The Places You Will Go

Fantasy writers take us east to new worlds | Imogen Russell Williams | Books | guardian.co.uk

Fights of fancy ... a ninja master. Photograph: Toshifumi Kitamura/EPA

Some fantasy writers create landscapes profoundly alien to the reader – cities chain-suspended over bottomless gulfs, or floating pirate metropolises built on the hulks of ancient ships. And some stay closer to home, anchoring their magical or extraordinary events in real countries and cultures thinly disguised. My least favourite settings of this kind are those Diana Wynne Jones describes as "Pan-Celtic" in her Tough Guide To Fantasyland – Welsh, Irish and Scots geography and folklore slapped in the blender and pulsed on High, resulting in a larger-than-credible proportion of feisty titian-haired heroines, and, for the British reader at least, little sense of either genuine otherness or internal coherence. Possibly, for me, it's all just slightly too close to home; perhaps this is also why I have a weakness for fantasy that uses historical Japan or China as a springboard.

By choosing to set her books in feudal Japan, Lian Hearn imparts a restrained, poetic splendour to her five Tales of the Otori. The story of Takeo, who has grown up among the secretive Hidden, but whose lineage is more exotic than he suspects, is interwoven with Kaede's, the beautiful daughter of a noble house fighting to achieve and deploy the knowledge denied her as a marriageable female and useful hostage. Although Hearn's characters are sympathetically drawn, the books are particularly enjoyable because the reader is never sure what the author has invented and what she's derived from considerable, loving research. The "nightingale floor" of the first book, for instance, an assassin-proof terrace of planks that chirp distinctively when trodden on, sounds like pure fantasy, but is based in historical fact. There is plenty of murderous, belly-slitting action, but it's the delicate, back-handed negotiations between powers, ritual prostrations in the presence of the aristocracy and movement between strata in the inflexible hierarchy that I found most memorable about the series.

Feudal Japan also provides Nick Lake's recently published Blood Ninja with an atmospheric and successful setting. At first I thought vampire ninjas might be over-egging the fantasy pudding – especially vampire ninjas living secretly in a hollowed-out volcano – but Lake manages to ensure the blood-sucking never feels like a gimmicky attempt to clamber aboard the YA vampire bandwagon. Instead, the vamp "blood ninjas", or kyuuketsuki, are set up in apposition to the inflexible, honour-bound samurai. They have greater autonomy than the oppressed peasantry, and enough imagination to disguise themselves as lepers or untouchables to weasel their way into tightly-guarded situations. Like Takeo, Lake's protagonist, Taro, is a lad with a destiny – Lake is indebted to Hearn – but this is far from quest-by-numbers fantasy.

In The Two Pearls of Wisdom, an alternate imperial China similarly allows Alison Goodman to anchor dragons – the outright fantastic – in the complexities of a rigidly structured society where women are barely valued. To the crippled heroine Eon/Eona, the idea of a female Dragoneye, or champion bonded with a dragon to deploy its powers, is appalling, although it's what she's fighting to become. Goodman's convincing setting breathes new life into the overused fantasy trope of "girl dressing as boy to fulfil warrior dream" – Eon/Eona's horror at her transgression moves the story well beyond the realm of high-spirited jape, asking challenging questions about identity and self-acceptance en route.

I enjoy this kind of fantasy particularly because the subtle, inflexible hierarchies and traditions of ancient Japanese and Chinese society are enthrallingly different to the traditions I'm familiar with – but the writer still draws on history to inform their setting, giving the books gravitas and conviction. Can anyone recommend others in the same mould – perhaps some by Japanese and Chinese writers? Or tell me about your favourite fantasy settings.

via guardian.co.uk

Posted via email from daphnelee's posterous

The Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medalists 2010

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has won the 2010 CLIP Carnegie Medal.

The Kate Greenaway Medal was awarded to Freya Blackwood for Harry & Hopper (written by Margaret Wild).

To read more about the winners and watch the award ceremony go to the official website.

So Much To Read

This book was delivered to my flat this morning.

So Much To Tell (Viking, page 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1846142000) is the biography of Kaye Webb, Puffin Books' most famous editor.

Her name was what I used to look out for on the title pages of my Puffins and, to me, Kaye Webb meant a good book.

Here's the product description of the biography (by Valerie Grove), taken from Amazon.co.uk:

Kaye Webb, a journalist with no publishing experience, burst into the world of children’s books in 1961 and changed the face of children’s publishing forever. Her child-like enthusiasm and shrewd business mind led her to become Puffin’s most successful editor and the genius behind the Puffin Club, which opened up the exciting world of authors and books to children across Britain. But whilst Kaye’s professional life had worked out beautifully, her private life had been the reverse. Kaye had two husbands before her marriage to the artist Ronald Searle, and the torment of his sudden and shocking departure never left her. Yet to the outside world Kaye Webb remained passionate and unstoppable. This is the unknown story of the woman who brought the joy of books to children everywhere whilst battling the emotional pain that plagued her private life.

And this is the title page of my first copy of Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. It was a 12th birthday present from, as you can see, my sister, Christina who, like everyone in my family, encouraged and nurtured my love for reading.

Notice the Students Service Centre Stamp! It was a bookstore in Batu Pahat that sold mostly text books and workbooks but had the odd gem. I also got Anne of Green Gables at this store, as well as The Gardens of Dorr by Paul Biegel - which is the book that showed me that children's literature could be dark and disturbing. (I still have those copies of Anne and Garden of Dorrs.)

I am so looking forward to reading the Kaye Webb biography but it will have to wait until I finish reading a couple of other books for review: Theodore Boone by John Grisham (everyone wants to write children's books) and The Castle in the Pyrenees by Jostein Gaarder.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer | Books | guardian.co.uk

Posted via web from daphnelee's posterous

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer promises a 'monster' in her latest Twilight tale, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, but doesn't deliver, says Imogen Russell Williams.

Photograph: AP Photo / David Stone / Little, Brown and Company

In Stephenie Meyer's introduction to her latest Twilight tale, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, she whets her fans' appetites by suggesting that in this novel she's "stepped into the shoes of … a 'real' vampire – a hunter, a monster". Any readers frustrated by the mundane suburban detail of Meyer's previous Twilight books – vampires who play baseball, drive Volvos and give each other tasteful, thoughtful gifts – might be tempted to perk up. Sadly, it's a folorn hope. One of Meyer's notable weaknesses is that she can't bear any of her narrators to have pasts or morals blacker than dove-grey. We're promised a wild, amoral, bloodthirsty teen protagonist, but what we get is Bree. Despite a few gritty touches, there's never any danger she's going to get into real trouble after running away from an abusive father in her early life. While starving on the streets she carefully avoids becoming a "junkie ho" before getting suckered by the promise of a cheeseburger, and subsequently being turned into a vampire. OK, she exsanguinates a prostitute here and there, but she spends most of the novella offering her new vamp boyfriend, Diego, high fives and double-wrapping the books with which she whiles away the daylight hours, because she "hates water-damaged pages". In fact, Bree is a thinly-disguised, bloodsucking version of Meyer's first Twilight heroine, Bella Swan – geeky, dependent on males to protect her and think for her, and utterly devoid of black-hearted, kick-ass joie-de-vivre.

Read All You Can!

Scholastic Press's children's book buffet means you pay just RM49.90 for as many books as you can fit into your buffet bag!

11-13th June, 10am-830pm, at MegaKidz, Mad Valley Mall.