Book Review: The Wind in His Heart

Reading Charles de Lint's latest novel, The Wind in His Heart, I was struck by how much of the story involved people feeling trapped in their own lives, and the things they do to change.

The book focuses on a number of main characters: Thomas Corn Eyes, a young man who feels shoe-horned into becoming a shaman for his people, Steve, a hermit who thinks he has long escaped his past, Sadie, a teenager abandoned by her foster father in the middle of a desert, and Leah, a journalist who thinks she may have just found the biggest story of her career.  

As compared to his Newford novels (which do get a shout out here) and his more recent Wilding YA series (which also have a blink-and-you'll-miss-it note), The Wind in His Heart has de Lint masterfully balancing multiple characters and storylines against an amazing background of life on an American reservation as well as journeying into a strange otherworld.

What I've always loved best about de Lint's work is the way he matches regular folk with the fantastic and examines how they deal with finding out their world is now much bigger than they had ever imagined.  The mix of real-world concerns with issues involving spirits, witches, shapecahngers and others bring both into sharp contrast.

The Wind in His Heart marks my last de Lint novel for now, I've been reading his his books at the rate of one a month since March of 2014 and have thoroughly enjoyed every one of them.  Now, like all the other de Lint fans out there, I've just got to sit and wait until he releases his next story.

Book Review: Brittle Innings

Brittle Innings begins like a baseball novel, gives heaps of nostalgia for fans of the sport and then deftly moves into becoming a sequel for one of the greatest horror novels ever written.

This is actually the second novel I've read by Michael Bishop, who's earlier work Who Made Stevie Crye? was an intriguing horror novel about a cursed typewriter. His 1994 novel, Brittle Innings (sorry for the 22-year-old spoiler) is actually a meld of two different stories, a monster hiding among humanity, and a nostalgic look at a man's career for a minor league baseball team in the 1940s. As someone who does not really care for sports, I found the baseball story, mixed with a coming of age narrative for it's protagonist, Danny Boles, to be pretty compelling, looking at the American deep south in the forties, and (for me) the world of professional baseball.

I felt that the monster story in the novel was incredibly well handled, and kept itself quite in keeping with the creatures origin. A neat gateway story for story-lovers who might not necessarily feel comfortable with horror.

Book Review: Beauty

Put simply, Sheri S. Tepper’s 1991 novel Beauty, is an examination of a number of classic western fairy tales (both Grimm and Perrault stories are represented) which includes elements of Science Fiction and focuses strongly on issues of Environmentalism and women’s roles in the middle ages.

The story follows Beauty (of the Sleeping variety, rather than the one with the Beast), as she moves through a number of classic stories taking on (mild, 25-year-old spoiler) various roles in various fairy tales. The story also includes a trip to a dystopian future and journeys to the more fantastic realms of Faerie and Hell.

Although slow to start, I found I enjoyed the narrative more and more as Beauty began to stretch beyond her own story. In many ways the book reminded me of Ursula K. Leguin’s Lavinia, although as a huge fan of the Ancient World, I did enjoy that one a little more.

An interesting read I would be happy to add to my own collection.

Bear with me, I'm almost finished my latest Gabaldon

All right, I'll admit that reading fantasy fiction does often come with a down side - as the books are bigger, you end up having to spend longer and longer amounts of time to read them.

Right now I'm on day nine of my latest book by Diana Gabaldon, A Breath of Snow and Ashes.  Now that's not to say I'm not enjoying this 980-page tome, (although I will admit - mid 10-year-old spoiler - that two kidnappings happening in the same book to two characters that have both been kidnapped before stretches my sense of reason a little), but I will say that usually in the same space of time I could have knocked out a couple horror or science fiction novels, and I'm pretty sure (not 100% however) that I'll finish tomorrow, and will be able to put up my review at that time.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Once more unto the breach!

Following Fantasy Series

Over the years I've read a lot of Fantasy, whether part of a shared world (DragonLance), or of the stand-alone variety.  The problem is that very few fantasy books stop at just one title.  Case in point - I've just finished up reading Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker series, which is comprised of six books, but does hold out the promise of a seventh.  Following taht I'm currently going for my first run through Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber - which is such fun I'm likely to revisit it again in a few years.

Every month I try to make sure I read at least one book from each of my favourite genres; Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction (SF), but although Horror and SF both have plenty of series, Fantasy seems to be almost nothing but series.

On the positive side I can invest a lot more in the characters in a Fantasy series than I can those who only appear in a single novel, but at the same time, while I'm trying out a large number of different Horror and SF authors, I find that over the course of a year I'm reading as few as two or three Fantasy authors, as it takes me months and months to get through their series.

I don't really have a solution to the problem, because I love reading these series, but sometimes I wish I could just find a nice collection of Fantasy short stories, and that would be enough.