Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Reviews

Leaflet Review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

by Leave a Comment

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel KayUnder Heaven’s book jacket copy:

To honor the memory of his recently deceased father, a general who led the forces of imperial Kitai in its last great war twenty years before, Shen Tai has spent the two years of official mourning alone at the isolated battle site, burying as many of the unnumbered dead lying there as he can. The dead are equally Kitan and their Taguran foes; there is no way to tell the bones apart, and he treats them all reverently. At night Tai can hear the ghosts moan and stir, and occasionally, when one voice falls silent, he knows it belonged to someone he has laid to rest.

Both sides respect his solitary work and take turns bringing him supplies, and it is during such a visit from a Taguran officer that Tai learns powerful forces have taken note of his vigil. The White Jade Princess Cheng-Wan, seventeenth daughter of the Emperor of Kitai, sent west after this last battle to seal the peace with Tagur, is pleased to present him with two hundred fifty Sardian horses. They are being given to him, she writes, in royal recognition of his courage and piety and of the honor he has done the dead.

You give a man one of the legendary Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You give him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him toward rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Giving him two hundred fifty is unthinkable—a gift to overwhelm an emperor.

Tai is in deep waters. He needs to get himself—and his own emperor—back to court alive. Riding the first of the Sardian horses[*] and bringing news of the rest, he starts east toward the glittering, dangerous capital of Kitai, and gathers his wits for a return to his forever-altered life.

Under Heaven is the first book I’ve read by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s not your typical kettle of fantasy—far from it. While I was reading, I tried to articulate Under Heaven’s flavor … and failed miserably. However, Kay conveniently inserts this into the book’s epilogue: “Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entirely overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a different story.”

The book fully illustrates this idea, and it illustrates it well. There are many places where the plot takes a different turn than what you would expect from a typical, trope-laden book, and most of those differences are driven by a character choosing a different branch, even though that choice may seem insignificant at the time. This is an interesting concept, and Kay explores it well.

That said, I didn’t fully enjoy Under Heaven. For many, many chapters at the beginning, I felt that the viewpoint characters withheld information in an infuriating manner. Two characters would talk and come to a decision, then continue talking and taking action, but I wouldn’t learn what the decision was for another chapter or so. This deliberate withholding irritated me as a reader.

I probably could have overcome this problem, since it’s relatively minor. However, I ran into the same problem with Under Heaven that I had when I was reading The Good Earth in high school. The way the men in these books (who are also the main characters) think of and treat women sickens me, and I have a hard time sympathizing with them. The main character, Tai, is a decent individual overall. However, there is more than one instance in which his views towards women make me want to punch him in the face, so I have a hard time casting him in a good light when I’m constantly concerned that I’m going to want to punch him in a few pages.

All in all, this means that Kay accomplishes a good verisimilitude of ancient culture. There were many cultural institutions that were so normal that they didn’t register as cruelties or hypocrisies when they were used by upstanding citizens. Tai is better than most (if not all) of his peers. He is simply a man of his cultural moment. That doesn’t change the fact that institutions in that cultural moment irritate me.

It boils down to this: Kay does a wonderful job of telling the story he sets out to tell. It’s just not a story I was readily receptive to. There were many aspects that captured my interest, there were several characters that fascinated me, and I was happy to read the book all the way through to the end. I can even think of people I’d recommend this book to without reservations. But for me and my tastes, I’m glad I bought it during the liquidation at Borders and not at full price.
_____________________

* I would like to mention that this first horse only serves an important role for a few chapters. After that it basically fades to the background and is pure scenery. These Sardian horses instigate the plot but have little hand in it.

Leaflet Review: A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

by Leave a Comment

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry PratchettWitch-in-training Tiffany Aching hadn’t expected magic to involve chores and ill-tempered nanny goats! But as Tiffany pursues her calling, a sinister monster pursues Tiffany, and neither mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the six-inch-high Wee Free Men (the greatest thieves in the world) can defeat it. When the monster strikes, Tiffany will have to save herself—if she can be saved at all!

I love Terry Pratchett, so I can hardly say anything bad about his books—even though, with so many books on the market, I’m bound to not like some of them. But I liked A Hat Full of Sky. Perhaps not so much as its predecessor, The Wee Free Men, but it was still a very enjoyable book. As always is the case with Pratchett, I both laughed out loud and had a bit of thinking time to go with it.

That said, there were several times where I thought the main conflict had been resolved, only to discover there was a new conflict (though, to be fair, these conflicts were always attached and related; I just don’t think they were foreshadowed). They felt a bit tacked on, if you ask me. However, all the conflicts were thematically consistent, even if they didn’t seem to be all part of the same action arc, so it wasn’t really bad. I was just expecting a book unified by a single action; if I’d been expecting a thematic work I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

As with The Wee Free Men, the book waxes philosophical. (What? In a children’s book? Absurd.) Pratchett gets away with it because it’s natural to the character—all the ideas are in Tiffany’s voice and they’re things Tiffany would think, what with her First, Second, and Third Thoughts running around. She’s bound to run into some heavy thinking. The other reason it works so well is that Pratchett makes you laugh while he’s going about it, and the things he talks about aren’t controversial in any way: they’re just thing you may not have thought about very much before. Like how full the universe is of things that are interesting an amazing, and how you should never reduce people to things, etc. He couches them in a context that brings the ideas home.

(As a side note, The Wee Free Men introduced ideas that I repackaged and repurposed for discussion in a literary theory class in college. My comments were referenced throughout the semester for their brilliant-ness and relevance, and I felt a little dirty not mentioning that I’d gotten them from a humorous young-adult fantasy novel. But you can’t parenthetically cite your source while you’re talking. At least, I haven’t figured out how to yet.)

That’s really what Pratchett does for me: He takes things I should know and presents them in a mirror that’s ever so slightly askew so I’ll actually see them. Defamiliarization is the term, I believe. And while he defamiliarizes he delights, so I can never complain about a Pratchett book. I’ll definitely be reading the next book in the Tiffany Aching plot arc (once I chew through the stack of books next to my desk, that is), and I’ll probably end up buying them all so future children who use my house as a library will be able to read them. I wish I’d read them as a kid.

Leaflet Review: Blackdog by K.V. Johansen

by 2 Comments

Blackdog by K.V. Johansen
Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland (trust me, it’s an even more amazing cover when you can hold it in your hands)

In a land where gods walk on the hills and goddesses rise from the river, lake, and spring, the caravan-guard Holla-Sayan, escaping the bloody conquest of a lakeside town, stops to help an abandoned child and a dying dog. The girl, though, is the incarnation of Attalissa, goddess of Lissavakail, and the dog a shape-changing guardian spirit whose origins have been forgotten. Possessed and nearly driven mad by the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan flees to the desert road, taking the powerless avatar with him.

Necromancy, treachery, massacres, rebellions, and gods dead or lost or mad, follow hard on their heels. But it is Attalissa herself who may be the Blackdog’s—and Holla-Sayan’s—doom.

I picked up Blackdog because Lou Anders from Pyr raved about it at WorldCon. I couldn’t help myself after hearing how excited he was about it. I even sent my husband to Barnes & Noble without me so he could pick it up because the week after WorldCon I was too swamped with deadlines to do anything but edit. (P.S. Giving ourselves a book budget was perhaps the smartest money decision Mr. S and I ever made.)

So I guess that leaves the question: Did it live up to the hype?

Overall, I’d have to say yes. I immensely enjoyed the journey Johansen took me on (I also very, very, very much appreciated that the book’s storyline is complete and won’t require six more books to complete). In the beginning I was a bit hesitant, but I got over it and I’m grateful that I did.

Not So Great Bits

First, the not-my-favorite experiences I had with the book: The book opens from the perspective of Otokas, the man possessed by the Blackdog spirit and the protector of the lake goddess Attalissa (do note that deities in Blackdog are local deities—Attalissa is goddess of a particular lake, Narva has a mountain, Sera a stream, Kinsai a river, Sayan a portion of the Western Grass, etc.). Attalissa is, at this point, a young girl of 8 or 9 and she is powerless until she reaches womanhood. This beginning initially bothered me, because I was emotionally attaching myself to Otokas, who I knew was going to die and be replaced as Blackdog by Holla-Sayan—the back of the book told me so. So why was I spending multiple chapters in a soon-to-be dead man’s head? (I needn’t have feared: Otokas’s memories are relevant to the plot and [slight spoiler] Holla-Sayan receives them when he is possessed.) The first chapters are also full of action (i.e. the sacking of Attalissa’s town and temple), and some of the prose has a syntactic style that made it difficult for me to grasp what was going on or appreciate it. This syntactic quirk either died in later chapters or I learned to understand it, because it wasn’t a problem as the book progressed.

Very Great Bits

Worldbuilding. Now for the good. The worldbuilding was fun and diverse. I loved it. There were lots of different cultures within the book, and they’re fairly well differentiated. Most (if not all) have some sort of parallel with the real world—Nabban is like China, the Northrons are Scandinavian-esque, etc. Holla-Sayan’s caravan is very culturally diverse, and you get a taste of each culture from spending time with the caravaneers. Everyone has a sense of place, of connection to their people, their land, and their gods. Even magic comes in widely varying cultural styles, from the cats-cradle woven spells of the Western Grass to rune-based Northron spells and Nabbani divination based on the Sun–Moon dichotomy. The theme of place wanders throughout the book, even while you’re following people in a caravan.

Year-spanning plot and age-spanning backstory. I was immensely impressed with how Johansen handled the fact that the book spans several years and that the world and the characters all have complex backstories. There was a bit of an infodump when Holla-Sayan was introduced, but overall the character and world backstories are revealed elegantly in piecemeal, partially because different pieces are introduced from various viewpoint characters and cultural perspectives. The histories of the seven devils and the seven wizards that rocked the world with their war on the Old Great Gods is shared in storyteller-type epitaphs in the first portion of the book as well as through the character’s eyes. Spanning years and eons in one book is a feat I rarely see done to my satisfaction, buy Johansen excelled.

Viewpoint-character diversity. The diversity in the viewpoint characters was the highlight of the book for me. Each character has things that motivate them and drive them to action, and they’re all pretty sympathetic (the person I sympathized the least with was, incidentally, the Villain). Even though two characters may view the same event in completely different terms (for example, Attalissa and Moth view things very differently but remember a lot of the same time span), both viewpoints are validated and neither is necessarily marked as any worse than the other.

(Side note: I loved Moth’s character. She added a lot to the depth and diversity of the book, and she granted a level of humanity and sympathy to Tamghat—the Villain—that I don’t think I would have gotten otherwise.)

(Other side note: Attalissa—or Pakdhala, as she is called while she is with the caravan—was probably the character it took me the longest to appreciate since she doesn’t really come into her own as a person for a long time.)

Conclusion and Disclaimer

Overall, I found the book immensely enjoyable, and I was very annoyed when I had to put it down to do something silly, like go to work. While I had my quibbles with this and that, those quibbles never marred my enjoyment of the story or of the characters. The plot is very multi-dimensional—far more so than I’ve communicated in this review, or is even hinted at in the back-cover copy. There is a grand scope to the novel even though it is isolated to location-specific characters and plot points. It has such a grand scope that I feared the loose ends wouldn’t be tied up by the final chapter and I’d have to wait for another book to come out, but Johansen neatly concludes Blackdog’s story. While there are certainly threads that could continue further (Moth’s quest is far from over, for example), the book is completely satisfying as a standalone.

I should also note that I’ve read a review or two that complain that it’s difficult to keep track of characters because each character has a name, a nickname, and possibly another name or two. I didn’t have a problem with this, but that’s probably because I was forewarned. So be aware: Attalissa is also ’Lissa, Pakdhala, and ’Dhala; other people also have a large variety of names. Go in prepared and it won’t be an issue.

Leaflet Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

by 1 Comment

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna ClarkeToday I’ll be reviewing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but before I make any comments I have to preface them with a sad, awful fact: I’ve been reading this book since January.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a beastie when it comes to length. My mass market paperback runs to 1,006 pages. But the length was no reason to take so long. Life happened, and my leisure reading suffered for it. As a result, my impressions of this novel are spread over nine months, so take pretty much anything I say about it with a hearty grain of salt.

Especially this first comment: The plot was pretty disjointed and full of vignette-style stories and incidents. That isn’t to say it wasn’t enjoyable, just that it was very, very hard to come back to when I was short on time, especially since I new section and chapter breaks were few and far between (I hardly ever stop mid-scene, but while reading this novel I had to on more than one occasion).

To somewhat support my point, please note that the book is called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and you don’t meet Jonathan Strange until page 243. In fact, I think he is only obliquely mentioned once or twice before then (excluding footnote references), and you only notice the mentions because his name is on the cover.

However, the book is full of delightful descriptions and immersive prose and circumstances (everything about the book is geared to immerse you in the alternate history—even the spelling). If read in a more sustained manner, it would probably be rich with an atmosphere that lingered when you had to put it down. Clarke’s descriptions of fairy things are full of synesthesia and mixed metaphors, and it works perfectly because the fairies are not quite human and live in a place that is just a sidestep shy of our reality. An example: “[The fairy box] was a beautiful shade of blue, but then again not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then again, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the color of heartache. But fortunately neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it.” The descriptions are brilliant and they’re done with precision and deliberation.

Overall, the plotting was not my favorite (probably a symptom of the nine-month read). I think it could have done with more focus and some quicker pacing. Even so, the novel definitely has texture. The worldbuilding is deep and full, complete with folktales (which of course made me happy). The characters are hardly stereotypes, and even when they don’t act exactly as you thought they would, they are still acting perfectly (or perhaps brokenly) human. Mr. Norrell is someone I didn’t like, but I couldn’t help but empathize with him on many occasions.

My final note will be somewhat redemptive for the plot: After I picked the book up for the homestretch sprint of reading I started close to a chapter called “A little box, the color of heartache.” From that chapter on I quite enjoyed the pacing and the conflict up to the finish. The end relied on a bit of what felt like deus ex machina, but what with a prophecy being in the book from the beginning, it isn’t so bad and probably wouldn’t have stung so much if I could actually remember any of the prophecy by the time I got to the end.

Bottom line: I dropped the ball as a reader on this one. Sorry, Susanna Clarke. I’m perfectly willing to give it another try if you put out another book (short story collection excluded for the moment due to the stack of to-read books next to my desk).

Eye-Catcher: Feed by Mira Grant

by 2 Comments

Cover: Feed by Mira GrantCovers have a certain appeal for me. Judging books by them makes it very, very easy to determine what I will read when faced with a tide of new books and stories. With covers doing a good bit of the legwork for me, I don’t have to read nearly as many back covers or first pages to find what I want to read. (I know, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But it’s darn helpful to have such an easy first gate of judgment.)

This year’s Hugo nominees boasted several good covers that appealed to me. The one I found most intriguing, from a creator’s standpoint, was Feed by Mira Grant.

Feed’s cover is not necessarily an intricate piece of artwork that I could spend hours staring at (A Hundred Thousand Kingdom’s cover is much better suited to that). But as a cover, I don’t know what more you could ask for. It’s so amazingly clever. Part of the cleverness stems from Grant’s genius in titling the book: if you don’t already know, Feed is a novel about a group of bloggers in a post–zombie apocalypse world. So it’s got zombies, who are always trying to feed, and bloggers, who want everyone to subscribe to their feed.

The cover captures this by focusing on only two elements: the title and the RSS feed icon painted in blood. The grungy gray wall in the background communicates the setting—semi–post-apocalyptic and definitely not pretty—and makes the word and icon etched in bright blood a high contrast. They pop, bringing the pun to the forefront. The blood and the grunge, when added to the word feed, evoke zombies in the minds of those in tune with the current cultural obsession with zombies. Adding the RSS icon gives a dash of the unexpected, and the pun becomes relatively sophisticated by virtue of being visual instead of vocal.

Because the cover taps into and combines two current cultural phenomena (zombies and blogs), it catches an audience’s eye and forces them to, at bare minimum, read the back cover to figure out what’s up. It achieves what a cover is meant to achieve: it gets people to want to know about the book. It makes readers stop for a moment before moving on to the next of their plethora of options. Feed stands out on the smorgasbord, and that’s the first thing a book needs when it is released into the market.

As far as the book goes, I greatly enjoyed Feed. It was a blast, and Mira Grant’s zombie-ridden world is detailed and exquisitely thought out. I loved that the zombies were not the story: they were a plot point but they were not the plot itself. Beautiful worldbuilding. My one gripe is that I could never quite believe that the main character had a reputation as a hard-fact news reporter. For a while I thought maybe the character could keep her strong opinions out of her writing, but the blog snippets that were at the end of each section never showed me that. So on that point, my disbelief never really got suspended, but it was a wonderful read in spite of that. It also has what is now one of my favorite sibling relationships in fiction. The main character and her brother are perfect.

Leaflet Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

by 4 Comments

The Prestige Cover
This is a lamentably crappy scan of the paperback cover.

Over the past few weeks I finally read The Prestige by Christopher Priest. (I have, of course, seen the movie, but that’s kind of irrelevant.) For those of you who haven’t seen the movie (and thus can’t puzzle out what The Prestige is about), I provide the back-cover copy from my paperback edition:

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose each other.

Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other’s ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magician’s craft can command—the highest misdirection and the darkest science.

Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations … to descendants who must, for their sanity’s sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

The book is told through a series of first-person accounts that are scattered throughout time: some are in the present (from the descendants whose sanity is at stake) and some are from the past (the dueling stage magicians, i.e. the portion the movie covers). The accounts are mostly written in personal journals, most notably from Alfred Borden (the first past-based viewpoint character) and Rupert Angier (the last past-based viewpoint character).

Narrators with Secrets

The narrators are obviously unreliable. In Borden’s journal he confesses this up front: “The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.” Because Borden so obviously hangs a lantern on the fact that he can’t be trusted, it becomes apparent that trusting Angier is risky business as well.

Having seen the movie, I already knew some of the secrets and illusions Borden and Angier would put out there (though Angier’s secret is notably different from what it was in the movie). In many ways, I wished I hadn’t already seen the movie—I wish, for example, that I could regain the initial effect of reading Borden’s contradictory prose without knowing the reason behind it. However, I relished the more intimate look into the minds of characters I already knew (in their essentials). The film does a wonderful job of focusing on the outward relationships the two magicians have and the effects of their secrets on those relationships, but the book brings you closer to the individuals.

Characterization & Fragmented Effects

The prose was interesting, and the characters’ voices and mannerisms were quite distinct. Angier is a penny counter; Borden is an idealist and theorist. Andy Westley/Nicholas Borden (he was adopted, and the Westley name is his adopted name and how he thinks of himself) shows a realistically confused young man; Kate Angier (great-granddaughter of Rupert) delicately captures her childhood experiences from an adult perspective.

Having so many narrators fragments the storyline—which is only more fragmented by the fact that many times you can’t trust what you’re being told. However, except for Andy’s account, each individual gets to go through his or her story, beginning to end, without interruption. I loved this. Each character was engaging enough alone to draw me into the story, and there were secrets and details enough to discover that repeated plot points weren’t redundant. Andy’s account bookends and separates the others’ accounts: because he comes into the Borden–Angier feud as an outsider, it’s almost as though the reader is discovering the family secrets as he does, so his bookending is appropriate.

I immensely enjoyed the book. The characters change, develop, and evolve over the many years of their lives documented within its pages. The story essentially comes down to one of obsessions, whims, and deep-seated aspirations. (It reminds me of English-language Romanticism, Gothic elements and all.) The Prestige, in the end, is a ghost story: the ghosts of whims, the ghost of obsession, the ghost of aspirations of immortality, whether through fame and glory or other means. The ghostly prestiges—the lingering effects of the novel—are the ghosts of human frailty and desire. As such, the book is chilling and fascinating, and it echoes painfully with reality—as nearly all good fantasy does.

Small Gripe

My only complaint would be that there were occasions when I didn’t believe that the words Angier were using were native to his time period and experience. Not to say that they couldn’t have been, but they didn’t ring true in my ear and jerked me out of the illusion of reading for a while.

Book–Film Comparison

As a side note, I couldn’t help comparing the novel and the film, if only to decide if I still liked the film adaptation after reading the book (I’ve watched the movie many, many times because I like it so much). I can’t say that I disagree with any of the choices the adaptation made. Focusing only on two characters made it easier to fit in the time, and focusing on the external effects of their decisions translates better to film and analyzes another side of obsession (as well as answering questions that Angier himself raises in his account). I even agree with how they changed Angier’s secret because it made it easier to get the strong impact without the luxury of time that a novel affords. I’d say I appreciate the film even more now that I’ve read the book (though, as I said before, I wish I could have had an untainted reading of the book—alas, it is not to be).

Christopher Priest’s The Prestige won the World Fantasy Award in 1996.