Wow, the year's just flying by, isn't it?
The previous 11 reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main site.
Enjoy!
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Sunday, March 27, 2016
My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George)
My Side of the Mountain
(The My Side of the Mountain trilogy, Book 1)
Jean Craighead George
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Adventure
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Like many boys (and some girls), Sam Gribley dreamed of running away from home to live in the woods, like something out of an old story. Unlike most, he actually set his mind to do it. The Gribley family owns a plot of land in the Catskill Mountains, though the place was abandoned generations ago: it's here that Sam means to live his dream. He sets out with a head full of book-learned survival knowledge and a pocketful of supplies... but the wilderness isn't a library book, and the old Gribley property is nothing like Third Avenue. Can a boy raised in New York City survive in the forest, or will he turn back at the first sign of hardship, as everyone seems to expect?
REVIEW: First published in 1959, My Side of the Mountain is a classic tale of wilderness survival and the beauty of nature. Sam's adventures are, to a certain degree, wish fulfillment, emphasizing the bounty of the forest and the many delightful surprises of life beyond civilization, with minimal true danger or hardship. He makes a home inside an ancient tree, "befriends" a few animal neighbors such as the Baron Weasel and a scrawny raccoon, and even trains a wild falcon chick, Frightful, a loyal companion every child (or former child) would love to have. For all the wonders of living out his fantasy, though, the civilized world always lurks at the edge of Sam's experience: a boy just can't up and disappear into trackless wilds in modern times. Dealing with this persistent pull figures into the climax of the story. Without spoilers, the ending isn't quite what I might have hoped, though it works okay within the tone and context of the book. It's a decent tale all in all, with many delightful details and some memorable moments.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Before Adam (Jack London) - My Review
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) - My Review
Wolf Brother (Michelle Paver) - My Review
(The My Side of the Mountain trilogy, Book 1)
Jean Craighead George
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Adventure
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Like many boys (and some girls), Sam Gribley dreamed of running away from home to live in the woods, like something out of an old story. Unlike most, he actually set his mind to do it. The Gribley family owns a plot of land in the Catskill Mountains, though the place was abandoned generations ago: it's here that Sam means to live his dream. He sets out with a head full of book-learned survival knowledge and a pocketful of supplies... but the wilderness isn't a library book, and the old Gribley property is nothing like Third Avenue. Can a boy raised in New York City survive in the forest, or will he turn back at the first sign of hardship, as everyone seems to expect?
REVIEW: First published in 1959, My Side of the Mountain is a classic tale of wilderness survival and the beauty of nature. Sam's adventures are, to a certain degree, wish fulfillment, emphasizing the bounty of the forest and the many delightful surprises of life beyond civilization, with minimal true danger or hardship. He makes a home inside an ancient tree, "befriends" a few animal neighbors such as the Baron Weasel and a scrawny raccoon, and even trains a wild falcon chick, Frightful, a loyal companion every child (or former child) would love to have. For all the wonders of living out his fantasy, though, the civilized world always lurks at the edge of Sam's experience: a boy just can't up and disappear into trackless wilds in modern times. Dealing with this persistent pull figures into the climax of the story. Without spoilers, the ending isn't quite what I might have hoped, though it works okay within the tone and context of the book. It's a decent tale all in all, with many delightful details and some memorable moments.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Before Adam (Jack London) - My Review
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) - My Review
Wolf Brother (Michelle Paver) - My Review
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente)
Six-Gun Snow White
Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, in a land where white men stole and killed and conquered in a ceaseless effort to quench their thirst for power, wealthy prospector Mr. H coveted a Crow maiden named Gun That Sings. They had a single child before she escaped by the only means left to her, leaving Mr. H a widower and her half-blood daughter alone in a world that had no place for her, not among the white men or the native tribes. The girl was hidden away from the world, left free to run in the wilds of her father's estate... until Ms. M came to be the new Mrs. H. Raised in Puritan hellfire, with a strange black mirror that holds the moon, she mockingly names the child Snow White after the skin and racial purity she'll never have, not for all the torments the woman lovingly bestows upon her. Thus unfolds a tale of love and hate, of magic mirrors and dark pacts, of wicked witches and not-so-innocent maidens, of the wild and harsh Old West and curses that even death cannot break.
REVIEW: Valente promises a unique, Western twist on the familiar fairy tale, and delivers that much in full. This story reaches beyond the sanitized Disney portrayals to the dark roots first recorded by the Brothers Grimm, where keeping a song in one's heart and having animal friends doesn't guarantee happy endings and handsome princes aren't always available for rescues. This Snow White is no fainting flower, but a girl born to a world that hates her, further broken and twisted by the warped, abusive attention of a woman who herself was warped and abused in the name of the Puritan God... a woman who only found some measure of escape by turning to the very forces her religious upbringing forbade. It's not a life for a lily-handed princess, and Snow White isn't a paragon of virtue herself, doing whatever it takes to survive with the imperfect tools and stunted, bruised heart she's been given. The tale takes several downright surreal turns, with wild Western towns and traces of Native American mythos amid elements of the original fairy tale, reworked yet still recognizable: the huntsman is a Pinkerton agent, the "seven dwarves" are a town of other broken women fleeing a world that has no place for them, and the infamous heart sequence makes for an unexpected plot twist. It ends on a peculiar note. Overall, while I enjoyed Valente's style and remarkable imagination, I was just a trifle too disturbed by some parts of the story to justify a full four-star rating.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt) - My Review
Wicked Women (Chris Enss) - My Review
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, in a land where white men stole and killed and conquered in a ceaseless effort to quench their thirst for power, wealthy prospector Mr. H coveted a Crow maiden named Gun That Sings. They had a single child before she escaped by the only means left to her, leaving Mr. H a widower and her half-blood daughter alone in a world that had no place for her, not among the white men or the native tribes. The girl was hidden away from the world, left free to run in the wilds of her father's estate... until Ms. M came to be the new Mrs. H. Raised in Puritan hellfire, with a strange black mirror that holds the moon, she mockingly names the child Snow White after the skin and racial purity she'll never have, not for all the torments the woman lovingly bestows upon her. Thus unfolds a tale of love and hate, of magic mirrors and dark pacts, of wicked witches and not-so-innocent maidens, of the wild and harsh Old West and curses that even death cannot break.
REVIEW: Valente promises a unique, Western twist on the familiar fairy tale, and delivers that much in full. This story reaches beyond the sanitized Disney portrayals to the dark roots first recorded by the Brothers Grimm, where keeping a song in one's heart and having animal friends doesn't guarantee happy endings and handsome princes aren't always available for rescues. This Snow White is no fainting flower, but a girl born to a world that hates her, further broken and twisted by the warped, abusive attention of a woman who herself was warped and abused in the name of the Puritan God... a woman who only found some measure of escape by turning to the very forces her religious upbringing forbade. It's not a life for a lily-handed princess, and Snow White isn't a paragon of virtue herself, doing whatever it takes to survive with the imperfect tools and stunted, bruised heart she's been given. The tale takes several downright surreal turns, with wild Western towns and traces of Native American mythos amid elements of the original fairy tale, reworked yet still recognizable: the huntsman is a Pinkerton agent, the "seven dwarves" are a town of other broken women fleeing a world that has no place for them, and the infamous heart sequence makes for an unexpected plot twist. It ends on a peculiar note. Overall, while I enjoyed Valente's style and remarkable imagination, I was just a trifle too disturbed by some parts of the story to justify a full four-star rating.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt) - My Review
Wicked Women (Chris Enss) - My Review
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Watership Down (Richard Adams)
Watership Down
Richard Adams
Avon
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When little Fiver has his strange visions and unaccountable feelings, his brother Hazel long ago learned to heed them... but the Chief Rabbit of their warren refuses to believe a premonition of doom. He even sets his Owsla, the chief enforcement guards, after them when they try to flee on their own. Along with a handful of other bucks, Hazel and Fiver make good their escape - but surviving isn't easy for homeless rabbits in the English countryside. Aside from men with guns, there are elil - the "Thousand" predators - not to mention injury, illness, and exposure to contend with. Fiver's visions insist there's a safe haven to be found... but even if Hazel and the rest reach it, will they be able to build a home, not just for themselves but for does and kittens for generations to come?
REVIEW: In a special anniversary edition of this title, Richard Adams talks of how he conceived this tale in a series of car trips with his children, stories of rabbits and their adventures in the English countryside to entertain and pass the time. Since publication, however, it's been hailed as a modern classic, inspiring numerous other "animal epic" fantasies (including one of my all-time favorites, Tad Williams's Tailchaser's Song - which borrows quite heavily from this book) and additional material, not to mention generations of fans more numerous than rabbits on the downs. Others insist it's a profound work, a symbolic examination of civilization and humanity (er, animality), or otherwise worthy of display on literary pillars of ivory and gold. When I started reading, therefore, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, aside from having once seen the movie (and suspecting a fair bit was cut from the script.) It moves at a fair pace, with some lulls and rough patches now and again, as the characters slowly grow from simple names and flat descriptions to more rounded beings... beings who don't always think or act as a human would, limited by lapine mentalities that preclude much abstract thought (beyond their numerous myths of the creator Frith and the first rabbit El-ahrairah, not to mention the Death figure, the Black Rabbit of Inlé), the bucks often reducing the does to vague entities required for breeding. (I admit this last point grew subtly irksome over time, despite does playing some part in later events of the novel.) They can learn, though; indeed, the balance of tradition with novelty, good new ideas with bad ones, makes a running theme through the book, as Hazel and company encounter various problems and warrens who have fallen into snares of their own innovation. The omniscient narration, though, tends to float above and beyond the rabbits, often contributing human observations and trivia of little use or concern to the rabbits themselves as they travel through the countryside. Sometimes, the descriptions get too detailed for their own good, thick with wildflowers and grasses, though Adams does an interesting job describing the flow and character of light. There are moments of tension and lightness, heroism and cowardice, cleverness and blundering. Ultimately, it may not be the great epic novel of the ages that some make it out to be, but it's a decent story, best thought of as Adams himself describes it: an adventurous tale of English rabbits, told to while away the hours.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) - My Review
Tailchaser's Song (Tad Williams) - My Review
Watership Down (Deluxe Edition)
- Amazon DVD link
Richard Adams
Avon
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When little Fiver has his strange visions and unaccountable feelings, his brother Hazel long ago learned to heed them... but the Chief Rabbit of their warren refuses to believe a premonition of doom. He even sets his Owsla, the chief enforcement guards, after them when they try to flee on their own. Along with a handful of other bucks, Hazel and Fiver make good their escape - but surviving isn't easy for homeless rabbits in the English countryside. Aside from men with guns, there are elil - the "Thousand" predators - not to mention injury, illness, and exposure to contend with. Fiver's visions insist there's a safe haven to be found... but even if Hazel and the rest reach it, will they be able to build a home, not just for themselves but for does and kittens for generations to come?
REVIEW: In a special anniversary edition of this title, Richard Adams talks of how he conceived this tale in a series of car trips with his children, stories of rabbits and their adventures in the English countryside to entertain and pass the time. Since publication, however, it's been hailed as a modern classic, inspiring numerous other "animal epic" fantasies (including one of my all-time favorites, Tad Williams's Tailchaser's Song - which borrows quite heavily from this book) and additional material, not to mention generations of fans more numerous than rabbits on the downs. Others insist it's a profound work, a symbolic examination of civilization and humanity (er, animality), or otherwise worthy of display on literary pillars of ivory and gold. When I started reading, therefore, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, aside from having once seen the movie (and suspecting a fair bit was cut from the script.) It moves at a fair pace, with some lulls and rough patches now and again, as the characters slowly grow from simple names and flat descriptions to more rounded beings... beings who don't always think or act as a human would, limited by lapine mentalities that preclude much abstract thought (beyond their numerous myths of the creator Frith and the first rabbit El-ahrairah, not to mention the Death figure, the Black Rabbit of Inlé), the bucks often reducing the does to vague entities required for breeding. (I admit this last point grew subtly irksome over time, despite does playing some part in later events of the novel.) They can learn, though; indeed, the balance of tradition with novelty, good new ideas with bad ones, makes a running theme through the book, as Hazel and company encounter various problems and warrens who have fallen into snares of their own innovation. The omniscient narration, though, tends to float above and beyond the rabbits, often contributing human observations and trivia of little use or concern to the rabbits themselves as they travel through the countryside. Sometimes, the descriptions get too detailed for their own good, thick with wildflowers and grasses, though Adams does an interesting job describing the flow and character of light. There are moments of tension and lightness, heroism and cowardice, cleverness and blundering. Ultimately, it may not be the great epic novel of the ages that some make it out to be, but it's a decent story, best thought of as Adams himself describes it: an adventurous tale of English rabbits, told to while away the hours.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) - My Review
Tailchaser's Song (Tad Williams) - My Review
Watership Down (Deluxe Edition)
- Amazon DVD link
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)
The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
HarperCollins
Fiction, Collection/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: A Martian woman's strange dreams provoke a strong reaction from her husband... an expedition to Mars inexplicably finds a small town from the 1950's American Midwest waiting at the landing site... a man has a strange encounter on a lonely road one long Martian night... an automated house patiently awaits the return of its masters... The story of humanity's exploration and conquest of Mars unfolds in this classic series of short stories and vignettes by noted sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.
REVIEW: I've read a couple short stories from this classic collection over the years, but never the entire volume, so I figured it was worth a try when I found the eBook version at a discount. Bradbury's work pushes into poetry, riddled with ethereal descriptions of both ordinary and extraordinary things. Though characters rarely return, the whole collection works as a narrative, as well as an examination of two civilizations doomed by their own inescapable flaws. The Martians, already in their twilight, refuse to accept what the coming of Earth-men means until it's too late, while the young hot-blooded humans, fleeing their own collapsing planet, fail to realize that the seeds of their own self-destruction are within them all along. Moments of wonder and otherworldly beauty punctuate a slow-motion tragedy, with glimmers of hope all too often quashed by Martian denial and human ignorance. It's more allegory than hard science, a space-age myth, in which the future Earth consists of hermetically-sealed 1950's white Midwestern American people, values, and lifestyles, and Mars is an especially exotic New World for human progress to destroy, plunder, and exploit. Men are independent scientists and explorers and doers, while women are needy and emotional tag-alongs. One wonders how much of this was a deliberate conceit on the part of Bradbury and how much was a result of cultural blinders of the era in which he wrote, the assumption that cultural norms (not to mention American dominance of space travel) would remain intact through interplanetary colonization. I have to admit some of those assumptions irked me, but such was the era in which Bradbury wrote these tales. They weren't meant to be literal scientific speculation anyway, but more a literary mirror to explore and expose our own flaws, not to mention the likely outcome if those flaws remain unacknowledged and unchecked. On the whole, despite some aging around the edges as the mid-century America he waxes poetic about fades ever further into history, this collection becomes more than the mere sum of its stand-alone parts, still well worthy of its classic status.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) - My Review
Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson) - My Review
The Martian (Andy Weir) - My Review
Ray Bradbury
HarperCollins
Fiction, Collection/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: A Martian woman's strange dreams provoke a strong reaction from her husband... an expedition to Mars inexplicably finds a small town from the 1950's American Midwest waiting at the landing site... a man has a strange encounter on a lonely road one long Martian night... an automated house patiently awaits the return of its masters... The story of humanity's exploration and conquest of Mars unfolds in this classic series of short stories and vignettes by noted sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.
REVIEW: I've read a couple short stories from this classic collection over the years, but never the entire volume, so I figured it was worth a try when I found the eBook version at a discount. Bradbury's work pushes into poetry, riddled with ethereal descriptions of both ordinary and extraordinary things. Though characters rarely return, the whole collection works as a narrative, as well as an examination of two civilizations doomed by their own inescapable flaws. The Martians, already in their twilight, refuse to accept what the coming of Earth-men means until it's too late, while the young hot-blooded humans, fleeing their own collapsing planet, fail to realize that the seeds of their own self-destruction are within them all along. Moments of wonder and otherworldly beauty punctuate a slow-motion tragedy, with glimmers of hope all too often quashed by Martian denial and human ignorance. It's more allegory than hard science, a space-age myth, in which the future Earth consists of hermetically-sealed 1950's white Midwestern American people, values, and lifestyles, and Mars is an especially exotic New World for human progress to destroy, plunder, and exploit. Men are independent scientists and explorers and doers, while women are needy and emotional tag-alongs. One wonders how much of this was a deliberate conceit on the part of Bradbury and how much was a result of cultural blinders of the era in which he wrote, the assumption that cultural norms (not to mention American dominance of space travel) would remain intact through interplanetary colonization. I have to admit some of those assumptions irked me, but such was the era in which Bradbury wrote these tales. They weren't meant to be literal scientific speculation anyway, but more a literary mirror to explore and expose our own flaws, not to mention the likely outcome if those flaws remain unacknowledged and unchecked. On the whole, despite some aging around the edges as the mid-century America he waxes poetic about fades ever further into history, this collection becomes more than the mere sum of its stand-alone parts, still well worthy of its classic status.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) - My Review
Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson) - My Review
The Martian (Andy Weir) - My Review
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