Sakura of DOOM

(I'm sorry for spamming! I have a bazillion book posts to catch up on, and I should probably write up Wiscon some time as well...)

Mirasol has recently been appointed Chalice of the Willowlands after the previous Master and Chalice died unexpectedly. As Chalice, her job to connect the new Master to the land is made more difficult given that the new Master was to be a Priest of Fire, and is now not entirely human. Although it sounds like epic fantasy, McKinley adds her usual every day touches, focusing just as much on Mirasol's bees and honey as well as the "who will rule the land" plot.

I've missed reading Robin McKinley. I didn't read Sunshine or Dragonhaven when they came out, due to poor or conflicting reviews, so it's been almost a decade since I've read new McKinley. I am also desperately compartmentalizing her white guy with a tan comment about Obama because I am so tired of having writers I like flash their ignorance online.

Chalice is very standard McKinley, which is to say it is comforting, homey, and focused on small acts of niceness amidst larger epic going-ons. I have no idea how this would read to people new to McKinley; she's been a favorite author of mine since I was in middle school, so I have absolutely no distance. That said, I find her focus on ordinariness and niceness a little less comforting than I did as a kid; I keep remembering some of deepad's comments at Wiscon about how niceness is small, how it is used to limit people, how you can be nice to people and hope for change, but you cannot use niceness as a way to battle systems of oppression. None of this directly has to do with the book, save that I wonder how much of McKinley's focus on niceness and humility and being ordinary I swallowed unthinkingly as a teen and continue to retain today. It is a narrative I am extremely familiar with and used to, and ... I am not sure how comfortable I am with that anymore.

I also have issues with the notion of citizenship and rulership in the book; the focus on bloodlines and blood relationships to the land works in this fantasy but begins to fall apart when you poke at it. And one element in the ending really didn't work for me.

All this said, I loved the book and the characters, even though sometimes they were too accomodating and polite and humble for me. I love the tentativeness of their interactions, I love the story of someone rediscovering his humanity, I love the plotline of trying to figure out what you're doing while you're doing it. I especially love the bees and the honey. I am very glad I had a bottle of farmers' market honey with me as I was reading, otherwise I would have had horrible cravings.

I probably should be doing more work today, especially seeing as how the paper due on Friday look like a lot of work. But, after having turned in the chapter yesterday, I just don't feel like doing anything.

So instead I will spam LJ.

I started rereading Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter yesterday and was immediately sucked back into the world. I don't know why, but I just have this thing for fairy tales -- the originals, the multiple versions, the modern rewrites and variations, all of it. Something about the repetition especially resonates with me, I guess. I have the same hankering for myths and legends; used to hunt them up all the time as a kid. I also read most of the fairy tales I know now back then, including all the variants that were usually censored by the Victorian publishers. Somehow, as a kid, it never struck me that the Prince impregnating Sleeping Beauty in her sleep was a strange thing.

I think this is why I'm so attracted to fantasy, and much less so to sci-fi. After voraciously reading all the myths I could, I wanted to find something else that felt like them. And finally, someone handed me Tolkein in sixth grade, and I was hooked. Now the epic fantasy doesn't intrigue me as much, because sometimes I feel as though they've gotten away from that fairy tale quality that I adore. Luckily, I found Robin McKinley, Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's fairy tales for adults series (Snow White, Blood Red, etc.), and a whole other fantasy world. There's always this sense of familiarity to all the fairy tales because they all follow some sort of archetype, and for the older ones, at least, there's this haunting sense of horror and fear hovering. I also love the cadence some of them have, the almost ritualistic language that's used for a specific purpose and invoked with "Once upon a time." It gives a sense that there's a charted course that the story will take, a lack of immediacy and a feeling that the author is only retelling a very old tale that the audience already knows. So even if I've never read the book or the tale, there is a sense that I've been there before, that this is a land that is not wholly unfamiliar.

And while I love the rewrites that take the old stories to a new place in new ways, something just can't replace the actual language of them. Neil Gaiman doesn't usually rewrite fairy tales (although his "Snow, Glass, and Apples" is gorgeous and haunting), but I always feel as though he captures the voice of fairy tales, in Sandman, with the stories told at World's End and the story of Nada, obviously in Stardust, and in the small snippets of gods in American Gods. I also love Robin McKinley, although hers are much more comfortable than Neil's; her books are the books I read on rainy days or when I want to feel at home, no matter where I am. I think this is why I've been venturing further and further into the YA territory, where people like Diana Wynne Jones (Fire and Hemlock!!), Meredith Ann Pierce and Donna Jo Napoli have continued to do this.

Something about them all has a dreamy, not too hard quality that can frighten me and charm me in a way that more "realistic" quest fantasies like Robert Jordan can't (although I have many, many, many other issues with Jordan).