InsaneJournal

My Life, in Books p1 : Mary's in India
So maybe listing the books that have influenced me and what I did or did not like about them will help me figure out where I want to go with my own stuff. It's likely that this will backfire but I'm doing it anyway.



I think Joss Whedon is one of the best television writers in existence but… he writes for tv mostly (and comics but I don’t really read those). Tv writers are just as important as novel writers but the big difference is that they aren’t working alone. They write scripts but they’re just as often supervising whole teams of scriptwriters who have to deal with budget considerations, advertising, censors, network notes and the actors capabilities. Whedon’s style comes off much better onscreen than it would in a book.

So here we go, in alphabetical order (not in order of importance to me).

Joan Aiken- I didn’t realize for years that the “Wolves” series was an alternate history. I’m still not sure I quite get it even now. I also didn’t realize it was all supposed to be kind of over the top and ridiculous. There are things I didn’t remember about the books, such as, the ship Dido wakes up on in Nightbirds on Nantucket is an American ship and “Dutiful Penitence Casket” is an American, which is a much funnier satire on Puritan naming conventions when you’re older.

ETA because I thought I should refresh my memory about just what was alternate about the history: as this review explains. When I think about it, that’s not so obscure after all and it’s kind of weird that neither I, nor the reviewer, understood this even as children. Maybe her alternate history wasn’t alternate and obvious enough because I think Jameses instead of Georges might have had more impact than is portrayed here. Instead, things are just slightly off, and I wonder what the point was, then? If your book is aimed at preteens, then you need to be a little more obvious, make it clear what your purpose was in setting this in an alternate timeline (besides the opportunity to give people really funny but outdated names). Maybe I need to reread them to get it, but mostly it seemed like people just acted a little nuts.

Anyway, the first story in the series, “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” is a Victorian story that takes place in the winter, in a Britain where wolves are not only not near extinction but are super strong, aggressive, overpopulated and a danger even to people in London. They even attack a train, and one breaks through a window and tries to eat one of the heroines. She is traveling to the countryside to live with her much richer cousin, whose parents are going on some kind of trip. There’s a lot of great atmospheric-winter in the country-type stuff (one memorable ice skating scene). Well, the new governess also arrives, and of course, yes, she is evil. She dumps them in a semi abusive girls boarding school from which they have to escape. It (and two of the sequels) was the type of book that had imagery and words that lodged in my head for the rest of my life.

The flaw is that the series got very strange after the third book, increasingly weird and I eventually lost track. I never found out what the wolves had to do with the whole alternate history thing (unless it was where Dr. Who got their “the Royal Family are werewolves” idea-Victoria would've been queen if they were in the right timeline, and she was the one who got bit).

And of course (*sigh*) when looking this book up online I realize that it’s not as obscure as I’d been led to believe. Of course. Of course there were tons of kids out there who read and loved this series and could’ve discussed it with me (or played games about it or written the fan fic with me or whatever) , I just had no contact with them. And I suppose if I started writing fic or whatever about it now there would inevitably be someone who does it better and gets more attention for it and yet another thing that was important to me would be tainted by knowing you can’t even do this right”.

She wrote a collection of short stories called “Smoke from Cromwell’s Time”, which I thought was amazing but I haven’t read or even seen available in years.

Apparently, she a) died in 2004 and b) is the subject of some controversy because she’s another one of those authors who wrote “professional fan fiction” about some Jane Austen characters and some historical figures.

Libba Bray: She has done something that no one else on this list managed. She wrote a deliberately feminist twist on the YA “coming of age” fantasy novel- while having actually been a teenage girl herself. Guys, no matter how hard they try and most of them never try, always miss something. This is a book series about Heroines and what it actually means/requires to become a woman-women of every type, not just the four clichéd archetypes found in fantasy novels by men (you know, the virginal prize, the temptress, the wicked witch and the sainted dead mother). And because she knows girls because she is one, the girls are also shown with all their downright nasty potential and all the weird, Byzantine complications that women’s relationships have.

She is a rural Texan transplanted to Brooklyn who wrote a series set at a girl’s boarding school in Victorian England and succeeded at it. It’s a perfect example of writing what you don’t know using what you know-it’s not her world but in many ways, the world of teenage girls is the same everywhere and in every era. It’s superior to “Twilight” in most ways (geez, they don’t even compare) and is filled with strong, memorable and realistic characters with realistic, complicated relationships.

She is wonderful at description, just… fabulous. I would love to be able to describe things like that. She has a wicked sense of humor which continues on her Livejournal. I also love that she is fen-with known connections to the Harry Potter fandom (not just the “I’d like to thank Cassandra Clare” bit, but there is a character that has a name very similar to another ex fan writer turned pro) and that this is basically…Harry Potter with all the genders flipped and set in a Victorian Muggle school.

What I Don’t Like: Her poorly informed anti religion views that keep slipping in, that seem much more informed by her childhood as a Baptist minister’s daughter in rural Texas than by attitudes of the upper class in Victorian England. Her message that self sacrifice is for weaklings (even Felicity…she finally learns to sacrifice and it’s portrayed as if Gemma has finally seen Felicity being “weak”). The series ends with pretentious quotes about peace, and immediately segues into solving everyone’s problems with violence. I don’t care either way, have battles or preach pacifism, just be consistent.

Her poor use of minority characters, when she set herself up for the potential to do so much more with them. Kartik basically existed just to sacrifice himself for all the pretty white girls.

Her characters are realistic, until they pass that point and become a bit unlikable. Gemma the heroine eventually does some things that make Felicity the school bully look like a nice girl by comparison and as it was recently pointed out, anyone not Gemma or Felicity had to follow different rules.

And as much as I root for Slytherin characters, because I am one, I don’t like that the entire series seems to be written as a vindication of the author’s version of Slytherin thinking, because the world *shouldn’t* run the way a Slytherin would run it. Come on, I know what we’re like, don’t let us run stuff. The world would collapse if there was no one left who thought about other people besides themselves and who had more of a tendency to give than to take (not that this is actually what being a Slytherin *has* to be about but that’s a rant for another time).

Terry Brooks A good example, I thought, of how an American author can write American fantasy fiction without having to struggle to imitate authors who wrote in another time and another culture. I have *only* read the Word/Void series, but that’s alright because that’s the only one I wanted to talk about anyway.

Even though the magic used in the story has its base in Wales (in our world, the series is connected to another series that is more complicated and takes place somewhere else), the majority of the W/V series takes place in the US. Specifically, a small town in Illinois called “Hopewell”. Hopewell is a town I had no trouble identifying with- it’s a place where nobody has money these days, the industries that once kept the town afloat are dying or moving overseas. The people are basically good and crime is basically low but it’s a constant battle between condo developers and trailer parks- one of my favorite passages is when he’s describing the buildings in the town and the way their functions have changed over the year, which reminds me of my own town. The fears and concerns and aspirations of the characters are uniquely American and very much the sort of things the people I know fear and are concerned about and aspire to.

It’s like fantasy fiction meets a Bruce Springsteen album. And I like the continuing message in it, of social responsibility and hope and faith in the midst of paranoia and despair.

There is an appearance of a literally magical Native American character but he is three dimensional and pretty cool and you know how I feel about the importance of people bothering to pay attention to and use, native mythology anyway. Yeah, the (extinct) tribe is fake but there's no town called "Hopewell, Illinois" either (or Hopewell, Ohio, which is what I typed before when I was severely short on sleep).

Plus, he’s one of those rare male authors who knows how to bridge the gap between “spunky little girl heroine” and “grown up woman heroine” – she gets married, has implied sex, even ends up pregnant at the end, all without becoming either a temptress/whore or a subservient airhead. I also love that she’s kinda religious (she voluntarily attends a church and even takes the youth group Christmas caroling) and that the series has religious elements that are very quiet and tasteful and Congregational but there nonetheless.

And there is one really, really cool scene in the middle of the second book that is probably one of the best written chase sequences I have ever read in a book.

Frances Hodgson Burnett Specifically, “A Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden”.

Always identified more with Mary than Sarah. Sarah is the kind of heroine everybody either thinks they are or wishes they were- you know, *you’re* the nice one, it’s everyone else who’s horrible, you do all the work and slave away unrecognized and one day, they’ll end up paying for failing to recognize how great you are. But because she’s fictional, she really *is* that kind and innocent and sparkly and would never *dream* of dreaming that they’ll pay for it. Anyway, “A Little Princess” is still a pretty powerful, if depressing and slightly traumatizing story. If you can ignore the part where rich friends show up at the end and just hand the heroine gifts and money and pull her out of the gutter again without her having to really do much to save herself.

I’m still waiting for that part to happen and the part where I learn to be a better person by being deprived of comfort, safety and my dignity. If it’s a test, I failed miserably.

I also didn't know back then that "Sarah" means "princess". And I could probably do a whole thing on lost queens and holy grails and black madonnas (the soot on her face and the dark clothes she has to wear) but this has gone on long enough.

I like “The Secret Garden” a lot more. I’ve got this thing for gardens, to begin with. The house and grounds are as much of a pair of 3D characters as the flesh and blood people are. I want a Mistlethwaite Manor type house and grounds of my very own. And since then I've experienced the magic of creating and growing my own garden. It really does do something to you (if you're successful).

The characters are archetypes I tend to gravitate towards. Spoiled, kinda helpless, in deep deep pain, flailing around everywhere because they have absolutely no coping mechanisms. And they didn't need to have everything taken away from them to learn how to be better, they just needed the time and space to be themselves and do simple things that made them happy, and then, they're a family again!

Anyone else think it’d be really funny to put those two heroines, Mary and Sarah, in the same room?