This is the story of Leah, a 9-year-old whose mother goes away one day, as adults in her town often do. But it’s the kind of upsetting that comes with being an emotionally fraught nail-biter, true and heart-wrenching right to its fantastic core. I don’t know that I should describe “Wild Things Got to Go Free” by Heather Clitheroe – ( Beneath Ceaseless Skies #170) as “fun” because, in fact, I found it deeply upsetting. Wild Things Got to Go Free by Heather Clitheroe Coupled with a strong, action-driven plot, this is exactly the kind of substantial page-turner that fantasy should strive to be. These flashbacks aren’t the selkie’s motivation, but rather a way of humanizing him – or perhaps, in showing that the world of human wars is the magical world as well. The selkie sees her, and himself, in the humans that surround him, like a vein of “wyrd” that runs through us all. These are beautifully evocative, the tale of a strong, powerful survivor who not only makes her own fate, but shapes the future of the world as well. Interwoven with the selkie’s struggles are his memories of his witch-wife many hundreds of years earlier, in the time of the Vikings. He negotiates with Danish ulfhednar and Sami noaidi, fighting for the fate of the world with the same engagement a human might. In the selkie’s world of magic and spycraft, the mysterious takes centre stage – humans are present only in the background. What they do is secret and mysterious, the way magic always is, but also the way espionage is. The selkie is a very old and powerful being, but Yeh hints at a world teeming with these, all embroiled in the affairs of humans. The trunk contains the key to the Allies’ victory over the Axis, but the selkie is intercepted and captured by a Nazi ship. The narrator is a selkie towing a mysterious trunk across the North Sea from Russia to England. Yeh ( Lackington’s #6) is a rich, nail-biting story of magical espionage during WWII wrapped up in the language and imagery that Lackington’s always emphasizes. I just expect it to carry a little something extra as well. But I still long for that “visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun” that drew me to genre in the first place. This is because I read a lot and have long since succumbed to what Tobias Buckell describes as the chief danger of long-term reviewing in his 2013 post, “The fate of today’s book bloggers.” After a while, you begin to see the same stories again and again and in your search for something new, different, and exciting, your tastes become rather rarefied. I read a manifesto recently that described a lot of current SFF as “niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun.” I’m sympathetic to this author’s complaints even if I think niche, academic, ideological work is enjoyable for exactly those reasons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |