In a few weeks, Big Mouth Press (aka Small Beer Press) releases Holly Black’s collection of short stories, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. It’s a mix of fantasy and horror, most featuring adolescent or college age characters. These well-written stories aren’t light, happy reading. But then, you should expect dark and complex with a title like The Poison Eaters.

Most of the stories feature characters who are somewhat outcast. They fight themselves more than they do anyone or anything else. Sometimes that sort of inner conflict bores me to yawns, but each of these characters have personality that makes them interesting.

One side note, just to get my opinion out there. Nominally targeted at the young adult market, this collection contains dark stories that include sex (not graphic) and that glorify drinking and partying. These stories don’t teach lessons about how it’s better to behave like an adult. These things are by no means foreign to young adult stories, so my opinion isn’t unusual. My opinion: kids can handle anything and everything thrown at them in a book. I’ve never once met a teen that needed to be protected from anything in any book I’ve ever read. Stuff like this book is the antidote that adults get to counteract the bullshit sheltering they received when they were younger. Worries about what kids can handle are really worries about what the adults can handle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

This story made a couple of Year’s Best anthologies for good reason. Vampires have the coolness factor that they do in Twilight, eternal life (undeath) and eternal parties, though they are quarantined off in Coldtowns in most cities because of how infectious they are. Matilda has been bitten, but is trying to sweat out the incubation period rather than give in to the blood lust that would turn her. She doesn’t want to be a vampire. Her ex-boyfriend who she’s still in love with and his new girl want to become vampires though. One of the few vampire tales I’ve read in a while that really engaged me.

A Reversal of Fortune

A teen signs a pact with the devil to save her dog. If she beats the devil in a contest, the dog is saved. If she loses, she loses her soul. The contest she chooses is an eating competition, and she gets her overweight brother to train her. I think what makes the story is the set-up where Nikki meets the devil on the bus and then spend the day working at the mall, which isn’t the fun time she imagined when she took the job.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

This story was left out of the review copy I received.

The Night Market

A second deal with the devil kind of story. Set in the Philippines, Tomasa’s sister Eva has been snared by an enkanto, a faery of some sort, and lies wasting at home. Tomasa tries to get the enkanto to make her better, and when it refuses ventures into the faery night market looking for someone who can. A little more confusing than the previous story though.

The Dog King

Intelligent wolves terrorize the countryside, but the residents of the stone-walled city are safe inside until people mysteriously start dying. The king promises his throne to the knight who can kill the wolf causing all the havoc. Of course, it can’t be the king’s tamed wolf, can it? This one had me rooting for the wolf.

Virgin

Jen has a thing for Zachary, a homeless teenage junkie. He’s got the looks that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. But Zachary tells a wild tale about watching his mom die in the woods after which a unicorn befriends him. Messed up kids have messed up lives, and this ends up messed up for everyone.

In Vodka Veritas

The lightest story in the collection. The king of the prep school nerds gets stood up by his fellow outcast best buddy Danny on prom night. The friend actually got asked to prom. Our hero’s plan is to get dressed in a tux, break into the old abandoned home of the school on the edge of campus with a bottle of vodka, and get drunk. I’ve had similar plans before when I was young and lonely. His plan is foiled by the Latin club. No one expects the Latin club.

The Coat of Stars

Semi-closeted gay costume designer makes costumes for faeries to try and bring back is youthful crush. Good story, but a little too much clothes-whoring for me to get into it. I dress up as a means to an end, not an end to itself. So I don’t get costume-lust like other people do.

Paper Cuts Scissors

Really liked this one! Justin’s girlfriend Linda knows how to put things in stories. As in, the book in your hand is now changed to include the things Linda wants in it, and those things are no longer in the real world. It doesn’t change the book for other people who have it; just that copy. After an argument between the two, Linda puts herself into a classic Russian novel. Justin, heartbroken, goes to library school to get her out of the story. I mostly don’t like stories written for other writers, but I go ga-ga over stories like this that are written for readers. Perfect.

Going Ironside

A loopy story of faeries attempting to get people to impregnate them. Not my thing.

Untitled (A Modern Faerie Tale Story)

The second story not included in this review copy.

The Poison Eaters

Inventive story of three sisters. They are poison. Touch them and die. It’s hard to explain this story without getting into spoiler territory. Well worth the read.

Four of the stories are must-read: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, A Reversal of Fortune, Paper Cuts Scissors, and The Poison Eaters. All the rest were well-written too. Can’t go wrong buying this one.

One other blogged review:

• Book Nerds

Title: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Author: Holly Black
Imprint / publisher: Big Mouth House / Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced reading copy
Length: 156 p. (published version will have 256 p.)
Publication date: Feb 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-63-8

Small Beer Press provided me with an advance review copy of this book. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $12.14 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

Charles de Lint’s book Little (Grrl) Lost came across to me as a decent story on the surface with a fair amount of crunchy stuff underneath. It’s quiet. Some of its elements came back to me a few times in the couple of days since I’ve finished the book.

Fourteen year old T.J. Moore’s family has moved from the country to Newford’s suburbs and T.J. isn’t happy about it. She misses the horse that they can’t keep in the suburbs. She’s resentful of her parents for losing the family’s savings, which is why they had to move. Nevertheless, she’s a goody two shoes who loves them anyway and always tries to follow their rules.

Sixteen year old Tetty Elizabeth Wood is a punky teen who storms out of her parents’ house to run away because she doesn’t like their reclusiveness. That’s her on the cover with the awesome Doc Marten style stompy boots. She’s packed her bags and left the house to run away when she meets T.J. Elizabeth is also a six inch tall Little, a magical race of people descended from birds. Small and vulnerable is why the Wood’s stay hidden and reclusive.

The jacket copy for the book talks about Elizabeth and T.J. questioning and learning to trust each other. But really they hit it off right away and can depend on each other. Trust issues are at the center of the book, but not about each other. The two kids spend much of their ink meeting new people and finding out whether or not they can trust them, sometimes the hard way.

I like how the story’s moral isn’t honor thy mother and thy father. In real life, parents are just as prone to screw up things as anyone else. Granted, they have better judgment than teenagers usually, but I hate how lots of books turn back to the tried and true cliché’s where the parents turn out to be right in the end. T.J.’s parents mess up. Right at the beginning they’ve already lost the family’s money. Throughout the book they are loving and nevertheless over-protective to a fault. In addition to the kids trusting the wrong characters sometimes, so do the parents.

In a nice bit of underplayed humor, de Lint has Elizabeth, a mythical creature, disbelieve in other mythical creatures.

I also quite liked the plot structure for the book. I gotta repeat myself again, but it ends with a quiet climax that isn’t overplayed. No battle between good and evil finishes this. Just two teenage girls find their way in the world.

Stuff I didn’t like? Mostly one male who is a stereotyped control freak. He’s introduced as a nice guy, but then goes ballistic partway through. I’ve yet to meet any control freaks who don’t exhibit at least subtle signs of their psychosis in most interactions. It really would have been nice to have some of those red flags show up early. Trusting your gut is one thing, but a person’s gut reactions are informed by little behaviors that we can learn to recognize.

Also, I should mention that this book passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. I think that’s especially good in young adult books.

A few other blogged reviews:

• The Hungry Readers
• Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
• Ravenous Bookself
• Stepdadding
• Someone’s Read It Already
• Miss Print

Title: Little (Grrl) Lost
Author: Charles de Lint
Cover creator: Scott Fischer (artist) / Nancy Brennan (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Viking / Penguin
Format: Hardcover
Length: 271 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-670-06144-0
Subject: Runaways — Fiction
Subject: Size — Fiction
Subject: Moving, household — Fiction
Subject: Friendship — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
LC classification: PZ7.D33954Lit 2007

On her blog, author Nisi Shawl recommended John Crowley’s work several times in the last few months. It just so happens that I picked up a copy of Little, Big at last spring’s Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale. When I saw that Crowley would be doing a reading at the Richard Hugo House in September, I decided to give him a whirl.

However, I have to report that I have no idea what’s going on in Little, Big. Smoky Barnable marries Daily Alice Drinkwater in a family that’s strange. Weird house. They might or might not have made deals with faeries. Faeries might or might not exist. Smoky doesn’t seem to know what’s going on either. Part of the story is about his son Auberon, named for a family uncle. Auberon moves to the City for a period and lives in a gutted out city block that’s been turned into a walled farm. That was cool. But then his girlfriend Silvie disappears and Auberon becomes a drunk in response. And then things get weird again and I lost track of the doings.

538 pages of stuff that went over my head. I actually read the whole thing though. But I can’t recommend it or disrecommend it.

Instead, what I will do with this review is provide you with a list of all the words I had to look up. Crowley likes to use $10 words. I’m smart. I have a large vocabulary. Not smart enough though. I haven’t read a work of fiction in decades that made me look up so much.

1. amanuensis: one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript
2. orrery: apparatus showing the relative positions and motions of bodies in the solar system by balls moved by a clockwork
3. plangent: having a loud reverberating sound
4. orgulous: proud
5. deshabille: the state of being dressed in a casual or careless style
6. marmoreal: of, relating to, or suggestive of marble or a marble statue especially in coldness or aloofness
7. ormolu: golden or gilded brass or bronze used for decorative purposes (as in mounts for furniture)
8. vocable: a word composed of various sounds or letters without regard to its meaning
9. casques: a piece of armor for the head : helmet
10. étagère: a piece of furniture consisting of a set of open shelves for displaying small objects
11. encomium: glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise; also : an expression of this
12. demesne:
    1. legal possession of land as one’s own
    2. manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants
    3. the land attached to a mansion : landed property : estate : region : territory
    4. realm : domain
13. bosky: having abundant trees or shrubs : of or relating to a woods
14. pard: leopard
15. oubliette: a dungeon with an opening only at the top
16. aestivate: to pass the summer in a state of torpor
17. effulgent: radiant splendor : brilliance
18. threnody (used threnodic) : a song of lamentation for the dead : elegy
19. cerement: a shroud for the dead; especially : cerecloth
20. wimple:
    1. a cloth covering worn over the head and around the neck and chin especially by women in the late medieval period and by some nuns
    2. Scottish : a crafty turn : twist : curve : bend
21. phthisis (used phthisical): a progressively wasting or consumptive condition; especially : pulmonary tuberculosis
22. homburg: a man’s felt hat with a stiff curled brim and a high crown creased lengthwise
23. mullion (used mullioned): a slender vertical member that forms a division between units of a window, door, or screen or is used decoratively
24. borborygmus (used borborygmic): A rumbling noise produced by the movement of gas through the intestines.
25. rachitic : rickety
26. rimson — couldn’t find a definition with a quick search
27. homunculous : a little man : manikin
28. percipience: perception
29. byre : a cow barn
30. fundibular — couldn’t find a definition with a quick search
31. bole: trunk
32. laved : wash, bathe
33. atomy : a tiny particle : atom, mite

Perhaps one of these blogged reviews can help you make more sense of the book than I.

• Things Mean a Lot
• Too Fond of Books
• Yet There Are Statues

Title: Little, Big
Author: John Crowley
Cover creator: Eric Fuentecilla (designer) / Ludovic Moulin and Lorraine Molina (photographers)
Imprint / publisher: Perennial / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: 538 p.
Publication date: 2002 (originally 1981 by Bantam)
ISBN-10: 0-06-093793-9
LC classification: PS3553.R597 L5 2002

This is an excellent work of fantasy. Hell, it’s an excellent work of fiction. It has one huge drawback though, somewhat related to it’s immense length (1006 pages), the first 400 or so pages can be skimmed. They are slow-moving, and much of it serves little point.

Like several other books, this one tells the stories of two feuding magicians. In this universe, magic is real but has been quite dead in England for several hundred years. Magicians are people who read and study old books of magic and magical history. But they don’t perform any magic. They are unable. Along comes a magician who fancies himself a practical magician, Mr. Norrell. After demonstrating his work, he proceeds to get the English government to employ him in the war against the French, and afterward, as the governments lone magician. The second magician who comes along is Jonathan Strange. At the beginning he is a pupil of Mr. Norrell’s, but they go their separate ways over several issues. First, Mr. Norrell wants to control all magic, and denies Mr. Strange the use of the only library of magical books in England. The second is that Norrell has decided that the ancient king and magician John Uskglass and all his cohort of fairy servants are not fit subjects for study by English magicians. Being that Uskglass was the most powerful magician of all time, Strange wants to make use of his magic, which Norrell forbids.

In order to establish himself, Norrell had called upon a fairy to raise the wife of a government minister from the dead. In order to resurrect Lady Pole, Norrell needed the assistance of a fairy. But in doing so, the fairy enchanted Lady Pole, as well as several other people, and generally set about to cause all sorts of problems for England, including against Strange.

I’m not really sure why this book was so frequently compared to the Harry Potter series. Other than being about England and magic, the similarities are few to none. It seems like every review I read started off by saying the reviewer was expected Harry Potter for adults. It’s not.

Ms. Clarke has built up an exceedingly well-thought-out and complete magical universe. Despite the length of the novel, most parts of it connect with other parts. They serve purposes which are revealed as you read.

Norrell is an unlikable character. Clarke intended for him to be unlikable. I didn’t like him so much because through the first half of the book he’s simply a crotchety old man. Then there’s a brief bit where he gets a bit more two-dimensional as Strange parts ways with him. And towards the end he starts becoming a character in which I was interested. Strange though, I liked him throughout. Both in the sense that he’s a character I like, and also a character that I thought was more interesting. The problem with Norrell was that his motivations were pretty simple. Strange on the other hand had all sorts of conflicting motivation: his responsibility for restoring magic, his curiosity about magic, his desire to help England, his devotion to his wife Arabella to name a few. Norrell simply wants to be the pointy-headed boss, and magic is his vehicle. Oh, he expresses words to the effect that he enjoys magic, but his actions bely that.

Clarke also did a great job of developing all the side characters with the exception of John Uskglass, the ancient magician. Because our only contact with him is through writings about him, often having gone through two or three steps in the game of phone tag, and revealed to us only through Strange or Norrell, I never really got a feel for what kind of person he was. I suppose that’s sort of the point, otherwise the conflict between Norrell and Strange over Uskglass would be fairly uninteresting to a reader. Still, as his magic becomes more important to the story, it felt like there was something missing about him. The other minor characters like Childermass, Lascelles, Arabella, Stephen, etc., had plenty of depth and made for good reading.

I don’t know that I would put the book on the pedestal on which it seems to have perched. But it’s a pretty good fantasy novel.

Title: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Author: Susanna Clarke
Illustrator: Portia Rosenberg
Imprint / Publisher: Tor / Holtzbrinck
Format: Mass market paperback
Publication date: August 2006 (September 2004 in hardcover)
Length: 1006 p.
ISBN-10: 0-765-35615-5
Subject: Teacher-student relationships — Fiction
Subject: Magicians — Fiction
Subject: Fairies — Fiction
Subject: London (England) — Fiction
Subject: York (England) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6103.L375 J65 2004