Victory of Eagles

Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik

A great entry in the Temeraire series -- the best, I think, since His Majesty's Dragon. The choices made by Will and Temeraire in the last book have devastating consequences for both them and England, and although the book ends with a victory, those consequences are not thereby wiped out. Will continues to be a thoroughly decent and likeable hero, while Temeraire is thankfully losing some of his childish naivete. Portraits of historical figures, particularly the Duke of Wellington, some interesting interaction among the dragons, and kickass battle scenes complete the pleasures of this book.

Catching Up a Bit

The ARC gods at LibraryThing have been extraordinarily good to me recently, but before I get to those books, it turns out I have a few from earlier I need to acknowledge.

• Dreamers of the Day, Mary Doria Russell. The first two-thirds of this book, describing Agnes's early life and travel to Cairo, are well-written and entertaining, and Russell's portraits of the real-life figures of Churchill, Lawrence, and others are fascinating. However, the whole tone of the book is a little too "fly on the wall of history" -- Agnes has no real effect on the unfolding of events, and they in turn don't really do anything to alter the arc of her life. The quasi-mystical/fantasy/religious final segment is completely tacked on and unnecessary.
• Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace. I made several valiant tries, but I could not progress more than a couple of chapters into this book. The incoherent style and unpleasant subject matter made it unreadable to me.
• Pushing Up Daisies, Rosemary Harris. It's hard to find much to say about this debut mystery, which is sort of like rice pudding: OK if you like that sort of thing, but not the most original or tastiest dessert in the bunch. The mystery is fairly well plotted (although the murderer is obvious from the get-go), and some of the secondary characters are well drawn (unfortunately, not the heroine). One annoying point: I found it impossible to tell what the heroine's background in television was supposed to be. Was she a filmmaker? A scheduling executive? Or what?

Garden Spells

Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen

I am in love with this book, which is all about love and loss and hurt and happiness. It's about families, about small towns where you carry the baggage of all your ancestors, and about sisters. It's about wanting to belong, and what happens when you don't. It's about magic, and some seriously tasty-sounding food. Go read it.

The Dream-Maker's Magic

The Dream-Maker's Magic, by Sharon Shinn

Disappointing ending to Sharon Shinn's YA Safe-Keepers series. It's not that the book is bad, exactly; it's just that it lacks the richness and emotional complexity of most of her work. Even given the premise that the hero's power makes unlikely coincidences happen and unspoken dreams come true, everything feels very scripted, very predictable. The characters and especially the setting are charming, but it didn't make my heart yearn as I've come to depend on from Shinn.

A Quick Thumbs-Down

A Sundial in a Grave: 1610 by Mary Gentle is one of several books I picked up because Abigail Nussbaum recommended them. I have found Abigail's opinions to be very similar to mine on some things (and always very well expressed), but we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

Stuart England is just a little later than the Elizabethan era that fascinates me, and Gentle is good at period detail: the sights, sounds, and especially smells of the time are vividly presented. But I found the main characters and their sexual kinks tedious and the plot unfulfilling. Especially tedious was the samurai Tanaka Saburo, who suffers from what I think of as "stoopid furriner" syndrome: his facility with English and French varies according to the needs of the plot, so that he can't string words together correctly one minute and can talk about someone's "mad fancy" the next.

My biggest objection was Gentle's framing device, similar to the one she used in her Ash saga, that explains the book as a translation and compilation of actual documents. It's probably meant to make some kind of clever academic point about textuality, but this is a novel, not a textbook, and the frame just needlessly distances the reader from the material. For one thing, if you're going to pretend that your story is a memoir, it should read like a memoir. For another, there's no reason the "extra-textual" material (supposedly letters and other fragments found with the main text) couldn't simply have been incorporated into the narrative without sleight of hand about computer reconstruction and missing kanjis.

I'm sorry I didn't see that this book is soon forthcoming in cheaper mass market paperback, because I resent shelling out 14 bucks for this one. Add it to my "Hours of My Life I'll Never Get Back" list.

More Solstice, Less Wood

Patricia A. McKillip once described something as being "as beautiful as a fragment of ancient poetry." That's an apt description of her whole body of work -- lyrical, enchanting, romantic, full of haunting imagery, evocative, elliptical. Her prose is lapidary, many-layered, full of symbols, elusive and allusive. Nothing is ever fully explained in a McKillip story; there are hints, glimmers, like the flash of fish in a pool, but nothing solid to hang onto, nothing the reader can be sure of. There are always mysteries left in the shadows.

Many critics have noted McKillip's penchant for riddles, most notably in her early books The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master trilogy. Indeed, the whole theme of the latter is "Answer the unanswered riddle." But even when the riddles are answered, questions remain. Who were the Earth-Masters? Where did their rivals come from, and why were they driven to destroy? How and why did humans rise in the place of these mighty peoples? We know fairly well why Morgon was chosen to be the Earth-Masters' heir, but what of Raederle? McKillip never tells us these things, even indirectly. This elliptical quality adds to our sense that each tale is but a piece of an infinitely greater saga, in the way that each Greek myth offers only one facet of a god's complex nature or that any one romance can never tell the whole story of King Arthur and his knights.

Even later works like Od Magic, where the framework is disappointingly slight, sustain a weight of mystery. What are the strange creatures sheltering on the mountain? Where did they come from and what powers do they possess? Questions like that nibble at the mind long after the book is closed.

Yet at times I have longed for McKillip to be more straightforward, to leave less to the reader's imagination and ability to piece clues together. Yes, yes, the shadow city of Ombria is changeable and elusive, but is it real? What actually happens to Corbett Lynn? How did Atrix Wolfe's actions trap Saro, how do they free her, and what does she go on to become?

So is it wrong of me to be sorry that my wish was finally answered? Solstice Wood is McKillip's latest novel, a sequel of sorts to Winter Rose. Three hundred years later, Corbett Lynn and Rois Melior's descendents gather at Lynn Hall to mourn the passing of Liam Lynn and anoint his heir to guard the passageways between our world and Faerie. As always, McKillip provides a rich array of characterization. There is the prickly and skittish Sylvia, afraid of her heritage, afraid to love; the gangly, unfinished Tyler, still mourning the death of his father and freaked out by his mother's remarriage; the indomitable Gran, zealously guarding the borders of the Otherworld, shouldering the burden despite Liam's nonchalance; the ladies of the Fiber Guild (very similar to the circle of wizards McKillip uses in her story "The Witches of Junket"); and the ageless, changeless, implacable Fairy Queen, who in the end is none of those things.

Ambiguity is a theme of the book: "Maybe. Maybe not. That's the point," is repeated several times. But perhaps by voicing it so clearly, the book banishes the ambiguity it's striving for. Everything is out in the open, on the surface. The prose, while still beautifully crafted, is straightforward and linear, with no wandering byways, no pockets of denser meaning. All the questions are answered: why did Sylvia run away? who was her father? what happened to Tyler? what makes Leith Rowan so special? what happened to Owen's wife? what does the Fairy Queen want? There's nothing hidden here, nothing beckoning the reader on to further revelations.

It's as though McKillip, like her characters, is bringing down the barriers between reality and Faerie. But in opening the way so clearly to Faerie, she removes the mystery, the wonder, the enchantment that has always drawn us there. So I take back my wish: Patricia, turn your lamps down low again, and let me have the shadows back.