Review: LONG LANKIN, by Lindsey Barraclough

Long Lankin is a fantastic, post-war Britain ghost story, with undercurrents of M.R. James-style horror.

Gosh, sounds a bit like description of wine.

In some ways, Long Lankin in an atypical YA novel.  First of all, two of the novel's narrators are twelve (maybe thirteen), which would suggest the novel is middle-grade (ie: for ages 9-12).  However, the third narrator is probably somewhere near sixty, which suggests this isn't a novel for young people at all.  Also, the narrative includes largeish sections of archaic documents, with suitably old-fashioned language and spelling and stories of adultery, etc.  The novel is, however, an atmospheric, suspenseful YA read, driven by a great story.  All these non-standard elements make it original and also, perhaps, appeal to readers of all ages.

On to the story!  Cora and her four-year-old sister Mimi are sent from their East London flat in 1958 to stay with their Aunt Ida in her crumbling ancestral home in the Essex marshes.  While there, they befriend Roger and his family and set out to solve the mystery of why strange ghostly children appear in the nearby churchyard and why all the windows and doors of Guerdon Hall must be kept shut and locked at all times.  It soon becomes clear that Mimi, Cora's little sister, is in grave danger.

All three points of view are well drawn and Aunt Ida's is just as interesting as the children's because she knows much more than she wants to say about the history of Guerdon Hall and the nearby church.

Interspersed with all this ghostliness are much less chilling elements of good old childhood fun - family life, making camps in the woods, riding bicycles, hanging out in an old pillar box left over from the war, running to the shop to get a sweet while one picks up Dettol or washing up powder for Mum.  I've seen some readers complain that the novel begins slowly but I savoured all these details of childhood and post-war Britain.  This is the era in which my parents were born and my grandparents lived, but I'm familiar with the narrative of boom and prosperity in North America.  For that reason, it was fascinating to see a world in which bomb damage in London still hadn't been cleared and one might have to run over to the pub to make a telephone call.  (It reminded me at times of BBC's Call the Midwife, which we are currently watching).  Also, as in Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, the post-war period offers a good opportunity for both ghost stories and discussions of class and social change.

The slow build of atmosphere and the careful revelation of the story of Long Lankin are very effective in racheting up the suspense.  At one point I felt viscerally, physically tense, waiting to find out what would happen to the characters I had grown to care for.

This is a novel based on the ballad "Long Lankin", which is printed at the beginning of the book.  Knowing the ballad makes the novel more chilling but doesn't give the plot away.  Part of the fun of the novel is the way Barraclough works out elements of the ballad and places them in a sensible historical context.  This method reminded me of Janet McNaughton's An Earthly Knight, a YA retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin.

P.S.  I love the cover - the misty obscurity, the looming trees, and the girls who look like they're actually from the 1950s.  One of my pet peeves in the covers of historical novels are models who look much too modern!

Review: A WORLD BETWEEN US, by Lydia Syson

In the last year, I've learned more about the Spanish Civil War from reading young adult novels than I ever learned in school.  First, I read Michelle Cooper's fabulous The Journals of Montmaray trilogy, which worked in details about the civil war through the characters' links to Spain and friendship with a Basque captain (reviews here and here).  Then, at the beginning of January I read - almost in one sitting - Lydia Syson's first novel for young adults, A World Between Us, which centres around a love triangle between a nurse, an International Brigades soldier, and a journalist, all fighting fascism in war-torn Spain.

Felix (short for Felicity) is a London nurse who follows Nat, a Jewish communist and International Brigades soldier to Spain, out of a sudden, head-over-heels love for him and deep need to escape middle-class, patriarchal suburban life and expectations.  George, a family friend who hopes to marry her, follows her when she disappears from the Gare du Nord in Paris and works as a journalist while he tries to discover information about her whereabouts.

Introducing these three point-of-view characters, explaining their motivations, and getting them to Spain takes a very few chapters at the beginning of the book, a tricky manoeuvre that felt slightly unwieldy and rushed to me.

But once they get to Spain, let me tell you, the novel really gets going.  This is the second novel I've read from Hot Key Books's inaugural year.  The clever wheel on the back of the book promises 50% epic romance, 25% history, and 25% drama.  I was a bit worried that the focus of the novel would be on the love triangle, to the exclusion of the fascinating and frankly, really important historical details of the Spanish Civil War, which was in many ways a training ground for the strategies and techniques used in World War II.  For instance, the bombing of civilian and not just military targets for the purposes of creating terror.  It began with the destruction of Guernica, so terribly evoked in Picasso's famous painting, and repeated itself with terrible consequences in the East End of London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, and many other cities.

Picasso - Guernica

However, I need not have worried.  Syson does a wonderful job of melding historical detail with the lives and loves of her characters.  The brutality of the fighting, dealing with bombings, and tending the war-wounded are told compellingly, as is the psychological strain Felix, Nat, and George experience.  In a setting like this, the memory of love becomes precious, a place to escape to in a world on fire.  The lovers in this novel don't actually spend that much time together.  Each character develops over the course of the war and comes to his or her own understanding of the importance of the conflict they are engaged in.  These periods of separation also means that moments like the ones in which George sees Felix again or Felix is able to sit with Nat in war-weary Madrid carry heart-breaking significance.  Syson deals well with the physicality of romantic relationships in wartime - why wait if you might die tomorrow?  What do social expectations matter in world turned upside down?

As the novel progresses through the various stages of the civil war, helpful maps at the beginning of each section show the advance of Franco's troops and the major centres where the action takes place, so that you can see just how far away the characters are from each other at any given time and how close they are to the front line.

Felix's experiences as a nurse, sometimes in haphazard, ad hoc conditions, are especially well done.  As a Canadian, I was so pleased to see that one of our national heroes, Dr. Norman Bethune, has a walk-on role.  Shamefully, I had not realised that Bethune pioneered a system for blood transfusions at the front during the Spanish Civil War.  The details of blood types, the importance of refridgeration, and the sacrifice of the doctors and nurses who gave their own blood to save their patients are all skillfully rendered.

Syson also does an excellent job at hinting at the divisions and suspicions within the anti-fascist faction.  George Orwell went to Spain to serve, only to flee with his wife when the communists accused him of being a Trotskyite.  The author also illustrates the conflicts between the communists and the Catholic Church, showing the reader that the political, religious, and military situation in Spain was complex and multi-faceted.

As the novel drew to a close, I became so engaged with the characters that I found myself throwing out any aesthetic expectations of a balanced ending, only hoping for the characters' happiness in the face of tragedy and barriers at every turn.  I'm happy to say that the novel ends the right way (notice, I'm not saying how it ends, or what "right" means).  Any personal happiness the characters win at the end comes at the cost of their experiences in Spain and also the inescapable fact of failure and impotence.  If you know the history going in, you know that the Spanish communists and International Brigades were defeated and Franco governed Spain until his death in the 1970s.  What I hadn't realised until the Afterword is that the international volunteers were actually sent home in 1938, unable to fight until the bitter end.

And more problems waited for them at home.  International volunteers were seen as suspect because of their relationship with communism and some were not allowed to volunteer as soldiers in the Second World War because Western governments were concerned about their loyalty.  Some people had trouble gaining employment after returning from Spain.  Volunteers also weren't recognised as veterans until long after the conflict as well.

If you enjoyed Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity or Michelle Cooper's Montmaray books and are looking for another fabulous YA historical novel, I heartily recommend you pick up A World Between Us.

P.S.  Last year, a bunch of old interviews with Canadian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War were discovered in the basement of the CBC building in Toronto.  Material from these interviews featured on three episodes of the program Living Out Loud.  You can listen to them on CBC's player here.  Fascinating stuff.

Music of Michaelmas 2012: Within Temptation Edition

Before the end of last year, I promised a post on the music I listened to in Michaelmas Term.  Seeing as we are now three weeks into Hilary, I thought I'd better get this music post up now before it becomes morbidly too late.

Because I went to Within Temptation's fifteen-year anniversary concert in Antwerp, I spent some time listening to their back catalogue, Enter (1997), The Dance EP (1998), Mother Earth (2000), The Silent Force (2004), The Heart of Everything (2007), and The Unforgiving (2011).  In honour of this re-listening to one of my favourite-ever bands, I give, you my favourite six seven songs. 

(Which were incredibly hard to choose!)

"Candles", from Enter.  My favourite from the era of the first album and EP, when the band did "Beauty and the Beast"-style singing.  That is, pairing Sharon den Adel's lovely "clean" vocals with male, er, growling.  If you don't listen much music with growling, it will come across as strange and Cookie Monster-ish, but I've developed a bit of a fondness for it (in moderation!) and I quite like the contrast it creates in songs like this one.

Favourite Reads of 2012

I suppose this post is a bit belated, but at least it's still January.  Without further ado, I give you my "best of" list for 2012.  I've starred my five most favourite books in honour of their outstanding quality (Caveat: these were hard to pick and I may well change my mind in the future.)

(For my favourite books of 2011, click here.)

Published in 2012

Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein*

I bought my copy in February, pretty soon after publication, because the cover had attracted my notice in Blackwell's.  I think this may be my single favourite book of 2012 and perhaps the one I would most recommend.  You should read it because it's a fantastic YA historical fiction novel about espionage, flying, and female friendship in World War II.  This is an emotionally gripping, tighly written, and twisty turny novel that made me absolutely sob at the end.  Also, in recent years, I've become much less of a re-reader, but I think I may need to read this one again soon.  It's just that good.  I reviewed it here.  (YA historical fiction)

Snow Day in Oxford!

Well, for the first time since we moved to Oxford, we had a proper snowfall.  It came down just about all day and it stuck and it was glorious.  Sort of.

(And now I'm going to wax poetic about snow.)

I hadn't realized just how much I missed winter - and snow.  My little prairie girl heart positively bursts with delight when it snows.  I feel calm, serene.  The world gets softer and quieter somehow.

This was the kind of winter day we dreamt about at home.  Lovely falling snow in just sub-zero temperatures.  I walked home from school (about a 45 minute-trek) and didn't get cold at all.

Also, I think Oxford really deserves more snowfalls.  The city looks utterly lovely under a nice white blanket.  Snow on spires - snow on ancient stone walls - snow falling peacefully over churchyards.

I made sure to take pictures, because I don't know how often I'll see Oxford like this.

Mansfield College

Holywell Cemetary, on the way to the English Faculty

Icicles!

I quite liked how the snow settled on the busts of the old men in front of the Sheldonian Theatre.

The Radcliffe Camera, with All Souls College in behind

The University Church, recently out from under a bunch of scaffolding

And the cemetary at St. Giles, a great place to have lunch with Tim

 Now.  The negative part of the story.  You see, the British don't get snow like this very often.  Today 10 cm/4 inches were expected to accumulate across much of England.  Schools closed.  The Bodleian's library system closed at 3 pm.  Trains and buses were cancelled and delayed.  This is all rather annoying.

Especially since at home everyone just drives slowly and it isn't really a big deal to have this much snow in a day.  The only time parts of the University of Saskatchewan started shutting down during my undergraduate days was when Saskatoon had its worst blizzard in fifty years!

I suppose it all depends on what you're used to.  Thus, I cackle every time I read about how "very cold" it is in the British press.  Cold?  You ain't seen nothing!  It was -2 for most of today in Oxford; tomorrow's high in Saskatoon tomorrow will be -21.  (For comparison purposes, the coldest it has EVER gotten in Oxford is -17...)

So, I hope the snow sticks around (though it does mean I can't cycle down to school while it lasts) and that the weather-related disruptions end soon.  Also, perhaps the government and local councils should look into investing in more winter weather-related infrastructure?

Review: DAYS OF BLOOD AND STARLIGHT, by Laini Taylor

This is a review of the second book in Laini Taylor's fabulous Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, with thoughts on the first book (HERE BE SPOILERS!) and the construction of the trilogy as a whole, because I think Taylor is doing some really interesting series-crafting.

I loved Daughter of Smoke and Bone when I read it last autumn and included it on my list of favourite books read in 2011 (here).  I didn't review it at the time, however, because I felt I needed to think about it a bit more.  The novel is a fantastic take on what I suppose would be considered the paranormal romance genre - as the main character, Karou, is apparently human, and enters into a passionate romance with an angel.  Except that the novel also explodes that genre, leavening everything with a good deal of quirky humour and, ultimately, a tragedy of apocalyptic proportions, stretching across two lifetimes and two worlds.

In the first installment, Karou discovers that she is, in fact, not human but a chimaera and that her life as a blue-haired art student in Prague, running errands for Brimstone - a collector of teeth, seller of wishes - is really a second chance.  This is what Karou discovers when she and Akiva, the angel mentioned above, break the wishbone Brimstone always wore and Karou was never allowed to touch.

And this is where my one quibble came in.

Taylor makes a very bold move when that wishbone is broken.  A large chunk of the novel's third act is an extended flashback, in which Karou re-experiences her former life as a chimaera in the world of Eretz, when she fell in love with Akiva for the first time, even though the seraphim and chimerae are sworn enemies and have been at war for centuries.  It follows Madrigal (Karou's previous identity) through her capture and execution by the Warlord's son and then her salvation by Brimstone, who trades in teeth because he uses them to resurrect the dead.

When I first read the novel, I raced through this section as quickly as possible, trying to put together the clues to Karou's old life and figure out her relationship with Akiva.  It's very risky to introduce a flashback of this magnitude with new characters and, in this case, a brand new world.  It can backfire, as most would argue backstory section in Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, does.  In that case, it bogs down the properly interesting detective story with much less interesting narrative of Mormons in Utah.  Here, I think it works.  I especially think it works because it allows the second novel in the series to get off to a proper start, since Taylor has already laid the groundwork for the characters and conflicts Karou must deal with in Eretz.

But I felt and still feel that in both the backstory in Book One and the narrative proper in Book Two, Eretz is not drawn in as detailed a fashion as I might like it to be.  I'm not the kind of fantasy reader who demands incredibly intricate world-building, but I do feel like I would like more.  Eretz doesn't feel as real to me as Karou's life in Prague did or as the kasbah in Days does.

31/10/2013 Note: I recently reread Daughter of Smoke and Bone and enjoyed it possibly even more the second time.  The writing is beautiful, the characters are magnificent, the fated nature of Karou and Akiva's love is hinted at in ways that I totally missed the first time.  Also, I think I may have done a disservice in my little criticism of the world-building of Eretz - there is a fair bit of detail there, which I think I missed on my first read because the plot compelled me to read so quickly.

Now that my quibble is out of the way, I want to lavish some praise on Taylor's structuring of the trilogy.  Once Karou's previous life has been revealed, Akiva then makes the astonishing revelation that, in revenge for the chimaerae's killing of Madrigal, he has just been responsible for their genocide and Brimstone, the only father Karou ever knew, is dead.  Karou leaves Akiva and passes through a portal in the sky to Eretz, creating as jaw-dropping a cliffhanger as Lord Asriel walking into the sky at the end of The Golden Compass.

The ending of Book One blows everything wide open.  The mystery of the disappearing portals to Elsewhere that was such a big part of Daughter is nothing in relation to the much higher stakes of Book Two.  Where Daughter was in large part a romance, Days sees Karou/Madrigal and Akiva perhaps forever sundered because of Akiva's destruction of Karou's people.  As she puts it, it's as if Juliet had woken to find Romeo still alive - but learns that he has destroyed her family and city.  How can they possibly be together after a breakage like that?

Days follows Karou and Akiva as they separately deal with the politics within their own peoples and try desperately to find a way to end the neverending war between the angels and chimaerae, a war in which both sides are culpable and both sides have suffered greatly.  Characters on both sides are revealed in all shades of grey; politics and stratagem are delineated with the subtlety of Megan Whalen Turner's Thief books; the prose is propulsive, while also being striking and often hilariously funny.

An important sub-plot is the romance between Karou's Prague friends Zuzana (who resembles a "rabid fairy") and Mik, which gives the otherwise quite dark book a necessary shot of humour and humanity.

The book has two separate and very big climaxes, one of which is especially brutal and visceral and had me tense with dread.  Book Three, due out in 2014, looks set to play out a war in heaven that could have grave impact on the human world.  I'm hoping that against all the odds, Karou and Akiva will somehow find their way back to each other.

Review: BLACK SPRING, by Alison Croggon

 Alison Croggon is an author whose books I must own right after release, even though that usually means expensive shipping from Australia.  But it's always worth it.

I fondly remember the day I discovered Alison Croggon's first fantasy novel The Naming in the young adult section at McNally Robinson's Saskatoon store, one day in May or June 2005.  I will always remember reading it while listening to the Within Temptation album Mother Earth.  Strange how those associations stick with you.  If you have a chance to read the Books of Pellinor (The Naming/The Gift, The Riddle, The Crow, and The Singing) and you are a high fantasy fan, do it!  They're wonderful and work in some ways as a feminist, post-colonial corrective to Tolkien.

So, when Croggon posted on her blog a few years back that her next novel was a gothic fantasy take on Wuthering Heights, I was sold.  Wuthering Heights is, quite possibly, my favourite novel of all time and I figured that if anyone could do it justice, Alison Croggon could, especially since she, like Emily Bronte, is both a poet and novelist.

However, because this book has a complex relationship with Bronte's, it's a bit difficult for me to write about - because I love the source text so much, because I also have literary critical opinions about the novel and how its works, and because Croggon's take probably fits into the Neo-Victorian genre (think A.S. Byatt's Possession), a genre which often creates complex intertextual links with Victorian novels and which I have researched and written on in the past year.

That said, there are two important things you can take away from this review.

1)  This is a fantastic book.
2)  In my opinion, it is also a respectful, critical, fascinating reworking of Wuthering Heights.  If you like Bronte's novel, I suspect you will enjoy Croggon's too.


(As a sidenote, I would be curious to see how people who are decidedly not lovers of Wuthering Heights feel about Black Spring, as it is quite faithful to the source text and reproduces the love story that isn't really a love story, as well as the unsympathetic characters and violence and capital "R" Romanticism of the original.)

Alison Croggon’s Black Spring follows the layered narrative structure and overall plot of the original novel very closely, so that any deviation is significant.   The novel begins with an urbane, self-absorbed Lockwood figure readying to leave the city for a spell in the wild, brutal plain society to the north.  There, he stays over in the house of his landlord, Damek (Heathcliff) and sees a vision of a beautiful, desperate woman in a mirror (Cathy Earnshaw).  From Anna (Nelly), he learns the mysterious history of Lina, born a witch in a society where women cannot practice magic, her foster brother Damek and their love, and the unforgiving laws of vendetta that structure their world.

I could go on and on about the really interesting changes and tweaks Croggon makes to Bronte's novel, the ways in which vendetta externalises the very personal revenge carried out by Bronte's Heathcliff, how making Lina a witch allows her very real power in a patriarchal society and allows her agency Cathy cannot have, the way Anna and Lina's relationship as women and "milk sisters" shifts the core of the story away from Heathcliff/Damek or the "romance" that readers sometimes mistakenly see as central to Wuthering Heights.  Also, because I knew the plot of Wuthering Heights, I was expecting certain events going in (especially a particular death) and was pleasantly surprised when they did not occur.  Neo-Victorian novels sometimes play on this familiarity with the source text and defamiliarize the story by twisting the "knowledgeable" reader's expectations, thus making the narrative new.  Croggon's novel does just that.  But I'll leave it there.  The book is a brilliant gothic fantasy all on its own but it gains in complexity and depth through its relationship to its source text.

I eagerly await Croggon's next novel, a prequel to the Pellinor series about Cadvan's earlier life.

Review: THE DIVINERS, by Libba Bray

North American edition

 I've been a fan of Libba Bray's since discovering and devouring her Victorian boarding school/secret society/alternate world Gemma Trilogy during my undergraduate degree.  Since then, she's written two standalones, Printz award-winning Going Bovine and Beauty Queens, neither of which I have read yet (though I may need to rectify this soon).

I was really pleased when I found out Libba Bray was returning to the realm of historical fantasy and doubly pleased that she was setting her new trilogy in the 1920s.  The Roaring Twenties seem to be making quite a comeback, what with Boardwalk Empire and the upcoming Baz Luhrman adaption of The Great Gatsby.  In an interview with the UK group Booktrust, Bray explains the sometimes disturbing parallels between the America of today and the 1920s:

"xenophobia, anti-immigration fervor coupled with a nasty nativist streak, fears of terrorism/anarchism, a backlash against labor, a rise in evangelicalism, the creation and worship of a youth culture, and the lionizing of American business and businessmen as sort of the standard bearers of ‘Americanism.’ And, of course, there’s the run up to financial collapse."

Also gorgeous Australian edition.

 So, there are many reasons to write about the 1920s today.  Plus, all the fun stuff: flappers, speakeasies, Art Deco stylings, etc.  (The era also makes for lovely book cover design, I must say).

The novel begins with flapper Evie, stuck in the back of beyond in Ohio, who is sent to stay with her uncle in New York City after she causes a scandal after doing an object-reading, a talent she must keep hidden.  Her uncle is the curator of the The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, which seems dull, until Evie, Uncle Will, and friends attempt to solve a series of occult-based killings by a mysterious figure named Naughty John.

British edition (which I own)

The novel sets up a great cast of characters: Evie (whom I didn't especially like for a chunk of the book, as she seeks the limelight and rushes from one excitement to the next, never thinking much about other people, but she developed wonderfully), her much more staid friend Mabel, daughter of Socialist campaigners, Jericho, who has a secret and is Uncle Will's ward, Theta and Henry, who live in the same building as Uncle Will and are part of the Ziegfield follies, Sam, a pickpocket searching for his mother, and finally, Memphis, a Harlem numbers runner and poet, who once had healing powers. 

Most of these teenaged characters have visions of a storm gathering over empty fields and a man in a stovepipe hat.  The are Diviners, people with special abilities who are making a comeback.  Not all of them are centrally concerned with the Naughty John killings, a plot which is wrapped up in this first installment, but I'm sure they will come into their own in future volumes.

The Diviners is intricately plotted and historically detailed, with some quite scary horror sequences, great characters, and a real sense of American history, especially in terms of religion and superstition.  I am very much looking forward to the next two books.

Coming (Very) Soon

I'm going to make up for not blogging for most of December by posting a bunch of year-end (and year-beginning) stuff in the next few days, including:

1) Book reviews!  I've read a bunch of fabulous YA novels in the last two months and I want to share them with you (Libba Bray's The Diviners, Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight, Alison Croggon's Black Spring, and Rachel Hartman's Seraphina)

2) The now unavoidable Music of Michaelmas 2012 post, which will feature a retrospective of my favourite Within Temptation songs, as I spent a lot of time listening to their back catalogue in the lead up to their anniversary concert in Antwerp.

3)  An annotated list of my favourite books of 2012.

4)  And finally, a 2012 retrospective with, possibly, goals/resolutions, etc. for 2013.

Hold onto your hats!

Fun December Things: A List

1. Mulled wine, my new favourite hot drink
2. Seeing Florence + The Machine live in London
3. Visiting Dr Johnson's house
4. Seeing the new digital restoration of Lawrence of Arabia at the BFI (with an actual and much-needed intermission)
5. Scottish country dancing at Tim's work Christmas party.  Very Jane Austen, while simultaneously being very Scottish.
6. Snow before Christmas (unlike last year's snow in February)
7. This morning's hoar frost-covered spider's web