Robin McKinley Dragonhaven

I have loved McKinley's work for years, and was excited to read her new novel. I waited eagerly all summer, and finished the book in three days when it finally came out.

Dragonhaven is the story of an adolescent boy who lives in North America's last dragon preserve. In the world of the novel, dragons are real but elusive, and interfering with them in any way is illegal. During his first overnight hike in the park, Jake Mendoza finds a mother dragon killed during birth by a poacher, and he rescues one of the baby dragons. In order to avoid criminal prosecution and the possible closing of the park, he must raise the dragon secretly.

In many ways, this is McKinley's most daring novel. Like her vampire tale Sunshine, it is told in a rambling first-person narration, but Sunshine's narrator was a determined, experienced and likable adult woman. The narrator of Dragonhaven is an uncertain and unfocused fifteen-year-old boy.

The story is not really about the dragon, the story is about Jake. His blindnesses and self-involvement, his resentments and passions form the narrative. We cannot see any of the events of the book except through his eyes. His voice is authentic, but it is authentically adolescent, leaving the reader to decide if they can actually enjoy a 300 page monologue from a teenage boy. Not everyone can.

I found myself impressed that McKinley could so insightfully and accurately portray the feelings of a mother of a newborn (which is effectively what Jake becomes to the desperately needy dragonlet), especially since she has (apparently) never had a baby herself. Exhaustion and confusion and the drive for the survival of the baby, a drive that might feel like love if only you had a little rest - this is all present in Dragonhaven and easily recognizable to anyone who has been the mother of a newborn.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, but the way that dragons communicate is also handled very well. It is a plot device frequently employed by incompetent authors, but in Mckinley's hands it enhances the story and highlights the otherness of the two species (human and dragon), rather than becoming a crutch for a poor storyteller.

There are a few missteps in the book. The depiction of scientists as reluctant to accept the challenge dragons pose to current taxonomies rings false. Biologists love new species and new arguments. I kept wondering if the hostility Jake expresses toward "Good Scientists" was derived from McKinley's feelings as a homeopathist.

I also found unconvincing the lack of change in Jake's narrative style. When the book opens, he is fifteen. In the closing chapters, he is a father in his mid-twenties, yet he has not significantly changed the way he tells his story. When the book is so realistic in the use of an adolescent voice, this seems a mistake. I can't imagine writing something at age twenty-five the same way I would have at fifteen.

Dragonhaven is also McKinley's most political book. The constant threat to the dragon preserve from politicians hangs over every page. At any moment the foolish and ignorant powers-that-be in Washington might do something destructive. This is a necessary part of the plot, but in the last fifty pages of the book, McKinley pulls out all the stops, and throws out phrases like "big oil" and "hardened senior Republican senators." Hmm. I wonder what she's talking about. Also near the end, a character is revealed to be gay and in a relationship, and all the good guys accept this blithely. Of course. What else would good guys do.

The political bits at the end did feel a bit like following a guide through the woods only to have her thwack you in the face with a tree branch at the end of the trail. But I still came away impressed with McKinley's insight into characters different from herself, and her ability to tell a good story.

Carol O'Connell Mallory's Oracle

When I try a mystery author unfamiliar to me, I rarely start with her first book. The first book is rarely the best, and I want to read the author's best work first, if possible. I began reading Carol O'Connells's series about detective Kathleen Mallory about eight years ago, and have enjoyed it so much that I thought it was time to read the book where it all started.

Many of the themes that occur throughout the series are also in the first book. Mallory is just as sociopathic, though her character is younger and less thoroughly herself in the first book. The love of her adoptive parents is still a powerful force on her life. The mystery of her character in the first book focuses more on determining whether she takes after her mother or her father more.

The book begins shortly after the murder of her adoptive father. Mallory, while grieving in her emotional hampered way, follows her father's investigation of a series of murders, trying to figure out what he knew that got him killed. Her challenge is to know all he knew, without sharing his demise. She follows his clues into the world of illusionists, magicians and psychics, uncovering old and new murders.

A few flaws are present in the first of the series. The opening prologue is never adequately connected to the rest of the storyline - the author was a little too subtle. In later books, I was always a little frustrated by the magical way Mallory used the computer. She could hack into anything, but how was never explained. In this first novel, a few more details of the how are supplied, but they are inaccurate. You can't electronically slip into someone else's computer through the outlet, regardless of whether they are connected to the internet. certainly you couldn't in 1995.

But the strengths of the later series are here as well: the interplay of callousness and mercy, truthfulness and deceit, faithful love and abandonment, friendship and isolation. Mallory is as bewitching as ever, and though Killing Critics and Stone Angel are probably the best written of the series, Mallory's Oracle is still an a satisfying read.

Anne Fadiman At Large and At Small

I have a special place in my heart for Anne Fadiman's essays. Several years ago my husband bought me her first collection Ex Libris, and spent my birthday reading "Marrying Libraries" aloud to me under a rose arbor in a favorite park.

When I saw her new book at the library, I had to read it. Unlike her first collection of essays, this book does not have one theme throughout. Instead, she meanders through varied interests, and whether she is discussing biographies of Charles Lamb or flavors of ice cream, she engages, amuses and informs. Fadiman's essay voice is so much like BubandPie's blogging voice that I sometimes find myself uncertain, as I muse over a remembered quote, which of the two wrote it (and I mean that as a compliment to them both).

Fadiman's book concludes with an essay describing her memory of seeing a boy drown when she was a teen. The essay does not fit with the rest of the book, or rather, it changes the rest of the book. Instead of a pleasant diversion, her book of essays acquires a darker edge, ending with a kind of mea culpa for the detached observant nature that writes and makes connections between seemingly unconnected things.

I am uncertain why the final essay was included, and I frankly wished it had not been. Whether it was an extra bit included because there was no other place to put it, or it was a necessary catharsis for the author's memory and emotions, or was included for more deliberate reasons, I think it was a mistake. The book generally maintains the tone of conversation between familiar friends, and the final essay ends the conversation on an abruptly tragic note. It would have been better developed into a separate book, or as a larger essay earlier and more integrated with the rest.

Ian Fleming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

The famous author of the James Bond spy novels also wrote one children's novel, a story about an unusual car rescued and restored by an eccentric family.

Caractacus Potts is an impecunious inventor who finally has a success with a new kind of candy. With the profits from his invention, he and his wife and son and daughter decide to buy a car. After looking around, they find an elegant old junker and decide to bring it home.

A car so well-built, so carefully restored and so loved proves to be more than meets the eye, and with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as they name the car, magical things begin to happen. Chitty takes the Potts on several suspenseful adventures, each chapter ending in a cliffhanger. If you make this the kids' bedtime book, expect a lot of complaints when you stop at the end of the chapter.

Fleming maintains an innocent lack of realism in Chitty. Throughout the story, even with its suspense and many dangers, there is an assumption that no one would really hurt the children. Criminals kidnap them, but, despite threatening them with harm, are too tenderhearted to wake the children from their nap.

The book is delightful, and unusual in its appeal to both girls and boys. It deserves to be a children's classic, and deserved a better movie than the one it got.

Nancy Mitford Pigeon Pie

Mitford wrote Pigeon Pie in 1939 and it was published a year later. This short, satirical spy novel describes the unexpected adventure of Sophia, an upper-class Englishwoman who spends her days idly amusing herself until the looming war draws her into action. I did not warm up to this book immediately; I was half done before I realized that Sophia really was as stupid as she seemed, but the author meant the reader to like her anyway.

Sophia lives with her husband, Luke, a boring man for whom she has some fondness. She has a long-term affair with Rudolph, and her husband Luke is in love with Florence, a fellow-member of an enthusiastic new religion that meets at Luke's estate. The blithe affairs, the passion for fashion and the constant competition between women convey a picture of the upper class as very silly people, astringently yet affectionately lampooned.

My favorite passages always concern Sophia's chief competitor, Olga:

Sophia rang up her enemy. Olga Gogothsky (nee Baby Bagg) had been her enemy since they were both aged ten. It was an intimate enmity which gave Sophia more pleasure than most friendships; she made sacrifices upon its altar and fanned the flames with assiduity.

"Hullo, my darling Sophie," Olga purred, in the foreign accent which she had cultivated since just before her marriage and which was in striking contrast with the Eton and Oxford tones (often blurred by drink but always unmistakable) of Prince Gogothsky.

Written just before the start of the war, the story involves the infiltration of German spies into Britain. There is murder, kidnapping and betrayal, clever disguises and secret plots. Sophia is forced to act at last when her beloved lapdog is kidnapped and threatened.

Pigeon Pie made me laugh, if quietly. It was a quick, easy read, light and frothy, with just enough acidic edge to make it flavorful.

Felix Salten Bambi: A Life in the Woods

Felix Salten was a Hungarian Jew whose family moved to Austria shortly after he was born, when Austria offered Jews full citizenship. He wrote several stories featuring animals as main characters, and his books were banned by the Nazis in 1936.

I began reading Bambi for my Disney Reading Challenge. Based on the movie, I expected it to be a novel written to deter hunting, and certainly many people have read it that way, but the further into the book I got, the more it seemed that this was a book about hunting the way Bulgakov's Master and Margarita was a book about the Faust story. Hunting provides the plot, but the real story is about something else.

Almost everyone knows the story, at least as the movie presented it. The novel is darker, soaked in the terror the animals feel for Him, the constantly capitalized pronoun for the human hunters. Bambi begins life innocent of the dangers He poses, and is only gradually taught the reasons for his mother's caution. The novel traces Bambi's development into an adult and a prince of the forest.

Trying to interpret the symbolism of a book always makes me want to pile on disclaimers, because I don't feel particularly good at it. Sadly, symbolism has to be pretty obvious for me to get it.

While Bambi is more than a simple allegory, it is the oppressive forces of totalitarianism and enforced social conformity, rather than hunting, which are the focus of condemnation here. The human hunters are organized and powerful and remorseless, unlike the woodland animals, who kill individually and out of simple bloodlusts. The human hunters enlist other animals (like dogs) in their hunt, and (in the novel) they kill massively and indiscriminately.

Animals who aid or abet Him are held in particular contempt. Gobo, a deer captured and hand-fed by Him, returns to the wild with stories of His kindness, only to die from stupidly trusting Him. The dog is attacked for serving Him in his hunt. Domesticated species are reviled for being traitors.

The high point of the book comes when Bambi is travelling through the woods with his father, who has been imparting his wisdom to his son before his own death. They smell Him in the woods and hear the terrible sound of his gun. Bambi's father insists that they move closer, telling Bambi that this time is different. They find the man lying dead on the ground, and Bambi's father says:

"Do you see how he's lying there dead, like one of us? Listen, Bambi. He isn't all-powerful as they say. Everything that lives and grows doesn't come from Him. He isn't above us. He's just the same as we are. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way. He can be killed like us, and then he lies helpless on the ground like all the rest of us, as you see him now."
There was a silence.
"Do you understand me, Bambi?" asked the old stag.
"I think so, "Bambi said in a whisper.
"Then speak," the old stag commanded.
Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, "There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him."

I don't think the author is trying to make any particular statement about God, but rather the inevitable destruction of forces that try to restrict and enslave the spirit of the individual.

There are other elements that do not fit perfectly into an allegorical interpretation, and the novel can be enjoyed for Salten's beautiful descriptions of the forest and its creatures alone. It was worth reading once, and I will probably read it again, though it will be awhile till my kids are old enough to handle the scary parts.

Julia L. Sauer Fog Magic

Julia Sauer's Fog Magic would probably not be published today. There are no bad guys or obvious conflict. The adults are all people worthy of trust. The magical experiences of the book are never explained. Even the heroine's adventures away from her parents are accepted and subtly encouraged by them.

Most of what creates tension and resolution in children's literature today is absent from this short novel. Published in 1942, this is a simple story about a girl in Nova Scotia who finds a magical place in the fog, a place only she can go, even though, strictly speaking, not much happens to her there.

But reading it awakened in me the longings of a child, longings for a place that is magical and meant, a place that is both utterly alien and full of welcome and belonging. Deftly, Sauer creates in an adult reader a reminiscence of childhood that is something more than nostalgia. We are caught up in Greta's love of home, sense of adventure and bittersweet appreciation for the things we leave behind when we grow to adulthood. At the same time, her portrayal of growing up as the next great adventure offers children a sense of mystery and anticipation for the future.

It is a lovely book, one I plan to strategically locate for my daughters to find on their own someday.