When I was a little girl, I used to finish a book and turn around and read it all over again. The Little Princess, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Travel Far, Pay No Fare. I’m not talking about rereading (I still do loads of rereading), but finishing a book and flipping it over and starting all over again, because you can’t stand the idea of leaving it behind right away. And look, I was serious about Megan Whalen Turner before. I loved those books. When I finished the first three and got the fourth from my ever-obliging big sister, I left the…
41 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
Review: Beyond the Vicarage, Noel Streatfeild
Published 16 Jun 2010
by
Gin Jenny
HaHA. A while ago I read the first two volumes of Streatfeild’s slightly-fictionalized autobiography, and I could not get the third one. I believe I rather fatalistically said the library didn’t have it and it was out of print and I’d never ever find out what happened to Noel Streatfeild. Obvious nonsense because of course we know she became a classic writer of children’s books. But anyway the public library here shocked me by having the third book, and I read it on Sunday after church. I dunno. My feelings were mixed. I liked reading about Streatfeild’s becoming a writer. …
17 CommentsReview: The White Road, Lynn Flewelling
Published 15 Jun 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Two things I enjoy in fantasy books: Chicanery. And political machinations. Preferably at the same time, like when people use their wits to effect the toppling of regimes or noble houses. I have no particular books in mind when I mention this, of course, although now that I mention it, I do seem to recall that there is a series of books by one Megan Whalen Turner that possess both of these elements. IN SPADES. Two things I tend not to enjoy in fantasy books: Lots of made-up words. And fuzzy-edged pseudo-mystic religions. And look, it hurts me to say…
48 CommentsReview: House of Many Ways & Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones
Published 30 May 2010
by
Gin Jenny
I love Diana Wynne Jones, and because I have not told you why I love her with sufficient vehemence or frequency, I will tell you why right now. It is because her characters discover things about themselves! They discover things, and they learn! Glorious! People in her books proceed by instinct and guesswork, and although these are not my own preferred means of proceeding, I like it that Diana Wynne Jones’s characters succeed. Their approach to magic is beautifully matter-of-fact. People can learn to do magic better, or more specifically, from teachers; but at a fundamental level, and often very…
19 CommentsReviewing other people’s grief
Published 28 May 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Alone in my sublet apartment, no library books whatsoever and no library cards also, and my sublessor having very few books unrelated to law and class anxieties, I picked up Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and read it. It’s a very unfortunate book! When Joan Didion’s only daughter Quintana was in the hospital with a serious brain problem, she and her husband went home for dinner, and her husband died. Being a writer, she wrote about it. Attempting to research death, she finds herself without a road map for grieving. She finds herself subconsciously taking measures to bring…
24 CommentsReview: River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters
Published 9 Apr 2010
by
Gin Jenny
I have a girl-crush on Elizabeth Peters. She set a murder mystery at a romance novel writers’ convention; she spoofs H. Rider Haggard and Gothic novels; she made one of her characters lament “the first sour grape in the fruit salad of togetherness”. The woman cracks me up. However, I thought that Children of the Storm should have been the last in the Amelia Peabody series (it gave me the pleasing feeling that the series had come full circle), and I have not cared much about the books that came after that. But I liked River in the Sky. It…
15 CommentsReview: Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
Published 11 Mar 2010
by
Gin Jenny
There is a particular sort of novel of which I always profess to be passionately fond: the sort with one plotline in the olden days with people doing their olden-day thing, and one in the present with eager scholars researching the very olden-day events in the other plotline. (Is there a word for this sort of book? Can there be one?) If you have ever reviewed a book like this on your blog, I have probably commented to say something like, “Love this sort of book! Adore! Worship! Cannot imagine my life without!” and added it to my reading list…
29 CommentsReview: White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
Published 6 Mar 2010
by
Gin Jenny
In White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi has done the thing I was afraid she wasn’t going to manage, which is to become EVEN BETTER YET in her third book than she was in her second. She can’t keep this up much longer, right? I mean she has to plateau at some point, right? Helen Oyeyemi! What will you do to stagger and amaze us next? White is for Witching is about a set of twins, Eliot and Miranda, who live in a haunted house. Miranda has pica, and the house hates foreigners. As the book goes on, we come…
32 CommentsReview: The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi
Published 21 Feb 2010
by
Gin Jenny
You may have heard of Helen Oyeyemi’s most recent book, White is for Witching, as it seems to have begun to make its way round the blogosphere. But it is all checked out at my library. I decided to make a virtue of necessity and read Oyeyemi’s three books in the order she wrote them, starting with The Icarus Girl which, I discovered, she wrote before she was twenty and published when she was twenty-two. Jessamy Harrison is a lonely little girl trying to find her place. Daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, she is never sure…
18 CommentsReview: Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones
Published 14 Feb 2010
by
Gin Jenny
So Fire and Hemlock is a retelling of the ballad “Tam Lin”, but it incorporates elements from a dozen other fairy tales, myths, and legends. I read this article one time that Diana Wynne Jones wrote, about the process of writing Fire and Hemlock and all the different strands of stories she used, which was quite, quite interesting. The story begins with a young woman called Polly, who is packing her things for Oxford and has come across a book that she remembers being quite different to what it is now. This leads her to the realization that she has…
46 Comments