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Different voices seeking a delicate balance April 2, 2024

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: children's literature, fantasy novels, reviews, young-adult literature
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This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.

‘Tell them stories’ is the refrain of award-winner children’s author Philip Pullman’s book The Amber Spyglass. It’s also a pithy summation of Pullman’s philosophy about writing in general, and children’s writing in particular.

The five books reviewed here are very different, but each demonstrates the challenge contained in this seemingly simple injunction. Children’s and young adults’ literature is always a delicate balancing act between plot and themes, story and didactic purpose, and the authors who succeed in creating an engaging book are those who manage to get the balance right.

Folklorist Kathleen Ragan is an American writer who earns her living by collecting and reproducing stories in their purest form. Her previous collection of folktales, Fearless Girls, was an attempt to rectify the imbalance, as she saw it, betwen the massed ranks of heroes in children’s stories (in both fairytales and more modern works) and the sparse offerings in the way of positive female role models. She also hoped to broaden the definition of heroism. Her most recent book, Outfoxing Fear, is similarly wide-ranging and ambitious: she has collected stories from around the world which take as their theme the banishment of fear. Ragan is a woman who utterly believes in the power of the story to stave off disaster, to ward off terror. And as Fearless Girls created a new concept of heroism, Outfoxing Fear develops a broader definition of bravery. Some of the stories in the collection are about the traditionally brave warriors fighting the supernatural, but most are about small acts of bravery — the quick wit of an old lady defeating a demon, the devotion of a sister riding out into a wild and stormy night to seek aid — and so are all the more inspiring.

The Book of Everything, the latest award-winning book by Dutch author Guus Kuijer, is a deceptively simple story, almost like the folktales Ragan has collected. It is the tale of a sweet-natured boy, Thomas, whose imagination and love of reading give him the power to resist his puritanican father and miserable home life. It is also an examintion of the evils caused by the misuse of religious faith. Kuijer, like Roald Dahl, is able to capture perfectly the outrage felt by young children whose trust has been betrayed. But while Dahl’s protagonists, with supernatural aid, usually escape the adults who treat them so badly, Kuijer’s Thomas relies on magic of a more domestic kind: the ability of one courageous person to inspire others. His reply to his father’s assertions that the Bible is the only real book in the world is to organise a poetry reading in his house, to expose his family to other, secular writing. The Book of Everything is a heartwarming story told with great sweetness. Kuijer does tend to lay on the moral messages with a heavy hand, though, and this detracts from the simple beauty of a narrative which would have benefited from a little more subtlety.

Ursula Dubosarsky is an Australian author who understands the value of subtlety. While her books are always carried by the fantastic stories they tell, they are enriched by the themes, concerns and questions which are allowed to whisper softly in the margins. The Red Shoe, her newest offering, is no different in this respect. Her narrative, like Kuijer’s, is revealed through the eyes of a child, in this case six-year-old Matlida, who lives in Sydney’s Palm Beach in the 1950s. Dubosarsky juxtaposes the story of Matilda’s family — her father, who is suffering from his experiences during World War II, her older sister, who has dropped out of school and is depressed, and many more skeltons in the closet — with the Petrov Affair. The Red Shoe, like all of Dubosarsky’s novels, captures the essence of Australian life. It appeals to the reader’s senses, so that he or she can feel the heat rising from tin roofs and asphalt, smell the eucalypts, and taste the lamb, peas and potatoes served up for dinner. This, along with the extracts from newspapers, makes the 1950s setting come to life, and it adds to the realism of the story. This realism is what makes The Red Shoe such a subtly power novel: like many of Dubosarsky’s works, it revels in the interior life of ordinary people and, as a result, possesses a luminous authenticity. Her characters seethe with life and vitality, inviting the reader into a world which makes the familiar seem marvellous. They are more than the cardboard cut-outs so often used in young adult literature, merely mouthpieces for moral messages.

Looking for Alaska, the deubt novel of American author John Green, is a poorer novel than Dubosarsky’s for this reason. A coming-of-age story, suitable for older teenagers, it begins well but is weakened by its strong desire to shock at the same time as moralise. Its hero and narrator, Miles Halter, is a teenage boy sent to boarding school in Alabama. There he discovers love, makes the first real friends of his life, and matures as a person. The first half of the novel is fantastic — a whirlwind of drinking, experimentation, and pranks — but unfortunately Green can’t resist indulging in the kind of bleak moralising popular among so many writers of books for young adults. He seems to believe that to be relevant to potential readers, books must pander to popular ideas about some common, comprehensively joyless adolescent world. This is a narrow and limiting view. A book does not to be a catalogue of stereotypical teenage problems (drug addiction, suicide, bereavement and the like) to be engaging for young adults. Coming of age does not necessarily mean becoming immersed in the darker side of life and if Green understood this he would have written a much more powerful book.

Catherine Webb’s The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle is the antithesis of Looking for Alaska, a joyful and exhuberant book reminiscent of Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series. Webb, who wrote her first novel at the age of 14, has presented readers with a rich, feast of a book, a detective story set in Victorian London which moves along as quickly and with as many sparks as electricity. Its hero is an unwilling detective, Horatio Lyle, who would rather potter around at home doing scientific experiments. Aided by a cheeky pickpocket and a bored an lonely aristocrat, Horatio must track down a missing Tibetan plate which may or may not possess supernatural powers. Webb tells her story with great wit and flair, glorying in the Victorian world she has recreated and the characters with which she has people it it. it is heartening to see a young writer valuing the story over a simplistic moral message, understanding that children are engaged more by a richly imagined fictional world than by a misplaced obsession with ‘relevance’ and realism.

This review originally appeared in the 6th May, 2006 issue of The Canberra Times.

Riding high in Harry Potter’s wake February 18, 2024

Posted by dolorosa12 in interview, review reprint.
Tags: children's literature, fantasy novels, garth nix, ya literature
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Readers have Canberra’s Turner Primary School to thank for Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series. The phenomenally successful and internationally acclaimed fantasy author reveals how an enforced cross-country run led to the memorable opening sequence of the first book in the series, Mister Monday.

‘I had asthma and bronchitis and I was on this run and I just thought I’d keep running. We were running around the oval at school and I had difficulty breathing … and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground looking at the sky. And so I based the beginning of Mister Monday on this real-life experience.’

Now based in Sydney, Nix lived in Canberra until he was 19, and is full of praise for his childhood home.

‘Canberra’s a very good place for a writer to grow up in. You’ve got good education. The Canberra public library service is very important too. Particularly the specialist children’s library they used to have at O’Connor shops, on my way to school. I would get new books almost every day from that little library. The librarians there were enormously helpful at getting books for me, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. It’s a good example of how libraries often sow the seeds for the work that people do later. They’re great sources of inspiration.’

Nix is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. His books, which have been translated into 30 languages, have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. Interestingly, he did not become a full-time writer until quite recently, and spent a lot of his adult life working in the publishing industry, as a literary agent, public-relations consultant and editor. He argues that while this experience was helpful to him as an author, it alone cannot explain his success.

‘Having a background in the business has helped me understand how to get the best for my books and to know when something’s going right or not and if somebody’s not doing the boest for the books or they are, but you can’t make things happen … A lot of it’s luck of the draw … You can market books, push them, but ultimately it comes down to the readers’ word of mouth.

‘I’ve been lucky as well, because I’ve always written the kinds of books that I wanted to read, and when I first wrote that was not a very popular area. You know, I’ve got rejection letters for Sabriel which basically say, “Fantasy? Forget it.” This is pre-Harry Potter, pre-Philip Pullman [the Whitbread Award-winning author of the His Dark Materials trilogy], and so I was always just paddling my little canoe, and then this giant tidal wave of Harry Potter just swept past and caught me up in its wake. I’ve been lucky that conditions for selling the stuff that I did changed. It may well change again, but I’ll just keep doing the stuff I want to write.’

At the moment, what Nix wants to write is a seven-part series called The Keys to the Kingdom. These books are set partly in a slightly futuristic indeterminate Western country, and mainly in the fantastical world of the House, an anarchic realm thrown into the chaos by the withdrawal of the Architect (a shadowy figure who created all the ‘Secondary Realms,’ including our own universe) and the division of her Will among seven villainous, Key-wielding Trustees. Into this bizarre world steps Arthur Penhaligon, a twelve-year-old boy who stands out as a particularly unsuitable hero in a genre famous for its ‘unlikely heroes.’ Nix explains that Arthur was perfect for the story he wanted to tell.

‘I like my characters to feel like real people, and sometimes that means that they are more frail than heroes. To be human you have to have weaknesses as well as strengths. But the characters emerge out of the stories, I often know very little about them at the beginning of the story. I don’t sit down and work out their whole lives as some writers do. I’m totally driven by the story. He has asthma because I had asthma as a child, I suppose, and funnily enough, it went away when I was about twelve or thirteen, and I didn’t have asthma again until I started working on The Keys to the Kingdom.

Nix is keen to reinforce the ordinariness of his protagonist, giving him one of the craziest, most blended of blended families, so that, in his world, he doesn’t stand out. ‘Because Arthur was adopted, I didn’t want him to be part of a typical nuclear family where he would be the odd one out.’ Even Arthur’s meaningful-sounding name, with its hint at a link with the medieval Arthurian legend, is for Nix a literary joke.

‘With Arthur Penhaligon, I guess I’m doing a sort of red herring on the reader, because you’re meant to think “Hang on, that sounds significant,” but in actual fact, it’s not. Arthur is chosen at random because he’s about to die, he’s not the Chosen One, so it’s a little ironic joke. He’s not the secret heir who’s been hidden away, he’s just a boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

One of the characteristics of Nix’s work is the number of clever ideas he manages to pack into a couple of hundred pages. The most brilliant conceit in The Keys to the Kingdom is that, rather like the television series 24, the action takes place over a relatively short period — one week, with each book devoted to one day. Nix explains that ideas like this come relatively easily to him. He gives an example from another of his books, Sabriel, the first in his Old Kingdom trilogy.

‘One of the central ideas is of two countries separated by a wall where one is magical and the other is technological, and it came from a photo of Hadrian’s Wall. On the southern side of the wall there was a green lawn and on the northern side there were these snow-covered hills and it actually looked as if one side was summer and the other side was winter. There are lots of stories in fairytales and fables with barriers between the fairy world and our world and demarcation points like hedges or walls or doorways, so it’s not a new idea, it’s just what you do with it.’

Nix is a voracious reader, and says that many of his ideas come from other books. Glancing around his bookshelves, he points out children’s stories, classic fantasy novels, short stories, biographies, history books and graphic novels. But one of the richest seams he mines is an old edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

‘It has so much old, weird stuff in it. You can open Brewer’s at any page and find an idea for a story. It’s quite astonishing how you can just open this book and discover amazing things.’

An element of myth Nix has transformed in The Keys to the Kingdom is the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Seven Trustees of the Will, whom Arthur must defeat, are thoroughly refreshing villains, each embodying a particular kind of modern evil. Thus, the slothful Mister Monday represents bureaucratic ineptitude, while avaricious Grim Tuesday becomes a symbol of corporate greed. In Sir Thursday, Nix is able to place the action in a setting of which he has some experience, the military. (Nix spent some time serving in the Army Reserve.)

‘Certainly I drew upon my Army Reserve experience, but I’ve always been a military history buff — a history buff in fact — and I read a lot of biographies, so I’ve read a lot of personal stories of soldiers, and it draws on that as well.’

And is it also good to correct some common mistakes made in films and books about the military?

‘Annoying things happen in movies sometimes. Some of them are incredibly basic, like little differences between the American and British armies, when Americans make films that have British soldiers in them, they have them saluting without their hats on, which they do in America and they don’t do in Britain. There are tiny details like that which most people couldn’t give a stuff about, but there’s always some who do, and it’s nice to get it right for them. And I do like it when I get emails from serving members of the military who just appreciate some of the military characters in my books.’

But while correcting misconceptions about the military is satisfying, Nix’s primary aim has always been to tell a good story. He views this as the natural purpose of children’s and young-adult fiction.

‘I think good children’s books, and good young-adult books nearly always work on multiple levels, and one of those levels is always a very strong strand of story. [A good children’s book will always have a] strong story, rich characters, usually told in a fairly straightforward prose, so it’s an easy read in the sense that it’s easy to immerse yourself into and be carried along by it, not lots of interruptions in the style which throw you back out of the story … But often the good children’s books have other levels as well, where more sophisticated readers, as well as being immersed in that story, can also pick up on the thematic level where the author is having a lot to say about the nature of the world, or the nature of humanity, or human relations or any of those deeper things, and perhaps because of that very strong weave of story, you often will pick up that subsidiary weave of thematic content without realising you’ve done so or having to pause and think about them, or stop.’

Philip Pullman has often spoken out against the trend in children’s literature to make a good story subsidiary to a moral message. It’s a view Nix shares. ‘I think with children’s books, if you set out to make your “top level” a message, or some sort of didactic theme, it doesn’t work, because there’s nothing to carry it along. A story can carry a theme, but a theme can’t carry a story. A good story can be deep and poignant and so on, but it must be the primary carrier of everything else.

‘Adult books don’t have to be like that, but the best adult books also have a very strong layer of story which carries everything else along, and that’s probably what Pullman was talking about in that he was able to convey a greater depth of meaning on the back of a great story, ostensibly for children, but the best children’s books are for everyone and you can reread them. You can read them at ten and just get the story, and again at 20 or 30 or 50 and get all that other stuff, and you can reread them again and again and again and get more out of them. That’s the characteristic of great books in general, not just children’s books.’

This interview originally appeared in the 25 March, 2006 edition of The Canberra Times.

Love and dreams for better things November 26, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: alyzon whitestarr, fantasy novels, isobelle carmody, reviews, ya literature
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Isobelle Carmody’s Legendsong trilogy imagines a world sung into being. Alyzon Whitestarr, her most recent book, extends this philosophical metaphor, even though it is not part of this series. Her new book is a song for humanity, in the broadest sense of the word: a plea for compassion, creativity, emotion and imagination, and a celebration of these qualities. At the same time, it is a repudiation of brutality, hatred, rage and apathy.

Her heroine, the whimsically named Alyzon Whitestarr, is the middle child in a dream family. Our introduction to the Whitestarr family prepares us for Carmody’s fantastical story, which will centre on them. Our first glimpse is of four siblings on a beach at sunset, with their father, watching their mother give birth in the water. There is beautiful Mirandah, musically gifted, with a penchant for dyeing her hair odd colours, gregarious Jesse, the deeply scarred Serenity, who has transformed herself into a gothic prophet named Sybl, and Luke, the baby. Their mother is a flame-tressed artist, who tends to waft in and out of the narrative dreamily. The focal point of the clan is Macoll, the larger-than-life father: an idealistic musician blessed with eternal optimism, and a belief that despite the depraved acts human beings sometimes commit, there is a possibility that things might become better some day. Smack in the middle of this family of artists, musicians, dreamers and sibyls is Alyzon, the narrator, who, in the style of many of Carmody’s heroines, feels like a boring changeling out of place in her exotic tribe. All this changes with a bump on the head. Alyzon falls into a coma, and when she awakens, finds herself with enhanced senses, which enable her to smell people’s essences. This allows her to see through the masks that people where, and she discovers that there is a disease spreading among humanity, a disease of cruelty, sadism and despair.

Interestingly for Carmody, who usually prefers this pet philosophical belief to be played out in a wholly imagined world, these metaphysical concerns are painted on a backdrop of contemporary Australia, with the government’s policy of mandatory detention and deportation of asylum-seekers becoming the spark which ignites the action. It becomes clear that the Whitestarr family’s closeness to a refugee woman, Aya, and their inability to prevent her deportation, is the cause of Serenity-Sybl’s emotional wounding. Serenity pours scorn over her father for writing a song about Aya, seeing his actions as those of a coward, capitulating in the face of evil. Alyzon’s fears for her sister begin to converge with her more general fears about the sickness of society. The novel culminates in a spectacular event, a charity concert that seems to symbolise Carmody’s attitudes about everything that is wrong with the world: bitter musicians singing of rage and despair while apathetic socialites drink and drug themselves into emotionally deadened insensibility. Carmody portrays the rage and the drugging as cowardly escapes from the cruelties of the modern world. The true heroes, in Carmody’s book, are those like Macoll, who never coerce, never give in to bitterness, but use their talents to give people a bit of hope.

Isobelle Carmody is a rare writer, an adult who has never lost the sense of what it feels like to be a teenager. Her books — from her award-winning Obernewtyn series, to her collection of short stories, Green Monkey Dreams — capture perfectly the idealism, aspiration and yearning of adolescents to change the world, as well as their despair at discovering that the world is a difficult place to change and may not be worth saving. Alyzon Whitestarr is another book in this tradition, a song, full of emotino, love and dreams. In it, Carmody attempts to convey, like Macoll Whitestarr, a little hope to like-minded people.

This review originally appeared in the 5 November 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Magic: the garden variety November 23, 2023

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Tags: books, fantasy novels, reviews, ya literature
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Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness is a 21st-century fairytale. Just as stories such as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White are underpinned by the complexities of family relationships, Magic or Madness explores the lives of three generations of women whose relationships are mediated through their attitudes to magic. And Larbalestier’s novel, the first in a trilogy, treats magic in their lives as a straightforward, matter-of-fact way, reminiscent of the acceptance of the supernatural found in folk and fairytales.

While most fantasy novels require a pre-industrial setting, presupposing that technology and magic cannot exist in the one world, Larbalestier embraces modernity, which she uses to enhance her brand of magic.

Magic or Madness has a simple message: reason and wonder can coexist, and are very much alike. She uses the coming-of-age story of her protagonist, the aptly-named Reason, to demonstrate this.

Before the story begins, Reason has already grown up on the run in the outback with her mother, Sarafina. The pair were in hiding from Sarafina’s mother, Esmeralda, who is, Reason has been told, an evil witch. Sarafina tries to instill in her daughter a love of science, mathematics, and all things ration. But all this problem-solving cannot address Sarafina’s own problems — when Reason is 15, her mother has a mental breakdown and is hospitalised. Reason is sent to live in Newtown in Sydney, with her dreaded grandmother.

Reason’s misery is alleviated slightly by meeting Tom, a neighbour, who shows her around the city. Larbalestier indulges in her own love of Sydney’s inner west — she writes in lyrical terms of the Moreton Bay fig trees, heat rising from asphalt roads, and Camperdown Cemetery. But all this is just a prelude to the great adventure awaiting Reason, literally right outside her grandmother’s back door. One day she opens it and finds herself in wintry New York.

This event forces Reason to accept the existence of magic, and to reexamine her attitudes towards her grandmother. Has her mother been lying to her for her entire life? Against a backdrop of snow and diners, pizza and pierogi, Reason grows up fast, learning some family secrets, as well as how to use her own amazing powers.

Magic or Madness is a simple book, one which combines fantasy and teenage realism with a dash of travel narrative.

Larbalestier’s treatment of the supernatural is impressively original, making magic almost ordinary and innate. She owes little to either J.K. Rowling, who emphasises the controllable, technical nature of magic, or the writers of New Age, Celtic-inspired fantasy who revere magic as something natural and wild. This is, most literally, the magic of Reason, and can be found in anything from the perfection of Fibonacci sequences to the uncanny ability to know who is on the other end of the phone before it is answered. Larbalestier manages to make the real world luminous and full of wonder. For readers in the 21st century, it’s good to know someone still believes that’s possible.

This review first appeared in the 22 October issue of The Canberra Times.

Weaving a magic thread November 23, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: books, fantasy novels, reviews, sophie masson, the curse of zohreh, ya literature
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Australian writer Sophie Masson, in The Curse of Zohreh, leaves her familiar territory of dark, mysterious Breton forests for the fiery world of the Arabian Nights. Masson’s talents as a writer have always been based on her ability to blend several genres of story, and combine the qualities of myth, legend and fairytale with modern sensibilities. She certainly doesn’t disappoint in The Curse of Zohreh, which mixes medieval Arab storytelling with modern fantasy, throwing in a dash of Romeo and Juliet love story and feminism for good measure.

The story concerns two families, the wealth al-Farouks of Ameerat, and the impoverished Parsarian descendants of a successful trader, Zohreh, who laid a curse on the al-Farouk family for destroying her business empire and stealing a family treasure. One hundred years after Zohreh’s death, 15-year-old Khaled al-Farouk is keen to break the curse. Just as determined to visit retribution on the al-Farouks is Soheila, Zohreh’s descendant, who has disguised herself as a boy and infiltrated the al-Farouk household.

What follows is an adventure in the best fairytale tradition. It involves werewolf carpet-sellers, ghouls, jinn, dusty libraries and terrifying car journeys through deserts. While it is Masson’s imaginative brilliance that makes the story engrossing, it is the emotional richness and moral complexity that gives The Curse of Zohreh its depth.

As the story progresses, the reader wonders with Soheila whether it is right to punish children for the sins of their ancestors. At the same time, we come to understand, with Khaled, that it is important for families to remember past wrongdoings and to learn from mistakes. However, Masson has never been an author to use her characters as mouthpieces for moralising, and so these emotional issues are hinted at rather than broadcast loudly from every page. Readers have to discover this moral dimension for themselves.

Although the book is a welcome addtion to good-quality Australian fiction for young teens, the more worldly reader may question Masson’s fantasy world. This is partly because it is so obviously based on the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East that readers might wonder why she bothered to reinvent it. Parsari is Persia, or Iran, while Mesomia is Iraq, which is even ruled by a bloodthirsty, Saddam Hussein-type figure called The Vampire. Soheila’s family follow a religion which has the characteristics of Zoroastrianism, and Khaled’s is recognisable as Islam.

It is also partly because of the anachronism of having mobile phones and jinn, cars and flying carpets, in the same story. Genre convention either has modern characters experiencing the weirdness of the otherworld or the story is contained in one internally logical universe. Here contemporary characters with mobile phones travel on flying carpet without comment. Some readers may have to work hard to accept this.

Ultimately, the most important theme of Masson’s book is one that is woven like a thread through all her books. This is her deep belief that magic, wonder and fantasy are essential to the human spirit, and that life is impoverished without this other world into which people can travel. For Masson, this other world resides between the pages of books. Despite the slightly uneasy stretching of the parameters of fantasy conventions, this nourishing richness lies there to be discovered in The Curse of Zohreh.

This review first appeared in the 9 July, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Depth and quality to keep every child happy June 27, 2023

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Tags: books, children's books, children's literature, fantasy novels, ya literature
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With Christmas and the long summer holidays ahead there’s no better time to think about some new books for that avid young bibliophile — or even reluctant reader — in your life.

The bookshops will be offering, as usual, almost too much choice and it’s tempting to reach for the latest novel that’s been turned into a movie (A Series of Unfortunate Events) or a book with ‘bum’ or ‘fart’ in the title. A little searching through the back catalogues of some established children’s writers might yield some more imaginative choices.

Emily Rodda is arguably one of Australia’s most popular and successful children’s authors. Her ever-expanding Deltora Quest series has a cult following among the eight to twelves. She is a prolific author who has been writing for children since 1984, but it was Rowan of Rin, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers in 1994, that really saw her hit her stride.

This now five-part series follows the story of young Rowan, an ordinary boy destined, despite his fears and self-doubt, to save his people from destruction. Rowan is mostly unappreciated by his fellow residents of the village of Rin: where they are active and athletic, he is shy and contemplative, and is viewed as a bit of a weakling. In each story he reconfirms his bravery, triumphing not only over the perils of the quest, but over his own terror.

Rodda wants to tell the reader that the brave person is not necessarily one who has no fear. The Rowan of Rin series demonstrates that it’s possible to fuse a strong moral message with a satisfying story.

Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons trilogy was written just as home computers entered our lives — in the late 1980s and early ’90s — and is built on the dreams and possibilities of this technological dawn. It is written for slightly older readers — probably late primary school to early high school — and deals with the challenges of adolescent life. However, it does so in the context of a richly imagined virtual reality inside computer games. These games are definitely not brainless shoot-’em-ups: they force their players — Andrew Hayford, Ben Challis, Elaine Taylor, Mario Ferrone and, in the fanl book, Shinkei, Midori Ito and Toshihiro Toda — to confront their prejudices and anxieties, and re-examine their aspirations.

They are adventure stories, but the action, in a sense, takes place in the characters’ own minds. The stories accurately portray the adolescent perception of the world as a confusing place where the struggle for self-understanding is of supreme importance.

This psychological quest becomes literal in the world of Space Demons: the protagonists must physically battle demons of hate, flee from the dark clouds of terror, and rescue their idealistic dreams from teh exploitation of greedy entrepreneurs and manipulative authorities.

In contrast to the books of these two Australian writers, The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden, is a book for a particular kind of reader — one who also enjoys The Secret Garden and A Little Princess — stories set in a quaint and gentle past. This is a Christmas book, ‘a story about wishing,’ which draws together the stories of Ivy, an orphan girl, Holly, an ownerless doll, and Mrs Jones, a childless old lady. In Dickensian fashion, all ends happily, with philanthropy and fortuitous meetings saving the day. This is a simple yet beautiful story, suitable for either young children beginning to read alone, or for parents to read aloud.

In rereading these excellent and very different books, I was struck by their shared qualities. Most importantly, they are all ‘plot-based,’ that is, story and characterisation are central, in contrast to the now more common (and unpleasant) trend in children’s fiction which makes themes the focus of the book.

This is not to say that Rodda, Rubinstein and Godden do not have ‘messages’ in their books — they certainly do. It is just that their messages are not rammed down their readers’ throats — and the ideas are the stronger for that.

Rodda’s central doctrine that people who overcome fear are braver than those who were never afraid in the first place, Rubinsteins empathetic understanding of the emotional world of teenagers, and even Rumer Godden’s simple message of compassion and yule-time charity, shine clearly through their well-crafted and interesting stories. But that is the point — the quality of the story and the believable characters not only give the books a moral subtlety, but make them good to read. What more could the Christmas shopper ask of a book?

This article first appeared in the 11 December, 2004 issue of The Canberra Times.

Only one has the magic touch June 27, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: children's books, children's literature, fantasy novels, reviews
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Two new books have tumbled out of the rift caves to join the rapidly expanding collection of The Quentaris Chronicles. Unfortunately, they are not quite up to the standard of previous books in the series. John Heffernan’s book, The Mind Master, relies a bit too heavily on fantasy literature clichés, while Treasure Hunters of Quentaris, Margo Lanagan’s contribution, is slightly too didactic and preachy. Much more rewarding for fantasy readers is Dragonfang, the second in the Jelindel Chronicles, one of the brains behind the Quentaris series.

The Quentaris Chronicles is the brilliant invention of authors Michael Pryor and Paul Collins, who created the world of Quentaris and now edit this series of stand-alone books by various Australian fantasy writers. Pryor and Collins have set up an excellent device to allow other authors into the series — Quentaris’s ‘rift cave’ portals which can connect with endless other imagined worlds. Previous books have ranged from tension-filled adventure stories to philosophical musings about the nature of true beauty.

The Mind Master is CBC Award-winning author John Heffernan’s first foray into the world of Quentaris, and it reads like an earnest creative writing student’s crack at the generic fantasy literature plot — insignificant boy discovers both that he must save the world and that he has magical powers.

The book’s hero, Torrad, a low-born servant, must fight a maverick magician bent on destruction. There is even another staple of the genre — a snobbish, ice-queen contessa to be rescued. Heffernan’s use of these fantasy literature clichés demonstrates at least his wide reading in the field, but he fails to animate them with originality.

The book’s most interesting and enjoyable aspect is the invention of a gang of ‘roach people’ who scurry, like their insect namesakes, through a network of tunnels and cellars under the city of Quentaris, passing on gossip, eating scraps, and avoiding the tangled web of Quentaran alliances.

Margo Lanagan is also a prize-winning author, having won the young adult section in the 2000 Aurealis Awards, as well as being shortlisted for various other awards. Treasure Hunters of Quentaris is the story of two outsiders, both born into families of explorers and guides, and their adventures in worlds they discover through the rift-caves.

As the title suggests, the pair are searching for treasure, and the story quickly turns into a fable about the folly of valuing gold and wealth over living beings. While this didacticism is not fatal to the story, it does tend to dominate it.

In contrast to the rather wooden offerings of Heffernan and Lanagan, Dragonfang is exciting and full of surprises. It is a continuation of the story of the former Countess Jelindel dek Mediesar, Adept-9 mage, resourceful adventurer and keen scholar, and her struggle to prevent the evil Preceptor from getting hold of five magical gemstones which would greatly aid him in his quest for world domination.

While Collins’s characters do tend to conform to fantasy stereotypes (the book’s heroine is at once awe-inspiring in her goodness and talent, and empathy-evoking in her fallibility, while her two sidekicks are opposites: charming rogue and honour-bound fighter) he is able to inject much more originality and surprise into his storyline and setting than the two Quentaris authors.

Ultimately, the neat idea behind The Chronicles of Quentaris cannot bear fruit. This is due partly to authorial constraints — the books are short and so provide little space to fully develop characters or explore complex themes. Writers are further limited by the fact that each book must stand alone.

Speculative fiction authors traditionally prefer to write trilogies or longer series in order to provide their readers with a wealth of characters and a richness of setting, necessary in a genre of writing which by its very definition is set in worlds which are not our won. Paul Collins’s intriguing Dragonfang demonstrates this principle. Both Heffernan and Lanagan do their best with the limited tools they have been given, but reliance on archetypes on the one hand and moralising on the other weaken the overall effect.

This review first appeared in the 11 September, 2004 issue of The Canberra Times.

A magical, mythic tale June 20, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: books, fantasy novels, reviews, ya literature
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The land of Brittany — with its mysterious, magical forests and rich culture of storytelling and mythology — has provided fertile loam for children’s author Sophie Masson. The skilful melding of her passion for Celtic myth, medieval history, and Arthurian legend has fuelled a series of excellent novels, including The Forest of Dreams (formerly called The Lay Lines Trilogy).

For her latest offering, In Hollow Lands, Masson has returned once again to the land of the Bretons. Set during the Hundred Years’ War, it tells the story of 12-year-old twins Gromer and Tiphane de Raguenel, who are abducted by korrigans, or fairies, as part of a power play between the dictatorial leaders of two fairy realms.

While Gromer is quickly overwhelmed by the enchanted world, resourceful Tiphaine struggles to find a way to escape. Her efforts would be to no avail, however, if it were not for those on the outside, in the human world, working to rescue her.

Her nurse, Viviane the Watcher, ‘seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,’ the first of such would-be rescuers, is quickly joined by an unconventional pair of poor soldiers, Bertrand du Gwezklen and Walter Owen David Davies of Hereford.

This is where Masson’s depth of knowledge and study come in, and the mix of history, folklore and legend in her story becomes apparent. She subtly weaves the minor Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady (with its heroine, Dame Ragnell — here, Lady Raguenel), Breton, Scottish and Irish folklore, and real history, creating a story satisfying on many levels.

Although, to most readers, the names of Masson’s characters could be meaningless, her postscript demonstrates their place in history. The love story between ‘the poor hedge-squire turned brilliant knight and eventual commander of the armies of the King of France, Bertrand du Guesclin (in Breton, ‘du Gwezklen’) … and his “fairy” wife, Tiphaine de Reguenel,’ is apparently still a strong memory in the cultural heritage of France and Brittany.

However, for those unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, medieval history, Breton mythology, or Arthurian legend, reading In Hollow Lands is still a satisfying experience, if only for the simple reason that it is an exciting story. The magical Viviane, with her bird ‘familiars,’ and the whimsical pantheon of korrigans should be enough to please those with an appetite for fantasy, while the remarkably human side of all the characters should hold those who do not usually read fantasy.

It is in this last regard that Masson is strongest. The friendship between Bertrand du Gwezklen, the Breton mercenary fighting for France, and Walter Davies, the Welsh mercenary fighting for England, is a particularly poignant reminder of the folly of war and the evil of placing those who would rather be friends in the position of enemies.

Masson’s command of Breton is remarkable, even for one who speaks French as a native language, since Breton is a Celtic langauge, bearing more relation to Welsh than the French which is spoken in adjacent regions.

In Hollow Lands includes Masson’s translation of beautiful Breton poems and songs, and the author also manipulates the language to create new words (such as mabrokorr for the world of the korrigans, the ‘hollow lands’ referred to in the title, and mabroden for the human world). As well as enriching the experience of the reader, this gives the story the added sheen of authenticity, as if Masson would have it take its place among the lays (poems based on myth and legend) and epics of Brittany.

Sophie Masson is a prolific writer, having written more than 20 books in genres ranging from realism to mystery and fantasy since 1990. She has been influenced both by her interesting life and heritage (born in Indonesia to French parents, she lived in both Sydney and the southwest of France in her childhood), and by the depth of her knowledge. She has studied everything from French and English literature to medieval history and ancient mythology.

Her early childhood was, if her autobiography on her website is to be believed, nothing less than blessed, with involved parents who infused a love of literature, music, history, travel and good food in their child.

Like many writers, the young Masson was already taking steps in her teens towards her future career, writing poetry based on ancient Celtic song cycles and sending it to the respected Australian poets Les Murray and A.D. Hope. This early persistence was rewarded when her first novel, The House in the Rainforest, a book for adults set in a small Australian town, was published in 1990. Those whose interests mirror Masson’s lifelong passions would do well to investigate The Forest of Dreams (The Lay Lines Trilogy). Her vast intellectual arsenal is put to good use in three dream-like fantasy stories using the real-life figure Marie de France, writer of lays and also the lover of Richard the Lionheart. As in In Hollow Lands, Masson weaves history, folklore and Arthurian legends to provide the reader with a profoundly satisfying experience.

Although it’s still foolishly early in the year to make such predictions, Sophie Masson’s In Hollow Lands will probably prove to be one of the richest literary feasts in 2004 for younger teenage readers. For anyone interested in the intellectual exercise of the melding of Masson’s passions, this book also has much to offer.

This review first appeared in the 6 March, 2004 issue of The Canberra Times.

Bleak glimpse forward to a decaying world June 11, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, review reprint, reviews.
Tags: books, dystopian YA, fantasy novels, reviews, ya literature
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It was deeply rewarding for me to read a new work by Jackie French, an author who has the distinction of having written the first book with chapters that I ever read. My love of her books began one hot summer down at Broulee on the South Coast with a copy of Rainstones, and for several years I considered her my favourite author.

Unlike Rainstones, a series of gentle short stories about the power and beauty of nature, Flesh and Blood, the concluding book in French’s Outlands trilogy, is another of the doom-and-gloom school, filled with apocalyptic prophecies about the future.

French, long of the apparent belief that humans are destroying the planet, has again harnessed this passion to a new story in which human beings will so destroy the environment that to be able to share in nature will be a luxury. The rich can choose to enjoy nature, but seem to have little interest. In Flesh and Blood, most people have forgotten the natural world.

Here, the reader founds shanty-town ‘burbs filled with angry people denied access to the City which sustains their existence, and a City populated by an intellectual elite which finds it easier to turn inwards and live a life of virtual reality than face the problems of a decaying world. Morality has almost deserted these people. The wealthy maintain a brain clone and a body clone in order to maintain their immortality, but keep the two clones apart so as not to think of them as a complete human being. People have taken genetic modification so far that they have created beings of mixed human and animal genes and a social hierarchy based on genetics. Only ‘true-norm’ humans are allowed into the City, which is the diseased heart of this imagined world. Against this backdrop, exiled City virtual engineer Danielle Forest struggles to solve the mystery of a new epidemic threatening the world, which causes the dead to rise again as murderous zombies.

Flesh and Blood suffers from a problem that seems to occur quite regularly in modern books for young adults. French’s ideas about society and where it is heading — rather than the plot and characters — are the starting point for the novel. So, instead of the message flowing organically from the story, the characters and what happens to them are merely coathangers for the earnest worthiness of French’s message.

So, while superficial comparisons might be made between this book and those of Isobelle Carmody, who also specialises in apocalyptic novels about worlds nearly destroyed by humans, this one is not redeemed, as Carmody’s books are, by an interesting array of characters. It is hard to retain interest in a book in which little empathy is felt for the characters. French obviously has a worthwhile and important message to get out, but it needs to travel almost invisibly on the back of characters in a good yarn.

This review originally appeared in the 10 April, 2004 issue of The Canberra Times.

Teen creation richly imagined May 28, 2023

Posted by dolorosa12 in review reprint.
Tags: fantasy novels, memories, reviews
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Is there something in the water of the north American town of Paradise Valley, Montana, that makes it possible for a 15-year-old to write a lengthy work of fantasy which is both intricate in its attention to detail, and exciting to read?

Perhaps, but it probably helps if the boy is sharing the tap with parents who own a boutique publishing house. Paolini International LLC published Eragon in 2002 and Christopher Paolini and his indefatigable mother set off across the country, appearing in bookshops, schools and libraries in a campaign to spread the word. Almost invariably, it seems, the fantasy novel was picked up by a major publisher and now the fruit of the family labour (mother and father are credited with editing, sister with plot advice, grandmother with the beginning and ending) is reaching a world-wide audience.

Paolini’s fantasy world of Alagaesia is a richly imagined creation, complete with bands of marauding Urgals, monstrous Shades, and Dragon Riders whose duty is to protect the ordinary citizens from these threatening creatures.

The biggest challenge to people’s survival, however, is Alagaesia’s kind, Galbatorix, a dictatorial ex-Dragon Rider whose immortality has enabled him to control his empire with an iron hand, allowing no dissent. The only one apparently able to stand against him is Eragon, the unlikely hero who stumbles upon a dragon’s egg in a provincial backwater and is catapulted on an adventurous quest which spans the breadth of the land.

Eragon’s travels see him meeting a variety of creatures and people — ancient storytellers with secret pasts, merchants-turned-rebels, captive elfin princesses, as well as a horde of Ra’zac, monstrous bird-like creatures whose relentless hunting of Eragon forces the young boy to learn swordplay, magic, and dragon riding in order to defend himself.

The biggest challenge for any fantasy author is coming up with something new, and, as writers of this popular genre are notoriously prolific, it seems almost impossible to come up with an original idea. The influence of the genre’s ‘giants,’ Ursula Le Guin and J.R.R. Tolkien, is evident in Eragon, but it does not overshadow Paolini’s own ideas completely. The Tolkien connection is apparent in the presence of elves and dwarves, swords with names, Tolkien-esque placenames like Farthen Dur, and, indeed, in Eragon’s own name, which sounds suspiciously like the name of The Lord of the Rings‘ hero, Aragorn. The Le Guin legacy is more subtle. It shows through in Paolini’s creation of a magical language in which it is impossible to lie, and through which those who speak it can control the forces of nature, a conceit used to great effect in Le Guin’s Earthsea series.

The basic plotline of unlikely hero pitted against the might of an empire is almost archetypal, used not only by fantasy novelists, but also in ancient mythology, and in the more familiar epics of modern popular culture such as George Lucas’s Star Wars movies. Australian children’s author Emily Rodda has mined this territory very fruitfully in her Rowan of Rin series.

As in these reimaginings of the basic myth, Paolini’s hero is an orphan who knows little of his heritage, a common plot device in such stories. However, the fact that Paolini employs such archetypes suggests some sophisticated research on the part of the teenager, if not the whole family.

Paolini’s real skill lies in his ability to use these influences and archetypes subtly, so that their presence is felt, but does not override his main concern — an exciting plot.

The test of any good fantasy novel is how hard it is to put down. Eragon rates eight out of 10 on the ‘put-down-able’ scale. This story is probably aimed at the Harry Potter age group — children and younger teenagers family with the fantasy style but demanding an interesting narrative full of drama, tension and danger.

Like all good fantasy writers, Paolini understands that a reader’s interest is only sustained by keeping him or her in a state of suspense, before relieving the agony with significant revelations (as well as lots of realistically gruesome battle scenes).

Fans of the young wizard could do worse than check out this remarkably mature first outing while they wait for J.K. Rowling to write her next doorstopper. For Paolini, life must be mirroring art in the unlikely unfolding of a teenager’s dream of becoming a published author against all odds. And, in true fantasy-author style, Christopher Paolini, now 19, is working on Eldest, the next in the trilogy he’s calling Inheritance.

This review first appeared in the 21 February, 2004 issue of The Canberra Times (and wow did my opinion of Paolini’s writing change dramatically since this glowing review).

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