strange and random happenstance

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter
Published by: Avon Books
Publication Date: September 24th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Maggie Chase has been having a hell of a year. Not only did she find out that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend but he was able to worm his way into a "legitimate" claim as co-writer of her cozy mysteries. He took everything. And she gets the consolation prize of overhearing her fellow authors discuss her downfall at her publisher's Christmas party. What's worse is the eager listener is none other than Ethan Wyatt, Leather Jacket Guy. One of her least favorite things in the world and he just happens to be a number one New York Times bestselling author. Her other two least favorite things are Christmas and parties. She knew she should have stayed home. But her editor Deborah insisted. Back in her office she hands Maggie an envelope. Maggie has been invited to the home of one of her biggest fans in England for Christmas. This is a nightmare. She was lured to one party to invite her to another. Deborah insists that this is legit and that something very big might be coming Maggie's way if she just gets on that plane. What Deborah didn't tell her was that Ethan Wyatt would also be on that plane. He would be there, calling her Marcie, and just being all leather clad and in her face. Though perhaps it's worth it as they cross the stone bridge and approach the palace made of stone and glass and centuries. They have arrived at Mistletoe Manor. Ethan is sure that someone wants to hunt them for sport and Maggie insists that that's the plot to an Eleanor Ashley novel. The author who has been with her as a guiding light her entire life who Ethan claims to have never heard of. Maggie's frayed paperbacks are nothing compared to the wall of first editions at her publisher's office. That's why she signed with Killhaven Books, because they're Eleanor's publisher. And then all the pieces click into place and she realizes that her host for Christmas is none other than Eleanor Ashley. Well, that and the fact that Eleanor is standing right behind her. She will be spending Christmas with the Duchess of Death. And her family. All of whom have ulterior motives. Eleanor is a wealthy woman, and where there is wealth there are those wanting to separate you from it. Even if you are related to them by blood. But as a storm moves in Eleanor disappears from a locked room. Is this stunt? Is she in danger? Cut off from the outside world Maggie and Ethan are the only ones capable of investigating what has happened to Eleanor and revealing all the secrets held in Mistletoe Manor. Even their own.

This is a book I was determined to love. I mean, even if it wasn't great anything was better than the cover. Seriously, that artwork, those horrid fonts, who designed this and where do they live!?! And there are aspects of the book I love, the leads have chemistry, there's incisive observations on what it's like to be gaslit and how that seeps into your every single decision, plus Thrombey level relatives. But there are two things I can't get past. Maggie and Ethan have wonderful snarky banter when she's under the misapprehension that they are each other's nemesis. And then halfway through the book her eyes are opened as Ethan comes in as a second narrator and the book stagnates. Now it's not that they aren't the perfect couple, because there are swoonworthy moments, it's that the pacing and the mystery of Eleanor Ashley are forgotten and it's more important for them to make out next to the entrance to the secret tunnel than to explore said secret tunnel. It was so...damn...glacial. I raced through the first half of the book and then limped to the finish line. That is not a momentum you should strive for in your storytelling. Yet, that could have been forgiven and forgotten. Because, as I've said, they are a perfect couple who I might have wished stayed more snarky than Nick and Nora once they hooked up, but then Ally Carter ruined it in the end. How you ask? Well, that requires spoilers, which I'm totally about to drop. You have been warned. So Ally Carter got the idea for this novel after learning about Agatha Christie's disappearance. This is a mystery that will endure forever. Where was she for those eleven days? Was it a mental break? Was it a PR stunt? Was she undercover solving a mystery? Was it giant alien space wasps? And yes, these are all theories that have been posited. Obviously one on Doctor Who, so that one probably isn't accurate. Or is it? So here's the fictional Eleanor Ashley, key FICTIONAL. She magics herself away from a locked room and the answer for how she did it is that she's Eleanor Ashley. That is a freakin' cop out of the highest magnitude. This is fiction, fiction is for resolution, not for giving us yet another unsolved mystery. This just enraged me. I was strongly reminded of the book Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois which was a fictionalized account of the Amanda Knox case. Again, fictional. And we got no resolution. None. And in the case of Cartwheel it has the EXACT SAME setup only for the answers to life's greatest mysteries to be what? Ineffable? Give me the answers or get out of my face. Which means that Ally Carter can still save this book with an additional epilogue for the paperback release. Let's make it so.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Ally Carter, Amanda Knox, Cartwheel, Christmas, Eleanor Ashley, Ethan Wyatt, Fictional, Jennifer DuBois, Maggie Chase, Murder Most Foul, Resolution, The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Published by: Open Road Media Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Publication Date: July 14th, 2015
Format: Kindle, 148 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Julian Blake was a temperamental genius. His manager knew that if Julian stayed in his bedsit in London all summer he'd get no work done and mourn the death of his girlfriend Arianna who committed suicide. So Wylding Hall was let. Julian's British acid-folk band Windhollow Faire would secret themselves in the country for the month of August to work and reconnect. It was a summer that would produce an album named after the grand estate they stayed at that would be under everybody's Christmas Tree that December but would also lead to the disappearance of Julian Blake. A disappearance linked to a white haired girl who mysteriously appeared on the cover of the album whom no one remembered seeing. But then a lot of mysterious things happened that summer. Weird hallways and chambers that went on forever. A library that only two people ever found. A room with hundreds and hundreds of dead birds. A tune in the air that Julian couldn't help humming. And the walks in the woods that the locals warned them never to take. Yet the band and the other people who came in and out of their lives back in that summer in the seventies never compared notes, until now. Now there's a documentary being done about the album, inspired by construction that has unearthed discoveries at the house, and secrets are being revealed. The shape of things is starting to come into focus, but it doesn't seem possible. In the end it comes down to a photo in the local pub, a song Julian unearthed, and a half-naked girl with feathers on her feet.

Sometimes there's a confluence of events that come together just right that elevates an experience to another level. This occurrence started at a joint birthday party where fate decided the next book club selection would be Wylding Hall and ended in an extremely rare consensus that we all liked the book while we dunked fruit into delectable chocolate. But we all agreed, it wasn't just the book, it was something in the air. It's almost as if we were haunted and the book manifested itself for our entertainment. The waning days of summer had set in, mirroring the time frame of the events that happened to the members of Windhollow Faire as August drew to a close and their lease on the hall was up. Despite reality versus fiction and the present versus the past there was this connection that made the book almost real. It's such a short read, a mere 148 pages, and yet I just wanted their summer to be endless and for me to be able to live in this spooky yet somehow homey world. What aided the book so well was the suspension of disbelief was possible through Elizabeth Hand grounding the book in the real world. If she hadn't got the music scene of the time just right nothing else could have fallen into place, and yet she did it. Making this story of the real world yet somehow not quite of it, like the characters had walked through a fairy ring and everything was just slightly distorted. Like when Sergeant Howie ventures to Summerisle in The Wicker Man, the townspeople seem a little off, a little unwilling to talk, and pictures that might illuminate events are quickly hidden away. The balance between believability and the unknown is perfectly struck here.

Yet the way Elizabeth Hand chose to tell the story was an interesting one, yet it did present problems. She goes the route of many a documentary with each of the characters telling their part of the story, therefore capturing that feeling of reality, we've all seen this before. We could be watching a VH1 Behind the Music special about Windhollow Faire after all. Yet given the brevity of the book I had issues with the dramatis personae, it took awhile for their character traits to come through and in the interim I was lost. They were written too similarly and what was odd in my mind, there wasn't a hint of unreliability and their stories all synced up. Maybe I'm just too used to unreliable narrators and Agatha Christie trying to pull one over on me. There was just a sameness to them as Elizabeth Hand quickly cut from one POV to another. It took me quite awhile to realize that Lesley was a female, and seriously, can authors NOT use two too similarly named characters, like Jonathan and Julian? I'm not proud of this but I totally stereotyped the characters to remember who they were, the folklorist, the girlfriend, the dead guy, you get my drift... and not all of them were flattering monikers, just something so I could quickly tell who was who. A really good writer is able to distinguish the different characters enough with their voices that this shortcut of mine wouldn't be a necessity. I felt like it lowered the book. But you could argue that Elizabeth Hand wanted to sew confusion from the start. That she wanted her readers to not get a firm grip on anything. If that was the case? Good on her! See, I'm totally willing to see the other side of things because books are fluid, what the writer intended and what the reader gets could be different, but that doesn't mean both aren't true at the same time.

Though what enchanted me most was the era. Ghost stories just seem to work better when set in a time before technology ran rampant. But I've come to realize that for a ghost story or supernatural spookfest to really catch me there has to be something I connect to. More and more this isn't character driven Victorian stories but more modern pieces set in the not-too-distant past. Like the 70s and 80s. There's a reason why The Conjuring series is doing so well and has so many spinoffs and why so many people have embraced Stranger Things. These are eras that have a distinct look and feel, a time when to get a hold of your friends you had to hope they got your message left with a family member on the one phone in their house or you'd just show up and pray their parents knew where they were. A time when plans couldn't be easily changed. A time when I was innocent and to see that innocence turn malevolent, there's something supercharged about that. Here it's the 70s, and it's perfect. Not just for the distant haze that memory has given me about the decade in which I was born, but because of this insidious supernatural phenomena creeping around the familiar. We have the isolated house, one lone phone, and this kind of golden haze and heat hanging over the events. Therefore when there are clouds or cold, you know something is going to go wrong. There's strange things happening in the house, it's rambling and easy to get lost in. A library that almost no one has found. Yet all of it could be explained away. Everything could be just too much indulgence, until there's proof that this isn't the case. Proof that comes almost at the very end.

Yet that ending is really abrupt. The whole book is kind of a summer idyll interspersed with supernatural phenomena. There's a laziness to it, not in that it's badly written, but in the luxurious pacing. You just want to inhabit the story but then they leave the house, put out the album, and then this interview happens years later... and as for Julian's fate... well, we aren't given anything concrete, we aren't given anything really. That throwaway line about one of the band members maybe seeing him years later doesn't count in my mind. I became invested in these characters lives and I didn't just want the story about THAT summer and their one "hit" album, I wanted to know what came after. How did Lesley become a star? How did Nancy, the girlfriend, end up a professional psychic in Florida? But more importantly, these interviews are all happening not just because of some anniversary for an album that achieved cult status but because there is work being done at the house. Work that uncovers artifacts of archaeological as well as personal interest to our characters. There seems to be a momentum throughout the book that they will all reunite and return to Wylding Hall and yet that never happens. It felt as though right when Elizabeth Hand was about to bring all the different threads together she decided instead she'd finished and just cut the work off prematurely. This is a three-quarters finished story. There is no final act. And THIS was the only bone of contention me and my fellow book clubbers had. Where is the resolution? Where is the final chord?

Because if we are to compare this to a song, they all have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All stories do too. But this one apparently won't. Yes, I have to accept this. I have to concentrate on that which worked so well. What I'm talking about is the purpose of fables and myths and epic songs, all that which goes into folk music. All these tales were told not because they were used as entertainment, but to impart warnings. "These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god's sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers." These songs were things that needed to be remembered. Things that needed to be known so that danger wasn't stumbled into blindly. While the Brothers Grimm might have gone a little too far with the moralizing, all tales that are passed down are done so with intent. There's a reason the locals get their backs up when these musicians come in asking about what shouldn't be talked of. Though logically IF the locals wanted them to behave perhaps some truth about the village and it's local legends could have warned them off. But that's not the purpose of villagers in these stories, their purpose is to see the strangers blithely walking into danger and keep their mouths shut. The danger that lies in the woods and lures Julian away with the fairies. It's this root of what folk music and folklore is that grounds the entire book in the human experience of tradition. So while it may falter, it still resonates.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 70s, Agatha Christie, Behind the Music, Brothers Grimm, Elizabeth Hand, Folk, Going Gothic, Gothic, POV, Resolution, Stranger Things, Summerisle, The Conjuring, The Wicker Man, Windhollow Faire, Wylding Hall

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Published by: Open Road Media Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Publication Date: July 14th, 2015
Format: Kindle, 148 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Julian Blake was a temperamental genius. His manager knew that if Julian stayed in his bedsit in London all summer he'd get no work done and mourn the death of his girlfriend Arianna who committed suicide. So Wylding Hall was let. Julian's British acid-folk band Windhollow Faire would secret themselves in the country for the month of August to work and reconnect. It was a summer that would produce an album named after the grand estate they stayed at that would be under everybody's Christmas Tree that December but would also lead to the disappearance of Julian Blake. A disappearance linked to a white haired girl who mysteriously appeared on the cover of the album whom no one remembered seeing. But then a lot of mysterious things happened that summer. Weird hallways and chambers that went on forever. A library that only two people ever found. A room with hundreds and hundreds of dead birds. A tune in the air that Julian couldn't help humming. And the walks in the woods that the locals warned them never to take. Yet the band and the other people who came in and out of their lives back in that summer in the seventies never compared notes, until now. Now there's a documentary being done about the album, inspired by construction that has unearthed discoveries at the house, and secrets are being revealed. The shape of things is starting to come into focus, but it doesn't seem possible. In the end it comes down to a photo in the local pub, a song Julian unearthed, and a half-naked girl with feathers on her feet.

Sometimes there's a confluence of events that come together just right that elevates an experience to another level. This occurrence started at a joint birthday party where fate decided the next book club selection would be Wylding Hall and ended in an extremely rare consensus that we all liked the book while we dunked fruit into delectable chocolate. But we all agreed, it wasn't just the book, it was something in the air. It's almost as if we were haunted and the book manifested itself for our entertainment. The waning days of summer had set in, mirroring the time frame of the events that happened to the members of Windhollow Faire as August drew to a close and their lease on the hall was up. Despite reality versus fiction and the present versus the past there was this connection that made the book almost real. It's such a short read, a mere 148 pages, and yet I just wanted their summer to be endless and for me to be able to live in this spooky yet somehow homey world. What aided the book so well was the suspension of disbelief was possible through Elizabeth Hand grounding the book in the real world. If she hadn't got the music scene of the time just right nothing else could have fallen into place, and yet she did it. Making this story of the real world yet somehow not quite of it, like the characters had walked through a fairy ring and everything was just slightly distorted. Like when Sergeant Howie ventures to Summerisle in The Wicker Man, the townspeople seem a little off, a little unwilling to talk, and pictures that might illuminate events are quickly hidden away. The balance between believability and the unknown is perfectly struck here.

Yet the way Elizabeth Hand chose to tell the story was an interesting one, yet it did present problems. She goes the route of many a documentary with each of the characters telling their part of the story, therefore capturing that feeling of reality, we've all seen this before. We could be watching a VH1 Behind the Music special about Windhollow Faire after all. Yet given the brevity of the book I had issues with the dramatis personae, it took awhile for their character traits to come through and in the interim I was lost. They were written too similarly and what was odd in my mind, there wasn't a hint of unreliability and their stories all synced up. Maybe I'm just too used to unreliable narrators and Agatha Christie trying to pull one over on me. There was just a sameness to them as Elizabeth Hand quickly cut from one POV to another. It took me quite awhile to realize that Lesley was a female, and seriously, can authors NOT use two too similarly named characters, like Jonathan and Julian? I'm not proud of this but I totally stereotyped the characters to remember who they were, the folklorist, the girlfriend, the dead guy, you get my drift... and not all of them were flattering monikers, just something so I could quickly tell who was who. A really good writer is able to distinguish the different characters enough with their voices that this shortcut of mine wouldn't be a necessity. I felt like it lowered the book. But you could argue that Elizabeth Hand wanted to sew confusion from the start. That she wanted her readers to not get a firm grip on anything. If that was the case? Good on her! See, I'm totally willing to see the other side of things because books are fluid, what the writer intended and what the reader gets could be different, but that doesn't mean both aren't true at the same time.

Though what enchanted me most was the era. Ghost stories just seem to work better when set in a time before technology ran rampant. But I've come to realize that for a ghost story or supernatural spookfest to really catch me there has to be something I connect to. More and more this isn't character driven Victorian stories but more modern pieces set in the not-too-distant past. Like the 70s and 80s. There's a reason why The Conjuring series is doing so well and has so many spinoffs and why so many people have embraced Stranger Things. These are eras that have a distinct look and feel, a time when to get a hold of your friends you had to hope they got your message left with a family member on the one phone in their house or you'd just show up and pray their parents knew where they were. A time when plans couldn't be easily changed. A time when I was innocent and to see that innocence turn malevolent, there's something supercharged about that. Here it's the 70s, and it's perfect. Not just for the distant haze that memory has given me about the decade in which I was born, but because of this insidious supernatural phenomena creeping around the familiar. We have the isolated house, one lone phone, and this kind of golden haze and heat hanging over the events. Therefore when there are clouds or cold, you know something is going to go wrong. There's strange things happening in the house, it's rambling and easy to get lost in. A library that almost no one has found. Yet all of it could be explained away. Everything could be just too much indulgence, until there's proof that this isn't the case. Proof that comes almost at the very end.

Yet that ending is really abrupt. The whole book is kind of a summer idyll interspersed with supernatural phenomena. There's a laziness to it, not in that it's badly written, but in the luxurious pacing. You just want to inhabit the story but then they leave the house, put out the album, and then this interview happens years later... and as for Julian's fate... well, we aren't given anything concrete, we aren't given anything really. That throwaway line about one of the band members maybe seeing him years later doesn't count in my mind. I became invested in these characters lives and I didn't just want the story about THAT summer and their one "hit" album, I wanted to know what came after. How did Lesley become a star? How did Nancy, the girlfriend, end up a professional psychic in Florida? But more importantly, these interviews are all happening not just because of some anniversary for an album that achieved cult status but because there is work being done at the house. Work that uncovers artifacts of archaeological as well as personal interest to our characters. There seems to be a momentum throughout the book that they will all reunite and return to Wylding Hall and yet that never happens. It felt as though right when Elizabeth Hand was about to bring all the different threads together she decided instead she'd finished and just cut the work off prematurely. This is a three-quarters finished story. There is no final act. And THIS was the only bone of contention me and my fellow book clubbers had. Where is the resolution? Where is the final chord?

Because if we are to compare this to a song, they all have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All stories do too. But this one apparently won't. Yes, I have to accept this. I have to concentrate on that which worked so well. What I'm talking about is the purpose of fables and myths and epic songs, all that which goes into folk music. All these tales were told not because they were used as entertainment, but to impart warnings. "These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god's sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers." These songs were things that needed to be remembered. Things that needed to be known so that danger wasn't stumbled into blindly. While the Brothers Grimm might have gone a little too far with the moralizing, all tales that are passed down are done so with intent. There's a reason the locals get their backs up when these musicians come in asking about what shouldn't be talked of. Though logically IF the locals wanted them to behave perhaps some truth about the village and it's local legends could have warned them off. But that's not the purpose of villagers in these stories, their purpose is to see the strangers blithely walking into danger and keep their mouths shut. The danger that lies in the woods and lures Julian away with the fairies. It's this root of what folk music and folklore is that grounds the entire book in the human experience of tradition. So while it may falter, it still resonates.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 70s, Agatha Christie, Behind the Music, Brothers Grimm, Elizabeth Hand, Folk, Going Gothic, Gothic, POV, Resolution, Stranger Things, Summerisle, The Conjuring, The Wicker Man, Windhollow Faire, Wylding Hall

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
Published by: Saga Press
Publication Date: 1990
Format: Paperback, 252 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Tenar didn't choose the life she was destined to live, nor did she choose the life that Ged and Ogion offered her, instead she chose her own life, marriage to the farmer Flint and two children, a son and a daughter. A life much like her mother lived in Atuan before Tenar was taken away to serve the Nameless Ones. The wizards might look down on her for choosing the life of a typical female, but it's a life she never thought was in her grasp. It's been twenty-five years since she made her choice, since she moved to Oak Farm on Gont and raised her family. Her children are now grown and gone and her husband is in the ground. But she has no regrets. She has made a life for herself as Goha, a pillar of the community, one whom others turn to. They turn to her when a young girl is left by vagrants badly burned and on the brink of death. Tenar helps save the child's life and takes her as her own. Therru is her third child and as she's so young she takes her to Re Albi when she gets word that Ogion is on his deathbed.

Ogion was like a father to Tenar and she wonders what her life would have been like if she had stayed, if she had learned magic. His final words to her though are in regards to the power residing in Therru and the change that has been wrought in the world. All has changed. Because unbeknownst to Tenar Ged has defeated the evil that was infecting the world, the evil that lead to Therru's disfigurement. There is to be a king in Earthsea again. A king that very much hopes that Ged will be at his side. But Ged has returned to Gont on the back of a dragon, powerless and ill. Tenar must return him to health and hide him from the crown. She had seen them all living at Re Albi, but evil magics push her and Therru away and Ged goes off into the mountains. Back at Oak Farm life returns to normal, or the new normal as it were. Though there is still danger. Those who attacked Therru want her back and other villains aren't very much in favor of the new king and his rule. Will Tenar and Ged be able to defeat the evil on Gont? Or will their age and diminished powers need help from another source?

Almost two decades after The Farthest Shore Le Guin came back to Earthsea with Tehanu. What's interesting in this is not the length of time she took to write it but in that it picks up Ged's story almost minutes after we last saw him. And yet, this isn't Ged's story. This is Tenar's. As a woman I felt far more of a connection to Tenar than I ever did to Ged. Tenar is his balance. The magic of Earthsea is all about balance and equilibrium so therefore it makes sense for Ged to have a strong female counterpoint. Yet I felt that by bringing these two characters together sexually as a couple it almost undid all that came before. It made Tenar's decisions to turn her back on magic and take on the traditional role of a female as just all backstory for when she finally got Ged. As for Ged, he's broken, so she's only allowed to have him because he can no longer be what he was? Yeah. Nope. While after I read The Tombs of Atuan I might have thought what if, sometimes it's far better to have that "what if" never acted on. How many times has the eventual consummation of a relationship destroyed a narrative Moonlighting style? The number is probably too numerous to count, so yeah, I just wish Le Guin hadn't gone there.

In fact, judging by her afterward I think there's a lot about this book she would second guess if she were to write it again. What I find interesting is that what readers seemed to object to most was the diminishment of Ged and the embracing of feminism. Firstly, this isn't Ged's story, so get over it. Secondly, I wouldn't call this book feminist, I would just say that it successfully shows a woman's POV, and given that this is Tenar's book, that makes total sense. I mean, yes, you could call any book with a female lead feminist, but what I particularly love about Tenar is that she embraces the true meaning of feminism, in that you don't need to be militant to be a feminist, you can be a warrior in your own way. You can be a feminist while still embracing the more traditional role of females of hearth and home. She's true to herself, and if that is feminism, well, I'm glad this book is such. Tenar gets the life she never thought she'd have by turning away from magic and that knowledge, and finding different knowledge and truth in herself while being vocal about what it is to be a woman.

The truth that's spoken about being a woman is that it is dangerous to be female. When people talk about living in a society that at this moment doesn't feel safe, the thing about being a woman is that you never really feel safe. And maybe it was being shown this truth that readers objected to. Yes, you can try to harness your power, marshal your resources, but any time you're out walking and you hear something or see someone coming towards you from a distance, you worry. You think, this is danger. With society taking more and more rights away from us and with danger lurking around an innocent looking corner, I think this book needs to be read by more people. It gets into the psyche of what it is to be female, but also, how to live if the worst does happen to you. If you're burned and raped and left for dead. Therru's journey is inspiring. She takes back her power and survives and, in the end, thrives. So once again, if this is considered "feminist" then so be it. This needed to be said, this needed to be seen. And if you're a reader who can't get past a label of "feminism" that doesn't really bring to the forefront the complexities Le Guin is dealing with, than I'm really sorry for you because you're missing out on so much.

Which brings me to Therru. Therru is awesome. But. Yes, you knew that "but" was coming. The problem is Therru's story feels only half told. She is a young girl destroyed by family through violence and fire. She is rehabilitated through Tenar's love. At the end she shows her true power, linking her to a story Ogion used to tell Tenar about a woman who was a woman and a dragon at the same time. Yet her backstory isn't fully explained and her future is left up in the air and is hopefully explained in the final to books in the Earthsea cycle. As for that left unanswered? Her father/uncle, the man who was the most concerned with her of her abusers keeps returning and trying to claim her. Why? Was it because he was drawn to her because of her innate power? Was it because he wanted to silence her forever? Was it because her power scared and thrilled him and that's why he would attack her but also wanted to be near her? The motives are NEVER explained. As for Therru and her relationship to Ogion's story... was she always part dragon? Hence the power drawing those to her? Or was her attack and near consumption by fire what gave her power? Made her have a new affinity for fire? I just feel that Therru even after a couple hundred pages is just as much a mystery as she was at the start and I NEED more of her story.

But then again, I've noticed that Le Guin isn't very deft with handling endings. She tends to rush straight into things and everything ends in a jumble. Here just a paragraph or three of degradation for Tenar and Ged at the hands of a wizard and then Therru and a dragon to the rescue. Literally this book is drawn to a rapid conclusion in only twenty-five pages! And also, I kid not, ends on a cliff. It's like, despite at the time calling this "The Last Book of Earthsea" she already knew there was going to be more and a cliffhanger might be funny. Yeah, cliffhangers are the last bastion of those who are a little bit lazy when it comes to being storytellers. They torture their readers by employing this device, so I guess the fact that she hinted at it but didn't actually do it should be considered a win for us readers? I think my main problem is that Le Guin has created this vast and complex world and yet likes to leave it a little messy and unresolved. Yes, this makes it more realistic, but this is fantasy. Fantasy is allowed to have everything handed to you on a platter with a nice neat bow. Her approach might not be as satisfying, but personally, I could have used a few more answers and a few less "until next times."

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Dragons, Earthsea, Feminist, Ged, Gont, It's a Kind of Magic, Magic, Moonlighting, Rape, Resolution, Tehanu, Tenar, The Farthest Shore, The Tombs of Atuan, Therru, Ursula K. Le Guin, Women