Here’s a quick wrap-up of what I read and watched in the last quarter 2022. I found a few great shows even though I read very little. And now we are already gearing up for 2023. How time flies!
Tag: fantasy-fiction
Book: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip
Published: 1973
Tropes: Short Story/ Novella, Knight quests, Riddles, Puns, Folktales
Readalikes: Alice in Wonderland, The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Edward Lear
The mad King Magnus sends his knight Caerles on a quest, to look for the Throme of the Erril of Sherill. (A tongue twister, if ever there was one — and it’s not a throne, by the way). If Caerles succeeds, he gets to marry the king’s daughter, who has been locked up in the castle and has never ever laughed. The problem is: the Throme doesn’t exist. Or does it?
“You are cruel and loveless, you and your wanting.”
“I know,” Magnus Thrall whispered. “I know. The Throme is my hope. Find it for me, Caerles.”
It seems like a wild goose chase from the beginning. And poor Caerles seems to be the only sane person in the book. I was chuckling at all his dry witticisms throughout.
“… I do not know what use it is to hurry when I do not know where I am going, and when there will be nothing to find when I get there.”
The whole novella is actually poetry in the form of prose. Does that make sense? Seriously, I’m in awe of McKillip. To pack such a riddle in such lovely words, and to then blend it with humor and pun and brilliant character sketches? This was beautiful. Mesmerizing.
“The house of the King was a tall thing of great, thick stones and high towers and tiny slits of windows that gleamed at night when the King paced his hearth stones longing for the Throme. He had a daughter who sat with him and wept and embroidered pictures of the green world beyond the walls, and listened to her father think aloud to the pale sunlight or the wisps of candle-flame.”
Rating: 10 of 10. Highly recommended.
Winter of Ice and Iron by Rachel Neumeier
Standalone Epic Fantasy
Published: 2017
Tropes: Land Magic/ Wild Magic, Mythological Fantasy, Bi-Protagonist, Court Intrigue, Dark Fantasy.
Winter of Ice and Iron was my pick for the “winter” theme for January, in Bookish Valhalla’s TBR SFF 2022 challenge. I’ve read and liked Neumeier’s work before and I think she deserves more press — so I picked this one up with interest.
Each kingdom’s land has a wild force which must be mastered by its ruler (else it will destroy the ruler and the people). Trouble starts when one particular mad king plans to usurp the wildforces of all neighboring kingdoms.
“Wolf Month was the starving month, the bitter month, the month when winter stores grew lean and the new growth had not yet come, the month when the long haunting cries of the wolves drifted almost nightly from the high mountains. It was a hard month. The cold lingered.”
This book reminded me of Game of Thrones but with land magic involved. (There are a lot of kings and queens asking each other to “bend the knee” which is a GOT reference if ever I saw one.) Ahem:
The Witness for the Dead
Series: The Goblin Emperor Series (but can be read as standalone)
Published: June 2021
Book Themes / Tropes: I can speak to the Dead, Judicial power politics, Court intrigue, A Good Person
Recommended if you like: Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold, or generally any mythological fantasy work
Rating: 9 of 10
How many times do we come across truly good, kind people in fiction? People who do the right thing even if that doesn’t help them much politically, simply because it is the right thing to do? In Witness for the Dead, Addison has created a good person in the form of Celehar who works as a witness for the dead.
Lewis Carroll’s gets a makeover in this old Czech film from 1988. And what a makeover it is!
The movie starts off on an eerie note, when little Alice, troubled and lonely, begins to tell you about her dream. It’s told like a child’s story, even a nursery rhyme, but the movie is clearly intended for older audience.
Categories
A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson
Book/ Series: A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson (Operation Otherworld Series Book #3, but can be read as standalone)
Published: 1974
Book Tropes: Alternative English History/ Fantasy
Recommended for fans of: Shakespeare (esp. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), R.L. Stevenson (esp. The Black Arrow)
Awards: 1975 Mythopoeic Award
Some time back, LibraryThing recommended A Midsummer Tempest for those who like Shakespeare’s plays, steampunk, the old adventure classics and medieval English history. I’ll second that recommendation, as long as you are certain that this blend is exactly what you’re looking for.
Oh, what an absolute gem of a book. Quiet and unassuming on the surface, yet so utterly charming and thought-provoking.
Bon Agornin dies one day, leaving behind two sons and three daughters. His sons, Penn and Avan, are in the clergy and government respectively, and his eldest daughter, Berend, is the matron in a wealthy family. The youngest daughters, Haner and Selendra, are unmarried, and are forced apart when their patriarch dies. Much of the story is about Haner and Selendra being uprooted from their old home and settling down in their new environment: Haner with Berend and her husband, and Selendra with her parson brother Penn.
The real pivot of the story?
They are all dragons. And dragons have a singular custom — that of eating dragon flesh of the deceased, because that is the only way they can increase in power and sustenance. Walton gives them other dragon-like characteristics and rituals too, but at the heart of the story is the grim truth that dragon eats dragon to flourish. It is to Walton’s credit that she makes dragon customs like these feel real but empathetic.
May 2021 was a slow reading month for me. I blogged much more than I read, which was unusual, but all thanks to the wonderful Wyrd And Wonder challenge. The link has all the posts for that challenge, most of these being SFF rec lists, but one standout read was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
Aside from that, here’s a wrap-up for the month.
Lang Leav’s The Universe of Us
A very short book, with poems of varying length. These are all love/ heartbreak poems, but I think we can view them from a non-romantic lens too. I’m sure we’ve all had friends and loved ones with whom we had a parting, Lang’s poetry would ring true for those relationships as well. Rating: B–
The Bulfinch Encyclopedia of Mythology states that the twelve most illustrious knights of Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire were called Paladins. Lois McMaster Bujold took this term and applied it to the hero of her 2003 book, The Paladin of Souls, for which she got her fourth Hugo Award.
Paladin of Souls is a fantasy work set in Chalion, a land where religious practice is split among the Five Gods: Father of Winter, Mother of Summer, Son of Autumn, Daughter of Spring, and the Bastard (God of Death). The Five Gods put a curse on Chalion a long time back, and people still suffer from the after-effects. The mythological world-building in this book is absolutely gripping.