The Dubious Hills

The Dubious Hills Pamela Dean Date: 2005-07-21 17:32:37   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy

There are times that I don't quite get what Dean is aiming at. In the Dubious Hills, knowledge is parceled out. One person knows what pain and injury is; another knows how to heal it. One knows stories and tales and another how to teach. But not knowing what pain is does not keep you from getting hurt, and neither does it keep you from acting badly when a subtle hurt— such as the abandonment by your parents— is present.

Such a hurt in her younger sister is what drives Arry, the resident Physici, the one who understands pain, to try and seek out knowledge. But before she gets very far, a threat to the village is presented in the form of wolves who offer the ability to understand things outside one's own purview; in other words, to make the residents of the Dubious Hills like those outside, who can know whatever they learn.

But how can people who only know one thing make such a decision? The Dubious Hills are the way they are for a reason, after all, that they might not be at war. And Arry has to try and figure out if such knowledge would be in her field, if such insights would hurt her people beyond repair.

And this book is a little too weird to me. Some people, however, identify with it right away, so don't let me discourage you from trying it.

The Whim of the Dragon

The Whim of the Dragon (The Secret Country Trilogy, Vol. 3) Pamela Dean Date: 2005-07-21 17:22:49   —   $6.29   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy, Juvenile

So after a decade of literally knowing nothing of a third book, I found out the existence of The Whim of the Dragon. My friend Stephanie, a graduate student, managed to get a copy through interlibrary loan and very kindly lent it to me for a week. I read it through twice, back to back (a practice I had not done since I was a child) as I knew it would be a while before I managed to get a copy of my own.

Imagine how pleased I was to find out they were coming back into print.

With this book, the cousins are forced to endure the consequences of their actions, and to find out what it means to meddle with fantasy. They have admitted who they really are and the few they have taken into confidence— the wizard Fence, the regent Randolph, and a few others— have to cope with the fact that their royal children may be gone for good. But there is still danger to be played out, and better with facsimiles than none at all, so they gather themselves for the last acts of a story designed by neither the cousins nor the people of the land.

Love this book. Really, really love this book. It's got everything, including a wonderful ending that makes a hard choice a little easier to bear, and the farewells cut a little less.

The Hidden Land

The Hidden Land (The Secret Country Trilogy, Vol. 2) Pamela Dean Date: 2005-07-21 17:15:02   —   $6.99   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy, Juvenile

For years I thought Pamela Dean was a strange and unusual writer. The primary cause of this was the Secret Country and the Hidden Land, two books which obviously went together. I was completely unaware that there was a third novel (out of print for some time before I acquired the first two.)

The reason for this is that The Hidden Land has an ending, a strange and adult ending that is utterly maddening, the ending that has the protagonists walk away from the magic. The message of this ending is that you don't always get to finish the story, that sometimes all you can do is walk away and never find out what happened. It is strange and very much in the style of a different form of fiction than fantasy, and I thought it deliberate. (Dean's book The Dubious Hills, set in another corner of the same world, did nothing to disabuse me of that notion.)

You can try reading it that way, because it does work, in a fashion. It is, however, far more comfortable to go on to read the third book.

The Secret Country

The Secret Country (The Secret Country Trilogy, Vol. 1) Pamela Dean Date: 2005-07-21 17:07:36   —   $6.99   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy, Juvenile

Pamela Dean is the product of a classically liberal education. Her work is filled with quotations from such notables as Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Pope, Keats, the Bible, Madeline L'Engle, and classicists everywhere. She also does not make you work for them; while it is obvious in most cases that something is a quotation, it is not necessary to the plot to understand where something came from.

The Secret Country is a game that siblings Ted and Laura play with their cousins Patrick, Ruth, and Ellen. They are the princes and princesses of this land, and they work through a story of war and betrayal every summer. So when Patrick, Ruth, and Ellen move to Australia, the summer looks as though it will be irretrievably boring— until Ted and Laura discover a way into the real Secret Country, and meet their cousins there.

There are problems, however. They are taken for truant and forced back to the castle, where things are similar to what they practiced but not quite right. The place looks wrong; the people look different from what they expect, and there's characters they had never thought of. To make matters worse, there's no convenient diplacement of time— and the real princes and princesses are nowhere to be found.

And the story of war and betrayal is unfolding just as they had seen.

I only bother to list this book as a juvenile because the young adult section is where you will find it. It is well worth the seeking out, even for adults.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz : 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder) L. Frank Baum Date: 2005-07-21 16:58:41   —   $16.49   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy, Children's

I actually read the original book fairly late in the game. I'd seen the movie, naturally enough, but I first ended up reading a later book in the series, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. This was because the copy my mother had of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was, more specifically, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, and I had some strange idea of what "Annotated" meant.

I was, after all, only a kid.

After reading several chapters of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, however, I was forced to admit that even given the discrepancies between movies and books, this could not be the original book on which the movie was based. So after a while I asked my mother and she pointed me at the Annotated copy, which I hated. That copy of the book was very wide, and had two columns of notes on the outer part of each page, while the inner part was dedicated to a facsimile of the original publication.

I can take footnotes, I can take endnotes, but I can't stand sidenotes. When your eye is drawn to text they are nastily distracting; the flow of the story is completely interrupted.

What was worse in this case was that I had read most of the other Oz books, and had gotten very fond of the John R. Neil illustrations. The Denslow pictures in the original story annoyed me for some subtle reason, probably the child's love of the familiar.

So what is the purpose of all of this? Merely to say that I still don't much care for that copy, I am still distracted by the sidenotes, and if you want a copy for your child, get a simple story version such as the one above. Much happier for all concerned.

And if you don't already know the story, you are hopelessly estranged from popular culture.

Great Cat Tales

Great Cat Tales Lesley O'Mara Date: 2005-07-21 16:24:19   —   $8.99   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Short Stories

This is a collection of— you guessed it— stories about cats. These are more in the general fiction mode than fantasy, which cats often end up in. Classics such as Kipling's Just So Story "The Cat Who Walked By Himself" make an appearance, and segments culled from books also appear. I would like to encounter some of those books.

If you like reading stories about cats, well and good.

Twilight Eyes

Twilight Eyes Dean Koontz Date: 2005-07-14 23:12:12   —   $7.99   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Horror

Dean Koontz. Also popcorn.

In this case, it's the tale of someone who can see goblins, those masquerading as humans and who feed on suffering. Since he kills them, but they look human, he is on the run for murder after determining that his step-uncle has killed his beloved cousin.

But what does it really matter? This is popcorn.