Author Archives: caseykins

Book Reviews: Tiffany Aching and Other Witches

Posted on May 6, 2015 by caseykins

Pratchett

I’ve been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett lately.  Someone introduced me to a lovely infographic on where to start his books.  Discworld is so diverse that it’s impossible to know where to start, and very intimidating.  But the infographic made it alright.  Also, after reading several of the books, even as part of a series, I can say you should just dive in wherever looks good to you.  Everything I read would stand on it’s own.

I started with the Tiffany Aching books: The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith.  There’s one more, I Shall Wear Midnight, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  And then I picked up the first of the witches books, Equal Rites.  To say I’m a fan is an understatement.

First of all, I have a thing about men who write women.  Most men do it very badly, especially in the Fantasy genre.  The women in Terry Brooks’ “Magic Kingdom” books, for example, are a very good approximations of females.  But there’s something not quite right about them, although it’s hard to put a finger on what.  The same can be said of all the women in The Lord of The Rings (although I LOVE Tolkien second to none), anyone in the Wheel of Time series, even The Princess Bride a bit.  Don’t even get me started on Piers Anthony…

Pratchett doesn’t have that problem.  His women are WOMEN, real and accurate.  They care about domesticity, even while they strain against it.  They’re each powerful characters in a matter-of-fact way.  It also doesn’t hurt that he’s wildly funny.  I wholeheartedly approve, and I’ve been disturbing Brian’s sleep because I have to keep reading them into the small hours of the night, and I can’t help laughing out loud.

So here they are in more specificity:

The Wee Free Men:  My only criticism of this book is that Tiffany seems much more mature than your average nine year old should be.  Other than that, the book is perfect.  She uses her annoying little brother as bait, and then when he’s captured, takes on fairyland with nothing but an iron frying pan and a bunch of small pictsies (the Nac Mac Feegles) who are vulgar, drunk, and hilarious.  They have awesome names like “Rob Anybody,” “Daft Wullie,” and “No’-As-Big-As-Medium-Sized-Jock-But-Bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock.”

It’s a story full of dreams and fairy queens; and a young girl’s need to live up to the reputation of her grandmother (who was probably a witch).  Tiffany herself is so spunky and practical that she is one of the best YA heroines I’ve read.  I would 100% recommend this book in every way.

A Hat Full of Sky: Not as good as Wee Free Men, I don’t think, but still pretty great.  Tiffany’s magic attracts the attention of something called a Hiver, which wants to take over her body and live as a mean, horrible version of herself.  She’s eleven now, and living in a different city with a woman named Mrs. Level who is actually one person split into two.  It sounds strange, but somehow it works.  The coven of witches with “no leader” is great.

The Feegles are back, and funnier than ever.  It seems like they’re hilarity is more for show than for actual plot furthering, but I do have to say that the dialogue while they’re all glommed together in a suit of clothes so they can pretend they’re a full sized man is just golden.  Especially everyone’s complaint about being the knees.  It’s sort of nice to see Rob Anybody coming into his own as a leader, too.

Full of much worthy stuff, and well worth the read, but not as tight as the other Pratchett novels I’ve read.

Wintersmith:  This was another of my favorites.  Tiffany is thirteen now, and studying with a Miss Treason, who is utterly delightful (if the adjective “delightful” can be applied to someone deliberately trying to seem nefarious).  She’s scary, and uses magic props from a catalogue to set up a haunted house-ish place in order to gain respect from the inhabitants of her village.  She takes Tiffany to the Dark Morris dance one night, and Tiffany gets swept up in it; dancing with Winter even though she isn’t supposed to.  The Wintersmith falls in love, and starts doing all sorts of embarrassing things like making snowflakes and icebergs in Tiffany’s image.

The Feegles are back in all their glory, along with an inexplicable sentient cheese.  The cornucopia is also pretty amazing, dumping hundreds of thousands of things you definitely don’t want into the house.  My favorite thing in the whole novel is all the “waily, waily” from the Feegles when Tiffany starts performing The Pursin’ o’ the Lips, and The Tappin’ o’ the Feets.

The end also feels inevitable and perfect.  I’d say it fully earned the awards it won.

Equal Rites: A hilarious comedy of errors, of sorts, where a wizard gets word that there will be an Eighth Son of an Eighth Son born in a small town and passes his staff on, but the Son is actually a Daughter instead.  She’s sort of forced to become a wizard.  The staff is temperamental, and  Granny Weatherwax is such a great character.  I got gleeful when she starts to make a bit of a romance of things with the head wizard.

Eskarina, or Esk, (the Daughter) is a stubborn girl.  She ends up entering the wizard academy as a servant, but still manages to learn a lot and ultimately saves the day.  Pratchett has such a way with character that you can forgive him a bit of density in his magical theory, even when she and the main wizard character come up with things that are utterly incomprehensible.  Did I mention that the librarian is an orangutan?

10/10 would read again.   And incidentally, if you’re looking for a well written essay by Pratchett on gender in fantasy, there’s a great one here: http://ansible.uk/misc/tpspeech.html

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Oh the Gophers

Posted on April 30, 2015 by caseykins

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I have a gopher infestation second to none.

No, seriously.  It’s obscene in the back yard.  Tunnels and holes as far as the eye can see.  The yard was a blank slate when we moved in, mostly dirt.  We’ve slowly been putting plants and pavers into the front yard, but the back has been low priority.  In the winter rains it grew weedy and green.  A veritable gopher smorgasbord and paradise, I guess, helped by the fact that Brian and I rarely go out there.  It looks like someone aerated the soil.  There isn’t a piece of the back yard they haven’t tunneled through.  I thought the recent deadness was because of warm weather we’ve been having.  I didn’t realize how wrong I was.

I found out about the infestation when I tried to put my tomatoes in.  I bought five lovely plants at Tomatomania.  I mostly got ones that were good for hot weather, and supposedly tastier than the normal heat-tolerant varieties: Juliette Grape, Lemon Cherry, Marriage Perfect Flame (which I bought for the name, not for taste or hardiness, I admit), Cherokee Green, and Red Brandywine.  I splurged on some fancy compost on Friday, and I was all ready to dig a bed in the back yard.

The Plan was veggies in the back, drought tolerant in the front.  But those damn gophers.  I composted the one empty bed in the front yard and put the tomatoes in there.  The Cherokee Green hasn’t taken transplanting very well, but you’ll be happy to know that the Marriage is thriving, tall and deep green.  Everything else seems to be doing rather well, too.  Armstrong has bright blue tomato cages, so I’ll go fancy and match them to my  door.  I am determined to have tomatoes this year, even if it blows the garden plan to hell and makes the front of my house look rangy and dead late in the season.

In the meantime, I’ll be waging gopher-war in the back so we can get on plan again for next year.  They underestimated me when they tried to stand between me and fresh tomato.

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An Explanation of Beach Smut

Posted on April 27, 2015 by caseykins

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I talk about Beach Smut on the blog sometimes, and it dawns on me that this is a term much like “Space Chicken” – my family uses it and everyone else has no idea at all what we mean.  (Space Chicken, by the way, is a supermarket rotisserie chicken in a plastic dome.  All ready to go into space in its own little ship).  But Beach Smut is an important thing to know about.

To qualify as Beach Smut, a novel can have no redeeming informational value.  It has to be for fun only.  No thoughts or deep meanings required.  Only feels.  If you’d never tell your English teacher about the book, but you’re LOVING it anyway, you’re probably reading Beach Smut.  In short, this is a genre that’s perfect for when you’re sitting and sunning yourself on the beach.  It’s vacation if you’re sunning yourself on the beach.  No high thoughts, morals, or meanings allowed.

I consider Twilight to be the pinnacle of the Beach Smut genre, although there are others just as good.  It’s a quick read, a little salacious, with plenty of Vampire/Werewolf drama.  It’s easy to identify with Bella, and it’s hard to take seriously.  There are four whole books, so you don’t even have to think hard about what you’re reading next.  Perfect.  Dive right in.  Others that qualify are Kiera Cass’ Selection series, any Anne McCaffrey novel, and things labeled “Aunt Dimity.”  I’m sure you can think of a host of others.

We all read them.  And their quality has to be judged differently from that of more serious books, because the aim of the author is different in writing them.  You can’t fault Twilight for not being The Fault In Our Stars.  It isn’t fair to either book, and it isn’t fair to either author.  They’re a totally different thing and they each have a valid place in the world.

So there you have it.  And when I rave of the Beach Smut merits of a particular book, you will know what I mean.

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Indio, Land of Date Palms and Dinosaurs

Posted on April 23, 2015 by caseykins

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Last weekend was full of crazy and lovely at the same time.  It was Brian’s birthday.  His mom had a timeshare in Indio for the weekend that she couldn’t use, so she offered it to us. I was so relived.  I’ve been so busy that I hadn’t planned the usual birthday party shenanigans, and now I didn’t have to.  A fancy timeshare condo would usually mean two full days of awesomeness, but Brian had to work until 5:00 on Saturday.

I found a cookbook last week on Tumblr, my new favorite thing.  It’s a primer for eating well for $4.00 per person per day, designed for folks on food stamps.  But the recipes looked SO GOOD.  And they were cheap.  So I bought a bunch of things, including a roast chicken and dried black beans.  I spent all of Saturday in the kitchen making meals for the week, and strawberry shortcake for Brian (who hates cake, the communist).

I picked him up at the train station Saturday evening, and we drove straight to Indo.  The resort was a lovely oasis in the middle of the desert.  Our balcony looked out on the prettiest lagoon, and there were birds everywhere.  I made Brian tacos and put a candle in his shortcake, and then we were so tired that we crashed and burned on the plush, king-sized mattress.

We spent the next morning in the lazy river.

“So how long until you think this will get boring?” Brian asked.

“Isn’t the chief virtue of a lazy river that it’s boring?” I said.

But we were hungry, and had resolved to find ourselves a date shake somewhere, via instructions from Brian’s co-worker.

Hence Shields Date Garden, an actual date farm with a stand that’s been there since the 1950s.  We ate burgers on the patio under white umbrellas, sipped our date shakes, and then went inside to peruse the store.  They had every date product imaginable, including date sugar.  There was also a rather un-salacious movie titled “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”  Which turned out to be a whole bunch of farm workers spraying down the palms with squeeze bottles of pollen, basically.

It was the perfect day, and I wished we could have stayed forever.  But we also wanted to get home at a decent hour.  We packed up the condo and left for home.  On the way out, Brian saw two giant concrete dinosaurs on the side of the road.  “I’ve always wanted to go to those, but my dad would never stop,” he said.

“Well, let’s stop,” I said.

“Dinosaurs, Palm Springs, California,” he told the GPS on his phone (even though they’re in Cabazon), and it found the place right away.

I don’t know what we expected, but it wasn’t at all what we got.  The giant brontosaurus was a gift shop with a fire-escape on the back of it, with ape and Neanderthal busts at the top of columns on the inside.  It was filled with a host of plush green things with teeth, and other cheap dinosaur-themed toys.  The T-Rex was part of a weird creationist/dinosaur museum that charged a bit of admission.  Animatronic dinos inside bobbed their heads next to cave men.  Some of the dinosaurs had saddles.  In the back, a lion hung out with a couple of velociraptors.  There was a medieval knight on his steed wading through a herd of triceratops.  There was a sand pit where anyone retrieving a rock painted with a dinosaur could redeem it for a prize.

The garden was full of more concrete dinosaurs, reposing with sheep, alligators, and turtles.  The culminating experience was a trip into the belly of the T-Rex so you could survey the scenery from his mouth.  A sign inside tried to claim that good old Nessie was proof that dinos and humans have lived together.  It was awesome, really.  Best $8 ever.

We got home just before the sun set, and had a lazy night on the couch.  A busy Saturday, but a perfect Sunday.

Thanks to all my laborious cooking on Saturday, we’ve been eating pretty well this week too: http://bit.ly/TMvNFU I heartily recommend the baked beans, the roast chicken, and the lentil burgers (I made ours with black beans and ground turkey instead, but close enough).  We’re trying her eggplant pasta tomorrow night. Yum!

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Spumoni Symphony

Posted on April 15, 2015 by caseykins

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I took Brian to the Redlands Symphony last weekend.  It has been a long while since I’ve been to a concert with a full orchestra; and even longer since I watched an orchestra from that close.  We used to get to the Hollywood Bowl at least once a summer, but that’s been spottier now that everyone is so busy.  What with the moving into a new house, and starting a new job and all, I didn’t make it last year.  My mother is a trombone player, so I used to see an orchestra play often.  Like, almost once a month.  She played with the Claremont Symphony Orchestra and the Claremont Winds.  She also taught trombone, and the music school would often get free LA Phil tickets for less popular programs.  In Little Bridges, I would sit on the very edges of the balcony so I could see the strange faces the conductor made at the orchestra.  At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I wandered the chandeliered hallways in a long black t-shirt dress I dubbed my “opera ensemble,” for extra fanciness. (I have also dated myself – no Disney Hall when I was in High School).

Brian enjoys a symphony as much as I do, but he doesn’t have the eighteen years of piano lessons and extensive exams to back him up on the theory of it all like I do. The program was Mozart’s Piano Concerto #23 in A Major, and Beethoven’s Eroica.  At the end of the Mozart, when everyone broke into applause, he turned to me.

“Now, how did everyone know that THERE was the spot it was okay to clap?” he said.

I pointed to the program, where it listed the three movements.  “You clap at the end of the last one.  It’s all one piece of music, so you don’t clap in between because it isn’t over.  It’s like a sorbet break during dinner.  The silence cleanses your palate for the next movement.  And then when it’s over you can clap.”

“Sorbet?” he said.

“Yes.” I said.

When we were stretching our legs during intermission, the conversation continued.  “So what’s the point of having a bunch of different movements, anyway?” Brian asked.

“They’re supposed to go together,” I said.  And then I realized that it was going to be a very desert explanation kind of night.  “It’s like spumoni ice cream, maybe?”

“Oh my God,” said Brian.

“No, this is a good one!” I said.  “Because spumoni is pistachio, strawberry, and chocolate, right?  Three flavors that totally aren’t like each other at all.  But you mush them together and they’re tasty…”

“ – That’s debatable.”

“… And they also become a single thing – spumoni – instead of flavors on their own.  So a concerto, for instance, is three different movements smushed together to make a single, tasty treat.”

“Spumoni is gross,” he said.

“Blasphemy,” I said.

But it’s sort of nice to know that my painstaking study of diminished seventh chords, culminating in a Senior Medallion from the Music Teacher’s Association of California, has provided me with a slew of desert metaphors to entertain others with.  Because that’s what it’s all about.  You know, that and the amazing sound of an orchestra tuning up, the single note breaking into a bouncing harmony that spreads over the hall and then falls into silent anticipation.  There really isn’t a better sound than that.

Sometimes I miss being the authority on all things music, although I know I’d never be as good at it as I was in high school.  Also, I should go to the symphony more often.  Beethoven is still just about my favorite thing ever.

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Comfort Books

Posted on April 13, 2015 by caseykins

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I was perusing some Reading Rainbow interviews with authors the other day (and by “authors” I mean “Neil Gaiman,” but I can’t let the internet know how out of hand the stalking has become.  Shhh, don’t tell).  They were talking in the interview about Comfort Books.  I had never heard of comfort books, but the second they mentioned them I knew exactly what they meant.  Those of us who are crazy voracious readers DO have books that we turn to when things are stressful, and we just need a little escape.

It’s so hard to tell people what your favorite book is.  As a reader, I seek for the life-changers; the books that tell me something about myself and my world that I didn’t know before.  I find enough of them that it’s worth it to slog through the things that aren’t as good.  And there is a definite place for things that are merely enjoyable with no Message (see Beach Smut for more info).  I could list off so many books that I found life-changing for you right now.  It’s impossible to pick a favorite, because a lot of them are mood-dependent.  Picking a favorite book is like picking a favorite child. You like them for different reasons, maybe, but better or worse?  No.

But a Comfort Book?  I can tell you my few comfort books right away.  They’re books where I love the world so much that I just want to be in that one instead of my own for a while.  They’re not always the life-changers, either.  It’s a different thing.  So in that spirit, I thought I would discuss mine.  They’ve changed quite a bit over the years, mostly because I can’t read some of the old ones anymore. I’ve read them so much I can recite passages by memory.  Things stop playing in your head like a movie when you can recite them along with the text.  So here are the books I turn to for comfort these days:

  • Howl’s Moving Castle, House of Many Ways, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Charmed Life, or Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones:  All feature great, zany people in worlds where you can mostly order things to be how you want with magic (although it usually doesn’t turn out how you think it will).  Laundry multiplies, stolen items call out who owns them, you can open the door on the city and then turn the handle and end up in a field of flowers, and the troll in the garden keeps outgrowing his clothes.
  • Austenland or Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale:  Austen’s great landscapes take a turn for the silly in both of these, where the line between fantasy and reality is really hard to see.  There are yummy, melt-worthy men.  But the books also contain some profound truths.  Like when Charlotte realizes that she was about to let a man kill her because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
  • The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery:  I love Valancy’s stodgy relatives so much.  And it gets even funnier when she gets the letter telling her she’s dying, because she doesn’t care at all about shocking them anymore.  There’s Roaring Able, the debauched and usually drunk carpenter, and Barney Snaith in his backwoods island home that is full of cats and firelight, and Uncle Benjamin’s horrible puns.
  • Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery: Emily is such a great girl, and the exploits she finds herself in are so funny.  You have to love the aunts at New Moon, and how mean Aunt Ruth is, and Ilse’s terrible behavior.  Add all of that to a realistic picture of life as a young writer, and you get something that’s just so lovely.
  • Little Town on the Prairie or These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder: All the girls are old enough that they’re real people and their adventures are more interesting (to me, anyway).  It’s easy to imagine what it would be like to live in DeSmet, and it’s nice to have a coming of age story where everyone in the family still basically likes each other.  Plus, how can you not be head over heels for Almonzo?  You can’t.
  • Lake Wobegon, 1956 by Garrison Keillor: A charming, if sometimes crass, book about a boy’s experience in a small town in high school.  He terrorizes his sister, is secretly in love with his cousin Kate, is too dweeby to hang out with the local bad boys (who have a band), writes stories about dogs who can talk, and deals with Dad’s neuroticism.  It’s all funny.  Especially the baseball stuff.  And you have to love Kate too.  So much.

I have a feeling that Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments and Fangirl are going to be added to that list, although it’s really too early to tell.  Also, I never realized how many of them there were until now.  Yikes.  I don’t know what that all says about the inside of my head and what spaces I like to inhabit, but there it is.  Someone do some psychoanalysis. Quick.

Categories: Book Review, Comfort Books, Diana Wynne Jones, Garrison Keilor, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shannon Hale | Tags: | Leave a comment

Of Cars and Easter

Posted on April 6, 2015 by caseykins

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Brian’s car died last week with a slow whimper.  It won’t go faster than 40 mph, and that’s no good for commuting on the California freeways, even if it wasn’t making that horrible sound between a rumbling and a wheeze.  We bought Brian his car specifically because it’s big enough for him.  He’s 6’5, and has to fold himself into my little compact car.  He gets knee and ankle problems when he has to drive it too much.  This means that I’m the designated chauffeur for both directions of commute.

It’s been nice and it’s been annoying, both.  I like leaving the house with him, trying and always failing to be ready at the same time, and driving along the roads in the quiet morning with my hand on his knee.  I like watching him lean over the railing of the pass that goes over the train in his dark trilby and tie, and seeing his face light up, his hand waving, when he finds my spot in the car in the lot.  Sometimes there are impromptu adventures like the when he suggested we go to the graveyard you can see from the train.  There is a marble serpent in that graveyard, swimming in green grass, and a few mausoleums.  I kept looking for Bod and Silas inside.  But I think their graveyard was a New England graveyard, not a California one.

The drawbacks are that it’s a whole hour earlier than I would need to get up if I were only responsible for getting myself to the office on time.  And although it’s only a few more minutes to zip down the 215 at the end of the day to the Riverside train station, it is just long enough that I get that twinge in my shoulder, that crease between my eyes, and that little bud of impatience in my chest.

I used to tease Brian when we commuted down to Orange County every day together that it was 3 hours of “forced alone time” with his wife.  But I forgot how great that time with no distractions can be.  I missed it, and I’m glad to have it back.  Even at the cost of some of my patience.

We had a lovely Easter this week.  By some miracle, I didn’t over-commit to bringing a thousand things.  I had a very nice Saturday trapped at home while Brian took the car to do some overtime at work.  I made pies with crust from scratch and generally loafed around with the cats.  Sunday morning, we left the house at 9:00 am, visited all the families, and got home about 9:00 pm when we fell into bed.  I had a great excuse to wear my vintage pin of a bouquet of pink flowers and my peter-pan collar shirt.

Highlights of Easter:  Brian attempted to force everyone to play Love Letter with him until my sister’s fellow finally trounced him at it for good (I’m kidding about the “forced,” they had quite a rivalry going).  At my grandfather’s house, twelve grown adults roamed the bushes and fought over bright plastic eggs to find the gold one (which was filled with an extra-fancy scratcher.  My dad found it).    At my mother’s house, she cut the heads off hollow chocolate bunnies to put port inside them… fortunately, she spilled the reddish port all over the place and it looked like some horrible bunny massacre.  A tasty, tasty massacre.

I expect this week to be rather sleepy.  Brian and I are still working our way through the edits on my novel.  I’ve started to draft out the sequel.  Tomatomania is coming to the Botanic Gardens next weekend, so I will have to put some attention into compost, watering strategies, and planting.  A large amount of my time is probably going to be spent keeping cats out of Easter candy, because Jennyanydots is way more devious and crafty than the other two ever have been.   With all of that, and with my duties driving Brian around, let’s hope it all continues as quiet as it’s started.

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Six in Six: Wrap Up

Posted on April 1, 2015 by caseykins

So, this is the official end of Six in Six.  The experiment wasn’t entirely unsuccessful, although I didn’t “win” by the rules I set out for myself at the beginning.  One of the stories was pretty old, and they were all supposed to be new things.  Sometimes it just works like that.  If I hadn’t tried to push myself to continue writing something that just wasn’t working, or if I hadn’t caught that horrible cold half way through, maybe I would have made it.  That’s life.  No fancy new books as a reward for me.

But I have 4 stories I will polish up and use for other things.  Yay!

Speaking of which… If you haven’t perused the stories you should feel welcome to – they’re all on the tab at the top, in order from newest to oldest.  I’ll keep them up until May 1st, when I’ll pull them down.

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Book Reviews: Madeline L’Engle’s Austin Family Books

Posted on March 31, 2015 by caseykins

Austin Family Books

When I was a teenager, I pretty much fell in love with “A Ring of Endless Light” by Madeline L’Engle.  I read it a thousand times, until I knew passages off by heart.  Vicky felt like I would have about things, and the summer on the beach in a grandfather’s house was so similar to my own experience, despite the sadness and death.  The poem her grandfather has on the wall of their attic bunk space still holds so much, even though I’m older.  I think it’s nondenominational.  After all, isn’t this also just meditation?

If thou couldst empty all thy self of self

Like to a shell dishabited

Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf

And say this is not dead

And fill thee with Himself instead

But thou art so replete with very thou

And has such shrewd activity

That He will say this is enou’ unto itself

T’were better let it be

It is so small and full there is no room for me

I knew there were others of the series, but I grew up in the dark ages before there were e-readers.  If it wasn’t in stock at Borders, or the school book fair, I wasn’t likely to be able to get ahold of it.  So I loved the fourth book and didn’t worry too much about the others.

Fast forward, and I found that I can get them now!!  All five of them!  So I had a little binge reading.  While I don’t think that any of the books really stands up to “A Ring of Endless Light,” they were mostly enjoyable.  I’m glad I read them.  Breakdown of the books is below.

Meet the Austins:

There wasn’t really anything in this book that seemed profound, but it was a lovely universe .  It was as if Anne of Green Gables or Little Women had moved to the fifties, with all the lamentations of growing up included.  You end up rooting for Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas to get together, for terrible Maggie to get to stay, and for Dad to get to eat dinner just once.  I enjoyed it.  Especially the nights under the stars and the Muffins picnic.  In a way, this is the best of what the Austins have to offer – real life introspectively.  It’s from Vicky’s 12 year old perspective, so it’s not terribly deep.  But it’s nice.

The Moon By Night:

Dad has taken a job at a research hospital in New York City, so to bridge the time the family goes on a cross-country road trip while camping along the way.  I mostly really loved this book.  The family dynamic feels more real than in “Meet the Austins,” and it’s sort of fun to see the boys all react to Vicky and have her be sought out.  I didn’t like Zachary, though.  He’s a huge part of the book, and I don’t know why Vicky doesn’t see that his desire to scare her isn’t desirable.  Or, I mean, I sort of understand it.  Because when you’re fourteen it’s nice to be noticed by a boy and that sort of overshadows the fact that the boy himself may not be that nice.  But I didn’t find it any less annoying.

Another big thing that bothered me was the earthquake that happens in the last part of the novel.  I had to read the passage again and again to make sure that it happened, and it wasn’t something I misread or something out of a dream.  It felt so unreal, just as Zachary’s protestations that he would become good were.  Perhaps it’s because I had already read book 4 so I knew he doesn’t, but it all seemed a little surreal.

I liked the book over all, though.  There is something about being with the Austin family that makes the other things seem worth it.  I was worried at this point, though, that the rest of the books were of this superficial quality and that “A Ring of Endless Light” wouldn’t hold up to my memory of it.

The Young Unicorns:

This book assuaged my worries about the rest of the series.  It was GOOD.  A little bit too unlikely thriller, but still good.  I liked how the whole premise of the thing rested on how no one was willing to share information with each other because they wanted to protect the others.  I also think that Emily’s blindness was handled really well.  She’s super-capable despite.  In fact, she saves the day, and that’s nice to see portrayed.

There were two things I had trouble with.  Okay, well, three… but the first was that the family didn’t seem its usual close entity in New York.  I think that’s probably by design, so I’m not sure it counts.  I still missed it since that’s what I loved so much about the first two novels.  Number two was that the plot line was so unlikely, it was like something out of a fantasy.  I know… it’s Madeline L’Engle so what was I expecting?  But the Austins live in an otherwise normal universe, so it felt like the crisis must have some element of normality about it.  It didn’t.  The last thing was that, after being in Vicky’s head for the other two novels, this one jumps around in perspective quite a lot.  It took me a bit to fall into the rhythm of it, although I got there eventually.

Still, the writing became so much more mature than the other two, and I couldn’t put it down.  An A+.

A Ring of Endless Light:

Oh the best book of this series by far.  It held up to my expectations of it, and more.  I was still annoyed by Zachary, but this time I think I was supposed to be.  And I could understand more why Vicky might agree to spend time with him despite his crazy.  I would really like to sit down with this thing and ferret out what L’Engle’s doing and why with all the death metaphors, and see if the structure is something I can learn from.  It’s so complex, in a way that feels real.  The only thing that doesn’t feel likely is Vicky’s easy telepathy with the dolphins and her ability to use it also with Adam.  But dolphins are a little otherworldly anyway, and her abilities with Adam create some very intimate moments between the two of them that I thrilled at.  Reading the rest of the series made the story all deeper somehow, and I didn’t think that was possible.  But I felt echoes of the previous books in the images in this one.

I spent a lot of time in my grandfather’s beach house when I was growing up, piled into tiny spaces with my family and loving every minute of it.  This book feels just like that did, where you know you are home and safe, but there really isn’t any home or safe anymore and you know that too.  Although none of the things happened to me that happen to Vicky, she is still 16-year-old-me’s patronus…

I’m so glad it held up.  I will treasure this book forever.  It was a life-changer.

Troubling A Star:

I don’t know what to say about this book, because I felt so betrayed at the end of it.  But I don’t think it was a bad novel.  I just think I was expecting other things from it.  And I believe that L’Engle set me up to expect other things for it.  Although maybe I’m being over dramatic because what I thought was going to happen didn’t.  It’s so hard to know.   It’s very like “The Young Unicorns” in spirit, so if you liked that one you might like this as well.

The book was well written and suspenseful.  It’s another crime drama, and it revolves around Adam’s Aunt Serena who gifts Vicky a trip to Antarctica to visit Adam during his internship.  It starts with that gimmick where the main character (Vicky) is  in peril (stuck on an iceberg and probably dying,) and then you get the rest of the book to discover how it happened.  I thought the continuing story of her saga on the iceberg kept suspense through the novel well, but I don’t think that the suspense ultimately paid off.  The ending just wasn’t big enough for all the nail-biting that preceded it.  No one is very certain what’s going on, it could be drugs, or it could be nuclear waste, or… but it looks like Adam’s in trouble, and therefore Vicky is too.

The thing is, the jacket description made me think it was going to be about Adam and Vicky figuring out their relationship.  I was looking forward to L’Engle saying something profound about the nature of romance, and that never materialized.  I also felt like Adam became a different person in this book.  He goes from being this man full of joy to being, well, not anything much at all.  It’s revealed that he’s this rich kid with an Arctic Exploration heritage, and then he’s just gone for the rest of the novel.  Even the letters he sends Vicky aren’t him, they’re Shakespeare quotes.  There is no mention that any of the experiences they shared in “A Ring of Endless Light” have changed either of them, or that this telepathic bond they’ve created still holds.  That’s really what angered me, I think.  It’s like the events in the previous book, events that really changed me as a reader, didn’t matter to the characters in the book at all.  I felt betrayed.

But I can’t really hold my own disappointment against the book as a whole.  I would say it’s well written, and there are charming moments when the Arctic ice is so pretty, and there are seals and penguins galore.  It just didn’t do what I expected it to.  I shall try to forgive it.

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Rejections of the Better Kind

Posted on March 26, 2015 by caseykins

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I’ve been sending out a lot of short stories, plaguing the editors of various literary journals with them.  I WAS planning on trying to meet a goal of $1000 earned from writing this year.  It has come to my attention, though (mostly through trying and getting rejection letters) that a monetary goal was perhaps too ambitious.  I am now going for 5 stories published, 1 paid for.  That goal still seems ambitious, but it seems like something I can meet.  And it’s mostly about exposure, not dollars.  Much better.

I have gotten to the point where a “no” hardly phases me.  In the early days, it never seemed that I would be able to take rejection after rejection with indifference.  But get enough of them, I suppose… When people ask me about it, I tell them that I’m pretending rejection letters legitimize me as a writer.  After all, doesn’t everyone published have a stack of old letters that say no somewhere?  Shannon Hale has taped hers into a scroll and unfurls it at school events.  Stacey Richter and friends decoupaged theirs onto a chair, a footstool, and some beer cans.  Anita Shrive was going to paper her room with them.

The thing is, I’ve gotten a little happy about rejection letters.  Why, you ask, would I be excited that my stuff isn’t going to be published?  Because I am getting the second tier of rejection letters now.  These are not the cold “we regret to inform you that we cannot use your story” letters.  These are the warm letters that might begin with “cannot use…” but contain a thank you and end with something like “please continue to submit.”   Yesterday I got a rejection that was not a form letter at all, but a nice, personal validation that I was on the right track (although they were refusing my story because they didn’t feel the ending was original enough).  They called the writing “beautiful.” If that isn’t a rejection letter to be proud of, I don’t know what is.

I mean, it’s still not an acceptance.  But on the great climb to becoming a published girl, this is a milestone saying that I am getting somewhere.  I may still be close to the bottom of the mountain, the scenery may all look the same, but I have traveled.  I spend so much time alone at a computer banging my fingers against the keys that it’s hard to recognize sometimes.  But there it is in the nicer set of rejection letters; my progress.

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