Bye-bye Broadcast

For the moment, we are a television-less household. We'll see how long this lasts.

It's not that we were ill-prepared for the switch to digital. We got our converter boxes months ago, and used them this winter after our local public television and ABC stations went digital on the original deadline in February.

But then the troubles started. We discovered that we only got digital signals when the skies were crystal clear. Then the trees sprouted leaves, and we lost all digital entirely.

We have an antenna in the attic, which we always liked a lot because we didn't have to worry about northeasters and ice storms. Now we have to spend $200 or so for a ginormous rooftop antenna, and possibly still more than that for a signal booster. And even then we're wondering if we'll get a signal.

It was very nice of the feds to help us out with converter box coupons. But the boxes are turning out to be the least of our needs.

We don't get cable in our little town--not that I'd want it, being easily distracted from my daily round. God help me if I had a bazillion channels to choose from, plus the guilty feeling that I'd better be watching them because I paid money for them. (New Englander? Me?) And even if I wanted to be channel-enhanced, I wouldn't get a satellite dish for the great pleasure of losing tv and internet every time the sky got cloudy.

There's just about no entertainment worth watching on the regular networks, but we definitely will miss the news shows. Here's the plan: We'll watch the news on the internet, either later at night than usual, or the next day. We already read newspapers in the flesh and on line...we'll just do a little more of the latter and add a little more radio. We already watch Olbermann, Stewart, and Colbert on line, the evening after. For entertainment, DVDs or Netflix or Hulu.

And, of course, books, although there are times when the eyes just need a rest.

We may discover we're fine without TV. Except for one nagging feeling: Aren't the airways supposed to be ours for free? So how come we have to fork over $300 or so to get access to them?

JUNE Book Review? Already?

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Heh-heh. I guess this means it's a month since my last post. But, hey, I can sit at the computer without whimpering now, and my brain seems to be my own for the first time in two months. Plus I'm getting out more. Plus my computer's fixed.

So no excuse for NOT turning over a new leaf, right?

Tune in soon for more scintillating posts. And right now...here's the June edition of the Book Review Club. Click on the widget (above) to find other reviews. (The widget won't work until our esteemed founder, Barrie Summy, posts her review. She's in California so there may be a brief delay for us Easterners.)

Nation
By Terry Pratchett
HarperCollins, 2008

Thank you, Nation, for finally bringing me to Terry Pratchett.

For years my soul has struggled. I felt that Terry Pratchett was out there, waiting for me to come to my senses and adore him. Time after time, I picked up one of the Discworld novels, found the writing delightful, laughed out loud at least once a page…and threw the book across the room about halfway through, never to return.

Clearly, there was something wrong with me. This is the funniest writer since P.G. Wodehouse, my friends adore him—why was I incapable of finishing his books? I tried Good Omens, which Pratchett team-wrote with Neal Gaiman, and loved it. Tried a Discworld book again. Threw it across the room.

So I approached his young-adult novel Nation with trepidation, reluctant to be toyed with yet again. But it sounded so good, so completely up my alley. I had to try, just one more time.

And, praise Pratchett, I saw the light. Or at least a glimmer of an inkling of why I was having so much trouble with such a marvelous writer.

I then read The Wee Free Men, supposedly a Discworld book (I don’t know how you’d tell) written for kids. Loved it. I retrieved The Colour of Magic, the first adult Discworld book, from an obscure quarter of my bookshelf and tried it again. I finished it, praise Pratchett, but found it tough going in places.

The glimmer became a radiance. I knew what my problem was. Same old problem I always have: character.

Based on four and a half books (I tried to read Monstrous Regiment a couple of years ago but didn’t finish it), it appears to me that Pratchett believes books for younger readers must have real characters, with full histories and known desires and prejudices, while books for adults can be pure farce with characters we know only superficially. That’s why I—unlike, I admit, most reasonable adults— lose interest halfway through…I just don’t know these people well enough to care what happens to them.

In The Wee Free Men, we know all about fledgling witch Tiffany Aching’s childhood, her heritage, her feelings for her grandmother and baby brother, her love for cheese-making…and where she gets her courage. We’re rooting for her from the minute she clangs a water demon over the head with a frying pan. In The Colour of Magic, all we know about Rincewind is that he got kicked out of wizard school and has a big bad spell lodged in his brain. He’s a coward who learns that his survivor skills sometimes could be mistaken for ethics—which is growth, which is good, but not enough. Nobody else in the book learns much of anything.

Which brings us to Nation, where everyone learns and grows, even entire cultures. The writing is funny, because Pratchett can’t help it. (Description of a main character’s Victorian grandmother: “…a mixture of the warrior queen Boadicea without the chariot, Catherine de Medici without the poisoned rings, and Attila the Hun without his wonderful sense of fun.”) But there’s a serious tale to be told here, of two young people learning that other cultures are just the same old people, sometimes venal and silly but mostly deserving of respect.

The story is simple: A nineteenth century tidal wave washes two kids onto a depopulated tropical island, one a Victorian miss in pantaloons, the other a naked islander. Neither of them knows enough about the other’s culture to be anything but suspicious, but they must suspend their doubts and collaborate in order to survive.

Over time, as other refugees wash ashore, they create an island nation that combines the best parts of several cultures. The Victorian miss, who calls herself Daphne because she (justifiably) hates her respectable given name, Ermintrude, discovers that she has a soul and an affinity with island mysticism. She who had never before seen a naked table leg now is capable of birthing babies. Mau, the islander, grows from a grief-stricken, befuddled boy into the thoughtful, flexible leader of a multicultural society. Add a British succession crisis and earth-shaking revelations of an archeological and mystical nature, and the effects of their teamwork become global.

This could have been a preachy novel, but it isn’t. The fact that it isn’t is what makes it such a work of art. Daphne and Mau are just so achingly, humorously, recognizably human—this is unquestionably their love story as well as a coming of age story for them and the human race. And even the secondary characters are fully rounded—we know as much about Daphne’s father’s character in two chapters as we learn about Rincewind in an entire book.

Reading Nation has given me a better sense of Pratchett, which I think will carry me though a few more of his adult novels. I’m revisiting Monstrous Regiment first. If I bog down, I understand there are a couple more Wee Free Men novels to revive me. Praise Pratchett.

PS: This morning, I found out Nation had won the Horn Book/Boston Globe Award for fiction, on top of many other awards. Richly, richly deserved.

May Book Review

Another month, another book review! (Click on the Book Review Club logo for links to this month's other reviews.)

Our little town has been the Bermuda Triangle of technology this week. My desktop computer and DSL connection both pooched last Friday, leaving me to schlep the laptop to the library when I want to go on line or check email. I am alternately encouraged and disheartened to know that several of my fellow townfolk also have mysteriously crashed their computers at the very same time, some of them more than one. (I put my hands over my laptop’s little ears when I typed that.) ( I love you, little laptop. Love you. You’re the best little laptop. The Best. In the world. ) (Don’t crash.)

Anyway, here’s this month’s review. I’ll check back in when possible.

The Mysterious Benedict Society
By Trenton Lee Stewart
Little, Brown & Co., 2007

Four kids are plucked from orphanages or families that don’t understand them, and trained to save the world by using their unrecognized talents.

They’re in a boarding school setting, with the full complement of baddies and their victims. They face dangers, some physical and others deeply, horrifyingly psychological.

The plot hangs together beautifully. The tone is one of delightful deadpan goofiness, permeating characters and action and setting.

Wow. This novel has it all.

So why did I have to keep forcing myself to read it?

I’d saved this book for a period of convalescence, so perhaps that’s the problem. I was fogged up on painkillers while reading it, only slightly less so when I wrote this review. Bear that in mind, by all means.

But still. I can’t help thinking that at least part of the problem is that I really didn’t care whether the good guys won.

For me, that’s the danger of goofiness. There’s a level of comedy (“level” may not be the right word— maybe I just mean “type”) that isolates me from characters, makes them and their plot and their actions seem less real, less important. This is why I tend not to enjoy slapstick—even, I’m embarrassed to say, the Marx Brothers. The minute I sense that the author cares more about laughs than understanding a character, I lose interest.

MBS sacrifices character for action, message, and humor…and the sacrifice almost works. The fact that the four main characters represent “types” is actually part of the fun. They are brought together by the mysterious Mr. Benedict, head of a very select and very secret group that is trying to prevent the villain from destroying the world in a particularly dreadful way. (I won’t tell you anything about the villain, because finding out about him also is part of the fun.)

Benedict chose the four for their important attributes: There’s eleven-year-old Reynie, a genius and born leader; Stickie, another genius who retains everything he ever reads; the redoubtable Kate, who is uncommonly brave and resourceful ; and the intensely annoying Constance, a very young child whose important attribute remains hidden until the end.

Benedict trains his team , then dispatches them to an island school where all the evil stuff is taking place. The foursome accomplishes remarkable feats of puzzle-solving, intrigue, insight, and derring-do while facing down soul-chilling dangers.

It’s boarding school novel, spy thriller, dystopian warning, and Kids-Against-Authority comic whirlwind rolled up in one. It has a lot in common with the Harry Potter books.

Except for one important factor. In Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, the moment when Harry learns he’s a wizard, destined to leave his despicable foster family and go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is a moment of giddy triumph for the reader as much as for Harry. It’s the moment you dreamt of when your parents had just grounded you—somebody showing up out of the blue to announce that these dull and unworthy people weren’t really your parents, you were really the lost queen of Anatolia. We already know enough about Harry, faults and all, to imagine ourselves in his situation.

In MBS, Reynie is our point of view character. We’re told he’s smarter than everyone at the orphanage and is made fun of, but what we actually experience of his life seems pretty good. He has a tutor who loves him and acknowledges his genius, he has a full stomach and clothes that fit. He doesn’t yearn for his lost parents, or for anything much. We’re intensely interested in what it takes for him to pass Mr. Benedict’s qualifying tests, but otherwise there’s nothing at stake. We don’t identify with Reynie or his situation, we can’t see ourselves in his shoes¬—we want to know what happens next but not necessarily what happens to him.

Worst of all, we don’t know him any better at the end of the novel than at the beginning. He has none of Harry’s flaws or humanity. He’s a figure on a chess board—no matter how thrilling the match, in the end he just gets packed up and put back in the box. Nothing of him stays with you when you close the book.

The Mysterious Benedict Society has a lot going for it—recommended reading, certainly, for anyone who likes puzzles and figuring things out. If you’re looking to populate your brain with a new set of characters, though, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

OK, So Maybe a Bit Longer Than a Week

Howdy. I am not dead, although I play one on TV.

Turns out I was a tad optimistic about my recuperative powers. I don't know where I got the idea that, two weeks after total knee replacement surgery, I would be off painkillers and a fully functioning member of society (such as I ever was).

We are closing in on six weeks and I still needs me my Vicoden. I tried making it through Monday and Tuesday on Tylenol, and re-confirmed my belief that Tylenol is what they use for a placebo in drug trials. By Tuesday night, I was in that achy state in which you can't sit still because you keep thinking the Perfect Painfree Position is out there somewhere waiting for you if you just squirm enough. So, back to Vicoden.

Percocet, which was My Drug for two weeks, is probably mentioned in those torture memos Obama just released. It works great on pain, less great on the entire rest of one's physical being. I lost a week of my life (Week Three, in fact) lying in a nauseated heap a/ because I had been taking Percocet for two weeks or b/ because I was not taking so much of it anymore. Or some lethal combination of a and b. On the plus side, I lost 15 pounds. On the minus side, my clothes hang on me and I don't have the time or the money to replace my entire wardrobe, so now I'm trying to regain 8-10 pounds but not the whole 15, ha ha ha ha. This requires just exactly the right ratio of chocolate chips to yoghurt.

As a result of all this, I did not get to attend the lovely party for the Maine Literary Awards, in which I was a runner-up. My childhood friend Amy MacDonald, who writes books for young kids, did go to the party and said it rocked. Oh well. Back when I thought I was a demigod who could have her knee cut off without particularly noticing, Amy and I were planning to turn the party into a Brookwood (elementary) School reunion, and Pammy Winsor Brindamour, one of my three absolute best friends from childhood, was going to come up from Rockport. No dice, but at least we got to exchange a lot of email.

Rescuing me from my bed of pain was the news that The Unnameables made VOYA's list of Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, 2008. (That link is a pdf.) (Along with Carrie Jones' Need, which means two of the 33 books on the list were written in Hancock County, Maine. Heh.) Plus, Medford and friends have been nominated for YALSA's 2010 Best Books for Young Adults list, the final version of which comes out next January. This is very cool indeed, although my editor is preparing me for disappointment in the end because lots of readers will think my book is anything but young adult. Still, much better than Tylenol. (Carrie's on that one, too. Go Hancock County.)

Possibly the biggest surprise about this whole publishing gig has been the number of times my name has been spelled right in print. I never expected that...in fact, I reserved domain names for my web site in the most common misspellings, because I've lived with this name all my life and I know what it does to people's brains. As it turns out, VOYA and YALSA are the first to get befuddled by all the vowels and things. The VOYA misspelling is one of the common ones, the YALSA one not so much. Guess I'll have to reserve another domain name.

The other thing that happened during my Perambulations in Pergatory was the launch of The Enchanted Inkpot, a group blog I helped to organize and will participate in once I have a brain. The members all write fantasy novels for kids and they know about a million times more about the field than I do, so I'm thrilled to be involved. Check it out, and you'll see what I mean.

I got my editorial letter for revisions on The Filioli a week or so ago, so am trying to figure out a way to sit at the computer with my leg up without twisting myself into a pretzel. Tried the Laptop in Bed routine, and think I prefer Snakes on a Plane. Stay tuned.

Off to Be Bionic

I thought I'd get a chance for a nice, newsy post before I went off for knee replacement, but no such luck. Thanks to everyone for the good wishes, and send some extra potent vibes to St. Joseph's Hospital, Bangor, Maine, tomorrow (Monday) at 7:30 a.m. EDT.

Tata for now... back in about a week, I imagine.

Lemon Tree Very Smelly

Sorry about the silence. But preparing to get your leg cut off at the knee turns out to be time consuming. (Don't worry...they'll reattach it. With a sparkly new titanium knee. Ooooo....shiny.) The big day is March 23. The surgery is at 7:30 in Bangor, and I'll have to get up at 3 to do all the stuff they want you to do beforehand and then drive for an hour. Yish.

My doctor says the two weeks after surgery will be "uncomfortable" -- that's doctorspeak for painful and depressing. Ooooo...damn well better be shiny.

Plus, I've come up against a major logical inconsistency in The Filioli (thanks to my friend Shelly) and a matching one in the sequel, which for the moment is called The Gloucester Ghost. Solutions have come to me in the middle of the night (duly written down and, miraculously, understandable the next day), but not enough of them.

For example, there's a character in GG who has drunk an elixir that enables her to see through enchantments. So there she sits, right next to an enchantment, and does she see through it? No indeed, so far she does not. Why is that? You tell me. Someone tell me. Please?

And then there was the Brooklin Cat Pee Disaster of 2009. Not quite as monumental as the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919.

We have a potted lemon tree in the front hall, sometimes lovely, sometimes sad, depending on how many caterpillars landed on it when it spent the summer outside under the maple. This year it's marginal. Anyway, I'd been noticing dirt sprayed on the floor and, like an idiot, thought nothing of it. "Oh, how cute, the cat's been playing in the plant," I thought.

I've had cats all my life. But denial dies hard.

Ignorance reigned until I watered the tree. Lots of water, which spilled out into the saucer under the pot. And within minutes the entire front hall smelled like an untended litter box.

"How could you do this?" I asked the cat, who was contentedly tormenting the dog with the "is this a paw or a claw?" game, which ends only when the dog, shaken, cedes her spot in front of the woodstove.

"Do what?" the cat asked.

"You don't smell it?"

"I don't smell. I create." (I don't think that's true but that's what she said.)

I solved most of the problem by hauling the saucer under the pot outside and dumping it out. Rob suggests that I don't water the tree again until summer, when we can put it outside and flush it out. At which point it will, conveniently, be dead. Since Rob hates the tree even when it doesn't stink, I'm beginning to wonder exactly who peed in it.

If it was the cat, I've foiled her for the moment by sticking a miniature stonehenge of chopsticks into the soil around the tree. If it's Rob, I hope it gets on his shoes.

The latest news: The Unnameables was a runner-up for the Maine Literary Award for kidlit. The winner was Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress by Maria Padian of Brunswick, which I haven't read but it sounds wonderful. There have been some more nice reviews, too, but I'll have to write about them later. This time I spent too much time writing about cat pee. There are priorities in this life.

March Book Review!

Well, doesn't time fly. It's been a month since our last book reviews, and more than a week *blush* since my pitiful last post. I have things to write about, too...the great cat pee disaster, snow, that sort of thing. But first, the Book Review Club! (Head over to Barrie Summy's blog for a list of this month's other reviews.)

Conrad’s Fate
By Diana Wynne Jones
HarperCollins (paperback), 2006
ISBN 978-0-06-074745


For years, books by Diana Wynne Jones have been one of my guilty pleasures. Even now, when reading kidlit fantasy could be considered part of my job, I get a nice rush of guilt settling down with yet another magical, funny, adventuresome DWJ.

Oddly, I’d gotten the idea somewhere that I wouldn’t like the Chrestomanci books. I am drawn to fantasies that have one foot in the real world, and most of the adventures of Christopher Chant and friends take place in alternate universes. Nope, I thought. I’ll stick to Archer’s Goon, in which a seemingly normal British family finds out that demigods are running municipal services, or The Ogre Downstairs, in which a magic chemistry set helps a blended family overcome its differences.

But one day I had nothing to read when eating out alone, so I picked up The Pinhoe Egg, the most recent Chrestomanci, set in a world that is just like ours except that magic and enchanters are commonplace. Normal and magical run up against each other…just my cup of mandragora tea. (Which probably would kill you but never mind.)

By now I’ve read all but a couple of the books and am hankering after the short stories. I probably should have read Conrad’s Fate before Pinhoe, but who knew I’d become an addict? And the way these books go zooming back and forth in time, it hardly matters.

The Chrestomanci books more or less follow Christopher Chant’s career from the discovery of his powers as an enchanter through his elevation to the role of Chrestomanci, the controller of magic in the thousands of alternate worlds that co-exist with ours. Some of the books are actually about him; in others, he simply sweeps in to help sort things out.

Here’s the thing about Diana Wynne Jones: Her plots are marvelous, intricate knots, delightful to unravel when you’ve got one of her books in front of you and, for me anyway, totally unmemorable a week or so later. This is a great boon to those of us who like to re-read favorite books, but it’s an odd attribute for such wonderful work.

What you do remember is her characters…proof that, while all novelists recycle and embellish the same basic plots, it’s a book’s characters that make it unique. And Christopher Chant just keeps getting better and better. Jones introduced him thirty years ago as a grown-up Chrestomanci, then slid back in time a decade later so we could follow his upbringing as an enchanter. He’s powerful and brilliant but deeply flawed, prone to arrogance, pouting, and, in his youth, thoughtless action. Jones manages to make him a figure of both romance and comedy, always a neat trick.

Conrad’s Fate is one of the back-sliding books, introducing us to Chant as a rebellious teenage student on the lam from the current Chrestomanci and searching alternate worlds for a fellow renegade, Millie. Add to the mix the unfortunate Conrad, a boy who is in the process of being as deeply misled and betrayed by his family as Chant was when we first met him. The two form a strong bond with each other—and with us—as they sort out who’s been misusing magic in Series Seven, Conrad’s native universe.

The two find jobs as manservants in Stallery Castle, a nest of aristocratic hypocrisy which Jones mines for expert comedy. They run afoul of the magical misdoings there, and do their bumbling bit toward unmasking the misdoers.

This isn’t the tightest of Jones’ plots—it’s a bit sloppy, actually, with a deus ex machina at nearly every turn. The discovery of Conrad’s secret talent is unnecessarily contrived. Conrad himself, though, is a heart-rending character who’s got you on his side from page one. Adding Christopher Chant is almost more than the heart can stand.

Spending time with Conrad, Christopher, and Millie is such a pleasure that I almost don’t feel guilty about it. Almost.