Bring your own mushrooms

Chelsey reviews the new Alice in Wonderland.

Percy Jackson

Claire takes a breather from library school to review the movie.

What to Watch?

We had only been watching half an hour or so of the new Prisoner mini-series when Richard said, "I'm tired of these shows." Pressed for elucidation, he said "you know, shows where the whole thing is WHAT'S GOING ON?"

There certainly a lot of these cued on our DVR--Heroes, FlashForward, Fringe, with Lost coming back soon, yes? We were also fans of that canceled one about the people in the bank robbery and that other canceled one about the aliens in the swamp. We gave up on Dollhouse (Eliza Dushku as a robot, quelle surprise) and after Richard announced last night that he had Had It with Fringe, we deleted that, too. (I was done with that one weeks ago, but would contentedly play iPod Scrabble while R attempted to parse the increasingly careless storytelling.)

These shows are quite a risk, especially in the aggregate, as people get more conservative about just how many they can handle, and as even regular shows like Ugly Betty and Law & Order (Anita gets cancer and a boyfriend) up their serial quotient. The only show we follow where you won't get confused watching out of order is Modern Family. Stand-alone TV episodes are about as rare as stand-alone fantasy novels!

But the real problem is with those shows that ask us to trust them to eventually solve the mysteries that provide their premises. Lost in only watchable if you have faith that it is going someplace worthwhile. Let's hope it doesn't end like Alias, but the issue isn't so much that the conclusion needs to satisfy us as it is that we feel encouraged along the way. Wait, now I think I'm talking about religion.

October Notes

The latest issue of Notes from the Horn Book has just been published, with an interview with Kristin Cashore, reviews of new fantasy sequels, new chapter books, new picture-book biographies of artists, and new books about autumn. New! New! New!

Is that a hobbit in my pocket?

Mainly because I could, last night I downloaded the Lord of the Rings to my Baby-Touch-Me iPod. Fourteen bucks from Amazon's Kindle store, not bad.

I'm all for ebooks and read them a lot, but I wonder if the format will encourage the kind of devotion to a text that my friends and I had for the Tolkien books in high school and college. I went through three paperback editions: the Baynes covers (I had a poster based on those, see left), the Tolkien watercolors (pale but evocative) and the Brothers Hildebrandt (fanboy embarrassing). The Baynes were for a boxed set ($3.00!) and in every case, having the books meant as much as reading the books. Digital culture will obviously create its own items of nostalgia (like that damned Myst music) but how will plain text fare?

For your weekend viewing pleasure

Claire saw Inkheart. It sounds good.

After all, the dictionary offers plenty of scope.

Deborah Stevenson sent me this useful chart.

When Worlds Collide

Our designer Lolly Robinson was spending a choir rehearsal break sitting in a Plymouth coffee shop and re-reading Shaun Tan's The Arrival, only to emerge and see this:


Lolly emailed me, "It made me wonder what other experiences like this people have had while still in the thrall of a children's book." It reminded me of when I saw Independence Day one summer day in New York, emerging afterwards into the full-on Manhattan Friday five o'clock rush hour just like the mad dash from the aliens the New Yorkers made in the movie. They ARE here. I also remember a train trip on a rainy day through a wooded portion of Connecticut while listening to an audiobook of The Fellowship of the Ring--full-on cognitive assonance!

Holding Mary Sue's Feet to the Fire

If these are the questions I don't want to see the answers.

The People Have Spoken

. . . and we have changed the order of the Narnia books on the Horn Book website.

Chronologist or Publicationist?

We got an email this morning objecting to the way we sequence the Narnia books on our website. Is there any consensus in re whether the books should be read in the order they were published, or in the order that the events chronicled take place? Was Lewis just being nice when he told a young fan that, yes, it made more sense to read The Magician's Nephew before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Was HarperCollins messing with a good thing when they re-ordered the books per Douglas Gresham's instructions? I'm no Lewis scholar but sense there is a seething hotbed of fan rage beneath these questions. Small stakes always make for the most drama!

At the Movies

Anita Burkam reviews Prince Caspian.

New Podcast

In our latest podcast, Martha Parravano talks to Catherine Gilbert Murdock about Princess Ben (Houghton), a slyly subversive--and satisfyingly romantic--fantasy that is receiving a starred review in the upcoming May/June issue of the Horn Book.

Who's in your backyard?

Horn Book Guide editorial assistant Rachel Smith reviews the new Spiderwick movie.

The Favored Five

As promised, here are Susan Cooper's and Gregory Maguire's five favorite fantasies as promulgated for our evening at MIT:

Susan's:

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett (told you she was deep)
The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White

Gregory's:

The Amazing Bone by William Steig
Father Fox's Pennyrhymes by Clyde and Wendy Watson
The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton
A Step off the Path by Peter Hunt
It by William Mayne

The last makes me unable to resist my favorite Dorothy Parker line. In reviewing Elinor Glyn's steamy It (1927), Parker wrote of the heroine, "It, hell. She had Those."

Live and on stage

Susan Cooper, Gregory Maguire and me, at MIT last month.

Wasn't that the short one that Robin McKinley loathed?

How the heck do you wring two movies out of The Hobbit?

Someone must have read the book in the meantime

the ARC:




the finished book:




Deirdre Baker has some pertinent thoughts (from "Musings on Diverse Worlds," Horn Book Magazine, January/February 2007):

In some cases, where the politics of inclusivity is not in the foreground of the story, the racial attributes of nonwhite heroes are rendered virtually invisible. Both Ged of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series and Eugenides of Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and sequels are described explicitly as "dark-skinned." Indeed, in conversation Turner has said that the images in her head of the Eddisians were "deeply influenced by the people of the Himalayas." But the brown skins of Ged and of Eugenides are downplayed by the books' current cover art, which shows Ged to be as bronzed as a white surfer (The Tombs of Atuan, 2001 edition) and Eugenides to have a noticeably pink and white complexion (The King of Attolia, 2006). While the texts give nonwhite readers the opportunity to see themselves reflected in these heroes, the cover art is telling them something else.

I'm glad this cover art changed its mind!

And I promise not to withdraw it.

Claire's review of The Golden Compass is here.

Susan Cooper speaks

WGBH has posted audio and video versions of Susan Cooper's Cambridge Forum lecture on fantasy.

Compass points

Kitty's put together a Philip Pullman page in anticipation of The Golden Compass opening this weekend; she's included links to both Monica Edinger and Bill Donohue, who must be stamping his little feet over The Catholic News Service's benevolent review.

And we apologize for the kind of rough audio, but my podcast interview with Pullman is also up for your listening pleasure.

Excuse My Dust

A Horn Book interview with Philip Pullman is forthcoming on our website later this week; Philip and I spent a few minutes on Friday discussing the upcoming Golden Compass movie and the peculiar Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, whose job I totally want: the man makes more than 300,000 smackers a year interviewing himself for press releases.

In preparation for the interview I reread The Golden Compass, something I hadn't done since reviewing it for BCCB way back when. In all the subsequent debate re the trilogy's weighty themes and dizzying ideas, I had forgotten just how action-packed this book was, complete with cliff-hanging chapter endings. It has completely propelled me into The Subtle Knife, which I'm re-reading via audiobook, an excellently addictive production (despite some cheesy musical interludes) narrated by Pullman himself with full-cast dialogue seamlessly worked in.

Now is this work-reading or pleasure-reading? Virginia Heffernan wonders why we draw a distinction.

Fantasy-astic

Gregory Maguire and Susan Cooper, photo by Richard Asch


While the rest of you were chowing down on thousand-dollar-a-plate surf-n-turf at the National Book Awards (unless you were too busy fondling--oh ICK I can't even say it) I was scarfing cookies graciously provided by Candlewick Press and Simon & Schuster as refreshment for our evening of talk about fantasy, the reading and writing of it, with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire. The house was full (guarding the door, Cambridge P.L.'s Julie Roach told me she heard all manner of subterfuges--"my friend has my ticket"-- and brooked none) and the conversation lively. Greg is naturally loquacious and Susan more reserved, so my job as moderator kept me on my toes. MIT will be posting a video of the event on their MITWorld site and I'll let you know when that's up; in the meantime you can still catch Susan Cooper tonight, free, at 7:30 PM at the First Church in Harvard Square.

Reading by the numbers

Monica Edinger has been hosting a lively discussion stemming from Jonathan Hunt's Horn Book article, "Epic Fantasy Meets Sequel Prejudice." Sequels sure do pose questions to reviewers: can you fairly evaluate volume one of something when volume two is meant to finish the job? What if you've skipped volume one, only to find that volume two has made it worthwhile? Or one was terrific, but two doesn't do it any favors?

I once had to review a volume three of something where two had not been published (in this country). And there's the recent example of Ellen Emerson White's new Long May She Reign, sequel to an out-of-print series whose most recent entry was published in 1989 . . . .

Merriman is gay?

Oops, wrong fantasy*. But in honor of the upcoming extravaganza with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire, Kitty and Claire have put online some of the Horn Book Magazine's finest fantasy articles, including Susan Cooper on Tolkien and Tom's Midnight Garden, Gregory Maguire on Philip Pullman, Philip Pullman on The Republic of Heaven, and several more esteemed writers on the whole doom-and-unicorns shebang. They won't be up forever, so read 'em now.

*But I still maintain that, in Susan Cooper's time fantasy King of Shadows, young hero Nat and the Bard of Avon totally had it going on, if you know what I'm saying.

I'm guessing Greenwitch will be a whole 'nother ball of wax.

The upcoming opening of The Seeker, formerly known as The Dark is Rising, has a lot of people on edge, not least Susan Cooper. I'm reminded of another time this title got in trouble, branded as racist in 1976 by the Council on Interracial Books for Children in their Human and Anti-Human Values in Children's Books: A Content Rating Instrument for Educators and Parents. And it was the title itself that got Cooper's book in hot water with this crowd, who believed that the equation of darkness with evil was "racist by commission," meaning overtly harmful. If I recall right, The Dark Is Rising was also labeled "racist by omission," by the CIBC, because it didn't have any black characters. I'll have to remember to ask Susan what she thought about all this.

"The Writing of Fantasy": Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire

Last Friday Daryl Mark (of the Cambridge P.L.) and I went over to MIT to look over the new location that anticipatory enthusiasm for the evening seemed to demand. So, we're still on for the program with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire, we're still talking about the writing and reading of fantasy, and it's still all going to take place on Wednesday, November 14, at 7:00PM. But note the new location: the program will now be taking place in the Frank Gehry glam Stata Center. MIT kahuna Paul Parravano (yes, consort to the inestimable Martha) showed us around, and it's quite an impressive place. Tickets (free but limit of four) for the evening will be available October 15th by sending an SASE to: Susan Cooper Event, Cambridge Public Library, 359 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02139. Note: seating is first come, first served; overflow "population" (MIT-speak for audience) will be accommodated via TV monitors. A reception will follow.

The following evening Susan Cooper will deliver a lecture, "Unriddling the World: Fantasy and Children" for the Cambridge Forum. This event is also free, no ticket required, and will be held at 7:30 PM at the First Parish church in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

Waiting for Harry

The reporters are calling again, looking for a new Harry Potter story. I wish I could be more helpful, but there really is no news. When they ask what the "next Harry Potter" will be, I point out that there was no last Harry Potter, depriving us off the crucial second dot from which we might be able to derive a meaningful line. Of course, we've seen book crazes before--Goosebumps, Sweet Valley, Babysitters' Club--and we can look back into the early 1970s to see another children's book that took over the adult bestseller list: Watership Down. But there has been nothing like Harry. And the next one, if there is one, probably won't be about a boy wizard, if the lack of success of the many post-Harry wannabes is any indication.

As for another frequent question, I really have no idea whether Harry Potter will be widely read in twenty years. One journalist floated the notion that once All Is Revealed, the series' cultural capital will be spent, but knowing that Frodo succeeds in his quest hasn't stopped fans from reading Lord of the Rings over and over again. There is an interesting comparison there, I think, but more for its differences than similarities: while both Harry Potter and the Tolkien books are multi-volume fantasy tales of an unlikely hero shouldering the weight of the world, Lord of the Rings for years was what you read if you were cool (at least, that's what its readers thought) or if you were a dork (that's what its scorners thought). The mass-market success of the Peter Jackson movies (and a Harry-wrought fantasy-friendly zeitgeist) might have changed that, but Harry Potter has been a crowd-pleaser from the start. You don't read Harry because that's what the cool kids are reading, but because that's what everyone is reading. (And I've never seen popular taste so ferociously defended. Tell people you don't like John Grisham, fine. Tell 'em you don't like Harry, and it's as if you have insulted humanity.)

The review copy of the latest Harry should arrive Saturday morning [correction: the 20th] at my house, from whence it will swiftly be retrieved by the assigned reviewer. When she's done, then we'll have some news.

More on Lloyd Alexander

We've posted further information about Lloyd Alexander here. And below, fervent Alexander fan and my best friend Elizabeth Law offers some of her own thoughts:


Lloyd Alexander is one of my favorite writers of all time, as well as one of my most influential. As a child and young adult, I read the Chronicles of Prydain at least once a year. I often slept with one of the books in my bed, so that it was the last thing I read at night and the first thing I read when I woke up. I don’t mean to over-analyze it, but those books had everything for me--good plots, a character I wanted to love and cuddle (Gurgi), a girl I wanted to be (Eilonwy), a friend I wanted to have (Fflewddur, after whom I named a cherished stuffed animal), and Gwydion, who seemed as glamorous to me as the teenager down the street who starred in all of the high school plays. (Years later, I still have a crush on Taran. Where, oh where, is the man who would sleep all night on the floor outside my door just to protect me?) Most of all, the books created a completely convincing, layered world that I wanted to be a part of.

Professionally, I learned an enormous amount from a piece Lloyd Alexander wrote years ago in the Horn Book, “The Flat-Heeled Muse.”:

Once committed to his imaginary kingdom, the writer is not a monarch but a subject. Characters must appear plausible in their own setting, and the writer must go along with their inner logic. Happenings should have logical implications. Details should be tested for consistency. Shall animals speak? If so, do all animals speak? If not, then which—and how? Above all, why? Is it essential to the story, or lamely cute? . . . (from “The Flat-Heeled Muse, Horn Book Magazine, April 1965)

I have quoted again and again from my dog-eared Xerox of that article in editorial letters. The point of the piece was that every fantasy world has an internal logic it must follow. Yes, it’s a pain for a writer to work that logic out, and to stick to it, but without it the writer’s story will feel fake and too convenient.

On a personal note, I send my thoughts to his now-retired long-time editor, Ann Durell. It was Ann who read the manuscript for The High King, intended to be the 4th and last book in the Prydain Chronicles, and said to Lloyd, “There’s a book missing here.” She saw the piece of the saga that Lloyd himself hadn’t yet seen, the book that became Taran Wanderer. That’s the greatest kind of editor/author relationship.

I’m so grateful to both of them.--Elizabeth Law

Androne here

And I'm a modest and shy ocelot who loves long walks in the rain. Have you picked your daemon yet?

Distant early warning

For those of you who enjoyed the profile of Gregory Maguire in the NYT yesterday, please put November 14 on your calendar, when I'll be conducting a public interview with Gregory AND Susan Cooper, about writing, fantasy, and the state of the world, in Cambridge, MA, location to be determined. Susan will also be giving a public lecture the next evening for the Cambridge Forum.

I'm also very happy with Gregory today because he's graciously agreed to donate a signed copy of Wicked for a benefit auction my man Richard's company is running tomorrow night for the BPL.