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Lynn Flewelling, The Oracle’s Queen: This is the final volume of a trilogy. Queen Tamir, revealed as a girl rather than a boy at last, has taken back her realm – or at least parts of it; her cousin/usurper still maintains that he is the rightful ruler. This book felt flatter than the first two, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was unfurling just as prophecy demanded, without getting the sense that it was risky and uncertain – a standard fantasy problem. Still, the trilogy as a whole is strong enough to be worth reading if you enjoy palace intrigue, dark magic, and angsty teenage romance.
Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures: Somehow I didn’t have this one in my collection, so I ordered it and reread. This is an earlier Discworld novel in which the death of a lone caretaker releases a dangerous illusion into the world, the illusion of Holy Wood, which seduces young (and not so young: CMOT Dibbler hears the siren song as well) Ankh-Morporkians to the fast-growing city by the ocean where the sky is always blue and the (demon-powered) cameras are always running. Mild satire, not Pratchett’s finest. Also features the origin of Gaspode.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement: Fawn is a young girl on the run from her farm home, trying to escape a shameful secret. Dag is a Lakewalker, a member of a mystical clan that protects the farmers from blight bogles, which devastated the world in centuries past and still pop up to threaten humans with enslavement and destruction. When Fawn is caught by the blight’s servants and becomes part of Dag’s hunt, their fates are entwined in ways neither understand. This is basically a romance plus world-building, and the obstacles so far are almost all external: farmers and Lakewalkers can be friends, but they can’t intermarry, or at least no one thinks it rational. After a blur of action in the beginning, things settle down so that Fawn can heal and she and Dag can work out their feelings and their strategies for dealing with the rest of the world; Fawn’s family turns out to be as difficult in its way as any blight bogle. While the book was expertly crafted, I can’t help wanting more Miles and intrigue.
George R.R. Martin, The Ice Dragon: Short fable of a strange girl, born in deep winter, whose special connection with the dangerous ice dragons might save her life when foreign invaders come, but might also sever her last connections with humanity. As with any Martin, war has horrors aplenty, but a child reading the book might not get the oblique references to atrocities that adults commit against other people. Nicely illustrated, but I want the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire! (This doesn’t seem to be set in that universe.)
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw: Walton’s dragon society is based, according to her, on treating “the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel” as “inescapable laws of biology.” What I found most interesting, however, is the ways in which the social configurations were extremely distant from those inescapable laws – based on them, yes, but not in any necessary way. In particular: the only way to grow really big and thus powerful is to eat a dragon’s flesh; it has magical properties distinct from those of other food. Thus, social customs regulate who can eat (a) weak little dragonets (the powerful families of a district) and (b) dead elders (their families, though intra-family division is the source of much conflict in this book). The other “biological law” is that sexual maturity and receptivity go together for female dragons – not male. They are triggered by sufficient proximity to a male and are signalled by permanent changes in the color of their scales. Thus, in polite society, a young female can be ruined by an importunate suitor and have no choices but disgrace or marriage. This also provides significant drama in Walton’s story, when one of the protagonists is prematurely exposed and – again fighting those “inexorable laws” – uses a dangerous medication, a product of culture, to restore her scales, running the risk that she will now never turn even in response to a desired suitor. The stories are basic Victorian dramas of romance and position, including long-lost relatives, relatives that the characters wish would get lost, and reversals of fortune. The parts I found most interesting involved the characters’ basic assumption of the naturalness of these upper-crust rules when a moment’s thought – even a look at how the lower classes live – would have revealed them as entirely socially constructed on the material base of the civilization. Unfortunately, other reviews I found seemed to accept without question that biology had somehow dictated that Victorian mores were inherently appropriate for these dragons; I would have loved to find more discussions of the gaps between biology and culture.
Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures: Somehow I didn’t have this one in my collection, so I ordered it and reread. This is an earlier Discworld novel in which the death of a lone caretaker releases a dangerous illusion into the world, the illusion of Holy Wood, which seduces young (and not so young: CMOT Dibbler hears the siren song as well) Ankh-Morporkians to the fast-growing city by the ocean where the sky is always blue and the (demon-powered) cameras are always running. Mild satire, not Pratchett’s finest. Also features the origin of Gaspode.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement: Fawn is a young girl on the run from her farm home, trying to escape a shameful secret. Dag is a Lakewalker, a member of a mystical clan that protects the farmers from blight bogles, which devastated the world in centuries past and still pop up to threaten humans with enslavement and destruction. When Fawn is caught by the blight’s servants and becomes part of Dag’s hunt, their fates are entwined in ways neither understand. This is basically a romance plus world-building, and the obstacles so far are almost all external: farmers and Lakewalkers can be friends, but they can’t intermarry, or at least no one thinks it rational. After a blur of action in the beginning, things settle down so that Fawn can heal and she and Dag can work out their feelings and their strategies for dealing with the rest of the world; Fawn’s family turns out to be as difficult in its way as any blight bogle. While the book was expertly crafted, I can’t help wanting more Miles and intrigue.
George R.R. Martin, The Ice Dragon: Short fable of a strange girl, born in deep winter, whose special connection with the dangerous ice dragons might save her life when foreign invaders come, but might also sever her last connections with humanity. As with any Martin, war has horrors aplenty, but a child reading the book might not get the oblique references to atrocities that adults commit against other people. Nicely illustrated, but I want the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire! (This doesn’t seem to be set in that universe.)
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw: Walton’s dragon society is based, according to her, on treating “the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel” as “inescapable laws of biology.” What I found most interesting, however, is the ways in which the social configurations were extremely distant from those inescapable laws – based on them, yes, but not in any necessary way. In particular: the only way to grow really big and thus powerful is to eat a dragon’s flesh; it has magical properties distinct from those of other food. Thus, social customs regulate who can eat (a) weak little dragonets (the powerful families of a district) and (b) dead elders (their families, though intra-family division is the source of much conflict in this book). The other “biological law” is that sexual maturity and receptivity go together for female dragons – not male. They are triggered by sufficient proximity to a male and are signalled by permanent changes in the color of their scales. Thus, in polite society, a young female can be ruined by an importunate suitor and have no choices but disgrace or marriage. This also provides significant drama in Walton’s story, when one of the protagonists is prematurely exposed and – again fighting those “inexorable laws” – uses a dangerous medication, a product of culture, to restore her scales, running the risk that she will now never turn even in response to a desired suitor. The stories are basic Victorian dramas of romance and position, including long-lost relatives, relatives that the characters wish would get lost, and reversals of fortune. The parts I found most interesting involved the characters’ basic assumption of the naturalness of these upper-crust rules when a moment’s thought – even a look at how the lower classes live – would have revealed them as entirely socially constructed on the material base of the civilization. Unfortunately, other reviews I found seemed to accept without question that biology had somehow dictated that Victorian mores were inherently appropriate for these dragons; I would have loved to find more discussions of the gaps between biology and culture.
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