Folklore

A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness

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Later this year a movie will be released of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.

I’m keen to see the movie, but reluctant at the same time.

Anybody who loves a book will know the feeling; excitement at seeing a great story brought to life, but anxious at the thought it could be ruined.

The trailer looks hopeful.

The story centres on Conor, who lives with his mother who has cancer. Her illness has made Conor feel isolated and alone, and he has been plagued with a recurring nightmare of darkness and screaming.

One night after midnight a voice calls to him outside his window. It’s the huge willow tree from the graveyard of the church he can see from his room, terrifying and stern, who insists it will come back and tell him three stories, and then Conor must tell his story to the tree. The yew does as it promises, each time returning after midnight. 

The consequences of the yew’s visits to Conor
grow more and more severe.

Ultimately, it leads him to confront his deepest fears.

9781406311525A Monster Calls has a sad history. In an Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Ness explains that the premise of the book was conceived by author Siobhan Dowd, along with the characters and the beginning. It would have been her fifth book. “What she didn’t have,” he says, “unfortunately, was time.” What he doesn’t mention in his note is that she had cancer.

However, he was asked to turn her beginning into a book. He felt like he’d “been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has handed me her story and said,

‘Go. Run with it. Make trouble.’

“So that’s what I tried to do.”

He had only a single guideline: “to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked. No other criteria could really matter.”

He certainly wrote a book a many people like. Ness and the illustrator Jim Kay won the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for writing and illustration, as well the British Children’s Book of the Year and a swag of other awards. I’d include it on any list of the best books for pre-teens/teenagers, and would recommend it to most adults. It’s a deceptively simple story, with a huge depth of psychological and emotional sophistication.

Film is a very different media to print, but I hope the underlying complexity, the confusion, grief, fear, love and alienation that Conor deals with manages to be portrayed in the film.

The monster paused again.
You really aren’t afraid, are you?
“No,” Conor said. “Not of you, anyway.”
The monster narrowed its eyes.
You will be, it said. Before the end.

Details
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Candlewick Press/Walker Books
ISBN 1406311529
Pub: May 2011

Links
Patrick Ness’s website
Second trailer for the A Monster Calls movie

Tower of Thorns, by Juliet Marillier

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A wailing monster, a cursed land and a lady with secrets.

Add a bristling healer and her hulky companion with pasts that haunt them, and you have an enthralling story that sweeps you into its world of fey and mystery.

22567177Blackthorn is a healer and wise woman who was rescued from a death sentence by one of the fey. The conditions of her reprieve included not seeking vengeance against the chieftain who unjustly imprisoned her. With another of the prisoners, Grim, as friend and companion, she has built a new life in Dalraida.

When the Lady Geiléis arrives seeking help from the Dalraidan prince, it is to Blackthorn they turn. A monster has taken up residence in an old tower surrounded by impenetrable thorns on the lady’s lands. It howls from dawn to dusk and has cast a blight upon the whole land.

At the same time an old friend emerges with a tempting offer for Blackthorn, to bring her old tormentor, Mathuin the chieftain, to justice. She plans to go the lady’s lands and deal with the monster, then slip away from Grim and travel south to help in Mathuin’s trial. Once at Lady Geiléis’ lands, though, it becomes clear the lady and her servants are hiding something.

Tower of Thorns works as a stand-alone novel, but readers of the first book in the Blackthorn & Grim series, Dreamer’s Pool, will be eager for this second offering.

One of the strengths of these novels is the complexity
of the title characters.

They are defined by the things they have in common; their traumatic pasts that are being slowly revealed to each other and the reader, their time in Mathuin’s prison where they occupied opposite cells while enduring deprivation and abuse, and their understanding of the brokenness of one another.  Yet they also provide a contrast for one another.

Blackthorn is well-named. She’s prickly, bitter and prone to fits of temper, finding it difficult to be around other people for long periods. She’s also assertive,  as Lady Geiléis discovers once they are back on her land.

“Once Blackthorn decided to take the reins, it seemed she was blind to anything that might stand in her way.”

However, even though she finds the caring side of her healing work exhausting, she does it well. She sees herself with little to give emotionally but is so attuned to others that she can’t help empathizing and supporting them when they’re in need. Though she’s been scarred by her life, at the core she’s decent and good and does what she believes is right.

Grim sees himself with little to give in general, in spite of being able to turn his hand to anything from thatching and growing vegetables to training others in use of weapons. Though they conduct their relationship as companions, his devotion to Blackthorn never wavers. Where her focus stays on making Mathuin pay for his crimes, Grim’s is on Blackthorn and doing all his power to protect and provide for her. Discovering more of his story and who he his in Tower of Thorns was especially welcome.

17305016It isn’t easy to get stories about people with post-traumatic stress right, let alone in the context of medieval Ireland where old magic and the fey are forces to be reckoned with. Blackthorn and Grim have different ways of dealing with the traumas of their pasts, but each is authentic and rings true in the context of the time. The descriptions of Grim’s flashbacks and physical symptoms are particularly well done.

Tower of Thorns is told from three points of view; Blackthorn’s and Grim’s, both using first person, and the third from the perspective of Lady Geiléis in third person. Though the narrative style changes, it works well. Marillier’s prose flows, often lyrical, always grounded.

Not only does it feel as though this medieval Ireland of fey magic is real, but it should be real.

Though evil is there just as it is in our world, there is also a beauty and wonder in creation that has been lost for most of us. Perhaps books like this can challenge us to appreciate what we have and strive to preserve the beauty and natural wonders around us.

As I said when reviewing Raven Flight, I’ve been a keen reader of Juliet Marillier’s books since her first book, Daughter of the Forest, was published, so I tend to be well-disposed towards her books when I pick them up. So far I haven’t been disappointed. I’m already looking forward to the next in the Blackthorn & Grim series.

* I received an ARC from the author for review.

 Details
Tower of Thorns  by Juliet Marillier
Pan Macmillan Australia
ISBN: 9780451466990
Published: 3 October, 2015

Links
Juliet Marillier’s Website
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The Court of Thorns and Roses

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When my Practical Bloke wanted gift suggestions this year (i.e. “What books do you want?”), Sarah J. Maas was at the top of the list – not her exactly, that would be illegal – but her Throne of Glass trilogy. I’d wanted to read it for ages, but he also bought me the first of her new series, The Court of Thorns and Roses.

ACOTARoriginalI was intrigued, and opened The Court first.

It begins with the young heroine, Feyre (Fay-ruh), hunting in a forest in deep winter. As she stalks a doe, a wolf also pursues her prey. It’s no ordinary wolf,  but one of the hated fae from over the northern border. She kills it with an arrow of ash wood then bring down the doe, relieved her father and older sisters won’t go hungry for a few days. The wolf is skinned to sell.

A day after returning home, she faces the consequences of the kill. A faerie lord arrives in the form of a great beast, declaring her life is forfeit for the crime of murdering one of the fae. But there is an alternative; the Treaty between humans and the faerie lords stipulates if she is not executed she must return to his lands in the north, never to see to her home or family again. Feyre is hauled off to the estate of the faerie lord, Tamsin.

When I opened this book I was soon chapters into it, though I’d intended to read the Throne of Glass trilogy first. Feyre is capable and resourceful, rising to the challenge of providing for her family since they fell on hard times. It’s refreshing that she is the youngest of the family, as usually in hardship stories it’s the oldest siblings that look after the younger ones. She’s no paragon, though, as she nurses a streak of resentment against her sisters for not shouldering their share of the burden, her father for losing their money, and even her dead mother for neglecting them.

The Court of Thorns and Roses has been described as a Beauty and the Beast tale, but it’s not as simple as that. It’s closer to a re-imagining of the Eros and Psyche story from Greek mythology, including the main character being the youngest of three sisters. It’s a fantasy love story, but is at its best in the sections where the romance is not the focus.

After Feyre settles into Tamsin’s estate, slowly letting go of her plots to return home and dealing with a growing attraction to Tamsin, I found the narrative gradually loses impetus. As it’s written in first person in Feyre’s viewpoint, we know there’s something bigger going on, but it’s so vague there’s a lack of real threat, no overarching goal or deadline to push the narrative forward. There’s a shadow, but no ticking clock. The growing romance didn’t really captivate me, perhaps because it seems to be the whole point at that stage, without a sense of where it’s all leading. Maybe the singular viewpoint in this case was a handicap, as if we saw the situation from Tamsin’s side the stakes and tension would flow naturally.

Feyre had caught me in the first few chapters, though, and it’s not too long until she’s back in action with grit and determination, ramped up to new levels. The rest was page-turning, with lethal threats, shifting alliances and inhuman determination.

ACOTAR

My page-turner rating through ‘The Court of Thorns and Roses’

I tend to be a visual thinker, so on the right is my graph of the page-turner rating level through The Court of Thorns and Roses (not exactly to scale). Obviously I liked the latter part of the book best. It bodes well for when I get to the Throne of Glass trilogy, because Sarah J. Maas can definitely write bad-ass women in action.

Links: Sarah J. Maas website

Do you know The Lady Bushranger?

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What do you know about women bushrangers?

If your answer would be, ‘Not much,’ you wouldn’t be alone. Before I picked up The Burial by Courtney Collins, my response would have been, ‘What women bushrangers?’

The Burial’s central character is inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, Australia’s ‘Lady Bushranger’ who ran with her gang in the 1920s in the area now known as the Wollemi National Park, part of the Blue Mountains range between Lithgow and Muswellbrook. While other women were consorts of male bushrangers and some carried out daring exploits, Jessie Hickman is the only one who stands out as a mover and shaker on the bushranger scene in her own right.

It’s easy to see why Collins was captivated by her story. Sold off while still a child to a bush circus, she became a skilled rider and performer, developing the skills and confidence in her own abilities which allowed her to take off into the bush, and to escape captivity multiple times. Stories of her include riding off a cliff into a river to evade police, and escaping after being locked in a toilet on a train.

While she’s reputed to have married three times and had a cattle and horse rustling career over many years, The Burial concentrates on a short period of her life at the end of her third marriage. It’s a beautifully written novel, but perhaps it’s a testament to the skill of its author that for the most part I didn’t notice that as I read it. The prose is evocative, but doesn’t get in the way of the story or characters.

BurialCollins doesn’t claim historical accuracy. A statement before the ‘Prelude’ reads, “This is a work of fiction – inspired by art, music, literature and the landscape, as much as the life and times of Jessie Hickman herself.” The narrative begins in the voice of a dead child and the burial of the novel’s title, but the story is primarily told from Jessie’s viewpoint as she heads into the mountain bushland, and that of Jack Brown, a half-Aboriginal drover/rustler and tracker. He and police sergeant Andrew Barlow are ‘inspired-by-life but mainly fictional characters’ (according to Collins), who provide the narrative of the search for Jessie and the hunter-versus-hunted tension.

This was one of those novels when I was looking out through the character’s eyes and couldn’t help contrasting my life with hers. To be sold off at a young age, essentially at the mercy of the men around you, be they kind and fair or lecherous and abusive, is it any wonder she chose to take her chances in the bush? A hundred years ago in Australia, when this novel is set, how many women suffered what she did but didn’t have the ability to survive in the bush or evade those who would come after them? I wonder how many tried – and died?

Of course, this type of scenario still happens, on large scales in countries where women are legally and socially oppressed and, closer to home, on smaller scales in secret. It’s a moot point to ask if Jessie Hickman would still have ended up on the wrong side of the law if she hadn’t been exposed to such abuse and injustice. We’ll never know. What we do know is that abuse and injustice distorts and destroys lives.

A book like The Burial helps remind us of that.

Links: Courtney Collins website
The Burial will be released in the US at the end of May under the title The Untold.
Her upcoming novel is entitled The Walkman Mix.

More about Jessie Hickman

by Di Moore

mistsA newspaper article on Di Moore and her non-fiction book
about Jessie Hickman, Out of the Mists

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I saw Courtney Collins interviewing Favel Parrett (Past the Shallows) and Brooke Davis (Lost and Found) as Newcastle Writers Festival 2015

Shadowfell – in the Dark: Juliet Marillier

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What do we take for granted?

Like others, my house had no electricity for four days after recent storms across New South Wales, and we had to get creative about the basics like lights and meals. (Internet? Hah!). In the middle of those four days, we had a plumbing emergency. Not pretty. Fortunately for us, we were able to get a plumber and it was fixed the same day.

15709129Those four days, I thought a lot about how many people in the world live without power and plumbing. I also spent a lot of time reading, much of it by candlelight. One book I read was Raven Flight, the second book in Juliet Marillier’s Shadowfell trilogy. Already being in a thoughtful frame of mind, this book had me thinking along disquieting lines.

The first book of the series, Shadowfell, follows Neryn, alone and hiding from the agents of the tyrannical king of Alban. Her young life has been one of tragedy, but her one hope is to find the rumoured base of a rebellion, Shadowfell. Her affinity with the Good Folk, the fey of the land, would mark her for death or enslavement at the hands of the king’s elite troops, but the Folk also prophesy of her importance to the land. She receives aid from a stranger, but the question is, can she trust him?

The second boo17847892k, Raven Flight, continues Neryn’s story after she arrives at Shadowfell. First she must become stronger in body, and then in order to truly help the rebellion she needs to be trained to use her gift. Eventually she sets out with one companion to find the Guardians who can teach her.

I have to make a disclosure. I love Juliet Marillier’s books, so I was well disposed towards this series at the outset. Her writing combines strong stories based on elements of history and folklore woven with romance. This is her first series written for a young adult audience, but I’ve never let the YA tag put me off. I’d miss out on too many good books that way.

So far I’ve found that, while still having a strong romantic element at the core, there is less emphasis on the romantic relationship in the Shadowfell books than in most of her others. The protagonist, Neryn, is a strong character – not physically, as she is weak and unwell for a significant part of the first book, but she has courage and strength of will in the face of danger and hardship. She spends a much of the first book traveling alone or in the company of the fey, so while there is sufficient time for the romance to develop, the focus is on her endurance and spirit. The main issue in the relationship between Neryn and her love interest, Flint, is the same as the main question of the book: Do I trust, and risk being vulnerable?

In the second book, Raven Flight, though Flint is often in Neryn’s thoughts they are only together for a short time. The emphasis in this book is on sacrifice for the greater good. They both have crucial roles to play in the coming rebellion which necessitate not only that they be separated, but also that they be willing to give the other up. Flint’s actions when worried about her threaten his position, and thus the rebellion. The question is asked again and again in this book: What will you give up for the cause, for the greater good?

Candlesbook60It was this question which had me thinking as I read by candlelight. I read a fantasy book set in a land with a despotic king, who ruthlessly cut down anyone who dared to breathe the slightest opposition. The sad part is that such things are not confined to fantasy, and we don’t have to look far to find examples either in history or in today’s world.

In Australia and other democracies we take so much for granted, just like our electricity supply. There are problems here, certainly, and there have been changes to legislation in the past twenty years, especially recently, which have been unhealthy and curbed freedoms. Perhaps it has happened with little outcry because we have taken so much for granted. I wondered while reading by candlelight: What would I give up for the greater good?

I wonder what questions the third book of the trilogy, The Caller, will ask?

Links: Juliet Marilliers Webpage

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Aussie Author Challenge 2015

 

 

awwsml-2015

Australian Women Writers Challenge