oyceter | McKillip, Patricia A.

I feel particularly stupid writing about some McKillip books... I mean, what do I say?

I loved the thought of a shadow city hidden amidst Ombria, I loved Mag in particular with her pin-laden straw-gold hair, I loved Faey and Domina Pearl's mustiness and Ducon and his charcoal. It has the same sort of non-logical-logic that pervades The Changeling Sea and Winter Rose, and while the strangest, dreamiest things happen, it all makes a sort of twisted sense.

And now I am basically repeating everything I said about Changeling Sea!

I wasn't that big of a fan of Lydea, but I didn't dislike her. I particularly adored Mag (as mentioned above) and her Magness, even though, stripped of McKillip's prose, she very easily could have been the stupid romance novel heroine who is always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So it was a beautiful, lovely book, and now I want to pick up more, but I also want to sort of keep them as especially rich chocolates to binge on once in a while.

Links:
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sophia_helix's review
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pocketgarden's review

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McKillip is one of my favorite authors precisely because of that oddly twisted logic that threads its way through her books and takes what could easily be a mundane story and makes it into a little delightful interlude.

I actually started out being rather bored by McKillip, but I seem to have fallen quite in love with them this year! Different frame of mind maybe?

But I do love her ordinary people -- reminds me a bit of Robin McKinley as well.

So it was a beautiful, lovely book, and now I want to pick up more, but I also want to sort of keep them as especially rich chocolates to binge on once in a while.

Likewise. And there is something about her style that scoops me right up and opens the door in the hedge to faery (or the really good reading experience, if you prefer.)

"Maybe a lot of the faerie... comes from my move east. Instead of being surrounded by the landscapes in California - vast distances and mountains and everything else - I'm surrounded by these little woods, and they're definitely 'fairytale' woods, especially when you look at them in certain casts of light and can't quite see what's in them. That's where the story begins, when you start wondering about what lies in these woods..."

Very subjective of course, but for me, she's one of the authors who hold the keys to that world perhaps it's magic, perhaps it's the subconscious, certainly mythopoetic. Any way, it is a wonder. Don't know if you've seen this interview?

"I think readers like faerieland because it is a source of power, a source of imagination which becomes a very powerful tool. Maybe that's why I keep digging into it, because it is something that's totally imaginative, and yet it's also a very ancient way of looking at the world. The first way I've handled it lately was in Something Rich and Strange, which was a sort of faerieland at the bottom of the sea. In that one, the characters moved out of the sea onto land and became semi-human, but they were also symbols. Maybe people look at these characters as symbols of something they want to be or to have. It's also a way of looking at real people. If you look at a person that way, they become more powerful because you don't know them; all you can see of that person is something that you want to be or to possess. Maybe that's partly where faerie comes from."

"It's certainly something I was trying to get at in Winter Rose. That was an enormously difficult novel, because I was trying to write about obsessive love, but it turned into a love story - though I was fighting it all the way! I made the mistake of framing it around the 'Tam Lin' story, which of course is a love story. I didn't realize it quick enough, so I spent the next year making it a love story. Faerieland in there was a very dangerous place to be. The characters there were out of the Wild Hunt, really not very nice people. It's the wicked queen, who doesn't really have any motivation, except that she wants to be wicked. One of the reasons I wanted to do the 'Tam Lin' story was that I did want to change they myth a bit. It's a transformation tale, but it's always the male who gets transformed. Janet has her child, and that's her transformation. She's very brave and courageous, but I wanted to write a story about a woman who had to transform herself, rather than rescue somebody else by his transformation. Instead of having a child, she bears herself in a certain way.

Patricia A. McKillip: Springing Surprises Locus, July 1996 http://www.evan.org/mckillip/SpringingSurprises.htm

I really wanted to go to Wiscon this year, had things worked out differently at work, and hear her speak.

Oh thank you for the link! Unfortunately, internet time is limited right now thanks to a Comcast mess up, but will peruse once I am safely settled in the new apartment!

It's strange -- for years I never quite was able to get into her novels somehow, and all of a sudden, they are these incredibly magical and lyrical places to be! I'm regretting not being able to attend Wiscon as well, but hoping for next year....

Glad you are enjoying her. I don't know that I would have read her the same way when I was younger. Forgotten Beasts of Eld was my first and that was such a long time ago now; but, I do remember being swept away by that book also.

I hope you get a chance to go some year; I think you would really enjoy it. (Jane Yolen has a fly by post at Surlalune also btw; but, she doesn't say too much as I think she was checking in between that one and leaving for Mythic Journeys.)

I remember starting and stopping Riddlemaster about a dozen times back in high school and reading Winter Rose and Atrix Wolfe in college and never quite getting into them.

But then I just recently reread Winter Rose and was absolutely floored. And now I am on a streak ;).

I really want to go... must plan ahead!

McKillip, Patricia A. - Ombria in Shadow

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