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rachelmanija will stop asking me what books of the library haul I've read and what I thought of them. :D
And when I said to guess which of them I'd read and was really liking, only one person did so! You losers!and she got it right
Nancy Farmer The Sea Trolls - Jack is an Anglo-Saxon kid living his happy little Anglo-Saxon life. He gets apprenticed to a bard and learns a bit of magic, just in time for the Vikings to hit his village and capture himself and his sister, Lucy. Jack has to figure out how to stay alive, and then how to rescue his sister from the clutches of the half-troll wife of Ivar the Boneless, the Northmen's king, which leads him between the worlds into the lair of the trolls.
The best part of the book was how Farmer sets you up to think one thing about a person or a group, then turns it around and makes you think another way, then turns it around again back to the original stance. Spoilers illustrating this in white text, highlight to read: For an example, the first you see the Vikings, they're on a raiding party and capture our protagonist. You see them from Jack's point of view as disgusting barbarians, and then you see their bloodthirstiness as the party of berserkers devastates a village. But then as Jack, and the reader, grows to know the Vikings, he grows to sympathize with them. And then he learns again how bloodthirsty they are. You get to see both sides. And then that lesson is extended to the other world, as well. [/end spoiler]
What bothered me is the "Anglo-Saxon" names. Jack? Lucy? I'm looking for things like Eadric and Ælfrida, not something that can be found in a contemporary novel. And the occasional bits that were what I guess the blurb referred to as "hilarious", such as when Jack says "Just say no to pillaging." I suppose that the target audience, which is a good bit younger than me, would find that funny as hell, but it was just jarring to me.
Holly Black Tithe - The main character (the book is in the other room and I can't be arsed to go get it) is a more-or-less rootless teenager, whose mother has dragged her from place to place as she pursues her dreams of becoming a rock star. As a child, she could see fairies and played with a few, but as she grew up, she stopped seeing them. Until one night when she finds an elfin knight dying of an arrow wound and saves him ... an elfin knight of the Unseelie Court, if you happen to know of faerie legend and mythology. The Unseelie Court needs a mortal sacrifice in order to continue to bind the solitary fairies to their service, and our protagonist finds herself caught in the middle of the struggle. And then she finds out something about herself she never expected.
This is a book that goes back to the roots of British fairy lore and uses those, instead of pseudo-Tolkien elves (in other words, the elves aren't humans with pointy ears and attitudes), which warmed the cockles of my tiny black heart, there was a twist that had I been paying any attention I could probably have figured out easily but I almost never see that sort of thing, the protagonist was intelligent and quick on her feet, there were no straight black or white sides, we see that what we think is a desirable outcome may not be so desirable after all, and in the end victory was not won without pain and loss.
Tamora Pierce Trickster's Queen - Er, um. The book before this I didn't hate nearly as much as most other people seemed to have, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up less than 50 pages into this one. Why? Inelegant infodumping. Some time has passed between the previous book and this one, months which the protagonist has spent doing this and that and building up her spy network, and so you get the feeling that you kind of missed an entire book between teh first one and this one because every time a character is introduced, it takes a while because Pierce has to explain who they are and what they've been doing over the past few months and how the protagonist is using them and it's boring as hell. Not sure I can hang on long enough for the actual plot to start.
I've only just started Isabel Allende's Zorro and M.T. Anderson's The Game of Sunken Places. The bits of Zorro I've read so far are all to do with the events leading up to Diego de la Vega's birth, so the story hasn't quite really started yet. TGoSP seems to be leading places that I wasn't expecting, so I remain cautiously optimistic.
The cat has spent the day patiently waiting until I've gotten up from the computer chair, then installing herself there the moment I've got my back turned. Silly kitty. I SQUISH YOU!!
rachelmanija will stop asking me what books of the library haul I've read and what I thought of them. :DAnd when I said to guess which of them I'd read and was really liking, only one person did so! You losers!
Nancy Farmer The Sea Trolls - Jack is an Anglo-Saxon kid living his happy little Anglo-Saxon life. He gets apprenticed to a bard and learns a bit of magic, just in time for the Vikings to hit his village and capture himself and his sister, Lucy. Jack has to figure out how to stay alive, and then how to rescue his sister from the clutches of the half-troll wife of Ivar the Boneless, the Northmen's king, which leads him between the worlds into the lair of the trolls.
The best part of the book was how Farmer sets you up to think one thing about a person or a group, then turns it around and makes you think another way, then turns it around again back to the original stance. Spoilers illustrating this in white text, highlight to read: For an example, the first you see the Vikings, they're on a raiding party and capture our protagonist. You see them from Jack's point of view as disgusting barbarians, and then you see their bloodthirstiness as the party of berserkers devastates a village. But then as Jack, and the reader, grows to know the Vikings, he grows to sympathize with them. And then he learns again how bloodthirsty they are. You get to see both sides. And then that lesson is extended to the other world, as well. [/end spoiler]
What bothered me is the "Anglo-Saxon" names. Jack? Lucy? I'm looking for things like Eadric and Ælfrida, not something that can be found in a contemporary novel. And the occasional bits that were what I guess the blurb referred to as "hilarious", such as when Jack says "Just say no to pillaging." I suppose that the target audience, which is a good bit younger than me, would find that funny as hell, but it was just jarring to me.
Holly Black Tithe - The main character (the book is in the other room and I can't be arsed to go get it) is a more-or-less rootless teenager, whose mother has dragged her from place to place as she pursues her dreams of becoming a rock star. As a child, she could see fairies and played with a few, but as she grew up, she stopped seeing them. Until one night when she finds an elfin knight dying of an arrow wound and saves him ... an elfin knight of the Unseelie Court, if you happen to know of faerie legend and mythology. The Unseelie Court needs a mortal sacrifice in order to continue to bind the solitary fairies to their service, and our protagonist finds herself caught in the middle of the struggle. And then she finds out something about herself she never expected.
This is a book that goes back to the roots of British fairy lore and uses those, instead of pseudo-Tolkien elves (in other words, the elves aren't humans with pointy ears and attitudes), which warmed the cockles of my tiny black heart, there was a twist that had I been paying any attention I could probably have figured out easily but I almost never see that sort of thing, the protagonist was intelligent and quick on her feet, there were no straight black or white sides, we see that what we think is a desirable outcome may not be so desirable after all, and in the end victory was not won without pain and loss.
Tamora Pierce Trickster's Queen - Er, um. The book before this I didn't hate nearly as much as most other people seemed to have, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up less than 50 pages into this one. Why? Inelegant infodumping. Some time has passed between the previous book and this one, months which the protagonist has spent doing this and that and building up her spy network, and so you get the feeling that you kind of missed an entire book between teh first one and this one because every time a character is introduced, it takes a while because Pierce has to explain who they are and what they've been doing over the past few months and how the protagonist is using them and it's boring as hell. Not sure I can hang on long enough for the actual plot to start.
I've only just started Isabel Allende's Zorro and M.T. Anderson's The Game of Sunken Places. The bits of Zorro I've read so far are all to do with the events leading up to Diego de la Vega's birth, so the story hasn't quite really started yet. TGoSP seems to be leading places that I wasn't expecting, so I remain cautiously optimistic.
The cat has spent the day patiently waiting until I've gotten up from the computer chair, then installing herself there the moment I've got my back turned. Silly kitty. I SQUISH YOU!!
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and to entertain ME!
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That's funny, considering a mailing list for fanfic is where I first met her.
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Arg, dammit, looks like I remembere Holly Lisle as Holly Black. I wonder where I heard of Holly Black then? I must ahve runa cross her name at about the same time as that particular wank (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/732225.html), for me to mix them up. I've known of Lisle for quite some time.
*pokes around Google a bit more* Ok, she was in at least one discussion over on Goldberg's blog, so she must have been quoted or cited or soemthing somewhere in the comments on the wank. Hum.
I feel much much better about her now, and I no longer have to feel vaguely guilty about liking her book. XD Thanks for pointing that out.
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