Story on the Brain

I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply.  Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over.  Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside. This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full ...

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it. What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree . Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world. First, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He doesn't have to fight for anything. Third, his powers are awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E. Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs than these books. Silver On the Tree was the worst offender, followed closel...

This is a shorter analysis because I truly despised this awful book. Don't read this if you liked the novel. You have been warned.  ***** If you think smoking, drinking, drugs, vomit, crime, and cruelty are cool, this is the book for you. The writing is gorgeous, if exhausting and overblown, but it's in the service of the most atrocious characters. The plot is strong but inflated to easily triple the size it needed to be, maybe quadruple. The narrative dribbles along in slow motion and is full of pointlessly baroque scenes and entire massive chapters that go nowhere. Pace your work, writers of the world. The main character is by far the worst thing about the book, after all the vomit. Have I mentioned the endless vomit scenes? He has no spine and makes no decisions and in no way drives the story. All he does is lie around being squalid, very nearly ruins the life of the kind man who took him in when he was homeless, and follows others around doing whatever they want ...

I have a whole row of candy-colored Meg Cabot books on my shelf, but the three "Boy" books are my favorites. The Boy Next Door , Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One. They're epistolary in the sense that they're built out of journal entries, email, messaging, voicemail, letters, notes, even documents from office work.  The Boy Next Door tells its story through conversations between Mel Fuller, a newspaper columnist, and her friends and co-workers, as she works through finding her neighbor unconscious, the victim of an assault, and tries to take care of the neighbor's Great Dane and two cats with the help of a man she thinks is the neighbor's relative. He isn't--and they fall in love--which is the twist that drives much of the drama of the book.  I'm interested in the epistolary format for something I'm writing myself, so I wanted to dig into these three books and see what works and what doesn't.  Epistolary is brilliant for lies and for cont...

Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig Fair warning, I disliked everything about this novel except for the original premise, which could have been written into a wonderful story if the author hadn't been obsessed with violence and grime and sadism and filth and blood and pain. But now I'll explain why. None of those things are inherently interesting in themselves. Obsession with all of them together turned what could have been a fascinating Cassandra story into a boring and incredibly repetitive recitation of signifiers. I'm not even sure what he thinks these things signify, but I'm going to suggest that the idea is reality, grit, truth, being down to earth. Maybe that's not it. I honestly don't get why someone thinks being filthy (actual dirt, actual old dried blood and crust) makes a person more interesting than being clean. I do know this is a guy thing generally. They can keep it. The core of the story itself really is fascinating. Miriam can tell with a touch wh...

This is an odd book structurally because of the dual storylines. It's not so much flashback as paired narrative, as we follow Clay in the present listening to Hannah in the past narrating stories about events in the even further past, all of them about people who hurt her in ways that led to her suicide. It's also an odd book because Clay makes Hannah's story all about himself in a way that he's not made aware of at all. I was struck by this all throughout the novel, that both halves of the story make everything that happens to Hannah all about Clay, but Clay never wakes up or grows up enough to realize that this story is NOT about him. It's really not. In fact, I would say Hannah's message to Clay is to stop making everything about himself, but he doesn't get that, either, and at the end decides he's going to be the savior for another disaffected girl and save her from herself. That's the message he gets: this other girl's story is also all ab...

            In this young adult novel, Shannon Hale tells the classic princess in a tower story first by setting it in a version of medieval Mongolia, and then by inverting everything about it. The princess, Saren, is a beautiful but terrified, traumatized, and probably mentally ill daughter of gentry, completely unable even to comb her own hair. The real star of the story is Dashti, a “mucker” girl, a nomadic herder who was put out of her clan along with her mother when times got tough, who then after her mother died, gave up her freedom to get a place working for the gentry, Saren’s father. In other words, the story is about one character who has everything except capability, and one who has nothing but capability. The two get bricked into a tower together for seven years by Saren’s father when Saren refuses to marry a nightmarish and animalistic lord, Lord Khasar, having formed an attachment to another lord, Khan Tegus, whom she ...