Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 14 (The Dragonet Prophecy)

Title: Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy
Author: Tui T. Sutherland
Themes: Belonging
Quotes: "A real scavenger would be smaller than her, according to this scroll over here. It says that scavengers have no scales, no wings, and no tail, and they walk on two legs, which sounds very unstable to me. I bet they fall over all the time. They like treasure nearly as much as dragons do."
Reading/Listening Time: 1 day.

Review:

This one's a middle-grade reading-level book my nephew left over at our house.  It's actually pretty suspenseful, I remember putting it away several times and then just pulling it back out because I had to know what happened next!

This one involves a world where dragons are the dominant species on the planet: there are several different races of dragon, and most of them don't like each other very much and they're at war all the time. The Dragons are also pretty brutal sometimes...like gladiator type stuff...

Anyway there's this prophecy that a group of young dragons from each of the main races will grow up and do something to end the conflict. This story deals with that group of dragonets (young dragons) growing up and going on their own adventure/s. The group dynamics was a lot of fun: it made me think a lot of Rick Riordan, if Rick Riordan weren't such a slut for the almighty word count and his characters had actual chemistry.

It was really neat to discover more about this world, and how each dragon-race is different from each other, as these kids are discovering more about themselves. (There's this really cool moment one of them discovers she can glow in the dark and she uses it to, like, help them escape the place they were kidnapped to as eggs...it's really cool!)

I'm not going to post a picture with this one because the way they are described in the book is so, so beautiful and unique, and every picture I can find of them (even fanart) looks terribly generic and doesn't do them justice at all.

Instead, please enjoy a picture of these loverly birds:

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 13 (Pawn of Prophecy)

Title: Pawn of Prophecy
Author: David Eddings
Themes: Parent/child relationships
Quotes: "When you get right down to it nothing, at least not much, is impossible."
Reading/Listening Time: 10 hours, 27 minutes

Review:

I felt like this book conveyed a lot more of the frustration and insecurity of adolescence than any "YA" book I've every read. Reading it made me realize how much of young adult literature published today, even the books I really like, is really cliche and not very realistic.

Now, I realize that a big part of the YA genre is wish fulfillment: As a teenager you might long for the comfort and protection of childhood, but you also want to believe that you'd be competent if you were thrown out into the world on your own. That's why there are so many books about orphans, and love triangles, and suddenly becoming competent and popular within your peer group.

This book, though, takes a completely different approach to exploring the the struggles of adolescence. The main character (Garion) is technically an orphan, but the story reads more like he's a child to a single parent. His very protective "Aunt" has raised him from birth, and throughout the story he takes a comparatively passive role in her adventure.

(He's just along for the ride because she's afraid he'll get somebody pregnant if he's left alone.) And the aunt is too preoccupied with her adventure to do a whole lot of nurturing or guiding her kid, even though he's so obviously desperate for parental guidance.

Like, he knows he hasn't got life all figured out yet; but she's not emotionally available to do much more than tell him to go to his room whenever he asks a question she doesn't want to answer.

The story focuses a lot on Garion's vulnerability, which is why I don't think he would be very popular among the YA Fantasy readers of today,  but thinking back to my own adolescence I think I readily identified with a lot of the emotions this kid goes through in this book (and I wasn't even brought up in a single parent household!)

It's interesting to me that even at the end Garion's Aunt still doesn't completely level with him, and he has to find other people in his life to help fulfill that need for nurturing and belonging.

I don't really think, either, that this necessarily makes Aunt Pol a horrible person. One of the biggest parts of growing up is realizing your parents have limitations and they're not always going to be able to fulfill your needs, even your need for growth. Garion realizes this, and it actually kind of re-affirms their relationship in a strange way: she doesn't exactly become a better parent, but he realizes he doesn't need her to be. His entire existence doesn't have to hinge on her any more.

Rating: The whole journey was pretty subtle, but somehow also really gratifying. I originally rated it 3/5 stars but looking back on it...and how easy it was to listen to, and all the supporting characters I really liked...I think it deserves 4/5 Stars.

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 12 (Conan the Barbarian: The People of the Black Circle)

Title: Conan the Barbarian: The People of the Black Circle
Author: Robert Ervin Howard
Themes: Masculinity vs Femininity
Quotes: "Kingdoms have fallen when a woman's slim white hands pulled the strings of destiny."
Reading/Listening Time: 3 hours, 49 minutes

Review:

If no one's ever made a movie out of this book they very definitely should get on that, because it already reads like a really fun "B" movie action flick. It's got a great hero and heroine, and a deliciously vile and complicated villain.

It puts me in mind of the Indiana Jones movies (the old ones, not the new) if they paid more attention to the love-interest and she actually got to contribute her POV to the story a bit more.

Conan is a bit of a brute: he lives in a magical world but that's not gonna stop him from smashing things up whenever he can. I guess the appeal of him is mostly that he's so macho and, like, a walking status symbol at this point in his life.

And he kind of has to match wits with Yasmina, who's like a priestess-queen-incarnation of a hindu deity. And she's the more magic character, in fact she even gets her own "Avatar-state" sequence, which was pretty cool.

She and her brother are being accosted by these dark-cultist priests who want to take over. And, like, there's no physical fight yet, but her brother knows he's gonna go crazy so he basically commits assisted suicide and warns his sister about the evil cultists.

At the start, Conan is just trying to kidnap somebody so he can get monies and she's just trying to escape the bad guys. And they have this neat little back and forth bantering that's kind of cute, and in the process they end up kinda joining forces (even thought he technically kidnapped her, and still plans on holding her for ransom.)

The way it ends up, where they're not together but they kinda have this romantic and personal appreciation for each other that they didn't have before, is exactly appropriate for the type of book this is.

Some parts of it are just so cheesy, but like fun cheesy. Like, I would actually buy popcorn for this...

There's also the bits with the villain. There's actually a couple of them, but the main one I'm thinking of has this kind of Macbeth thing going on where his wife is kind of egging him on to do horrible stuff and take more power...It's great fun!

Rating: 3/5 (Not quite a masterpiece, but still very enjoyable)

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 10 (Elric of Melnibone)

Title: Elric of Melnibone
Author: Michael Moorcock
Themes: Moral and political corruption
Quotes: "We are victims, cousin, of a conspiracy--a game played by gods, demons and sentient swords." 

Reading/Listening Time: 5 hours, 34 minutes

Rant:

Michael Moorcock is kind of like George R.R. Martin in that he kinda sees himself as an anti-tolkien writer. He thinks that Tolkien kind of infantalizes fantasy, that it lulls people into a passive mentality, and his particular "brand" of fantasy isn't realistic to what one sees in the real world

I have this vision of JRR Tolkien in the afterlife going:

Now I can understand, within the context of there being a lot of copycat Tolkienesque writers in Mr Moorcock's day, that there comes a point where the mimicking of a certain style can be awfully repetitive, and I appreciate a lot of the ideas that Mr Moorcock focused on in this book...

But Mr Tolkien and Mr Moorcock are writing from two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT literary traditions and comparing them just because their both "fantasy" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what each of them is trying to say.

One thing that's been reinforced in my mind from my Year of Epic Fantasy Reading is that Tolkien is really only a nominally fantasy writer: his writing is more focused on culture, and language, and most importantly...mythology (which is actually quite a different thing from fantasy because it has a basis in history and tells us the things people valued in life...NOT what they typically did). 

This is quite a bit different from the realism school of fantasy- which is more about introducing fantasy races and monsters into a psudo-historical landscape and using them to project a story (imagining what real people would do in that situation).

So if LOTR isn't completely realistic it's because THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REALISTIC!! They're supposed to reflect MYTHS! A part of our history, and our past, how we relate to it, and how we figuratively have to WATCH IT DIE to adopt a modern perspective...

It's like comparing apples to oranges when you absolutely hate apples...


 /UHG!

/end rant


Review:

Now that I've got that off my chest...

I'm just gonna copy-paste my goodreads review:


This book is supposed to be, like, the literary successor to another book I read called "The Sword of Welleran". 

This one is like...The Sword of Welleran's moody younger brother. Not too moody, you know? But still through the whole thing there's these little forshadowing moments where the narrator hints that things aren't going to turn out so good for our protagonist in the long run. I really felt like the story could have done without those. Elric is dynamic and conflicted enough of a character that that quality shines about him without the narrator having to point it out all the time. 

Elric is an emperor of this certain magical land, somewhere. And he was born an albino, and very weak. He has to take a lot of medicine so he doesn't die, and he's a bit of an intellectual. His country is kind of on the barbaric side: like they will do things that by modern standards are really atrocious and it is A-OK. But Elric has the nagging feeling that maaaybe things like gang rape and slavery aren't such great ideas. He wants to guide his people to change, but at the start of the story he really doesn't know how. 

He's got these two cousins, one of them is a girl and she is his fiance. The other is a guy who thinks he could be doing Elric's job better than Elric can. And he tries to prove it by, in the middle of a campaign against these enemy marauders, staging a mutiny. NOT such a bright idea...

So Elric, to get more power to defeat his cousin who's challenging him, enlists the power of these semi-demonic forces. And his cousin does the same, and they retaliate against each other back and forth. 

Pretty early on Elric is conflicted because he recognizes that to get what he wants he's violating all his principles, and he's gonna do it anyway. He basically feels horrible about himself as a human being (or whatever species/race he is) but he's still not going to change. 

And then he finally confronts his cousin: he's leveled up, geared up, and their tension has come to a head. And he realizes that, if he kills his cousin, he's just bein' a pawn in the hands of the supernatural forces that he's allied himself with...And those guys do NOT have his best interests at heart!

(Which is exactly what I tell myself whenever I meet a Daedric Prince in Skyrim) 

So he does the weird thing and decides to make peace with his cousin instead of killing him. They go home happy together in a state of semi-peace, and Elric decides he needs to learn more about himself and the world before he tries to change it and make it better. 

He leaves the country in the care of his cousins and goes on a road trip to accomplish this goal, accompanied by his trusty sword Stormbringer, and his trusty friend Rackhir. 

All in all, I think that this book works well as a standalone novel. It reads more like a Lovecraft Weird Tale, or a Superhero/villian origin story, than regular fantasy. 



Notes: 



Through the whole thing I kept imagining the Elf Prince Nuada from Hellboy 2, but like with pinkish-red eyes as what Elric looks like.

Rating: 3/4 Stars.

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 9 (The Carasoyn)

Title: The Carasoyn
Author: George MacDonald
Themes: Persistence
Quotes:
"I am very sorry you are blind." he said. 

"Never you mind that, my dear. I see more than you do for all my blindness."

Reading/Listening Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Review:

This is by the same author who wrote "The Princess and the Goblin" but while that one had a kind of dreamlike quality to it, I think this one had more of a sense of urgency. At least it did for me...

It's about this boy named Colin and he's kinda the homemaker in his household, since his mom died. He doesn't have a lot to do, so he does this little project where he re-directs a stream that goes into the poopy cow pasture...into his house.

But, like, the water's clean (since it's not going through cow poop anymore) and I guess it doesn't affect he house's structural stability because his dad doesn't really make a big deal out of it: He's just like "You are a very strange child, I am now questioning my parenting choices...but as long as it keeps you happy..."

The stream-diversion scheme has a much bigger impact on the faeries that happen to live there. They are appropriately grateful to him for making it so they don't have to live in poop water anymore. And they want to give him a gift to show their appreciation.

On his first interaction with the faeries, Colin meets a changeling: a little human girl who was kidnapped at birth and is like a servant to the faerie queen, and he decides to request her freedom as his reward for helping the faeries out of the stinky situation.

Unfortunately, the faeries are just not very nice people...they only care about keeping their word if it won't inconvenience them in anyway and they don't want to loose their slave so they offer a counter-proposal: if Colin brings her a cask of Carasoyn ('The wine that makes people happy')  the faerie queen will give him the changeling girl.

And that is the main struggle for our protagonist: figuring out how to  create happiness, bottling it, and finally deliver it to the faeries.

Even though it's a short story, the process seems so arduous that there are some points where you feel like: "This is obviously supposed to be an impossible task..."

But it isn't!

It's time consuming, labor-intensive; it requires a collaborative effort and know-how...but it can be done!

And fortunately Colin, who's is a problem-solver, always looking for solutions and ways to do things better...is just the type of guy for the job.

This story also has a kind of sequel in the second half, that takes place some years later: it's kind of like a "The Revenge of the Faeries" type thing...I think a lot of people who read this might think that it's a little repetitive, but I really liked it. Because first time, he's just trying to help another kid and it shows us what decent human being he is. The second time around though, the stakes are a little more personal and I loved watching him actually get to outsmart the faeries this time.

Rating: 4/5 Stars.

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 8 (The Infernal City and Lord of Souls)

Title: The Infernal City/Lord of Souls
Author: Gregory Keyes
Themes: Individualism vs Friendship
Quotes: I don't have any quotes fort his one :(
Reading/Listening Time: According to goodreads I finished the first one in 2 days, the second one took me 28 days.

Review:


These books take place in the Elder Scrolls world, which is the same place Skyrim is supposed to take place in, it has a really different feel from Skyrim though. The first book in particular feels like a reverse Star Trek episode: where the aliens get beamed up to an interdementional space ship and have to learn about life there, so they can (hopefully) beam back home again.

I think a lot of the first book was really imaginative and pleasant, in a weird way. It ends on a cliffhanger so I was really looking forward to more in the second book. Unfortunately the second book has a bit of a different tone to it, it feels more like a spy-thriller (or rather, it's trying to be a spy-thriller...and not doing a very good job of it) and for some reason the main character is just automatically good at everything, even when there is no reasonable explanation for it...like she's just guessing and she always gets it right...Which I thought was kinda ridiculous...

There are probably more main characters than the story needs. I felt like the prince's storyline was really repetitive and could have been condensed a little bit, but the writer did a good job at writing the characters within the limitations of their personal perspective, or worldview, and I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd enjoyed the characters themselves a bit more.

I did really enjoy the world building aspect of it, especially in the context of a world that I've already been in while playing Skyrim. Seeing the other countries in Tamriel, and the Oblivion realm, and learning about them was pretty neat.


Rating: 4/5 for the first book, 3/5 for the second (probably deserved 2/5)

Year of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day 7 (The Princess and the Goblin)

Title: The Princess and the Goblin
Author: George MacDonald
Themes: Childhood
Quote: "That is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the things we are afraid of."
Reading/Listening Time: 5 hours, 36 minutes

Review:

I read that book is supposed to be one of the very first modern fantasy stories. If that's so, it's really surprising to me that one of the very first modern fantasy stories would have to do with what it means to be a princess. One of the main characters is literally a princess, but the story makes it clear that by 'princess' he isn't even particularly referring to female children: it's just kids in general and how precious they are.

It kinda starts out feeling like a regular fairy tale, and it ends kinda feeling like a fairy tale. But in the middle, there's definitely a lot that's atmospheric and nuanced that I really enjoyed. It has something of the quality of going into Narnia, even though the characters never really go into a distinctly magical realm.

The magic in this book is in nighttime,

and starlight,

 and caves,

and the wonder in experiencing something new and mysterious!

This is something I really appreciate on an aesthetic level...

The main characters are a 8 year old princess named Irene and a miner's son named Curdie.

Because the story is called "The Princess and the Goblin" I kept expecting a particular goblin protagonist or antagonist to show up, and sadly they didn't. (Curdie doesn't even turn out to be a goblin in disguise! BOO!) Actually there are several goblins, some of whom are revealed to be quite antagonistic, but I never felt like there was one particular goblin who was up against them.

(I guess it should be called "The Princess and the Goblins" instead...)

The goblins are just another race of human being, and they've cut themselves off from the surface world because they felt like they were being treated like second class citizens in Irene's kingdom. I like that, while they are antagonistic, they are never made out to be monstrous. I think it would have been cool to have central character who represented this tho...

Anyway the little girl has a really sheltered upbringing until she meets a grandmotherly figure who encourages her to explore, and gives her a magical spidersilk-string that will lead her back to where she came from.

When we were first introduced to "the grandmother", I was totally freaked out:

UM NO! DO NOT DO WHAT THE CREEPY LADY TELLS YOU TO!!

But really the point in the story is that it's important for kids to be able to explore the world under the supervision and protection of a parental figure. In this case, she turns out to be Irene's actual grandmother who *SPOILER ALERT* has kind of been put away because she was married to a Goblin at one time, and

[END SPOILER]

might be trying to convince other people that you don't need to be afraid of people just because they're different from you.

The little boy is learning to be a miner. I think it's funny that, like, they single Curdie out as the prince archtype in this story. Little girls might want to be born a princess, but typically young boys want to feel like they've earned it, or at least that they've exhibited some heroic qualities. And Curdie certainly does: He has the confidence of his father, who allows him to spend the night in the dark caves, he keeps his cool when confronted by the kobolds and hears their plans. But ultimately, I think it's interesting, that he can be saved by Irene and her grandmother and it doesn't diminish his bravery in any way.

I mean, it's politically correct before politically correct even existed.

Kudos Mr MacDonald!

Rating: 4/5 Stars