two hundred public words 13/30
Jul. 25th, 2010 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Well, that previous entry was somewhat cathartic. My mom liked it, anyway. Now, back to our interrupted scheduling of non-stop writing about young adult fiction authors. I think I'll do fantasy. I'm saving historical YAF (which may be my favorite subgenre) until entry fifteen, halfway through.
Fantasy (YAF) authors whose names I would bandy far and wide:
J. K. Rowling
Philip Pullman
Christopher Paolini
Gail Carson Levine
Anne McCaffrey
Robin McKinley
Diana Wynne Jones
Monica Furlong
The organizing principle in the list above, by the way, is from authors who have books which have been made into films through authors who have not, in more or less order of fame.
J. K. Rowling. I feel like I don't have to say a lot about J. K. Rowling. She's got fame and renown and sales enough. She's kind of incredibly (literally, as in, it is hard to believe) wealthy, as it is. Still. She's kind of the goal post for fantasy fiction for kids, you know? I very much admire the PUBLISHING PHENOMENON that is, and was, Harry Potter. I read the first two books aloud to various classes of mine in West Oakland, and after some resistance to fantasy as a genre at all, kids settled into it and were, apparently, marked by it. At least, former students I run into, in Oakland, tell me that they never forgot Harry Potter, and that they go and see all the movies! Ha, not exactly the victory for literacy that I wanted it to be. Still. They're not wretchedly bad books. They're enjoyable. I own all of them. I basically ordered them as they came out, delivered on the day, and read each of the later ones through the day I got it.
Phillip Pullman Another English author of fantasy fiction for kids, mostly known for his Dark Materials trilogy, which is apparently some attack on organized religion. It's good, no doubt, and the film (of The Golden Compass) was very pretty to look at. I got bogged down in the books, actually, and have not finished the third one, The Subtle Knife. I think that's the title. Or else it's The Amber Spyglass. Hm. It's The Amber Spyglass; I can see it on the bookshelf behind me. What ground me down? Normally I am slightly obsessive about finishing books, even if I don't much like them. Which makes me kind of careful about what books I start. Not discerning and selective in LITERARY terms, mind you. Just, I tend to know what I like. In this case... I think it was that Pullman really thought out his world and the ideological/religious issues in it, and they're pretty damn depressing. I will probably go back and finish the book sooner or later, which is more than Hollywood will do, apparently, for the movie franchise.
Christopher Paolini At fifteen or so, he wrote a dragons-and-magic tome, called Eragon. It was made into what I am told was a really crap movie. Even my STUDENTS said that, so it must be bad... they tend to be fairly uncritical of spectacle. I read Eragon, and its sequel Eldest and I own, though I have not started yet, the closing book of the trilogy, Brisinger. I am mostly amazed at the precocity of Paolini and his follow-through. It's a very derivative story, really, with lots from Anne McCaffrey and her telepathic dragons (see below) mixed with endless lifts from Tolkein... though, obviously, if you've got elves, you're standing on the shoulders of Tolkein, so who can complain? I should have included Tolkein on my original list and in this one, huh? I'm not sure there's anything at all original in this trilogy. But it's a good enough read. And male students like it. I am always overjoyed, basically, to see kids reading books that are crazy long. Except for the Twilight series, which (though I've read them) I feel is politically pernicious. I didn't include Stephenie Meyer on this list, for instance.
Gail Carson Levine She did Ella Enchanted, the movie of which is very cute, though less serious than the book... and I would say anyone that reworks classic fairy tales is standing on the shoulders of Robin McKinley, about whom more below. She's written many other revisions of fairy tales, from short, parodic ones aimed at younger pre-teens, to longer, novel-length books with fairly serious considerations, on the nature and utility (or not) of beauty, of empathy, of heroism. Her longer books include Fairest, The Two Princesses of Bamarre, and Ever. They all give a younger reader a lot to chew on, packaged in a format that seems to be about magic and fairies. I have to say, I actually prefer her historical fiction YA novel Dave at Night, which is about a Jewish kid in New York in the 1920s who is orphaned when his carpenter father dies in a work accident.
Diana Wynne Jones She's one of the most original fantasy authors on this list, I think. She doesn't reinvent old fairytales, but she does mix both contemporary Britain and magic (long before J. K. Rowling) and invent worlds. She's prolific, so there are a lot of books to choose from -- her Chrestomanci series is one that is often preferred by my book-mad students. It involves the idea of parallel worlds with slight differences: in some, magic works, in some, it doesn't. The way in which the impossible mixes with the really existing in her books reminds me sometimes of Joan Aiken*, who really should also be on this list -- but someone else on my LJ friendslist would be better at that -- write on Joan Aiken! This has gotten too long as it is! Humor is an important element in most of Jones' books. The other series that sort of travels through a world's history with magic and which seems kind of Welsh-ish to me comprises Spellcoats, Drowned Ammet, Cart and Cwidder, and The Crown of Dalemark. Almost anything you pick by Diana Wynne Jones is bound to be amazing. Oh, and her Howl's Moving Castle became not only a movie, but an anime movie.
Anne McCaffrey McCaffrey is enormous, and the only reason she's so far down in this list is because there's never been a movie about Pern. It's ridiculous -- with CGI the way it is these days, how can there NOT be an adaptation of these dragon books, which originated the subgenre? Anyway, she has three books which she wrote for teenagers, or preteens, as opposed to all of her other Pern and other varieties of sci fi/fantasy novels. Not that those don't work for kids, too. I read them in middle school. Her YAF books are a trilogy about the Harper Hall, which is the devolved education/news/intelligence gathering/entertainment complex on Pern. They comprise Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums. The main characters are Menolly, a despised daughter of a reactionary Sea Holder who loves music and composing, Master Harper Robinton, who leads the Harper Hall, Sebell, his lieutenant, and Piemur, a young Harper Hall apprentice whose voice change throws his future into doubt. These novels focus on 'fire lizards' instead of full size dragons, since they're not set in the Weyrs on Pern, but in Fort Hold, where the Harper Hall is located. Obviously I know McCaffrey's world well; I've read everything she's written. She has such a following that I think there is actually a sort of offshoot of the Society of Creative Anachronism whose members spend their time imagining themselves as inhabitants of Pern, with dragons (or fire lizards, I am sure) of their own. Online, I hope. I don't know if there are Ren Faire equivalents for them. Nevertheless, I love her books and this series for kids, and I recommend it all the time. I look forward to when my niece gets into them.
Robin McKinley I first read Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast when I was, what, twelve? Well, that's the year it came out, 1978, so that is definitely possible. I know that when I eventually saw the Disney movie, I felt very much that they had ripped off McKinley, in terms of talking cups and plates and so on, and a bookworm protagonist. McKinley has updated many other fairytales, as well. She sometimes chooses lesser known (and more horrifying, which fairy tales often are) stories, as she did with Deerskin. That story is about incest, pure and simple, and it is disturbing as hell. Other times, she turns her sights on something well known like Sleeping Beauty. She has a somewhat self-indulgent and recursive writing style, but I like it very much. If you want to see what I mean, Spindle's End (the Sleeping Beauty retelling) and especially, her BLOG, are good examples. My favorite two of her books, though, are two of her earlier "histories of Damar", an invented world with similarities to British colonialism plus magic. The first one is called The Blue Sword and undoubtedly ranks as one of my favorite fantasy-romance-adventures ever. The second is a sort of prequel, called The Hero and the Sword. She's written a few short stories set at one or another period of Damar's history, but I yearn for her to write another full-length novel set there. Damar is a more or less desert country where magic -- called kelar -- runs in some people's blood, especially the royal family. It has been conquered by Outlanders (or Homelanders, in their own terms, ha) for which, read Brits, who are materialists and disdain any possibility of magic. The Blue Sword is a great combination of musing on colonialism and dabbling in semi-feminist magic and romance. There's something of the sheikh-kidnapping-a-white-girl thing going on, but chaste-er and more eventually PC. Just read it. It's really good.
Monica Furlong She has written three books that I know of, a trilogy that is essentially about what witchcraft might really have been like in the Middle Ages -- psychotropic drugs smeared in a grease on your skin that make you THINK you're flying, etc., plus a great deal of sort of modern paganism/neo Celtic stuff, contrasted to Christianity. They're good books, with well-crafted characters who stand up to inspection, not flimsy cutouts. Her trilogy starts with Wise Child, about a girl who, when her grandmother dies in a small highland village, is taken in by the local wise woman and trained as a 'doran', or door, in Gaelic, their word for a witch. It continues with her training-witch's childhood, in Juniper, which is set in Cornwall, and finishes with a recent addition, Colman. Furlong is actually a Christian theologian, in Britain, and has written a fair amount about Catholic mystics like Merton, and women in the Church.
*oh, man, and I should be covering Cynthia Voigt's intricate and complicated series which begins with Jackaroo and goes on to On Fortune's Wheel, The Wings of a Falcon, and Elske. So much to write about! And Lloyd Alexander! Gah!
Fantasy (YAF) authors whose names I would bandy far and wide:
J. K. Rowling
Philip Pullman
Christopher Paolini
Gail Carson Levine
Anne McCaffrey
Robin McKinley
Diana Wynne Jones
Monica Furlong
The organizing principle in the list above, by the way, is from authors who have books which have been made into films through authors who have not, in more or less order of fame.
J. K. Rowling. I feel like I don't have to say a lot about J. K. Rowling. She's got fame and renown and sales enough. She's kind of incredibly (literally, as in, it is hard to believe) wealthy, as it is. Still. She's kind of the goal post for fantasy fiction for kids, you know? I very much admire the PUBLISHING PHENOMENON that is, and was, Harry Potter. I read the first two books aloud to various classes of mine in West Oakland, and after some resistance to fantasy as a genre at all, kids settled into it and were, apparently, marked by it. At least, former students I run into, in Oakland, tell me that they never forgot Harry Potter, and that they go and see all the movies! Ha, not exactly the victory for literacy that I wanted it to be. Still. They're not wretchedly bad books. They're enjoyable. I own all of them. I basically ordered them as they came out, delivered on the day, and read each of the later ones through the day I got it.
Phillip Pullman Another English author of fantasy fiction for kids, mostly known for his Dark Materials trilogy, which is apparently some attack on organized religion. It's good, no doubt, and the film (of The Golden Compass) was very pretty to look at. I got bogged down in the books, actually, and have not finished the third one, The Subtle Knife. I think that's the title. Or else it's The Amber Spyglass. Hm. It's The Amber Spyglass; I can see it on the bookshelf behind me. What ground me down? Normally I am slightly obsessive about finishing books, even if I don't much like them. Which makes me kind of careful about what books I start. Not discerning and selective in LITERARY terms, mind you. Just, I tend to know what I like. In this case... I think it was that Pullman really thought out his world and the ideological/religious issues in it, and they're pretty damn depressing. I will probably go back and finish the book sooner or later, which is more than Hollywood will do, apparently, for the movie franchise.
Christopher Paolini At fifteen or so, he wrote a dragons-and-magic tome, called Eragon. It was made into what I am told was a really crap movie. Even my STUDENTS said that, so it must be bad... they tend to be fairly uncritical of spectacle. I read Eragon, and its sequel Eldest and I own, though I have not started yet, the closing book of the trilogy, Brisinger. I am mostly amazed at the precocity of Paolini and his follow-through. It's a very derivative story, really, with lots from Anne McCaffrey and her telepathic dragons (see below) mixed with endless lifts from Tolkein... though, obviously, if you've got elves, you're standing on the shoulders of Tolkein, so who can complain? I should have included Tolkein on my original list and in this one, huh? I'm not sure there's anything at all original in this trilogy. But it's a good enough read. And male students like it. I am always overjoyed, basically, to see kids reading books that are crazy long. Except for the Twilight series, which (though I've read them) I feel is politically pernicious. I didn't include Stephenie Meyer on this list, for instance.
Gail Carson Levine She did Ella Enchanted, the movie of which is very cute, though less serious than the book... and I would say anyone that reworks classic fairy tales is standing on the shoulders of Robin McKinley, about whom more below. She's written many other revisions of fairy tales, from short, parodic ones aimed at younger pre-teens, to longer, novel-length books with fairly serious considerations, on the nature and utility (or not) of beauty, of empathy, of heroism. Her longer books include Fairest, The Two Princesses of Bamarre, and Ever. They all give a younger reader a lot to chew on, packaged in a format that seems to be about magic and fairies. I have to say, I actually prefer her historical fiction YA novel Dave at Night, which is about a Jewish kid in New York in the 1920s who is orphaned when his carpenter father dies in a work accident.
Diana Wynne Jones She's one of the most original fantasy authors on this list, I think. She doesn't reinvent old fairytales, but she does mix both contemporary Britain and magic (long before J. K. Rowling) and invent worlds. She's prolific, so there are a lot of books to choose from -- her Chrestomanci series is one that is often preferred by my book-mad students. It involves the idea of parallel worlds with slight differences: in some, magic works, in some, it doesn't. The way in which the impossible mixes with the really existing in her books reminds me sometimes of Joan Aiken*, who really should also be on this list -- but someone else on my LJ friendslist would be better at that -- write on Joan Aiken! This has gotten too long as it is! Humor is an important element in most of Jones' books. The other series that sort of travels through a world's history with magic and which seems kind of Welsh-ish to me comprises Spellcoats, Drowned Ammet, Cart and Cwidder, and The Crown of Dalemark. Almost anything you pick by Diana Wynne Jones is bound to be amazing. Oh, and her Howl's Moving Castle became not only a movie, but an anime movie.
Anne McCaffrey McCaffrey is enormous, and the only reason she's so far down in this list is because there's never been a movie about Pern. It's ridiculous -- with CGI the way it is these days, how can there NOT be an adaptation of these dragon books, which originated the subgenre? Anyway, she has three books which she wrote for teenagers, or preteens, as opposed to all of her other Pern and other varieties of sci fi/fantasy novels. Not that those don't work for kids, too. I read them in middle school. Her YAF books are a trilogy about the Harper Hall, which is the devolved education/news/intelligence gathering/entertainment complex on Pern. They comprise Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums. The main characters are Menolly, a despised daughter of a reactionary Sea Holder who loves music and composing, Master Harper Robinton, who leads the Harper Hall, Sebell, his lieutenant, and Piemur, a young Harper Hall apprentice whose voice change throws his future into doubt. These novels focus on 'fire lizards' instead of full size dragons, since they're not set in the Weyrs on Pern, but in Fort Hold, where the Harper Hall is located. Obviously I know McCaffrey's world well; I've read everything she's written. She has such a following that I think there is actually a sort of offshoot of the Society of Creative Anachronism whose members spend their time imagining themselves as inhabitants of Pern, with dragons (or fire lizards, I am sure) of their own. Online, I hope. I don't know if there are Ren Faire equivalents for them. Nevertheless, I love her books and this series for kids, and I recommend it all the time. I look forward to when my niece gets into them.
Robin McKinley I first read Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast when I was, what, twelve? Well, that's the year it came out, 1978, so that is definitely possible. I know that when I eventually saw the Disney movie, I felt very much that they had ripped off McKinley, in terms of talking cups and plates and so on, and a bookworm protagonist. McKinley has updated many other fairytales, as well. She sometimes chooses lesser known (and more horrifying, which fairy tales often are) stories, as she did with Deerskin. That story is about incest, pure and simple, and it is disturbing as hell. Other times, she turns her sights on something well known like Sleeping Beauty. She has a somewhat self-indulgent and recursive writing style, but I like it very much. If you want to see what I mean, Spindle's End (the Sleeping Beauty retelling) and especially, her BLOG, are good examples. My favorite two of her books, though, are two of her earlier "histories of Damar", an invented world with similarities to British colonialism plus magic. The first one is called The Blue Sword and undoubtedly ranks as one of my favorite fantasy-romance-adventures ever. The second is a sort of prequel, called The Hero and the Sword. She's written a few short stories set at one or another period of Damar's history, but I yearn for her to write another full-length novel set there. Damar is a more or less desert country where magic -- called kelar -- runs in some people's blood, especially the royal family. It has been conquered by Outlanders (or Homelanders, in their own terms, ha) for which, read Brits, who are materialists and disdain any possibility of magic. The Blue Sword is a great combination of musing on colonialism and dabbling in semi-feminist magic and romance. There's something of the sheikh-kidnapping-a-white-girl thing going on, but chaste-er and more eventually PC. Just read it. It's really good.
Monica Furlong She has written three books that I know of, a trilogy that is essentially about what witchcraft might really have been like in the Middle Ages -- psychotropic drugs smeared in a grease on your skin that make you THINK you're flying, etc., plus a great deal of sort of modern paganism/neo Celtic stuff, contrasted to Christianity. They're good books, with well-crafted characters who stand up to inspection, not flimsy cutouts. Her trilogy starts with Wise Child, about a girl who, when her grandmother dies in a small highland village, is taken in by the local wise woman and trained as a 'doran', or door, in Gaelic, their word for a witch. It continues with her training-witch's childhood, in Juniper, which is set in Cornwall, and finishes with a recent addition, Colman. Furlong is actually a Christian theologian, in Britain, and has written a fair amount about Catholic mystics like Merton, and women in the Church.
*oh, man, and I should be covering Cynthia Voigt's intricate and complicated series which begins with Jackaroo and goes on to On Fortune's Wheel, The Wings of a Falcon, and Elske. So much to write about! And Lloyd Alexander! Gah!