50-Book Challenge 2009: Books 21-30.
Books 1-10
Books 11-20
21. What the Lady Wants (aka The Little Lady and the Prince), Hester Browne - third and last in the series about mousy, insecure Melissa and her alter-ego, the brassily confident and ruthlessly efficient Honey who can organise everyone's life except - predictably enough - Melissa's. This instalment throws a minor Eurotrash prince into the mix, both as a client and as a candidate for Melissa/Honey's affections. Who wins the day? Readers of all three books will probably not be surprised to learn the answer. To add to her problems, her sister Emery, a woman so wet it would be hard to notice when her water broke, is pregnant and has inherited the family Nanny from Hell. This series is not, by any means, either literature or high art - aside from all else, the author has a tendency to let her characterisation shift to suit the needs of the plot rather than the other way round - but the books are readable, and fun, filled with some delightful characters, most notably Honey's fast-living grandmother, the wonderfully-named Dilys Blennerhesket who, in her mid-seventies, is also in the market for love. Besides which, Melissa is a well-built young woman (and so hopelessly naïve that she doesn't fully understand why her schoolmates called her 'Melons') with an unpleasant, bullying father. I sympathise completely.
22. Dear Enemy, Jean Webster - a sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs and, like the earlier book, written entirely in the epistolary style, the letters in this case being from Judy's college friend Sallie McBride, who Judy and Master Jervie have, apparently quite at random, appointed as the new Superintendent of the John Grier Home of Judy's dreadful childhood, and mostly directed either to Judy herself, Sallie's fiancé Gordon, or to the Home's appointed doctor, the 'Dear Enemy' of the title. At first understandably reluctant to take over the running of the Home, Sallie soon rises to the challenge and quickly becomes a ferocious advocate for change and improvement. This, remember, long, long before Women's Suffrage was anything but a silly idea in some dear little feathery heads. Dear Enemy has not achieved the classic status of its sister title; it's charming in its own way, but lays more emphasis on moral and social issues and less on romance, and also contains some theories on heredity and eugenics that are enough to make a modern reader's hair stand on end. I must also warn against this particular edition (Echo Press), which bears the hallmarks of a print-on-demand title; the text appears to have been run straight from typescript without any thought (ironically, perhaps) to widows and orphans, so that in several places the letter ends at the foot of one page and the accompanying signature at the head of the next. There should also be author illustrations, which are lacking here.
I also note a personal dilemma: Daddy-Long-Legs lives on my children's shelf; I've always thought of it as a book for late teenagers (the cover art on my copy rather bears this out). Dear Enemy, however, emphatically is not. The two must, I fear, be parted. Unless I splash out and buy the omnibus edition that contains both. And then where would I shelve that?!
23. Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, Chris Priestley - imagine a cross between M R James and Edward Gorey, in particular The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and you pretty much have this book spread out in a nutshell. Solitary Edgar is in the habit, during the school holidays, of visiting his Uncle Montague, an equally solitary soul whose house (or at any rate the study, the only room Edgar has ever been in, save the lavatory) is filled with curios, each of which has a story behind it. A ghastly, creepy story which inevitably ends in the grisly death of its juvenile protagonist. And, behind it all, there is Uncle Montague's own strange and sinister history, and the mystery of the children who haunt the woods that Edgar must pass through …
The stories themselves vary; some are genuinely scary, others fall flat, while still others are just plain weird, but they're short enough to read several in one sitting, and the entire book isn't likely to take more than an evening or two. David Robert's black and white illos add to the Goreyesque quality and contribute considerably to the overall atmosphere.
24. Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster - a reread - I couldn't read Dear Enemy and not come back to this; the classic story of orphaned Jerusha Abbot, rescued from a bleak future by one of the trustees of the orphanage which she's now outgrown. Convinced by the Home's Superintendant that Jerusha is a worthy cause, the trustee agrees to put her through college, on two conditions: one, that he remain anonymous and two, that Jerusha - who very quickly rechristens herself Judy - write him a letter every month. Judy, with nobody else with whom to share her wonder as she gradually discovers the world outside the John Grier home, more than lives up to her bargain. The result is a fly-in-amber portrait of life at an American women's college at the turn of the last century, twinned with an enduring and affecting love story.
Or so I thought when I first read it. Over the years it has come to dawn on me that, actually, Daddy-Long-Legs himself is a little bit creepy and stalkerish … but that's late 20th century culture talking, and we would be far better off accepting the story at face value, and as a product of its time. And, as a product of its time, this is actually pretty progressive: Judy is no helpless Cinderella, but is determined to stand on her own two feet. Her ambition is to be a writer, and write she does - and the first thing she does on receipt of her first publisher's cheque is to start repaying Daddy-Long-Legs the cost of her education. Now, that's a heroine I can relate to.
Judy's tribulations as she struggles with manuscript after manuscript will resonate with any would-be writer, and her life at college and beyond is both eminently memorable and delightful.
25. One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak - … oh. They count crows in America - not magpies. Hence, I suppose, Counting Crows. It all makes sense now.
But the book: fifteen-year-old Adam is a high school misfit, a loner from a dysfunctional and borderline abusive family, caught up in a string of tragedies: his beloved grandmother dies, his mother is involved in a car crash that leaves her confined to a wheelchair, and then a classmate, a boy with whom Adam was almost friends, is found murdered in the nearby woods. Gradually Adam slips further and further away from reality and into the ghost world of the murdered Jamie.
Evocative, but bleak; I can't imagine revisiting this story. And a terrible confession: what resonated most with me was the mention of Youngstown, known only to me through the Springsteen song of the same name. In all fairness, it is one of my favourite songs …
26. The Various, Steve Augarde - twelve-year-old Midge is sent to stay on her uncle's West Country farm for the summer holidays. She's bored and lonely until the day she finds a tiny winged horse lying injured in an outbuilding and goes to its rescue.
So far, so ordinary - there's a band of tiny people living in the woods on the hill, and Midge finds herself caught up in their lives and problems - but the depiction of the tiny people, the 'Various' themselves, sets this book apart: they're a far cry from the ethereal fairies of Victorian art, or the Doc Martened Fae of urban fantasy; they're tough, gritty, dirty, earthy, for the most part far from magical, unwelcoming and secretive and, occasionally, downright dangerous. And they all talk like my Granddad. Not my posh granddad, the Somerset one. Ar.
The Various live in a distinct and inflexible caste system: the winged Ickri, the tribes' hunters, are their rulers and leaders; other tribes farm, or fish. Two other tribes are cave dwellers and are considered far inferior. But these, it turns out, have secrets and surprises of their own, all tied in to the almost legendary Celandine - Midge's great-great aunt, whose legacy Midge finds she has inherited.
I enjoyed this, although it's patchy, with long stretches of nothing much happening (it takes several chapters before Midge encounters the Various), and numerous shifting points of view. It's pretty dark in places, too, with - I warn you - a dead cat at one point. It's not a nice cat (it's the farm's hunting Tom), but still I skipped over that bit.
The story ends abruptly and with many loose ends unexplained and unexplored, to be continued in two sequels.
27. The Seance, John Harwood - almost the best thing I can say about this book is "I liked the cover". It's a pastiche of the great Victorian Gothic novel, with overtones of Wilkie Collins. Sadly, the great Victorian public had more patience and more time on their hands than I do, and had also been less exposed to popular culture (there having been less of it around at the time) and were thus possibly less able to predict every. Last. Word of the storyline. There are no twists and no surprises: it does exactly what it says on the tin.
To be fair, I quite enjoyed the first section, the saga of poor, sad Constance with her unloving father and her melancholic mother and how her urge to help her mother leads her to the fatal path of spiritualism, but as disaster and woe piled on disaster and woe I was, once again, irresistibly reminded of Edward Gorey. When the perspective shifted and the next narrator took up the story I found myself skipping and, in the end, just read the last section, in which Constance picks up the narrative again, and found that, actually, I had missed almost nothing at all.
I will give it credit for this. On learning that her nursemaid's mother had had five children die, Constance naturally assumes that she must have been even more grief-stricken than Constance's own mother, who had lost only one child. "But no, said Annie, there had been no time for mourning; her mother had been too busy looking after the rest of them." Melancholia was and, I suppose, still is, strictly a middle-class privilege.
28. Celandine, Steve Augarde - sequel to The Various or, actually, prequel: this takes us back to 1915 and the story of Celandine, Midge's ancestor and the first of her family to encounter the Various. This is very much a book of two halves: the story of Celandine, which is largely taken up with a long, miserable period of exile at a strictly-run boarding school peopled by hateful fellow-students and teachers who are little better and, running alongside that, the Ickri's pilgrimage from the cold north in search of their lost brother tribe, the Naiad. It's Celandine's escape from school that makes her seek refuge with the Various, and the arrival of the Ickri that leads to her banishment from their world - the reason for which only becomes apparent to her too late.
Set against the background of the Great War, this is an unusual and poignant children's fantasy.
29. Attack of the Theater People, Marc Acito - sequel to How I Paid for College. Having blackmailed his father into sending him to Juilliard, Edward Zanni shortly thereafter finds himself expelled for being 'too jazz hands'. Cast adrift in New York City with nothing but a dream and a group of friends that includes aspiring actors ranging from Marxist street theatre to swing in Starlight Express, an exiled Iranian aristocrat, a boy who plays Bruce Springsteen in an E-Street tribute band, a cross-dressing gay Vietnamese and Natie Nudelman, Edward's neighbour from home and a budding career criminal, Edward is hard-pressed to make ends meet. He gets by by squatting in a dead guy's apartment (Natie's idea), working as a theatre usher (a job for which he qualifies because he's gay) and a party motivator, and, latterly, by getting mixed up in insider trading (Natie's idea again). With the FBI and two teenage stalkers on his heels, will Edward ever find his way back to Juilliard and realise his dreams? Funny, engaging, and immensely readable.
30. The Rainbow Opera, Elizabeth Knox - I'm not putting this one under a cut because I want the WORLD to know about it! I can't remember how I found this book; I believe I ran across one of the author's other titles at work, thought it looked interesting, and checked out the rest of her back catalogue. However it happened I'm very glad that it did, because this is the best thing I have read in a long, long time.
Fifteen-year-old Laura and her cousin Rose inhabit a world very much like our own - they have Jesus, The Mill on the Floss, demotic Greek, hockey. They also have the Gospel of St Lazarus, and the Place: a pocket of land, a fold in the universe, unmeasurable and inaccessible to all but the very few and most elite - the Dreamhunters. The Place is a world where dreams are marked at map locations; Dreamhunters cross the border at one of two points, sleep in a specific grid reference, catch the dream that has its existence there, and take it back to share with a paying audience. For this is 1906 and, in this world, dreams are what cinema became in ours - more, because each dreamer experiences the dream as their own. There are dreams of healing, dreams of adventure, dreams of peace, dreams of romance - Rose's mother, Grace, specialises in these - and, although Laura is initially unaware of this, there are nightmares, too, and Laura's father, Tziga Hame, the Dreamhunter who first stumbled (literally) upon the Place some twenty years before, has his own dark trade in these. When he vanishes, he leaves Laura this legacy, along with a duty to repair the damage he's done. He also leaves her a strange companion to help her with this burden.
We end on a shocking climax; this is part one of a two-part story, continued in The Dream Quake, which I am impatiently waiting for the postman to bring me any … day … now.
Dense, complex, and beautiful: I don't have the words to do justice to this story. I only wish I did.
It isn't just the storyline that sets The Rainbow Opera apart: there's something unique and distinctive about its voice that I can't define. The only thing I can think of is that the author's from New Zealand and that perhaps her background and experience colour the narrative in a way that's slightly alien to my understanding.
This is one of the best and most original fantasies, YA or other, that I've read in years. In a world where the mundane, the badly written and the run-of-the-mill dominate the bestsellers charts, how is it possible that I only stumbled upon this wonderful book by accident?
Read it. Please. And then come and talk to me about it.
Books 11-20
21. What the Lady Wants (aka The Little Lady and the Prince), Hester Browne - third and last in the series about mousy, insecure Melissa and her alter-ego, the brassily confident and ruthlessly efficient Honey who can organise everyone's life except - predictably enough - Melissa's. This instalment throws a minor Eurotrash prince into the mix, both as a client and as a candidate for Melissa/Honey's affections. Who wins the day? Readers of all three books will probably not be surprised to learn the answer. To add to her problems, her sister Emery, a woman so wet it would be hard to notice when her water broke, is pregnant and has inherited the family Nanny from Hell. This series is not, by any means, either literature or high art - aside from all else, the author has a tendency to let her characterisation shift to suit the needs of the plot rather than the other way round - but the books are readable, and fun, filled with some delightful characters, most notably Honey's fast-living grandmother, the wonderfully-named Dilys Blennerhesket who, in her mid-seventies, is also in the market for love. Besides which, Melissa is a well-built young woman (and so hopelessly naïve that she doesn't fully understand why her schoolmates called her 'Melons') with an unpleasant, bullying father. I sympathise completely.
22. Dear Enemy, Jean Webster - a sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs and, like the earlier book, written entirely in the epistolary style, the letters in this case being from Judy's college friend Sallie McBride, who Judy and Master Jervie have, apparently quite at random, appointed as the new Superintendent of the John Grier Home of Judy's dreadful childhood, and mostly directed either to Judy herself, Sallie's fiancé Gordon, or to the Home's appointed doctor, the 'Dear Enemy' of the title. At first understandably reluctant to take over the running of the Home, Sallie soon rises to the challenge and quickly becomes a ferocious advocate for change and improvement. This, remember, long, long before Women's Suffrage was anything but a silly idea in some dear little feathery heads. Dear Enemy has not achieved the classic status of its sister title; it's charming in its own way, but lays more emphasis on moral and social issues and less on romance, and also contains some theories on heredity and eugenics that are enough to make a modern reader's hair stand on end. I must also warn against this particular edition (Echo Press), which bears the hallmarks of a print-on-demand title; the text appears to have been run straight from typescript without any thought (ironically, perhaps) to widows and orphans, so that in several places the letter ends at the foot of one page and the accompanying signature at the head of the next. There should also be author illustrations, which are lacking here.
I also note a personal dilemma: Daddy-Long-Legs lives on my children's shelf; I've always thought of it as a book for late teenagers (the cover art on my copy rather bears this out). Dear Enemy, however, emphatically is not. The two must, I fear, be parted. Unless I splash out and buy the omnibus edition that contains both. And then where would I shelve that?!
23. Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, Chris Priestley - imagine a cross between M R James and Edward Gorey, in particular The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and you pretty much have this book spread out in a nutshell. Solitary Edgar is in the habit, during the school holidays, of visiting his Uncle Montague, an equally solitary soul whose house (or at any rate the study, the only room Edgar has ever been in, save the lavatory) is filled with curios, each of which has a story behind it. A ghastly, creepy story which inevitably ends in the grisly death of its juvenile protagonist. And, behind it all, there is Uncle Montague's own strange and sinister history, and the mystery of the children who haunt the woods that Edgar must pass through …
The stories themselves vary; some are genuinely scary, others fall flat, while still others are just plain weird, but they're short enough to read several in one sitting, and the entire book isn't likely to take more than an evening or two. David Robert's black and white illos add to the Goreyesque quality and contribute considerably to the overall atmosphere.
24. Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster - a reread - I couldn't read Dear Enemy and not come back to this; the classic story of orphaned Jerusha Abbot, rescued from a bleak future by one of the trustees of the orphanage which she's now outgrown. Convinced by the Home's Superintendant that Jerusha is a worthy cause, the trustee agrees to put her through college, on two conditions: one, that he remain anonymous and two, that Jerusha - who very quickly rechristens herself Judy - write him a letter every month. Judy, with nobody else with whom to share her wonder as she gradually discovers the world outside the John Grier home, more than lives up to her bargain. The result is a fly-in-amber portrait of life at an American women's college at the turn of the last century, twinned with an enduring and affecting love story.
Or so I thought when I first read it. Over the years it has come to dawn on me that, actually, Daddy-Long-Legs himself is a little bit creepy and stalkerish … but that's late 20th century culture talking, and we would be far better off accepting the story at face value, and as a product of its time. And, as a product of its time, this is actually pretty progressive: Judy is no helpless Cinderella, but is determined to stand on her own two feet. Her ambition is to be a writer, and write she does - and the first thing she does on receipt of her first publisher's cheque is to start repaying Daddy-Long-Legs the cost of her education. Now, that's a heroine I can relate to.
Judy's tribulations as she struggles with manuscript after manuscript will resonate with any would-be writer, and her life at college and beyond is both eminently memorable and delightful.
25. One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak - … oh. They count crows in America - not magpies. Hence, I suppose, Counting Crows. It all makes sense now.
But the book: fifteen-year-old Adam is a high school misfit, a loner from a dysfunctional and borderline abusive family, caught up in a string of tragedies: his beloved grandmother dies, his mother is involved in a car crash that leaves her confined to a wheelchair, and then a classmate, a boy with whom Adam was almost friends, is found murdered in the nearby woods. Gradually Adam slips further and further away from reality and into the ghost world of the murdered Jamie.
Evocative, but bleak; I can't imagine revisiting this story. And a terrible confession: what resonated most with me was the mention of Youngstown, known only to me through the Springsteen song of the same name. In all fairness, it is one of my favourite songs …
26. The Various, Steve Augarde - twelve-year-old Midge is sent to stay on her uncle's West Country farm for the summer holidays. She's bored and lonely until the day she finds a tiny winged horse lying injured in an outbuilding and goes to its rescue.
So far, so ordinary - there's a band of tiny people living in the woods on the hill, and Midge finds herself caught up in their lives and problems - but the depiction of the tiny people, the 'Various' themselves, sets this book apart: they're a far cry from the ethereal fairies of Victorian art, or the Doc Martened Fae of urban fantasy; they're tough, gritty, dirty, earthy, for the most part far from magical, unwelcoming and secretive and, occasionally, downright dangerous. And they all talk like my Granddad. Not my posh granddad, the Somerset one. Ar.
The Various live in a distinct and inflexible caste system: the winged Ickri, the tribes' hunters, are their rulers and leaders; other tribes farm, or fish. Two other tribes are cave dwellers and are considered far inferior. But these, it turns out, have secrets and surprises of their own, all tied in to the almost legendary Celandine - Midge's great-great aunt, whose legacy Midge finds she has inherited.
I enjoyed this, although it's patchy, with long stretches of nothing much happening (it takes several chapters before Midge encounters the Various), and numerous shifting points of view. It's pretty dark in places, too, with - I warn you - a dead cat at one point. It's not a nice cat (it's the farm's hunting Tom), but still I skipped over that bit.
The story ends abruptly and with many loose ends unexplained and unexplored, to be continued in two sequels.
27. The Seance, John Harwood - almost the best thing I can say about this book is "I liked the cover". It's a pastiche of the great Victorian Gothic novel, with overtones of Wilkie Collins. Sadly, the great Victorian public had more patience and more time on their hands than I do, and had also been less exposed to popular culture (there having been less of it around at the time) and were thus possibly less able to predict every. Last. Word of the storyline. There are no twists and no surprises: it does exactly what it says on the tin.
To be fair, I quite enjoyed the first section, the saga of poor, sad Constance with her unloving father and her melancholic mother and how her urge to help her mother leads her to the fatal path of spiritualism, but as disaster and woe piled on disaster and woe I was, once again, irresistibly reminded of Edward Gorey. When the perspective shifted and the next narrator took up the story I found myself skipping and, in the end, just read the last section, in which Constance picks up the narrative again, and found that, actually, I had missed almost nothing at all.
I will give it credit for this. On learning that her nursemaid's mother had had five children die, Constance naturally assumes that she must have been even more grief-stricken than Constance's own mother, who had lost only one child. "But no, said Annie, there had been no time for mourning; her mother had been too busy looking after the rest of them." Melancholia was and, I suppose, still is, strictly a middle-class privilege.
28. Celandine, Steve Augarde - sequel to The Various or, actually, prequel: this takes us back to 1915 and the story of Celandine, Midge's ancestor and the first of her family to encounter the Various. This is very much a book of two halves: the story of Celandine, which is largely taken up with a long, miserable period of exile at a strictly-run boarding school peopled by hateful fellow-students and teachers who are little better and, running alongside that, the Ickri's pilgrimage from the cold north in search of their lost brother tribe, the Naiad. It's Celandine's escape from school that makes her seek refuge with the Various, and the arrival of the Ickri that leads to her banishment from their world - the reason for which only becomes apparent to her too late.
Set against the background of the Great War, this is an unusual and poignant children's fantasy.
29. Attack of the Theater People, Marc Acito - sequel to How I Paid for College. Having blackmailed his father into sending him to Juilliard, Edward Zanni shortly thereafter finds himself expelled for being 'too jazz hands'. Cast adrift in New York City with nothing but a dream and a group of friends that includes aspiring actors ranging from Marxist street theatre to swing in Starlight Express, an exiled Iranian aristocrat, a boy who plays Bruce Springsteen in an E-Street tribute band, a cross-dressing gay Vietnamese and Natie Nudelman, Edward's neighbour from home and a budding career criminal, Edward is hard-pressed to make ends meet. He gets by by squatting in a dead guy's apartment (Natie's idea), working as a theatre usher (a job for which he qualifies because he's gay) and a party motivator, and, latterly, by getting mixed up in insider trading (Natie's idea again). With the FBI and two teenage stalkers on his heels, will Edward ever find his way back to Juilliard and realise his dreams? Funny, engaging, and immensely readable.
30. The Rainbow Opera, Elizabeth Knox - I'm not putting this one under a cut because I want the WORLD to know about it! I can't remember how I found this book; I believe I ran across one of the author's other titles at work, thought it looked interesting, and checked out the rest of her back catalogue. However it happened I'm very glad that it did, because this is the best thing I have read in a long, long time.
Fifteen-year-old Laura and her cousin Rose inhabit a world very much like our own - they have Jesus, The Mill on the Floss, demotic Greek, hockey. They also have the Gospel of St Lazarus, and the Place: a pocket of land, a fold in the universe, unmeasurable and inaccessible to all but the very few and most elite - the Dreamhunters. The Place is a world where dreams are marked at map locations; Dreamhunters cross the border at one of two points, sleep in a specific grid reference, catch the dream that has its existence there, and take it back to share with a paying audience. For this is 1906 and, in this world, dreams are what cinema became in ours - more, because each dreamer experiences the dream as their own. There are dreams of healing, dreams of adventure, dreams of peace, dreams of romance - Rose's mother, Grace, specialises in these - and, although Laura is initially unaware of this, there are nightmares, too, and Laura's father, Tziga Hame, the Dreamhunter who first stumbled (literally) upon the Place some twenty years before, has his own dark trade in these. When he vanishes, he leaves Laura this legacy, along with a duty to repair the damage he's done. He also leaves her a strange companion to help her with this burden.
We end on a shocking climax; this is part one of a two-part story, continued in The Dream Quake, which I am impatiently waiting for the postman to bring me any … day … now.
Dense, complex, and beautiful: I don't have the words to do justice to this story. I only wish I did.
It isn't just the storyline that sets The Rainbow Opera apart: there's something unique and distinctive about its voice that I can't define. The only thing I can think of is that the author's from New Zealand and that perhaps her background and experience colour the narrative in a way that's slightly alien to my understanding.
This is one of the best and most original fantasies, YA or other, that I've read in years. In a world where the mundane, the badly written and the run-of-the-mill dominate the bestsellers charts, how is it possible that I only stumbled upon this wonderful book by accident?
Read it. Please. And then come and talk to me about it.