Patricia C. Wrede

Excellent. I was just wishing for a YA in which the female protagonist is not primarily interested in who she's going to marry...it is a matter of interest, but definitely secondary or tertiary. The Far West is far more interesting - to Eff, and to me. The first half of the book follows directly on the end of Across the Great Barrier, as the expedition comes back with a dead medusa lizard. Politics and family matters tangle around Eff as she tries to figure out who and what she's going to show more be. A spell testing the dead lizard indicates that there are more of them heading east, and a new expedition is planned to explore further west than anyone's gotten - or at least, farther than anyone's gotten and come back from. Nearly every named character is invited along, and family and personal politics play an important part in who agrees and who declines. Eff goes, of course. The second half of the book, almost exactly, is the expedition itself - who goes and how they go, what's learned along the way both about the new creatures and territory and about the people in the expedition. There are plenty of expedition members we don't even learn the names of - most of the soldiers, especially - but there's still a lot of characters to keep track of. They're all pretty distinctive, though. Eff learns more about her amulet; she, Lan, and William learn a lot about magic the way she's been dealing with it, which turns out not to match any of the accepted theories of magic (they even have a Cathayan along, whose magic is yet a third...or fourth...or fifth way of looking at things, and still not like Eff's). She ends up with a breakthrough that saves the group from a disastrous wildlife attack - and that allows them to discover a much bigger catastrophe in the making. They deal with it, temporarily, in a very Eff-style combination effort, and the expedition comes home. The story could end here - I hope it doesn't, there's a major unfinished job but more importantly I want to see more of Eff. Great story. show less

Something was missing. I kept reading, thinking surely Indians would appear. Maybe the narrator was too young to pay attention to un-European cultures, too wrapped up in her own family dynamics. Maybe they hadn't gotten far enough West? Maybe Indians would appear in the next volume?

Well. No Indians at all simply didn't occur to me, until I took a look at the blogs on the Tor site. Wrede decided to skip them, being uncomfortable with the only two options she perceived for portraying show more white/indian relations: either the Indians could be savages, or they could be ecologically advanced sages. And after all, they massacred the megafauna, right? So without them, she could also have mammoths. And then the Indians wouldn't have crossed the landbridge and therefore they're all still Siberian.

Uh huh. So, leaving aside any debates my fellow nerds might want to throw around about the theories of mass extinction, or about migration patterns to the New World - none of which are so simple - and maybe even leaving aside questions about moral responsibility (after all, an author should have the right to simply tell a good story, right?), it seems to me that this omission has raised some really troubling issues.

It's weird, right? Weird that such a capable writer would only see two unappealing stereotypes as her options for depicting Indian cultures. Weird that she'd think that readers wouldn't see that absence and feel uncomfortable, to say the least. Her vision of 'empty America' is too close to that old propaganda about Manifest Destiny - the Indians counted as wildlife, not people. Is it OK just to erase a gigantic episode of genocide from history because it's inconvenient to your story? After so many attempts to erase native americans from the official narrative, is it OK to do it again, for different reasons, in a popular kid's book? I suppose that's where the question of moral responsibility comes in.

I've seen other readers compare this to "Years of Rice and Salt", arguing that Robinson's story killed off Europeans wholesale and no one objected, and that this is just more of the same - a clever plot device. I don't know. At least Robinson accounted for the fact that there had been Europeans in his story, and that something terrible had befallen them. It just seems sinister, somehow, that in Wrede's world the Indians never even existed, like they'd not just been exterminated, but erased. Like those creepy Soviet photos, with executed former officials edited out. History re-written by the victors, so that no one will even remember what is lost.

I don't think that's what fiction should be used for. I have really, really mixed feelings about the book. It's got so many interesting facets - the characters are great, the magical system is fresh and intriguing - but the overall emotion I'm left with is sort of a queasy disgust. show less

Utterly delightful; I do love an epistolary novel, especially one with some magic! Cousins Cecy (in the country) and Kate (in London) exchange frequent letters - at first simply to keep in touch and stave off boredom, but events in both places quickly grow more interesting.

It's England after the Napoleonic wars, and an England where magic is practiced (although Aunt Elizabeth doesn't approve). After Kate is briefly abducted by Miranda, Dorothea's (step)mama, Kate and Cecy begin to suspect show more that Miranda is in league with Sir Hilary Bedrick, working against the Marquis of Schofield (Thomas). Thomas proposes to Kate in order to protect himself from Dorothea/Miranda, while Cecy makes charm-bags, studies magic with Mr. Wrexton, and criticizes James Tarleton's attempts at sneaking and spying.

The authors' dedication - to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, JRR Tolkien, and Ellen Kushner - conveys with perfect accuracy the type of story they have written, and who will enjoy it. I requested The Grand Tour right away!

Recommended by Ella S.

Quotes

It seems there are a great many magicians who, in order to use their magic most effectively, must have an object through which to focus their power. This object must be kept nearby when casting spells. (I believe it works along the same lines as wearing spectacles - some people need them, others don't; every pair is different and it does no good to try to use someone else's; one can see without them, but not nearly so well; and they do one no good whatever if they are not in place when one requires them.) (161)

"...the enchantment merely animates the pieces. It doesn't instruct them on the finer points of play."
"How dreadful," I replied, "to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules."
"It's not a plight unique to this chess set," Lady Sylvia observed dryly. (276) show less

Summary: A collection of what I would call fairy tales or folk stories, although they're mostly original imaginings - only one or two tread the ground of retelling familiar stories. There are stories of not-too-bright gods, singing enchantresses, vain unicorns, curses and werewolves, a bone harp that may or may not speak the truth, a curse that may have been left too long to be broken, an enchanted rose garden, an ancient sword with unusual power, and a short story from the Enchanted Forest, show more featuring Cimorene, Mendenbar and The Frying Pan of Doom. And, to top it all off, there's a recipe at the end for Barbarian's Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake (it makes more sense in context, I swear) (edit: Just made the cake, and it's not the best cake I've ever had, but it's pretty darn good).

Review: I enjoyed this book a lot more than a lot of the other "fairy tale" books I've read recently. A large part of that is that I really enjoy Patricia C. Wrede's writing: it's clever and elegant without getting too caught up in itself, and I think it's accessible to younger readers without any talking down that might alienate adult readers. I was a little surprised about halfway through the book at how dark some of the stories were. All of Wrede's writing that I've read so far (the Enchanted Forest Chronicles and the Sorcery & Cecelia series) have been for the most part pretty light and very witty, and the first few stories in this volume follow the same vein, so when I got to "Earthwitch", with its darker view of magic and the cost it exacts, it was sort of... not off-putting, certainly, but it definitely threw me a little. Overall, though, every story had either substantial charm and humor, or some real power and emotional pull behind it, and sometimes both.

Recommendation: Definitely worth the read for some original fairy tales that aren't exclusively for kids. show less