I’m going to talk a little bit about two children’s series I read over the last few weeks, the (ongoing) Tapestry series by Henry H. Neff and the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull. These are fantasy books, which aren’t usually my jam, but hey, isn’t that where all the good writing for kids is going these days? I had some fairly heavy hitters on my currently reading list, including Ulysses, the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, a couple of nonfiction books about imperial Chinese warfare, and the latest Banana Yoshimoto, and my fiancée had been on a fantasy kick post Harry Potter 7.2, so I picked up her kindle and started reading.

The Tapestry

The Hound of Rowan is a story about a troubled orphan boy who discovers that he is a wizard when he is invited to join a secret wizarding school out in the countryside. Along the way he makes friends with a talented know-it-all and a mischevious underachiever, explores a world of magical creatures in which all myths are true, and sneaks out under the nose of his teachers to have wild adventures. Unfortunately Max McDaniels’s education will not be a normal and happy one, as he lives in dark times: a long vanquished enemy of incredible power is returning.

So… Harry Potter?

Yes. Yes it is. The first book is almost point for point Harry Potter. This is maybe smart. Harry Potter was big. Bigger than Big. Huge. But it is not inspiring. Luckily it’s not the last book in the series.

The Second Siege, book 2 of the series, diverges from the Harry Potter mold significantly. The school of witchcraft and wizardry paradigm falls away, as danger comes to the world much faster than in the Potter books. The stakes are raised, the writing is stronger, and this is where the first really new ground is laid. But then…

In The Fiend and the Forge, the Harry Potter themes creep back in. The hero abandons the relative safety of his magical environment and goes out into a hostile world on his own. He gathers magical items and allies and has a direct confrontation with the big bad. The difference from the Harry Potter books here is that this is the middle book in a planned series, not the end, so the story isn’t over.

And hey, these were pretty solid. If you read these as an adult, you don’t have to kill yourself afterwards. I’d give these things a solid B-.

But…

Fablehaven

Fablehaven is the story of a young boy and girl discovering that they are heirs to a secret magical world in which all myths are true, and of course they cannot simply explore and enjoy their new discovery, because the world is in immediate peril from long-vanquished enemies. I get that it sort of has to be this way. You can’t have a series where the protagonists have always known about the magical world, because you get left with enormous exposition problems (if everyone knows what’s happening, why would they ever explain it?). And you can’t have three extremely boring books about a magical world running efficiently with no threats, because no one would care, even if you somehow dropped hints that shit was about to get unreal in book 4. So… eh.

Where Tapesty gets off to a rocky, derivative start, Fablehaven is strong from the get go. The writing is better, the characters are better, the plot is better, the universe is more interesting, &c.

Rise of the Evening Star does most of the work of establishing the various players, factions, and ideologies in the universe, at the expense of a slightly less interesting plot than the other books in the series. It’s good, but it’s a bridge to the main arc of the story, which begins in…

Grip of the Shadow Plague — by this point the protagonists are discovering their abilities, the factions are established, and the danger to the world is looming larger. The first two books were interesting, this one is actually good, sturdy solid.

Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary is the fourth book, which has a great climax. It’s questy, with desperate moments and solid characters. It’s probably the best book in the series, though I’m sure there are readers who prefer book 5…

Keys to the Demon Prison — Now this is still a solid book, a good read, &c., but I can’t understand why this wasn’t split into two books. So much of what goes on in the middle two thirds is hurried, skipping from day to day, leaving out details and character moments to race from set-piece to set-piece, that it’s easy to come up with some divisions that would have made sense and allowed a more measured pace and some better character work. There’s an afterword in which the author explains that he always envisioned a 5 book series, but if he crammed this all together in blind adherence to a 5 year-old outline, that seems like doing the series a disservice.

Taken all together, this series is the stronger of the two, although the Tapestry books aren’t all in yet. It’s B+/A- territory. I read most of it in big chunks, hours at a time.

So What Can We Do Better?

If you’re sitting down to write a children’s fantasy series, let me ask you a few questions:

1.) Does all the exposition have to be done in dialogue?

If you didn’t write the world as it was being discovered by the protagonist (if your protagonist had grown up in the magical world), what would be different? Are we worried that children won’t read passages without dialogue to learn the backstory? Is this fish-out-of-water trope really necessary to keep people engaged, or can we assume that an interesting magical world will be worth ferreting out? Is this half monkey-see and half “if the protagonist doesn’t kn ow anything about magic I don’t have to know anything about magic until it comes time to write the relevant sections”?

2.) Does there have to be a crisis that threatens the entire magical world?

If the enemies are small-time and their goals are small, does that mean the story will be boring? Would you expect every Poirot mystery to be a Regicide? Aren’t Hardy Boys mysteries interesting even though no one ever dies? Does magic automatically raise the stakes?

3.) Do ALL myths have to be true?

Do you have to have wizards and werewolves and vampires and satyrs and phoenixes and nagas? Do the norse myths and the indian myths and african myths all have to be concurrently true? Isn’t it conceivable that the magical world could be made up of only a few mythical creatures, or creatures outside of myth altogether? Is this a nod to multiculturalism (as in: if we put in greek monsters we’d better throw in some african ones, too, we can’t judge one culture’s myth as more valid than anothers)? Is it lazyness (as in: why should I think of magical entities when I can go to wikipedia and type in “zoroastrianism”)?

4.) Does the protagonist have to have special powers beyond those of the rest of the magicians around him?

Can’t we read about a team of competent magicians with normal magical powers? Does every hero have to be a genetically predisposed hero? Can’t these skills be learned? Isn’t there room for teamwork and strategy? Would you believe a story about a real world conflict that was only solved because one member of one faction was born with a special ability?

I don’t think the fact that these books are written for children means they have to follow any of the tropes I’m asking about. I don’t think the fact that they’re written about magical worlds means there’s no room for realism in plotting. I’m not even convinced that smaller stakes books wouldn’t be just as interesting.

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I’ve been reading some other things, too, and I owe some reviews for them, but maybe they’ll be quicky goodreads reviews and not whatever this garbage became. Stay tuned.

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So, this is the second book of a trilogy, and then there’s another trilogy, and then some other books, and when you’ve tallied it all up, you have something like 27 books in the series. And I’ve read the first two, but unless I get pneumonia and my reading time suddenly quadruples, I’m probably done, and I feel strange about it, because when all is said and done, I don’t hate these books.

The setting is imaginative. The stories move along at a good pace. The stories are interesting. If that was all their was to a book, this would be a pretty decent read.

But it isn’t.

The characters are garbage. They’re cardboard. The heroes never make any mistakes, but they also never do anything interesting. If anything they do is surprising, it isn’t genuinely surprising, it just wasn’t foreshadowed.

The writing, the style? Also largely nonsense. When I got to the end of the book, and I found myself wondering what happened in the next one, I had a flash of inspiration: I would much rather read the plot summary than the actual plot.

What I like about this series is the hierarchy, the relationships between people, the structure of the world, and how the events in the story impact that society. But since I don’t like or care about any of the individual people, it’s more than enough to just read what happened next, in bullet points or on a timeline.

So fuck it.

View all my reviews

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly solid. I had pretty low expectations going into this, because I wasn’t a huge fan of the revisionist history return to the Ender’s Game timeline, but I just read it from cover to cover, or, since I’ve been doing a lot of reading on kindle for my iPhone, I tapped the right side of the screen until the book was done. There’s just something I like about post-war Ender, and this covers a really critical part of that story. So: good! Read!

(In an effort to post more often, I’ve decided to automatically repost my reviews from goodreads here. At the moment there aren’t a lot of reviews there, since all I’ve really done is rate books and mark that I’ve read them, but if this works out, you may eventually want to pick me up there, as well.)

my currently-reading shelf:

I was looking for something light earlier this year. Something definitely for adults, and something with the potential to keep me occupied for a while, probably a series, and something I’d never read, but it had to be light. I wasn’t about to throw in Proust with Ulysses and the Autobiography of Mark Twain. I don’t remember exactly what made me think the James Bond books would be a good plan, but when I went to check them out, and discovered that they had been written by multiple authors over the years, I was a little dismayed. I decided I only wanted to read the real James Bond, the original, who had formed before the movies and was a creation all his own. So I decided that I would only read the books by Ian Fleming, or at the very least, I would consider the end of those books the end of the project. That meant, in order:

1. Casino Royale
2. Live and Let Die
3. Moonraker
4. Diamonds are Forever
5. From Russia, With Love
6. Dr. No
7. Goldfinger
8. For Your Eyes Only
9. Thunderball
10. The Spy Who Loved Me
11. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
12. You Only Live Twice
13. The Man with the Golden Gun
14. Octopussy and the Living Daylights

I think that I was excited to start these because Casino Royale was the last bond movie I actually saw in the theater, and I knew I’d be starting there. And Casino Royale is an interesting story, and has a lot of action and drama, but I was totally unprepared for the level of terrible writing I was about to encounter. For what it’s worth, this was the first novel, and Fleming’s writing gets better as the series goes on, but in Royale it’s just a train wreck.

It also set a trend for the first few books: it’s a little unsettling to have to hear James Bond’s thoughts. You’re spared this in the movies, and I think helps make Bond a cool, charismatic character. You don’t have to come to terms with the fact that he’s a racist, a misogynist, obsessed with clothing and restaurants, and frankly, a bit of a bungler. He isn’t a master spy, his cover is perpetually blown. And he isn’t a master planner, he just gets lucky a lot. The only thing he’s really and consistently good at is gambling, but of course even there he prevails by luck. He’s simply a lucky man who brute forces his way through everything.

He’s also a very transparent author insertion fantasy for Ian Fleming, who was an unimportant dabbler in intelligence and an inveterate womanizer. When he talks about how all women want to be raped (it comes up a lot), it just feels like Fleming talking. So do the outmoded 1950’s racial ideas.

There are high points to the series — Thunderball and From Russia, With Love are pretty ok — and low points. Live and Let Die is dreadful. Two of the titles above (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and the Living Daylights) are short story collections, and they have a different tone than the novels. One, The Spy Who Loved Me, is told from the perspective of a Bond girl, and bond is only in the climactic middle chapters.

There are also some things that you know if you’re reading them now that you might not have known then, and they take away the suspense. Ultimately, no woman in any of the books is important, and I found myself constantly hoping that Bond would just ignore them and we could get on with it. Also, because Bond can’t die, a lot of the scenes that put him in personal danger are ineffective.

So 14 books in, and what do I think? I prefer movie Bond. He’s just a better secret agent. He’s cooler, he’s more likeable, and he’s less of a blunderer. Maybe Ian Fleming wanted a more flawed character, but once you have 14 books about someone, they are going to become a hero and you’re going to want to see them do well, go about their business competently. Because it isn’t as if Bond fails to stop the villain in Dr. No and we know that he can lose. Even when Bloefeld survives two novels and lives to have a final confrontation with Bond in the third, his plots have been foiled all along. So if Bond wins every time, and everyone he runs across knows his reputation as a crack agent, then showing him as a bungler is just unsatisfying.

In the end I’d recommend them if you’re looking for what I was looking for: light, fast-paced books you can get through in a night or two. They don’t have much literary merit, and they’re uneven in quality, but they’re good enough to read on the can.

The Sea Wolf, by Jack London, was an attempt to get back to fiction after my miserable sojourn in formulaic non-fiction. I was talking to one of my reading friends about Moby Dick, and how I prefer the first 45 chapters, which is mostly before the story gets going, and he recommended The Sea Wolf. But really for me it was the same story again, I liked the first half a lot, and the second half a good deal less. I thought it would make good review fodder, until I saw that wikipedia already contains the best and most accurate review of the book, attributed to Ambrose Bierce:

The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen… the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime… The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.

And there you have it. That is the exact, perfect review of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.