oh the sea, that rough and unkind mirror, the unknowable depths, the shallows that still can drown. it gives and it takes away. you shall project youroh the sea, that rough and unkind mirror, the unknowable depths, the shallows that still can drown. it gives and it takes away. you shall project your own fears and desires upon it. will it care? be angry, be sad, be lonely, be defiant; little chance the sea will respond to your petty mortal concerns, they are as stones thrown at a mountain. but what if it does respond? in its own strange and watery way. its shore can be a gateway, one used as entrance or exit, from either direction. you cast your angry hexes upon the sea. and to its shores, to you, comes a boy. first one boy and then another. two boys for the price of one fit of rage and grief. which is the boy you will love? the boy from the sea but born of the earth or the boy born of the sea brought to live on earth? which changeling shall love you in return? of course your own choice is clear: you yearn for the boy with the stars of the sea in his eyes, the earthbound boy born of water, the boy who yearns to return to his home. you love best what is most out of reach. and so your love shall be in vain, for a boy who is like the sea cannot love you back. you are but a creature of the earth, after all....more
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is for Awesome! A simple one-word description for this perfectly wonderful book. A is also for Alphabet! An alphabet of thorn is a lure fo
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is for Awesome! A simple one-word description for this perfectly wonderful book. A is also for Alphabet! An alphabet of thorn is a lure for the novel's heroine, a translator in the royal library. Words and their meanings are her passion, and that passion leads her down a strange path, to a magician in a magical forest, to a new Queen learning her own magic, to a sorceress aiming to protect the kingdom, to her own cloudy past, to another sorceress who lives in that past and plans to take over the future, and all futures.
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is for McKillip! Patricia A. McKillip continues her love affair with language in this delightful then eerie then finally transcendent book. M is is also for Me, mark monday! A reader also in love with words and with books that centralize words, books that recognize that it is through language that we define ourselves and the world around us, and books that warn us that language and words can be both challenge and trap, as their meanings and ramifications shift and change throughout cultures and throughout time, as humans use language to love but also to destroy, as language can repel and obsfuscate as often as it can embrace and create clarity.
is for Ziggurat! A ziggurat is a temple in the form of a pyramidal tower, consisting of a number of stories and having about the outside a broad ascent winding round the structure, presenting the appearance of a series of terraces. I think that's a nice simile for the terraced and winding structure of this complex story, which is many stories within one story, winding around each other, built on top of one another. But that's also a bit of stretch. Better yet: Z is for Zenith! McKillip is the zenith of authors for me. The enchanting prose, the characters, the themes, the clarity and mystery and ambiguity and the music played with words, and best of all the understanding, of people, of life....more
I thought this was beautifully written (no surprise there, given the author) but sad to say, it is my least favorite by McKillip so far. there was a kI thought this was beautifully written (no surprise there, given the author) but sad to say, it is my least favorite by McKillip so far. there was a kind of lifelessness to it, and the repetition of actions by the protagonist Rois became hard to bear. go to the forest and well; go to the brokedown mansion; go to the apothecary; go home. so circular.
and yet the circular actions and even the static lifelessness of the plot, when combined with how intense McKillip gets with her prose and all of the hallucinogenic imagery, made the experience a hypnotic one for me. despite not loving it, I didn't dislike it either. a frustrating but still fascinating book. this is a chamber piece where the chamber is very small and enclosed, but man the gorgeous design of the chamber itself still impresses.
I was feeling lazy, so I just copied (and edited) my comment from the great group Beyond Reality. one of the best groups on Goodreads! ...more
all the world's a kitchen! a great steamy kitchen, full of cooks and servers, pluckers and cutters, a head chef and a tray mistress, spit-boys and a pall the world's a kitchen! a great steamy kitchen, full of cooks and servers, pluckers and cutters, a head chef and a tray mistress, spit-boys and a pot scrubber. all the food that is birthed there! so many tasty treats and delicious dishes, made for the lords and ladies and assorted gentry, but enough that can be picked at, pecked at, pulled from the bottom of a pan, enough of those leftovers to feed the loudly bustling world that lives in the kitchen.
a list of characters and events would make this novel sound like the grandest of sagas: full of shape-shifting wizards and doleful ghosts and fearsome enmity; a Faerie Queen in the wood and her stolen husband and daughter, both transformed; a battlefield full of slaughtered soldiers, a monstrous Hunter created by a curse and destined to return and slaughter again; whirlwinds of magic that transform and steal away. despite all of that grandeur, all of the fey and the strange... for me, the most magical parts of The Book of Atrix Wolfe was all of the time our lowly pot-scrubber spent in that world-within-a-world of a castle kitchen.
McKillip is a wizard with the words, as usual. perfectly formed phrases, pellucid prose, ah the elegant loveliness of it all. the novel continues her love affair with words themselves: words as evanescent things that may often define us but are just as often, in the end, unreliable and certainly subject to change - and update! The Book of Atrix Wolfe is primarily concerned with how we should acknowledge our mistakes while still forgiving ourselves and moving on. these are regularly appearing ideals throughout McKillip's works: we cannot run from our past actions, but instead must learn from them; despite how they may reshape us, those mistakes need not define our future. in her own fey, strange way, McKillip is a moralist. although not a strident, cold one that preaches; she is an empathetic and loving moralist, one that teaches....more
how to express how much I love Patricia McKillip and her books, how much her stories move me, how they slowly and invisibly transform from enthrallinghow to express how much I love Patricia McKillip and her books, how much her stories move me, how they slowly and invisibly transform from enthralling fairy tale to a genuinely emotional experience? how to describe the prose: so refined and elegant, so expressive, so light and delicate, so deep and beautiful, and yet often so simple? just so: her arrangements are perfect, my own kind of perfect. how to describe all of that, to make into something as plodding as a book review? love is a subjective experience and so resists codification. it would be easier to describe why I liked that walk in a forest, that beam of sunlight hitting the leaves in just that way; or how I like to watch the fog roll in past that great hill, making of the world a dreamscape. words seems so small for such a task, and yet words are the very tools she uses.
the tale is about a magical woman in a forest. she is a cold woman and her forest is surrounded by an angry world. she surrounds herself in turn, with what she loves, the only things she truly understands: her beasts - her friends. the story is about being loved and falling in love; it is about making bad decisions and letting terrible things turn you into something terrible. it is about being understood and not being understood, why understanding is not always necessary, why it can be hardest to understand yourself. it is about letting go; it is about letting other people be a part of you. it is a fable, and so much more....more
Dream a little dream of a little book, perfect in every way; a story about a little village on the seacoast, less than perfect but full of charm, a liDream a little dream of a little book, perfect in every way; a story about a little village on the seacoast, less than perfect but full of charm, a lived-in village with charming, lived-in characters; a village with a mysterious crumbling manor with many doors to another world: a world of rituals and ravenous crows and glassy-eyed knights and a trapped princess and an uncertain doom; the world of a castle, a castle in a book.
Dream a dream of spells, two wizards and a wood witch and her daughter, and a strange bell that tolls from nowhere each night; dream a dream of a little romance, sweet and pure.
A book about books, about the wonder of reading, about readers and their voyages and writers and their trials and victories. A book that loves books. The theme: the power of stories. A motif: what are the eyes saying, what sort of house exists behind those windows, look to the eyes. The prose: refined, delicate and lovely. The feel: wispy and evanescent. The result: it was like a nap in the park on a sunny, breezy day, a nap full of little dreams, all these little connected dreams within one enchanting dream. I imagine I was smiling throughout this happy dream; I woke from it still smiling....more
this is a beautiful, dreamy fantasy. it is about a fallen city, the mysterious city under that city, two magical beings, a royal bastard, a cast-out mthis is a beautiful, dreamy fantasy. it is about a fallen city, the mysterious city under that city, two magical beings, a royal bastard, a cast-out mistress, a kind of changeling, a curious scholar, a lonely child prince. it is about ruthless control and equally ruthless revolution against that control. although it does not have faerie, it is a fairy tale, one that is both modern and classic in tone and structure. the writing is splendid; McKillip's words are like gems that she strings together to make a sparkling kind of wonderful. she does not overwrite her story; her prose is lusciously rich, almost edible - but it is also streamlined, stripped-down, full of ambiguity and meaning yet never spelling things out too explicitly, never getting lost in detail. sometimes you have to step back, to appreciate the vivid beauty conveyed on the page, to wonder over the mysteries being so carefully teased out, piece by piece. the setting, the city of Ombria, is a marvel: a sad, gloomy, violent, desperately alive place, one that has fallen far from its glorious history; a sad, gloomy, mysteriously un-alive un-place, a shadow city beneath and between and co-existing with the living spaces of Ombria, an un-living history. Ombria in Shadow is full of magic, tragedy, mystery, and love.
MAGIC: it is front and center. don't expect rules to this magic, although it doesn't feel random. it is simply not spelled out. it is as ambiguous and mythic as the rest of the tale. its two sorceresses - one a fell and fungal villain of the darkest hues and the other an unsettling force of nature, change, and potential catastrophe - are marvelous creations.
TRAGEDY: there are the central tragedies, of course, the greater ones that dominate the narrative. but McKillip does an excellent job in making the tragedy hurt beyond those larger strokes, beyond the death of a king, beyond the attempted murders, beyond the ruination of a city. she makes the tragedy felt in many small ways... casual violence in the night, the distance between father and daughter, lovers parted and lost, the feeling of disempowerment, the loneliness of a little boy.
MYSTERY: answers are almost always tantalizingly out of reach, parsed out little by little, nothing ever simply dumped on the reader. the ending gives you answers, but they are not straightforward, they require contemplation and a willingness to forsake easy answers and easy satisfaction. when they come, the answers were almost as mysterious as the mysteries themselves. that said, when the riddles of the nature of the two sorceresses were finally answered, separately... marvelous to read, perfect.
LOVE: my gosh i was delighted about the Love that is at the heart of this tale. specifically, the love between children and those people in their lives who love them and care for them - be they parents or friends or guardians. of course i have nothing against Romantic Love and its place in any story. but how refreshing to have that focus changed! there are Love Stories in Ombria, naturally. but this book has at its heart Familial Love - with "family" being one that is both born and chosen.
this is the kind of book that you just want to hold close to your heart, be sentimental over, and think about again... but perhaps not talk about, at least not too much. it is a delicate book, like most precious things....more
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