Tomes on Tuesday: Green Boy by Susan Cooper and Assorted Rantings About Books To Movies

Okay, I love Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series.  Love.  I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but  reading The Dark is Rising (the book, not the series) during a Newbury Award book-reading contest cemented in my head the idea that fantasy had to be smart and grounded in mythology to be good.  (I'm not saying this is a Truth, I'm saying that it's MY Truth.)  I'm not really down with sword and sorcery unless it's smart sword and sorcery and if you're going to tempt me with fantasy, it needs to have a thick line of well-researched myth for me to be happy with it.

I just started reading Over Sea, Under Stone (the first book in the series) to Jeffrey, and while I love it, it's a bit slow-going.  It makes me wonder if I've read too much "Hi, I'm Harry Potter and oooh, look, my hair grows at an enormous rate"-type children's fantasy lately.  Or it could be that this story lacks a great deal of the overt magic in the series.  Anyway, I'm reading it to the Bug and we're slogging through, because good things happen in this series.

(Pardon me while I make a giant, ungraceful leap over to a newish topic.)

Good things also happen in The Green Boy, by Ms. Cooper, although the story-telling is occasionally heavy-handed and, to be honest, I thought waaaay too much about some plot points that weren't maybe that important.  (Please note, this is NOT a new book, but is instead one that I found on the shelf that I hadn't read yet and I thought, Yay!  New Cooper!)

In a departure from her usual settings, the story takes place on a fictional Bahamian island, and centers around two Bahamian boys, Trey and Lou.  Lou can't speak, but is really in tune with Nature.  It's all a bit complicated, but developers are seeking to turn the island into a resort and Trey and Lou are horrified, as is their grandfather.  (Mom works in another city and dad is splitsville, although he does show up in an unpleasant way.) The boys discover that their island is actually a portal to another world (or maybe Lou is...) and travel to this world, which has been stripped of wildlife except for some unpleasant areas where the genetic mutations bred by scientists live.  Okay.  Now, up until this point, the story reminded me heavily of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, which is not all bad.  I'm down with that.  Oooh, look, I thought.  A new dystopia.  But...no.

Instead, the book took a sharp mythological turn that made Lou synonymous in some way with Lugh, the Indo-European light-bringer.  Oh, dear.  This might sound small-minded of me, but it was jarring for me to have two native Bahamians become agents of an Indo-European myth, particularly when a disgorging Green Man made an appearance late in the book.  (Hang on, I'm about to get nerdly.)   The majority of folks (including Trey and Lou) in the Bahamas are the descendents of African slaves, and while I am not knowledgeable enough in African myth to be certain, I assume that there exists in the canon some kind of resurrection or light-bringing or nature-tending that could be utilized here.

Because, ultimately, that is what this book is about:  the importance of man's connection to and reverence of Nature.  The message is occasionally heavy-handed, but it IS a children's book, where sometimes subtlety can be lost.  (This is also probably the reason why the Lugh thing tripped me up--it's actually a decent way to get kids interested in Irish and Celtic mythology, but maybe if you KNOW that stuff already, it feels all wrong.)

I would certainly recommend this as an easy, interesting read for children up to high school age, but if you're an adult fan of Cooper, you might want to skip it (or at least go into it with the knowledge that this is NOT The Dark is Rising.)

In a not very related topic, well...sort of.  Sigh.  Have I mentioned it's hot?  Anyway, the other evening a friend and I were discussing the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games.  I have been, for the most part, appalled at the casting (Lenny Kravitz as Cinna.  Lenny KRAVITZ as Cinna?  Lenny.  Kravitz.  As.  Cinna.  I love me some Lenny and I would most definitely go his way should he strut past, BUT CINNA?  No.) and am concerned about how in the world Hollywood will take a book that is an intensely personal story of a heroine's inner struggle and turn it into a movie that is in any way in keeping with the book.

Hollywood, by and large, sucks when it comes to adapting my favorite books, particularly the children's books.  I don't even want to get into what was done to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (both versions, frankly, although at least the Gene Wilder version didn't feature a fricking dentist daddy issue storyline.)  When Hollywood announced it was going to do The Dark is Rising, I wavered between happiness and sheer horror, and it turns out the latter was the correct emotion, because Walden Studios totally removed any bit of subtlety or Arthurian legend or Celtic myth or dark magic and instead turned the movie into a giant wad of crap, filled with explosions and young love and Americanisms that made me want to barf.  Susan Cooper requested the script be changed because it was so blech, but apparently, that was a no go.  If you go read that link, be sure to read where the writer knew the book had to be changed to adapt to film, because it was "... it was written in this quite lyrical, poetic, kaleidoscopic fashion."  Yes, children just HATE that kind of thing.  (Bangs head on desk.) 

My fear for the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games is that the makers will see it as "ooh, look, there's explosions and death and kissing and mutants!  With explosions!" when it's reality is a little more like "teenagers are capable of great emotional depth and the world is a fragile place, so cling to the things that keep you safe while embracing a different way of looking at your environment.  Also, dystopias suck."

There is a difference there that is so, you know, subtle (CUE IRONIC SNORT) that I'm not sure if Hollywood understands.  And if it doesn't don't...well, I'm not sure Lenny's hotness can save the movie, y'all.

I mean, even hotness of that magnitude has its limits.

Tomes on Tuesday (Wednesday edition): The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen and Shadowfever by Karen Moning

A little caveat here:  I have a problem when reading books in my favorite genres.  This also applies to watching movies. For example, I hated the movie Never Let Me Go, a dystopian alternate reality mess that featured lifeless characters (or maybe it was just the acting) and tried to be all profound.  Bleagh.  If my dystopias don't feature some HOPE of a utopia (or just less awfulness), I'm not gonna love them.  THAT'S the problem:  if the worlds an author creates don't gibe with my ideas of how the worlds should work, I can't get into the book.  And that's unfortunate for me, because I just read two such books.

I'll start with Shadowfever by Karen Moning. Up until last year (or maybe the year before...it gets confusing), I'd never really heard about the vampire sex books.  Or fairy sex books.  Or werewolf sex books. Or the anythingthatdoesn'treallyexistonthisplane sex books.  Turns out that there's a whole subgenre of books floating around the speculative fiction universe which features hot action between the sheets with various fanged, winged, furry, magic-wielding creatures.  Who knew? 

It miffs people who love these books (and there are a lot of them) when I condense it down to this, but in my mind, this is what Moning  (and the other authors) do best:  write good sex.  It's hard to capture that connection, in my opinion, and plenty of romance novelists can write about swelling body parts, but not every one can make your pulse race.  Moning does.  The sexual attraction between her characters is strong and provocative and titillating.  Yay, the sex! 

However, everything else bugs the crap out of me.  This book, which is the fifth in the series, is confusing, convoluted, and could have stood to be about a hundred pages shorter.  The goal for the author, I think, was to wrap up the main character's story.  Mackayla Lane went to Dublin in the first book to solve her sister's murder, only to find herself plopped down in the middle of a Faerie war.  This is a HUGE simplification, but at the end of the day, that's what it turns out to be.  The series trots along at a fairly fast clip, with hot sex and derelictions from the Faerie canon that made my teeth curl in different and uncomplimentary ways.  Mac is a Southern girl, so I feel for her, but she's drawn so shallowly that when she has to be a badass who loves the dirty sex (have I mentioned the sex?) instead of a beach baby who inexplicably seems to have no love life, that transformation has to be outlined in EVERY NOVEL.  Including this one, which given the awful mess that Mac's gone through, seems odd.  But it keeps being hammered in, mainly by describing Mac's clothes.  Apparently, her inner torment is revealed by her predilection to wear a thong and put her hair in a high ponytail.  AT THE SAME TIME.  That's deep, y'all.

Anywho, all the secrets about Mac and her lover/tormenter/favorite beast Barrons and those crazy Faerie sex folks were supposed to be revealed in this book, and I guess they were.  But to be honest, I had to keep skipping giant chunks of book because...I was bored.  And confused.  And pretty sure that whatever got revealed to Mac was going to be unrevealed in a few pages because it...kept...happening.  She'd figure out who she was and then a few chapters later, it would all fall apart.  She and Barrons would get straightened out and then he'd get pissed off again, for reasons I never really understood.  Mac's identity, when it was all said and done, never was really clear to me, and to be honest, most of this book felt like a set up for another series.  With hot sex.  And sexual tension.  Occasionally with fangs and/or wings.

I can't NOT recommend this series, because--as I think I've said--Moning writes good sex and up until this book, has told a fun story that you can sink into IF you're willing to shunt aside the entire codex of Faerie lore. This would be a good series to read during the summer--just make sure you DON'T drink a pina colada while reading the last one.  It would be too confusing.

Moving on to The Peach Keeper.  As you may recall, I love Sarah Addison Allen's previous book Garden Spells.  It is a book friend.  And I really, really, really like The Sugar Queen.  This one...eh.  Okay, here's the deal:  I LOVE magical realism.  I WRITE magical realism. So when I read magical realism, I want it to be good.  No, I want it to be great.  I want the magic to be natural and startling at the same time.  I want the realism to be, you know, real.  And Allen USUALLY does this well, but, to my regret, this book fell flat for me.  This was, I think, for two reasons:  a rushed feeling and either stale or underdeveloped characters.

The characters first:  we have the rich, good girl who longs to break free.  We have the poor girl from the once-rich family who was smart but couldn't get her stuff together. (The rich girl has an overbearing, gossipy mother and a blank father.  The poor girl lacks a mom, but has a peach of a dad.)  (Aside:  the title makes no sense.  None.  It drives me crazy when that happens.)  There's the rich dude who finally escaped the trappings of his former life.  There's the bad guy, who is your standard charlatan/charmer who might be the devil, but who's to say?  Two old ladies:  one feisty, one with dementia.  A quirky secondary character with a heart of gold.  The ONE character who is interestingly different is also a dentist (which slays me, for some reason) and the weirdness that Allen hints might be Fey or magic or SOMETHING turns out to just be plain old weirdness mixed with a touch of sexual confusion.  

The pace and plot were also just...aggravating.  Some things are introduced but never fully developed:  the peaches from the title SHOULD be pivotal, but wind up being only a vague influence.  The charlatan was clearly a magical being, but this was never really explored and was, in fact, basically ignored.  And not in a "Well, we live in a realistically magical town, so shit happens" way, but in a "As an author, I'm just not going to explore this" way.  We kept getting hints that the aforementioned sexually confused character (or maybe ambiguous--hard to say) was really important to the whole charlatan's history angle, but then that part just sort of faded away.  The flocks of black and yellow birds?  Never explained.  When the lovers all get settled, the story dwindles to a "and then everybody was cozy and looked wryly at each other" thing, which I HATE in a story.  When a beloved character from another book shows up, her appearance was a lot less "yay!" than I thought it would be, mainly because it felt like yet another throwaway moment.

And I think that's what really bugs me here:  this story didn't feel crafted, to me.  It felt thrown together for fans, but not truly realized.  The bones of a good story were there, but they were covered up by layers of fluffy smells and noises and characters that seemed MEANT to move the story, but wound up being unnecessary or feeble.  The magical realism touches were forced or unexplained or, worse, felt like Alice Hoffman with a Southern accent.  So, with regret, I really can't recommend this story.  If you want to check Allen out, please go find Garden Spells or The Sugar Queen, both of which feature strong characters, clear stories, and magical elements that make sense or are vital.

Snirf.  Here's hoping that I can find something good to read between now and July, when Maggie Stiefvater's Forever comes out.