TOO MANY CURSES, A. Lee Martinez

What do you do when you throw together a kobold, a sadistic wizard and packrat, and a castle full of enchanted creatures and objects who just want to get back to their normal lives, and not get mauled, petrified, or consumed by a door that must never be opened? When you put it like that, it sounds like a Harry Potter spinoff, but even Hogwarts was never this unruly. Instead of a boy wizard, our intrepid hero is a foxy-looking kobold named Nessy who just wants to get through her chores without the castle falling into utter madness, especially after her master, Margle the Horrendous, is accidentally murdered. Such is the romp Too Many Curses.

This fantasy screwball comedy brings out all the wildness of its premise. But Curses isn’t exactly a laugh-out-loud riot. Much of the humor relies on dry wit and quirky characters, not clear-cut punch lines. It will get a chuckle out of you, but don’t be too disappointed if you’re not rofl-ing. Now and then you can feel the humor push a bit beyond its reach and trip over itself. Thankfully those moments pass quickly and are easily forgiven. Maybe it’s the type of humor that hits its mark best when someone is actually delivering it. In other words, I really would like to see a film adaptation of this book and how comic minds would perform these scenes. But there’s more than humor working in this book’s favor.

THE LEGEND OF DRIZZT: HOMELAND, R.A. Salvatore

Wow, a fantasy book that isn’t Young Adult? It’s a little unsettling, actually, that so many entries in the fantasy genre (and this blog) are geared to a younger audience. Perhaps not that surprising, since literary works are considered more “adult” and “serious”, but even sci-fi gets to explore adult themes more widely. Aside from Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings, much of fantasy falls under YA or romance. I’m hoping that novel series like Forgotten Realms will keep cropping up and drawing in older readers in search of stories both insightful and entertaining.

The appeal of these Dungeons and Dragons books, like its tabletop origins, is that people across the age spectrum with a love for fantasy can appreciate and enjoy them. That’s certainly the case with Salvatore’s The Legend of Drizzt series, or at least his first chronological installment, Homeland. There’s good-old action and lore to excite the action junkie and lore nerd, but he also teases out some social commentary about oppressive societies that use fear and propaganda to control its population, and how suffocating it is to live in them, unable to escape. While the world of the drow (dark elves) in Menzoberranzan bears witness to obviously questionable morality, it can make us reflect on those aspects in our own culture an outsider might find objectively horrifying but we accept on a daily basis.

THE SLEEPER AND THE SPINDLE, Neil Gaiman

I almost feel as though this should be considered a Short Review since The Sleeper and the Spindle pretty much qualifies as a short story in length. With its illustrations, it comes out to just under 70 pages. And honestly, it’s a concise, beautifully rendered story that doesn’t need much said, and shouldn’t have too much said to avoid spoilers, so forgive the brevity of this review.

As one should come to expect from Gaiman’s approach to rehashed fairy tales, the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty weave together in both a new and familiar way, and with such seamless ease you’d think other writers would have tried to bring them together sooner. The opening action follows three of the seven dwarves visiting the cusp of Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom to procure fine cloth for Snow White’s upcoming wedding. Right away we glimpse at the devotion the dwarves have for her (if only these three—keeping the number of dwarves low is an understandable alteration for the sake of effective characterization) as well as understand where we are in Snow White’s story. 

THE HOB’S BARGAIN, Patricia Briggs

As a (new) reviewer, I can occasionally—ha, yeah, occasionally—hit a brick wall when it comes to writing on a book I’ve enjoyed. Why? A good question I don’t quite have the answer for. It probably comes down to being reluctant to deconstruct the weaknesses as well as the strengths of a work when you have less tangible reasons for liking it. How does The Hob’s Bargain stand apart from other fantasy books? How is it similar? Is the devil in the details rather than the, let’s face it, tried and true formulas of stories in general? Finding the answers is a large part of why I started reviewing fantasy books.

As a fan of both Rumpelstiltskin- and Beauty and the Beast-inspired stories, the back cover of Hob’s Bargain promised a mix of both. Aren, our hero, is a peasant woman with the power of foresight, though it’s a fickle power she doesn’t have much control over. Only when the raw magic of the world is released, previously bound by human mages, does she begin to understand her gift. But with this self-discovery come the dangers of untamed magic resurrecting supernatural creatures of myth, including the Hob, a powerful being who is known for its deals. To better understand her magic and guarantee the safety of her village, which is filled with people who distrust her now that they know about her magic, Aren strikes a bargain with the Hob. 

TIGER LILY, Jodi Lynn Anderson

When it comes to adapting Barrie’s story of a fantastic land where children never grow up, the aspect that just about everyone stumbles on is the portrayal of his Native American characters, who even in the original story suffer from the influences of colonialism and racism. Jodi Anderson attempts to not only tackle a new vision of Neverland’s native residents but put them in the spotlight as a culture and a collage of diverse characters. That doesn’t spare her from some deserved criticism of the stereotypes and caricatures she employs, as better dissected by Debbie Reese in her review of the book. Forgive my willingness to leave the problematic elements to the scrutiny of critics with a better grasp of the prevailing racial issues in Western literature that Tiger Lily reflects. I’ve honestly struggled to post this review out of fear that I wasn’t giving the Native American portrayals their due analysis, as my own knowledge on the subject is limited. For anyone interested, you can read Reese’s article here, and I recommend you do. I’ll mostly stick to assessing the story elements on the whole.

THE LOOKING GLASS WARS, Frank Beddor

Between this and Tiger Lily, you’d think the latter would’ve given me more trouble while I worked out how to address its flawed approach to racism and queer identity while also praising how it brought Barrie’s characters and world to life in a new way. Well, it came to a 50-50 split over which book gave me the splitting headache of these last four months. Where Tiger Lily and The Looking Glass Wars differ lies in how I can’t contribute much social criticism to the first (as you will see next week), while I have plenty of story-based issues with the second.

This blog reviews various works of fantasy, but my specialized interest is in reworked popular stories that, over a century later, still enthrall us. Sometimes I’m rewarded with works like Tiger Lily; while it’s not free of problems, it successfully respects and perpetuates the spirit of the original. Then we have The Looking Glass Wars. Oh, boy, do we ever. We have it so much that it’s prompted my longest review to date. I pray for my readers’ perseverance (if I have any readers at this point).

Let’s start with one of my biggest adaptation pet-peeves.

OUT OF THE PAST, Kalinda Vazquez & Corinna Bechko

Remember how, back in December, I was going to post a review of Once Upon A Time: Out of the Past as a follow-up to Shadow of the Queen? Yeah . . .

The long and the short of it, there’s a lot of material to cover in this book, and that’s a good thing. Out of the Past distinguishes itself from Shadow of the Queen and has learned a few important lessons. Telling four stories instead of one over the course of 88 pages demands tighter structure and perhaps simpler self-contained ideas. I think the book benefits on the whole. We get to see more characters following their own arcs, spared attempts to entwine them all into one plot that would only stretch them thin. They also each nail a personal, crucial aspect of each character’s development. Shadow of the Queen had a similar goal, but magical shenanigans distracted it from that purpose.

That said, this collection has its share of strengths and weaknesses, and they need to their fair share of consideration. Much as I tried, I couldn’t do the whole book justice in one review. So I’m breaking up Out of the Past into four “short reviews” for your reading pleasure. You can go directly to those reviews here: Dead in the Water (Captain Hook), Truth and Daggers (Rumplestiltskin & Belle), Ghosts (Evil Queen), Tea Party in March (Mad Hatter).