Graceling
Kristin Cashore
Harcourt, Inc., 2008
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-15-206396-2
480 pages; $17.00

It took me almost no time at all to fall in love with Kristin Cashore’s main character, Katsa, in Graceling. In this book for young adult readers, Katsa is a strong – both literally and figuratively – sharp-minded young woman who practices a well-developed sense of ethics, knows herself, and knows what she wants (and more importantly, what she doesn’t want). What a wonderful role model she is for the female teenagers who are Cashore’s target audience! How much better it would be for a 13-year-old to read about this type of young woman than about some swoony female who falls for a vampire because he glimmers in the dark!

Katsa has a “Grace” – a special innate ability, as is evidenced by her eyes, one green, one blue. Her Grace reveals itself when she is 10 years old and a cousin makes sexual advances on her: she kills him. Swiftly, efficiently, and without thought, she smashes him in the face, pushing the bones of his nose into his brain. Everyone concludes that she is Graced with an ability to kill, though it also evidences itself with an uncanny ability to fight, to anticipate the movements of her enemies, and to avoid sickness. Still, others born with different-colored eyes are graced with such things as an uncanny ability to dance, or to swim like a fish; a Grace for killing is frightening to most, and her Grace therefore tends to isolate Katsa.

The logical thing for Katsa’s king to do in response to a child Graced with killing is to banish or kill her, even if she is his niece. But King Randa of the Middluns thinks instead of the use to which he can put her as an assassin or at least an enforcer, and keeps her close. He is not an evil man, but he is certainly greedy, and Katsa learns to hate the use to which he puts her. When he sends her to hurt one of his lords who has refused to offer up a daughter to an unsuitable marriage for which King Randa would receive the dowry, she must make a decision about whether she intends to live the rest of her life as a king’s instrument of power.

But that is only the beginning of her story. Katsa soon finds herself traveling with Po, a young prince from another country, to find out the story behind his grandfather’s kidnapping. Katsa tries her best not to fall in love with Po, because she has sworn never to marry or bear children. She falls nonetheless, but still manages to remain true to her decisions about how to lead her life, and how to make her life one with room for fully realized love.

This is what most impressed me about Katsa. Imagine: a woman who wants to remain wholly herself, for herself! Have you ever read about such a character in young adult fiction before? Heck, how often have you read about a female like this, of any age, in any fiction? I was even more amazed when Katsa was thrown into contact with a young child, a girl of 10 who needs her protection, and still doesn’t change her mind about bearing children of her own. Even today, one is considered unnatural for making such a choice. Cashore’s decision to write of such a woman in a medieval setting it strikingly imaginative.

Katsa’s quest becomes, as so many quests do, a voyage of self-discovery, though not in the traditional sense (that is, she does not change her mind about who she is, but instead discovers more about what she is able to do). In this story, she is the hero rather than the rescued. She does the rescuing. It does not make her male counterparts any weaker, but only makes her stronger.

I fear I am making this book sound like a feminist polemic. It is not. It is an exciting and well-told tale about a pair of fascinating characters, Katsa and Po, and the challenges they face. The supporting characters are equally well-drawn; Randa’s son Raffin, for instance, is essentially a scientist who seems to have missed inheriting his father’s greed and cruelty. Still, I find this book remarkable mostly because Katsa is such a strong character.

I wish I’d had this sort of role model to read about when I was a young teenager. For me, Little Jo from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was about the only example I ever read of a girl who wanted to do something with her life besides get married and have babies – and even she wanted to write in addition to getting married and having babies. The idea that a woman could eschew the role of wife and mother was never presented to me. Thank goodness girls today know that that’s a choice, and that women like Kristin Cashore are writing characters who aren’t afraid to make that choice.

We Never Talk About My Brother
Peter S. Beagle
Tachyon Publications, 2009
U.S. trade paperback, first edition
ISBN 978-1-892391-83-4
256 pages; $14.95

I’ve loved Peter Beagle’s work ever since I read A Fine and Private Place when I was still wet behind the ears. I still don’t know why it was that novel rather than his better known and far more popular The Last Unicorn that caught my imagination; perhaps it was because I was such an introverted teenager that the idea of the dead conversing in a graveyard was unreasonably appealing to me. Certainly it was one of the first novels of contemporary fantasy I read, and led me to The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song, and over the years to all of Beagle’s stories.

This year Tachyon Publications brings us We Never Talk About My Brother, a collection of ten of Beagle’s recent stories. Eight were previously published from 2007 through 2009, demonstrating that Beagle has been as productive in his late 60s as he was at the age of 19, when he wrote A Fine and Private Place. Certainly his late work shows a mature intellect and imagination, as well as a perspective on his youth, that flavors his fiction with nostalgia, regret and a deep appreciation for life.

The title story is told by the narrator to a reporter who comes searching for news about the narrator’s brother, who used to be a famous news anchor. Esau Robbins, the news anchor, disappeared entirely from the scene years before, and his brother Jacob knows why, and is willing to tell the story. It seems that Esau didn’t exactly report the news; he made it. He made it by reporting it. He was a sort of Angel of Death, telling tales of horrible doings and thereby causing them to be done. How does one stop such a man? Jacob figures it out, and thereby hangs his tale.

“We Never Talk About My Brother” is a sharp, tight story, but for my taste, “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel” shows a lot more of that mature intellect and imagination that I spoke of earlier. Beagle states in his introduction that the story is one of only a few he has told that draws specifically from his New York Jewish childhood, and it makes me long for a memoir tinged with fantasy from him. This story is about an angel who comes to pose for his Uncle Chaim, who is an artist. The angel simply shows up one day and announces that she is his only model now – and a great model she proves to be, too, able to hold a pose seemingly forever. But there are a few problems. For one thing, almost no one else can see the angel except in Chaim’s paintings (though the young narrator of the tale can). For another, there’s something just plain weird about this particular angel. We find out what that weirdness is, and experience an unusual act of kindness and bravery, in the climax to this gentle, lovely story.

I’d come across “The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French” before in Eclipse One (2007), an original anthology of science fiction and fantasy edited by Jonathan Strahan. (That anthology is not available through Amazon for reasons I can’t fathom, but it appears to be available through the publisher’s website – and if you should go there, you’ll find that Night Shade Books offers all kinds of goodies including Eclipse Two.) It’s about a Jewish American man who slowly becomes French after visiting France on his honeymoon. He loses his ability to speak or read English, becomes very rude to those who speak (or attempt to speak) French with accents of which he doesn’t approve, and, ultimately, becomes more French than the French themselves. It’s a strange story that should be simply funny, but is ultimately melancholy.

I loved “Spook,” about a duel by bad poetry. Beagle says in his introduction that he can’t wait to record the audiobook version, and I can certainly see why. I don’t think I’ve ever read worse poetry in my lifetime, and I say that as someone who wrote sad, sad poetry about unrequited love at the age of 16 and read it again at the age of 40. I hope very much never to have to read the poetry of Theophilus Julius Henry Marzials ever again (sample lines: “And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top/Flop, plop/A curse on him”).

“Chandail” is set in the universe of The Innkeeper's Song, and is about Lal’s encounter with one of that species. It is an accomplished story that first appeared in Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy. That’s another collection you shouldn’t miss. I reviewed it in detail here.

“By Moonlight” is a conversation between a highwayman and a preacher who was once Titania’s lover, and seeks to be once again. “King Pelles the Sure” is an antiwar tale about a king “who dreamed of war,” and thought he could have just a little, manageable one, just big enough to ensure that he would be remembered as a hero; “Nobody is every remembered for living out a dull, placid, uneventful life,” he complains. He comes to rue those words. “The Unicorn Tapestries” is a poetry cycle about the tapestries hanging in The Cloisters in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park. “The Stickball Witch” is a slight story about children playing on the streets of the Bronx, and their adventure one fine day with the neighborhood witch – or at least the poor immigrant widow in the neighborhood that they all feared, for some unknown reason (that is, unknown even to them). “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri” is my least favorite story in the book, about a man who works his way up in a Japanese court with the help of his mysterious wife. I was not convinced by the setting or the characters, and nothing about the tale spoke to me of Japan; it could as easily have been set in England if the names were different. Perhaps I like my Eastern mysticism to be a bit more mystical, but this story just fell flat for me.

This is one of those collections that I read nearly straight through, barely pausing to set the book down. Many single author collections tend to have much of a sameness about them, I have discovered, and suffer from that sort of reading. Not Beagle; not this collection. The stories are varied in theme and tone, though alike in craftsmanship.

This slim volume is not only worth reading, but worth adding to your library, for you are likely to find yourself returning to these stories again and again. If you are a reader, you will find sheer pleasure in them on each rereading. If you are a writer, you will explore them to find out just how Beagle does it. He is one of the most able writers of the fantasy short story working today.

Black Ships
Jo Graham
Orbit, 2008
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 0-316-06800-4
448 pages; $14.99

Virgil’s Aeneid has had new life breathed into it by a number of authors and translators of late. First, Robert Fagles offered his new translation in 2006, to much acclaim. Then, Ursula K. LeGuin and Jo Graham offered their fictional renderings of different portions of Aeneas’s life almost simultaneously. In Black Ships, Jo Graham writes of the hero Aeneas’s search for a new home for his people, the survivors of the fall of Troy; and Ursula K. LeGuin takes up almost exactly where Graham leaves off in Lavinia, written from the perspective of Aeneas’s new wife in his new home.

Black Ships is told from the perspective of someone we first meet as a girl named Gull, the daughter of a woman stolen from Troy when it fell and made a slave by the Achaians. She is born from a rape, but her mother loves her no less for that. Still, her mother is unable to save her when a chariot passes through, running over Gull’s leg and crippling her, making her unfit to work the flax fields. Gull’s mother therefore dedicates her to Pythia, the goddess of the dead, and it quickly becomes apparent that Gull does, in fact, have the gift of prophecy.

Gull becomes Linnea, apprenticed to the woman who then serves as Pythia and learning the ways of the goddess. It is a quiet life until the day the nine black ships arrive, a day that changes everything. Linnea meets Aeneas and becomes his Sybil, guiding him through angry seas, unknown islands, difficult diplomacy, war, and a doomed love affair. Only a girl herself, she nonetheless finds her own way, her own strength, and her own love.

Black Ships is painstakingly researched and thoroughly thought out, with some details from The Aeneid changed in order to make historical sense. I enjoyed reading about historical bits and pieces such as what the characters ate, how warfare was actually waged, how ships worked and what ancient religions were actually like. The characters are reasonably well-drawn, if perhaps almost universally too good to be true. One does wonder why Aeneas is always willing to drop everything and mobilize an army on the word of an 18-year-old girl, but after Aeneas has a bit of experience with Sybil’s power, it only makes sense to listen to her. The picture of Sybil’s own love affair with her chosen mate is drawn well enough that it brought me close to tears at the end of the book. As to the inevitable comparison with LeGuin: LeGuin is a master craftswoman, who has been writing for decades. Lavinia is a beautiful book, telling an altogether different story. Read it, too.

This is a well-written first historical novel by this author, from whom I am glad to say there is already a second book in press: Hand of Isis, set in Egypt. I hope to be able to tell you about it soon.