Nina Kiriki Hoffman

After putting this down, I was really conflicted over whether I really liked the book or not. On the one hand, as I was reading it, I got swept up in the story, had trouble putting it down, and really wanted to keep reading. But, once I finished the book, I was left unsatisfied and a bit disappointed. There were a number of things that were flawed:

The characterizations were very weak and vague. While the family antics amused me (Oh boy, talk about dysfunctional!), none of the characters, not show more even the narrator was fleshed out enough for me to feel an emotional attachment. Of the siblings, if Hoffman hadn't used their names I probably wouldn't have been able to tell them apart. Nor did we fully get to meet anyone outside the family. Claire and July were supposedly large and important parts of Gyp's life, but they were barely there and personality-less. We didn't even learn much about Ian other than he was a nice guy.

The rushed ending. Gyp figured out how to control her magic, and book ended. The end. What? Wait. It's only been a week, if that! Really needed more for me to feel real resolution.

Magic was too casually acceptance by those outside the family. After Gyp outs herself with Ian, and later with Claire, neither of them freaked out, asked a billion questions, or did anything but accept that she can curse things. Completely unrealistic, even with both's experiences with the occult, given that neither of them were particularly gifted themselves or had knowingly seen real magic before.

But what really bothered me throughout the book and made me not like it was the implication that if you had power, you could do whatever you wanted to anyone who had less power or no power -- with little or no consequence. The old adage that power corrupts is shown throughout the book. The LaZelles manipulated those around them, their surroundings, and even themselves however they saw fit, and did not question their right. As the normal sibling, Gyp was subjected to magical manipulation of her thoughts, feelings, wants, desires, actions, and even her own shape -- all without a second thought by the rest of her family. It was considered their right to spell her... because they could. Why else would her (horrible, horrible) mother never step in to police her children's use of power? Or try and protect Gyp from being made into a guinea pig? And her mother was the worst of the lot, creating compulsions for her children to never leave home, spelling her daughter so she would exercise and diet relentlessly, structuring their life to fit her idea of how it should be. She was abusive without ever having to lift a hand towards her children.

And when Gyp comes into her own power, she proves herself above this unthinkingly cruel way of being. She doesn't want to hurt people and tries desperately to try and harness her power benignly. So what does being this goodhearted persona get her? The role of walking doormat. She accommodates everyone automatically. She was so nice and sweet, she put up with everyone spelling her, manipulating her, and using her. And she STILL cheerfully cooks dinner half the week and spends an entire day making them cookies. But I have to wonder how much of that is her true personality and how much of that is having lived for two decades under the subtle control of her more powerful family members? She hated not being herself when she's cursed with Ultimate Fashion Sense - yet does she even know who she really is? She never stood up for herself; she let herself be talked into working on a day she had called in sick, she lets herself be pulled along by Altria, though she tries and controls the outcomes. THAT was the reason why I didn't connect with Gyp - I could never see myself acting so passively.

Though all the descriptions of food made me really want to make cookies and brownies. show less

This was the most engrossing creepy wish fulfillment fantasy I've read in a while. Gypsum is the one untalented sibling in a family of people capable of magic. There's no magical boarding school and kids do to each other the nasty things that kids do to each other, but even more so. It's the story of her finding her power and trying to find herself, the usual YA stuff, but I found it hard to put down and gorged on it in only a few days.

I know Hoffman’s name, but I don’t think I’d read anything by her before reading this, except perhaps a story in an anthology – although none spring to mind. Which is a shame, as the contents of this short collection are actually pretty damned good. Hoffman’s approach to fiction is probably epitomised by ‘Savage Breasts’, in which a woman sends off for an exerciser after seeing an ad for “Charlotte Atlas”, but her new-found bustiness proves her undoing when her breasts show more demonstrate they have a life of their own. This is one of the most, er, savagely feminist stories I’ve ever read, and I’m surprised it didn’t appear in Sisters of the Revolution (although, weirdly, it was reprinted in an anthology of comic fantasy, Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves, edited by Alan Dean Foster and Martin H Greenberg, which looks best avoided). The other stories in Author’s Choice Monthly 14: Legacy of Fire don’t match ‘Savage Breasts’, but they’re well-written, with a slightly-sideways approach so they sit somewhere between mainstream and genre. The title story, for example, has a stranger visit a very small town in middle America, and offer an enigmatic choice to the narrator, who happens to be a person of short stature. That’s the only story that isn’t about women, although the a woman joins the narrator is accepting the stranger’s challenge. I think perhaps I should try some more Hoffman. show less

I love Tad Williams. Well, at least his writing. Let's not get too overboard here. This is a pretty awesome but short story in a Scherezade mold, where a sultan is called upon during a drunken revel to tell a story. His tale is one where he is much younger, in a group of soldiers accompanying a caravan from Araby into the Caucasus mountains. They are attacked by some brigands, and the few survivors try to escape back to the desert. However, the vampyr stalking them has other ideas. They know show more from a young lad that they apprehend that the vampyr must stop to listen to any stories told to it, and that this is their only chance to survive. So this is what they do, until the vampyr walks up to their fire and declares his boredom. It challenges them to a contest of sad tales. If the wanderers win, they are free to go, but if the vampyr wins, he gets to eat one of their members.
Vampyr tales are always so grim and foreboding that I usually don't like them, but if Tad Williams writes one, I might as well try it. He uses the best metaphors (or are they similies?), like 'The vampyr's laugh sounded like bark being ripped from a rotting tree.' Or, from his Otherland series, 'Getting him to do anything was like pushing butter through a stone.' Great stories, great characters, even in a book as short as this one, but he does push the boundary of too much data. Within sight of the border, but not too close. Anything by Mr. Williams is to be immediately read, at least until you run out of books, then you have to make do with his mutterings on his website. The only things by him that I haven't read yet is his debut Tailchaser's Song, because I really dislike cats, and his multiple new series that are as yet incomplete. And the 8 or so issues of Aquaman that he wrote a few years ago. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is, in my opinion, the best modern fantasy story out there, just for sake of saying. show less