoil things, but I think the climax of this book deserve special mention. You remember when you were a kid, reading a fantasy story by one of the masters and they managed to build the intensity such that it got your heart racing and just scared you? When Shelob attacks Frodo, or when you see the Jabberwocky for the first time? Yeah. Grossman did that to me as a 26-year-old adult curled up in my cozy hotel room. He did it without blood or gore or any other "easy" pretense - he just built up his atmosphere and layered on the suspense more and more. I was nervous about turning off the light at bed time.

I recommend The Magicians more highly than anything else I've read in the last 4 months. It is fresh and original (in spite of all of the preconceptions you might harbor upon reading the summary) and it twinges the emotional strings like nobody's business. Huge thumbs up.

[Lisa's Take] Thomas the Rhymer (Ellen Kushner)

You don't see this particular book of Ellen Kushner's in bookstores all that often, so I nabbed a copy when I happened to spot it at Borders. It's a slim little volume, clocking in at only 260ish pages, but it is the winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1991 and has a glowing cover-blurb from Neil Gaiman. Needless to say, my expectations were high.

The story is a novel-style re-telling of the classic ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (who is in turn based upon a real 13th century Scottish laird). According to the ballad, Thomas is seduced be the queen of Elfland and tricked into staying in her fairy world for 7 years. When he returns to the human world she gives him a parting gift of prophecy.

Kushner's take on the story is true to the traditional ballad, but she takes the tack of telling the tale from the point of view of 4 characters: Meg and Gavin, two surrogate parental figures; Elspeth, a friend and potential lover; and Thomas himself. Her approach is interesting and lends a certain depth and sense of realism to the legend.

The prose is lovely, as is always the case with Kushner's work, and the story moves along fairly quickly. Unfortunately, the book never quite connected with me - there was something missing, though I can't for the life of me put my finger on what. I think part of it was that Meg and Gavin seemed a bit shallow as characters; I didn't empathize with them as greatly as I did Thomas and Elspeth. I also thought the story laid it on a little too thick with some of enchantments of the Elfland queen - it got to the point where I found myself thinking "ok, I get it, she's unfathomably desirable and Thomas is hopelessly entranced. Can we move on?"

In the end, I suppose this book was a mixed bag. The writing style was lovely, and it was an interesting way to approach a classic story. Sadly, I felt let down from where my expectations were set by so much glowing praise, which cast a pall on my opinion as a whole. Take from that what you will, and maybe only pick up Thomas the Rhymer if you're in the mood for something classic and poetic.

[Related Aside: I realized in writing this review that I've now been disappointed by 3 or 4 books that I picked up (at least in part) because of a cover-blurb by Neil Gaiman. Maybe I should take a hint: read his books, but not the books he recommends...]

[Lisa’s Take] Peter and the Starcatchers (Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson)

After reading Peter David’s most excellent novella Tigerheart, I was feeling a soft spot towards Peter Pan stories. So the reason I picked up Peter and the Starcatchers was threefold: it was sitting on a “staff recommended” shelf at the book store, I was feeling fond of Neverland, and Dave Barry writes such a great news paper column that I figured his fantasy would have to be great.

Peter and the Starcatchers is kind of a Peter Pan Prequel (mmm, alliteration), the first in an ongoing series. It follows the story of a group of young orphans who get sent off on a ship that will take them to live in the employ of an evil prince. Their voyage does not go as planned, however, and through the course of the story we find out just how the ordinary boy Peter becomes the legend that can fly and defy pirates. We also meet Captain Hook’s precursor and discover the events through which he came to be plagued by a crocodile.

This book is definitely a kids book; I think a child between 8 and 12 would really love it. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to the “timeless tale” measure, like Tigerheart did. I chomped the book down on a flight home from Memphis, all in one sitting, but I really only kept reading it because I had nothing better to do. The story was fun and it was a creative and interesting take on Peter Pan, but there was no real substance to it. At times the narrative aaaaalmost took on a self-aware tone and injected a bit of humor… but in the end it fell short and missed the mark.

Peter and the Starcatchers is a good book for youths and young adults, but lacks the punch or depth to make it appeal to all audiences. If you pick it up looking for Dave Barry’s usual wit and humor, I fear you will be disappointed.

[Lisa’s Take] The Book of Lost Things (John Connolly)

Imagine The Wizard of Oz: a young child experiences trauma and gets whisked away to an alternate, magical world inside his brain. Instead of munchkins and scarecrows, mix in a handful of well known fairy tales – the gruesome Brothers Grimm versions, not the squeaky clean Disney kind. Add a dash of philosophical dithering on destiny and growing up, and you pretty much have a solid picture of the plot and themes in The Book of Lost Things.

It’s a really promising premise, and John Connolly delivers a solid book. The plot moves along nicely; his takes on the classic fairy tales are interesting, dark, and sometimes humorous. And yet... I’m having a hard time coming up with the rousing endorsement that you’d think would logically follow. I’m not really sure what the cause of the disconnect is – I just didn’t get as caught up in the plot and characters and stories as I wanted to be.

I suspect there are a couple of contributing factors here – first is that I’ve read Tad Williams Otherland books, which are really the master work in fantasy when it comes to taking existing folk and fairy tales and mashing them up. Once you’ve seen it done so well, it makes later works feel less original; much like trying to go back and read Neuromancer after reading contemporary cyberpunk.

The other problem is that my internal heuristic for when the book would end was thrown off in The Book of Lost Things. You know how when you’re reading a book you get a feeling for the pacing of the end of the story by how many pages you have left? If you have 20 pages left to turn, you figure “wow, the end is really near! Things are going to happen quickly!” but if you have 100 pages left, you think “this can’t be the big climax – I still have chapters and chapters to read!” Unbeknownst to me, The Book of Lost Things had about 100 pages of author interviews, reprintings of the original fairy tales, and discussions of the author’s use of the tales. So as I was nearing the end of the story, I kept thinking I had a hundred pages left, so surely there would be so much more to tell—then I turned the page and it was over and I was confused and disappointed.

Neither of these items is really Mr. Connolly’s fault – only my own preconceptions and expectations coloring my enjoyment of the book. As such, I’ll neither recommend nor discourage you from reading this book. I think it could be enjoyable and entertaining (perhaps even rewarding) to the right reader in the right mindset, and I think it was a good work – just not for me right at this moment.