Heart's Blood

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier
Read: 1/7/10-1/27/10 (but only in about three sittings -- around 50 pages one day, the rest of it a few weeks later)
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Fantasy, Romance, Fairy Tale, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval, Family, Fear... and a couple other tags I won't include this time just in case it'd spoil things for a couple of you.

Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is with the author's own words (I will link to it only with the warning that the page includes spoilers, but I don't think the part I've copied here really spoils anything, unless you just don't want to know what a book is about at all before you read it, in which case, why are you here?):

"Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favourite fairy tales, and readers will recognise the bones of it in Heart’s Blood: a mysterious house with an alienated, disfigured master, a priceless plant growing in a forbidden garden, magic mirrors and unusual household retainers. The story of my novel has the same general shape as that of Beauty and the Beast.

However, this is far from a fairy tale retelling. It’s not even a close reinterpretation of the traditional tale. Heart’s Blood is a love story, a... [Marcy just now realized one of the descriptions she uses could be a big spoiler to the right kind of brain and cut it] ...a family saga, a story about people overcoming their difficulties, and a little slice of Irish history, as well as a homage to a favourite fairy tale."

Aside from the magic mirrors and one other spoiler aspect, there isn't a great deal of the fantastic in this book, especially when one has "Beauty and the Beast" in mind while reading it. It had a gothic feel to me (although I'm not widely read in gothic literature), even more so than some of the traditional retellings, which seems a little odd now that I think of it. I suppose when there's already a beast in an isolated castle you don't want to make the tale too dark, or the happy ending begins to feel implausible. And I suppose it made particular sense for Heart's Blood, because one of the main themes concerns facing your fears, so a dark, frightening mood lends itself to the theme.

And now you're going to think it's horror or something. Not so much. It's fantasy, romance, and historical fiction; in that order, I think. Maybe more romance than fantasy, but not enough that you would ever want to shelve it there. Heavens, no. For starters, fantasy readers don't like going into the romance section, whereas the reverse is not true. Romance is one of those things... any genre can have a pretty huge dose of it without necessarily offending its readership or moving it in the bookstore. Anywho.

As for the historical fiction, it's set in western Ireland, Connacht, in the twelfth century. Dang it, I started a new paragraph, but that's really all I have to say about that. Huh. I mean, I could say more about the period, but I don't really need to for my purposes, and I'd risk spoilers. So meh. You can read more about it (on the author's page, or elsewhere) after you finish the book.

I didn't like it quite as much as some of her other books, but that isn't saying much, as Daughter of the Forest and Wildwood Dancing are among my favorites. I'm not quite sure why I didn't like it as much. It was certainly well written and enjoyable. It just didn't have that extra something those two did, to flabbergast and amaze me. Maybe the themes and characters didn't speak to me as much? And yet, I did like and relate to them; the hero not as much as other characters, perhaps, maybe that's it. Maybe I stayed too busy thinking about the book instead of living it. I'm really not sure. It was very good. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if other readers fell in love with it.

The Wolf Hunt

The Wolf Hunt by Gillian Bradshaw
Read: 9/11/09
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Historical Fiction, France, Medieval, Fantasy, Romance, Sonderbook (click here for Sondy's review), and another tag I won't actually use because it'd be a bit of a spoiler

Ware spoilers for this book, for they abound. The book's cover blurb, the Publisher's Weekly review, several of the top amazon customer reviews -- for some reason they all feel compelled to summarize the entire plot, right up to the climax of the book. I understand a certain amount of summary is customary in reviews, but the entire thing? Good grief.

In some ways I didn't mind too much myself -- the only reason I picked the book up at all is because I was browsing in the library and picked this one out of a row of books by Gillian Bradshaw based on reading the blurb. The description fit my mood at the time and sounded more interesting to me than her other books. I was chagrined as I read to realize how much the blurb had revealed, but it was still well-written enough to keep my attention, even when the details I'd picked it up for were long in coming and I found I already knew certain elements which could have made for suspense.

So, what can I tell you about the book, without spoiling anything myself? Not as much as I'd like (perhaps the reason so many tell everything...), but here goes. As you can tell from my tags, it's historical fiction, set in medieval France. There are a few fantasy elements, but they're included in what I can't tell you, although they're really not hard to guess. It's based on a poem by the twelfth-century Marie de France, and set at the end of the eleventh century, although she says in the author's note, "as befits a medieval romance, the history is not entirely exact." At the very beginning of the book (so don't read this if you want utter and complete spoiler-freedom) the main character, Marie Penthievre, is kidnapped from her priory in Normandy and taken to the court of Brittany, where she fears she'll be forced into a marriage that will give Brittany her Norman lands. Although there was a king over all of France at the time, Normandy and Brittany were basically at war much of the time, despite that. Early medieval, and all.

I didn't find the plot as melodramatic as Sondy did. Probably in part because of how much I was expecting, from reading the blurb. Partly because some of the more melodramatic elements, like her kidnapping, are entirely plausible (actually quite common) for that time and place in history. And unlike certain books in the romance genre (this book is certainly romantic, but doesn't really fit into the genre), the author's done her research, which does a great deal to make kidnappings and things seem quite level-headed rather than melodramatic. She's not just spinning a yarn set in the vague romantic past.

Quite the contrary, this is one of the best medieval novels I've read, as far as being true to the time period. She doesn't gloss over anything, she gets across a good deal of their mindset as least as it relates to the fantasy elements, and she doesn't make them seem like idiots in the process (which is good, because medievals weren't idiots). I knew she was a scholar, but not even all scholars get the medieval period right, and most of her books are set in the ancient world, so I was quite relieved.

There's also a good dose of mystery, but it isn't a who-done-it -- you know exactly who did it, the whole time. The mystery is in how in the world the culprit is ever going to be caught, how the main characters are even going to realize there is a mystery to solve. Add in some interesting thematic elements, and I highly recommend this one. Enjoy!

Heir to Sevenwaters

Heir to Sevenwaters (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #4 -- okay, okay, not exactly, but it amuses me, and it almost is) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 1/17/09-1/18/09
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval, Irish Mythology, Mythology

Beautiful book. I'm so glad she came back to Sevenwaters, although as far as I've heard everything she writes is wonderful. Plot-wise, it definitely is distinct from the original trilogy, and there's a lot of promise for the two books to follow. I hope she is able to finish them. The romance was fairly obvious, but it often is in romance, and it was still good; well developed, actually romantic, all of that. And the fairy tale elements! It wasn't a fairy tale retold, but the elements of a fairy tale were definitely all there. Kind of like Fruits Basket. Only different. Um, with Irish mythology instead of the Chinese zodiac. Yeah. It's not so much a new take on the existing mythology (as fairy tales retold sometimes are) as... an addition to them, I suppose. Recommended.

Child of the Prophecy

Child of the Prophecy (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #3) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 12/19/08-12/21/08
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval, Redemption

I really really liked this one; especially the perspective, the character Marillier chose to be narrator. It added a wonderful tension to the story and immediacy to the battle between dark and light. It would have made a good book in its own right, but with the backdrop and setup of the last two books the perspective change had an even greater impact. Delightful.

Son of the Shadows

Son of the Shadows (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #2) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 12/7/08-12/18/08 (started reading before that on 7-8-08, but stopped after only 20 pages, so I just started again in December)
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval

As you can see, it has been a few months since I read this, so this won't be a super-detailed review. I remember I didn't like this one quite as much as the first or third, but my opinion is hardly universal. Certainly it was a good book. But the first one was amazing, and had other things going for it that I won't talk about for those of you who haven't read it yet. And the third one... well, in my opinion the perspective (especially with the setup of the first two books) made that one, well, also amazing. So. I think this one was the least self-contained of the three (or at least it has the least closure -- like I said, the third one relies on setup), which is probably another reason I liked it less than the others. It does have its own story, but that story is shaped by motivations and struggles which aren't fully played out yet. And there's a little less time actually with the love interest too, which can be annoying. Like in Sleepless in Seattle. I like to see their romantic interactions. The more the better. "Interactions" being the key word. Not just daydreaming or hearing others talk about them or hearing their voice on the radio (again, Sleepless in Seattle). Yep. Anywho.

The Discarded Image

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis
Read: 9/28/08-1/5/09
LibraryThing tags: Literary Criticism, Medieval, History, Philosophy, SLOBS

This should be required reading for everyone. Okay, it might be a bit academic for that. Still. His focus is very much on interpreting literature, so if a historical tangent would be important but has no bearing on the literature, he says so and moves on. Nonetheless, for such a focused little book, he covers a decent amount of history, especially the history of philosophy. He corrects several very common historical misconceptions, like the idea that the medievals thought the world was flat, or that they would consider a sphere problematic because everything would fall off the other side (something he himself uses in Narnia, oddly enough). I've seen this corrected in other books, but Lewis' analysis is such a great read.

Obviously they did differ with us on some aspects of astronomy, but that affected life and imagination in different ways than one might think. For example (not the best of all possible examples, but I like this quote),

“The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything--and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison."

I love his preface. He explains of his book, "I cannot boast that it contains much which a reader could not have found out for himself if, at every hard place in the old books, he had turned to commentators, histories, encyclopaedias, and other such helps. I thought the lectures worth giving and the book worth writing because that method of discovery seemed to me and seems to some others rather unsatisfactory. For one thing, we turn to the helps only when the hard passages are manifestly hard. But there are treacherous passages which will not send us to the notes. They look easy and aren't. Again, frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself."

And from much later in the book, one of the things that "look easy" and isn't: “The importance of all this for our own purpose is that nearly every reference to Reason in the old poets will be in some measure misread if we have in mind only ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. One of the most moving passages in Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Romance of the Rose (5813 sq.) is that where Reason, Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess, deigns to plead with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love. This is frigid if Reason were only what Johnson made her. You cannot turn a calculating machine into a goddess. But Raison la bele is ‘no such cold thing’.”

I wonder if, later in the Enlightenment and modernity when you have the exaltation of the more specific type of reason, the deductive part, if they ever took as support the old statements glorifying Reason, when in fact those old statements referred to something larger, something that could not be justified by the smaller meaning alone. Seems quite possible.

And later in the preface, "There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its 'quaintness', and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort."

Daughter of the Forest

Daughter of the Forest (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #1) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 7/1/08-7/3/08
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval

Doesn't this list of tags just make your mouth water? No? Hmph. You're weird.

I can't tell you one of my favorite things about this book, because premise or not, it's not something you find out for sure until over a hundred pages in. So you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. It's good, read it. One of my favorites, now. The prose is wonderful. Despite its length (544 pages), it feels very polished, crafted and magical.

Book of a Thousand Days

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

Good book, good book (happy dance)! Inspired by the fairy tale "Maid Maleen" and medieval Mongolia (kept making me think of a couple things I'd read of Kazakhstan for one of my classes), I think this is my favorite of Shannon Hale's YA since Goose Girl. They both appeal to my desire to be known, understood and protected without having to tell people whatever it is I want known directly to their face. Yes, that's kind of an unhealthy desire. But, even in its perversion, I think it provides a glimpse of God's understanding of us, so far beyond what we could ever tell Him. Maybe that's why it seems so romantic and lovely in story form. And it's not like the main character in either story could have solved all the problems by herself with better active communication (or at least, she couldn't know that she could), or like either of them were particularly passive and helpless -- I only mention it and say it's an unhealthy desire because, as another book reminded me, I can forget that my husband can't magically read my mind, and that I shouldn't love him any less for that. But in relation to God, it makes a lot of sense. And our romance here on earth often mirrors that, albeit dimly. Every so often we understand each other better than we understand ourselves...

"Oh Master, grant that I may never seek...
...to be understood, as to understand..."