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Three, count ‘em, three chapters of PEGASUS
NOTE FROM AUGUST 30TH: DON’T USE THE ORIGINAL LINK FROM THIS POST (BELOW). THIS ONE IS MUCH BETTER AND EASIER TO READ: http://www.scribd.com/doc/36512923/Robin-McKinley-Esampler
Here:
http://issuu.com/penguinyoungreaders/docs/robin_mckinley_esampler
Knock yourselves out. Please.*
And, while you’re at it, feedback would be welcome about how easy (or otherwise) you find it to navigate and read. Hint: I find it neither. I’m asking Putnams to please sort it anyway, but reader reaction is always good for the bolstering of a viewpoint that is not going to be popular.
I’ve already asked the mods for their reaction, and Maren has come up with these suggestions for the untechie-minded like yours truly for making the experience a little less like [MMMGLRMNTH: censored to keep Robin out of trouble]:
1. The default view you’re in when the page loads is called “magazine view.” When you zoom in while in magazine view and it goes all jumpy, click the button at the top that I suppose looks like an eye? It’s between the envelope and the +/- slider. When you click on the eye, you get a menu that says “read” and “drag.” Counterintuitively, you are already in “read” and you want to switch to “drag”–it will stop jumping around.
2. OR before you even zoom in, hover your cursor over the button at top left between Fullscreen and the globe. (I don’t care for the wordless buttons at all, either.**) This will allow you to choose either “presentation view” or “paper view.” Presentation view displays one page at a time and you have to click the arrows every time you want to turn the page. The page still moves when your mouse does, but only vertically. Paper view is closer to a .pdf file–you get the whole document at once and scroll like normal. The text is a bit blurry in paper view, though–it looks best to me at 125 or 150%, but still not great. To get out of paper view again, click the button to the right of the search box at the top.
* * *
* The beginnings of both SUNSHINE and CHALICE are excerpted there too^, but you’ve all read them already, right?^^
^ Not very eptly.
^^ I still think the idea of an author blog is a bit bizarre. She eats! She sleeps! She has hellhounds (and ME)! Who cares! I’m going to go read some fiction!
** This was one of my original complaints about it. How are we supposed to know? Telepathy?
Three Short Books
. . . which have NOTHING to do with each other except that I read them all recently and liked them all.* I liked three books in a row. This doesn’t happen.
Say Yes, by Audrey Couloumbis.
I had read her Getting Near to Baby when it first came out, and liked it a lot. Say Yes is entirely different, barring the kid-getting-on-with-her-life-in-difficult-circumstances aspect, although this is an entirely different kid in entirely different difficult circumstances.
Twelve-year-old Casey lives alone with her stepmother, Sylvia; her dad died two years ago, and they both still miss him. But Sylvia is the sort of person who needs to have other people to hang onto, to cling to. She holds on to Casey, which Casey both likes and doesn’t like, and she hangs onto her boyfriend. The boyfriend doesn’t like Casey, and the feeling is mutual.
One morning Sylvia is particularly affectionate as Casey gets ready to go to school. Casey maybe wonders a little what is up with her—but only a little. Until she gets back from school and Sylvia isn’t there. She doesn’t come home that night at all. And she left some money in an envelope under a magnet on the fridge. Sylvia doesn’t leave money around.
It’s not really till the next day, when Casey notices that the freezer is full of her favourite dinners, and none of Sylvia’s—and that Sylvia’s clothes and stuff are gone—and she tries the boyfriend’s phone number and it’s been disconnected—that she begins to realise how much trouble she’s in. . . .
The Big Bazoohley, by Peter Carey
‘Like most grown-ups, Sam Kellow’s parents never guessed that their son ever thought about money. . . . But in truth Sam knew a lot about how much things cost, and when the family arrived in Toronto in the middle of a blizzard, he knew they were there to sell his mother’s latest painting to the mysterious Mr. Edward St. John de Vere. He also knew they were down to their last fifty-three dollars and twenty cents.’ And the hotel they’re staying at is very grand: ‘He watched his father tip the doorman five dollars and the bell captain two dollars, and when the porter brought their single suitcase to the room, Sam saw how much Earl Kellow gave him and he knew they now had only forty-four dollars and twenty cents left in all the world. . . .
‘Vanessa Kellow['s] . . . tiny paintings showed entire cities. Not just the buildings and the streets, but the bakers and butchers, and the stews bubbling in the pots, and the freckles on the faces, and the cat sleeping in the basket, and the fluff under the beds, although you could not see these things without a special magnifying glass, and then you might find a ruby ring in a secret drawer or a jar of blue-and-green striped candy in a cupboard. . . . People would go crazy when they saw his mother’s tiny paintings . . . and if they were rich people, they would pay a lot of money. . . . ’
The mysterious Mr de Vere ‘“ . . . has a mansion which is totally underground. You reach it from a door on the Bloor Street subway platform.”’
Except that when Sam’s mother goes to deliver her painting she discovers that the entrance to the mansion has disappeared.
And their hotel room costs four hundred and fifty-three dollars a night. Plus tax.
But the hotel is also playing host to the Perfecto Kiddo competition. The winner will take home $10,000. Sam is more the grubby, backwards-baseball-cap type than the Perfecto Kiddo type, but emergencies demand drastic action. . . .
Owl in Love, by Patricia Kindl
‘I am in love with Mr. Lindstrom, my science teacher. I found out where he lives and every night I perch on a tree branch outside his bedroom window and watch him sleep. He sleeps in his underwear: Fruit of the Loom, size 34.’
She is not kidding when she says she perches on a tree branch: ‘I am Owl. It is my name as well as my nature. There are birds of prey in my family going back hundreds of years, one every two or three generations . . . by night I seek my living in owl shape . . . By day I am an ordinary girl (more or less) attending the local high school.’ And while it is not unusual for fourteen-year-old girls to develop crushes on their science teachers, there are complications in this case: ‘I am Owl; it is in my nature to give my love once and only once in a lifetime. I shall love him until I die, or he does.’ And Mr Lindstrom is forty years old, and has a wife and a son—a son about Owl’s age—although no one seems to know anything for certain about the son; there is an awful rumour that he is insane, and is kept under restraint in an asylum, and that this is why Mr Lindstrom’s wife left him.
Owls are solitary creatures; Owl has never had a friend aside from her parents. But in science class they are about to have to prick their fingers for blood samples—and Owl’s blood is clearly not human. She needs an ally—an ally who doesn’t mind providing a second blood sample. That ally is Dawn, who has guessed Owl’s passion for Mr Lindstrom, and invites her home to experiment with potentially science-teacher-attracting make-up. Owl, rather bemusedly, agrees. ‘Dawn’s house was nice enough inside, I suppose, if you like all that furniture and that glaring sunlight pouring in at the windows. To my taste it seemed awfully cluttered. . . . You couldn’t walk ten feet in any direction without bumping into a piece of overstuffed furniture. . . . A few rotting branches or some old leaves would have made the place look a lot homier, in my opinion. . . .’ There is a tricky moment when Dawn offers Owl, hungry after another night of keeping watch rather than hunting, her hamster to hold: ‘“Here, pet him . . . he’s really friendly.” . . . I have been carefully raised. Hungry as I was I could not be guilty of such a violation of proper conduct as to eat my hostess’ pet. . . .’
Owl has lately been watching Mr Lindstrom’s house with more purpose than mere longing. There is another shape-shifting owl who has taken up residence in the woods behind Mr Lindstrom’s house. A young one—a young incompetent one. Owl cannot decide if she should run him off what she considers to be her territory, or help him learn to be what he is. For the moment, she decides to keep a wary eye on him: ‘I will try for larger prey to stave off my hunger, and so be free to watch by the window longer. I have sometimes caught fat rabbits hopping in the moonlight around our frozen vegetable garden. . . . .The garden of a were-owl at midnight makes a perilous salad bar.’
They’re all three funny and warm and lovely in their very different ways; each author has a sharp, individual style and something to say. I recommend them all.
* * *
* And were in the same dusty box under the bed only recently discovered. Sigh. I didn’t think there were any more dusty boxes of books under there. In fact I’m sure there weren’t. So I have a new theory. There’s a hole in spacetime under my bed. Boxes of various items come through occasionally. This particular hole does seem to have a predilection for books, but there are worse things. At least I know what to do with books.^ There was a random-selection box not long ago that was pretty challenging.^^
^ Put them in piles. All over the house. Reading is good too. But creating and rearranging the piles is the important thing.
^^ Especially the intelligent squid who had lost her navigational widget and taken a wrong turn.
Friday the 13th or, YA* is not a dirty word
Or, it’s actually been a pretty good day** and not only is time hurtling by like a hellhound*** but stuff I really want to point and shout at is stacking up and in another day or two I’ll forget which is my best trick of all, unfortunately, and I figure there’s all this Friday the 13th energy washing around, waiting to turn you into a tadpole or make you win the lottery even if you didn’t buy a ticket, so I might as well ride a little of it.
Emoon [@emoontx] saw it first, and tweeted the link to ‘The Kids’ Books Are All Right’, printed in the NYTimes, no less, about—brace yourselves, this is going to come as a shock—adults are reading books for young adults. YAAAAAAH. I retweeted somewhat ungraciously, adding ‘I am a 30+ year survivor of “when are you going to write a real book?”’—and I’m not impressed. I ‘follow’ the Huffington Post Books section, and they retweeted, so I retweeted again as follows:
Oh do stick yr hushed amazement in yr ear RT @HuffPostBooks: Why it’s okay 4 adults 2 love YA books as much as teens http://huff.to/dAxuSS
I thought about blogging about it myself, but as the above pithily indicates, I was going to have some trouble being professionally polite. And then, lo, Jodi sent me this link:
http://www.gayleforman.com/blog/2010/08/10/sandbox/
Way to go Gayle. Yes, flaming frell it. Yes.
Which will also serve as a much-delayed lead-in to telling you that if you haven’t read Forman’s book IF I STAY, you have a big, sobbing, heart-wrenching, glorious treat waiting for you. Jodi† blogged about it a while ago†† http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/760957.html
. . . but I never quite got around to it, partly because Pollyanna and I kept arguing about terms. See, there was no way I was going to like this book. My editor sent it to me—it’s published in another part of the Penguin forest from me—and I took one long disbelieving look at it and laid it down again for several months.††† It ticks all my instant-death boxes: It’s written in present tense. The heroine is a Sensitive Teen. I hate Sensitive Teens. They give me a rash. She’s not only sensitive, but fabulously talented, and already has her great musical gift to organise her life around. I hate sensitive teens who already know who they are and what they’re good at. She also has a Perfect Boyfriend who not only has his own clear, mature aims and goals but gets hers. Also, he’s cute. He could at least be geeky and spotty. But nooooo. He’s cute. I probably hate Perfect Boyfriends the most of all.
SPOILER ALERT HERE. Jodi was very good when she blogged about the book—she didn’t give anything away. My own feeling is that you’re allowed to blow the set up, the first (say) twenty pages—I’m very literal-minded in my little dragons-and-pegasi way and I find it too difficult to get behind a read this book without mentioning at least a few specifics. So, if you’re willing to take Jodi’s and my word for it, and you like sitting down to a book that you know absolutely nothing about but that the odds are good you’ll like it (which in fact I do, so I will perfectly understand), STOP READING NOW.
But for the rest of you: Mia, our heroine, and her much-loved parents and little brother, are on their way to see friends. School’s been called off because of snow; but the snow stopped almost as soon as the announcement was made, so the roads aren’t even slippery. Slippery enough however: There’s an accident. ‘The car is eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pick-up truck going sixty miles an hour had the force of an atom bomb.’ Mia’s parents are both killed instantly; she and her little brother are dangerously injured. Mia tells the story as a disassociated spirit, as her damaged and unconscious body lies in a hospital bed connected to various drips and tubes and life-support machinery. The point at which the book really grabbed me for the first time happens when Mia first ‘wakes’ outside her body immediately after the accident, and sees the wreckage around her: ‘You wouldn’t expect the radio to work afterward. But it does.’ She sees what has happened and can’t bear it. ‘Wake up! I scream. Wake up! Wakeupwakeupwakeup! But I can’t. I don’t. . . . Then I hear something. It’s the music. I can still hear the music. So I concentrate on that. I finger the notes of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3 . . . as I often do when I listen to pieces I am working on. . . . I play, just focusing on that, until the last bit of life in the car dies, and the music goes with it.
‘It isn’t long after that the sirens come.’
For my money, one of the reasons the book is so absorbing is the groundedness of it. You hear, graphically and specifically, about the accident, about what happens to Mia—about how they go about trying to save her life—about her prospects—which are not at all good. The entire book takes place in the hospital, while the doctors and what remains of her family and friends wait to see if she will live or die. And this is intercut with the story of her life so far: the music—shortly before the book begins she’d had her audition at Juilliard—the Perfect Boyfriend (who is a rock star, but he’s okay really, he wears Converse All Stars), the best girlfriend. And the family. The family that she is a part of in a deep, genuine way that she knows she is lucky to have. The family who has been destroyed by a little bit of wet road.
It’s also a thriller. Forman does a brilliant job of wracking you silly over the latest section of the hospital vigil . . . and then whoops you back to Mia’s life before, with her music and Adam, the boyfriend, and Kim, the girlfriend, and her parents, and Teddy, her brother, and her dad’s parents, her school, and the ramshackle old house she and her parents and brother live in, and which is something of a refuge for everyone they love. And as you keep anxiously, lump-in-throat-ishly turning the pages you realise that it’s a real question, about whether Mia chooses to stay. To live. Or not. And the present tense narration? This may be the only book I’ve ever read where it’s absolutely right; where the moment-by-moment of Mia’s fragile existence after the accident is perfectly reflected in all those present-tense verbs.
Read it. But have a big box of tissues handy.
* * *
* Pronounced YAH. Or possibly YAAAAAH.
** So far. There’s a few minutes of it left. Things could always change. But Oisin and I spent a big fat chunk of this afternoon drinking tea and engaging in parallel play with our new toys^—he has a brand-new-this-week iPhone4 too. It’s pathetic. Here we are, respected career professionals in glamorous if ill-paid creative callings, both of us a lot nearer sixty than fifty, and behaving like fifteen-year-olds over a couple of pieces of shiny new kit. Well, I’m still badly mired in the Ooooh! Shiny! stage. Oisin is a bit more blasé, having had earlier versions of the iPhone for several years^^, but he’s the one who explained how you can not only take terrible pictures of the person sitting on the other side of the teapot from you but you can then load one of those terrible photos next to the person’s info on your contact page and then assign them their own ringtone.^^^ So the moment your phone begins ringing you know who’s calling. Supposing you can remember if you assigned the theme from JAWS to your dentist or your accountant. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter that much really. You know you don’t want to answer it.
And then at bell practise tonight . . . I genuinely am beginning to stagger through touches of Grandsire Triples on an inside bell. ‘Beginning’ and ‘stagger’ still being the operative words. But given that it was only a fortnight or so ago that I remained clueless on the touches of Grandsire Triples front, this is excellent. I am going to learn this. I am.
^ Piano lesson? Remind me what that would be—? Although he did remember my empty threat last week about bringing something to sing. Well, he’s the one cancelled at the last minute—not me. And this week is—this week. Not last. Besides, I’m hoarse from screaming.
^^ And in fact bears some responsibility for enmeshing me in this whole iPhone thing in the first place. That and Cathy’s Fingerzilla.
^^^ This is getting as appalling as the existence of a cheat app—of several cheat apps—for Angry Birds.
*** Only twenty four hours left to get a recipe in for the sticky-baked-goods drawing for a shiny gold SIGNED copy of SUNSHINE! http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/08/07/sunshine-contest-%e2%80%93-round-2-guest-post-by-ajlr/
† Jodi is everywhere. Don’t do anything you don’t want her to see.
†† Right after we’d been talking about how good it was. Jodi, however, wrote about it. I dithered.
††† I finally picked it up again because Hannah and her daughters really liked it.
An Unscheduled Night Off
So I got back from home tower practise* and found this in my Twitter feed:
tessagratton In Which My Friend Sends a Piece of God in a Pink Envelope: http://tinyurl.com/232y7g3 @mstiefvater @robinmckinley
And I figure if your sins** have caught you out, you might as well get a free guest-post substitute out of it.*** Furthermore, how often is a hellgoddess† truly granted her rightful divinity?†† This is obviously a moment that should be commemorated as widely as possible.†††
PS: Tessa, I hate your fingernails. Because I am horribly jealous. I stopped bothering with make up way early.‡ But I would have liked to play with nail varnish. I can’t: I’m allergic to the stuff. It makes my fingernails fall off.‡‡ Curses.
* * *
* I have to ring a quarter peal the day after tomorrow. Somebody. Please. Shoot me. Just a nice little tranquillizer-dart gun. You want to do it Sunday morning, so someone has an opportunity to discover my unconscious body and find some other eighth ringer by 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
** I still haven’t decided if that should have been ‘who’ or ‘whom’. As you will notice by its strange indecipherability. Pretend it’s like Vina in The Menagerie.^ It will be whatever you want it to be.
^ Pathetically geeky ST: The Original reference. Menopause brain has wiped out most of my higher learning. Star Trek, however, remains.
*** It’s also here: http://tessagratton.livejournal.com/563891.html I’m dubious about how many times a link will copy and paste and stay linky.
† You will note the pink envelope. I almost sent her a red one in acknowledgement of her position on the arc of unusual public personas, but I decided that no, the hellgoddess should be manifest in this case.
†† Mind you, I read it and went ‘eeep.’ Although I read her original BEAUTY post and went ‘double eep.’ Possibly quadruple eep. I’m also very impressed that she had the generosity of spirit to be willing to read anything that contained a so obviously drippy useless heroine with a serious skin condition and pink horns.
††† Although I wish to point out that I am never weird, as regular readers of this blog already know.^
^ Except on days beginning with M, T, W, F, or S, and between the hours of midnight and 11:59 pm.
‡ I’m creeped out by the choice of photo that seems to be everybody’s favourite for copying, which is from the wedding I went to two years ago in which I am wearing lipstick. Ewwww. Okay, my fault for posting it, but how was I to know that would be the one?
‡‡ Speaking of ewwwww.
Bluebell Wood
To my considerable bemusement I’ve had two or three requests for bluebell photos.* Maybe the photos look better if you’re not surrounded by the real thing. Although it’s a funny thing about bluebells: even though they’re almost overwhelmingly magical in person, even I feel the Must. Go. There. of bluebell photos. Even these not-very-satisfactory photos, because bluebell photos are never satisfactory, do have that effect—well, on me anyway, and at least two or three of my blog readers, I guess. You know that that world is enchanted—the world with flowering bluebells in it—and in the photos it’s the whole world. When you’re walking through a bluebell wood you’re sadly aware that you’re going to have to come back out again into the world of internal combustion engines and aggressive off lead dogs and hung parliaments**. A photo of a bluebell wood is a little window to Middle earth.
Bluebells also smell, however, and it’s somehow a wild smell, much wilder than, say, wild hedgerow roses, and it stays wild even when you have bluebells trying to take over your garden, which is what bluebells do in a garden, they’re the flowering bulb version of blackbirds. But the fragrance is some recompense for the inevitable reentry of/to engines, nasty dogs and parliaments.
* * *
* Remember: askrobin@robinmckinleysblog.com It’ll go up permanently on the opening page soon, but until then I’ll keep reminding you.^
^ And while I’m hanging around at askrobin, let’s answer another question.
Was it your intent for the Queen from ‘Spindle’s End’ to seem like she came from Ossin’s country in ‘Deerskin’ in what seems to be direct lineage to Deerskin’s friend Lilac (if she isn’t Deerskin’s friend Lilac) or possibly even Deerskin herself.
Yes. No. Yes, Rosie’s mum in Spindle’s End is from Ossin’s country, but no she’s not directly related to Lissar or Lilac.
In your defense of Pollyanna, [ http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/05/03/in-defense-of-pollyanna/ ] you mentioned, that you strongly disliked a book, that it did not work for you. What are your personal criteria for dismissing a book as trash? Bad prose? Weak female characters? Can a book be written with one or the other and still be considered a success or at least worth reading?
First I want to differentiate between good trash and bad trash. Good trash is fun enjoyable stuff that doesn’t shake you out of your comfort zone, or maybe only a little, in a tingly, giddy sort of way. Am I being insulting? I hope not. I love good trash. Georgette Heyer wrote the epitome of superb trash. She’s not the only one, but she’s safely dead so I don’t have to worry about insulting her.
Bad trash . . . bad trash is junk food for the mind and the heart. You may think it tastes good on the way down—and if you’re on a steady diet of it you won’t notice the icky chemical aftertaste—but it’ll fur up your arteries and make you stupid.
In this particular case it was another of these frelling supernatural romances. I was reading it because it’s one of the ones that come up when people are discussing the post-TWILIGHT boom of YA supernatural romance. It features another wet, useless heroine, another hundreds-of-years-old supernatural boyfriend+ who Loves Only Her for No Discernable Reason, an almost total lack of plot, a short list of tics and mannerisms instead of a writing style and endless bulldiddly about whether to Go All the Way or not.
Bad prose is unfortunate, and generally speaking, there being so many books out there and I am such a slow reader, I won’t bother with a book that isn’t written with story-specific grace and aplomb—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time are both written with great story-specific grace and aplomb, for example, even if it’s not what Jane Austen or Jorge Luis Borges would use. And if I threw out every book with weak female characters I’d have to throw out pretty well all of, for example, Charles Dickens and Raymond Chandler, both of whom I cherish. But both of them had other virtues—style to burn, for example, especially in Chandler’s case, and an imagination so vivid it pretty well boils off the page at you in Dickens’.
They were also humans, which is to say men, of their times.++ I’m really not going to put up with wet, useless heroines in books written today, and the post-TWILIGHT+++ frenzy for boyfriends who totally take care of you so you can go on being wet and useless MAKES ME CRAAAAAZY. And so does the coy crap about sex. Arrrgh.
P.S.: I was wondering something else: Where does the name ‚Pollyanna come from? It’s definitely a character in a book I should have read but which book and by whom?
Ahem. Google and Wikipedia are your friends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna
+ I adore Buffy, and with every other gloppy fanatic one of my favourite eps is the one where Angel shows up at the prom, but she is the Slayer, which a lot of the rippers-off who have come after seem to forget.
++ And Dickens had quite a scintillating line in tortured anti-heroines. He just couldn’t do good women without plunging hip-deep into sentimental tosh.
+++ And yes, TWILIGHT is pretty much the only current book I’ve been willing to say I don’t like—and I mean seriously don’t like—and that Bella and Edward’s relationship is psychotic. TWILIGHT is trying to chain feminism in the cellar again, with a gag in her mouth and a bag over her head. No. I won’t go.
** Gah. Get on with it, guys, we do need a government.
