[sample sip.] Johnson, E.K.: A Thousand Nights

sample sip. is a tagline for the knee jerk, i can't wait until the release day thoughts i have right after finishing an arc. it is not a full or final review. nothing is full or final here. except for my patience with myself.

A Thousand Nights
Hitting Shelves: October 6, 2015
Disney*Hyperion

Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to her village, looking for a wife. When she sees the dust cloud on the horizon, she knows he has arrived. She knows he will want the loveliest girl: her sister. She vows she will not let her be next.

And so she is taken in her sister's place, and she believes death will soon follow. Lo-Melkhiin's court is a dangerous palace filled with pretty things: intricate statues with wretched eyes, exquisite threads to weave the most beautiful garments. She sees everything as if for the last time.But the first sun rises and sets, and she is not dead. Night after night, Lo-Melkhiin comes to her and listens to the stories she tells, and day after day she is awoken by the sunrise. Exploring the palace, she begins to unlock years of fear that have tormented and silenced a kingdom. Lo-Melkhiin was not always a cruel ruler. Something went wrong.

Far away, in their village, her sister is mourning. Through her pain, she calls upon the desert winds, conjuring a subtle unseen magic, and something besides death stirs the air.

Back at the palace, the words she speaks to Lo-Melkhiin every night are given a strange life of their own. Little things, at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. With each tale she spins, her power grows. Soon she dreams of bigger, more terrible magic: power enough to save a king, if she can put an end to the rule of a monster.

 
Goodness.

The utter wealth of this book.

I am at a loss right now for the right words to string together – which is just as well, as I don’t trust myself right now not to spoil everything.

And that is a beautiful thing in itself. This is A Thousand Nights, after all: the timeless classic, the story of the girl who won back her life with carefully woven stories and well-placed cliffhangers. It might seem as though, after years of retelling and renditions, there’s nothing left to spoil.

But you haven’t read this particular story yet.

Here’s what I am allowing myself to tell you:

1. A Thousand Nights is gorgeous. I am not Middle Eastern, but I have shared a meal with Middle Eastern friends, and I could clearly picture the plates, the food, the meats and breads and the pinched morsels between oily fingers. I could smell the spices wafting off the pages, see the goat herds and the humble tents and the bright threads used in a bride’s wedding gown. The language is very carefully chosen and it paints a broad, vibrant world.

2. A Thousand Nights is not about the stories. It is about the woman who uses her wits, so brilliantly, to see the light of day. It is about the woman who forges alliances with those who are worried to let her into their hearts, because they are so aware of the fact that in the morning, she may be another forgotten name as their ruler sets out in quest of a new bride. It is about the woman who is wise, and determined – to set her world to rights, to be strong, and to see the next day with her own eyes.

3. A Thousand Nights is about the women. It is about the women who love devotedly, who sacrifice and lay siege and worship for the sake of each other. It is about sisters and sister-wives and mothers and daughters. It is about protecting young girls and learning at the knees of older women. If there is anything I will likely wax poetic about, beyond the language, it is the women of this world. It is the type of representation and love we should expect from every young adult novel, and exactly what we deserve.  

4. A Thousand Nights is not only woven brilliantly - it is woven with respect.  A world that is coded brown, and blatantly so, is full of characters who hold their agency firmly. They live, they marry, and they converse without a black cloud of potential stereotypes being unleashed over their heads. It’s unspoiled, because it’s done with care.

5. A Thousand Nights lingers even after you've turned the last page. For much of the reading experience, it may even seem like a quiet title. So much rests in the world-building and the relationships and little acts of magic that are steps forward to larger scenes and crucial defiance. And that is what firmly roots it into your mind. Every little moment is a marvel that leads to a grander denouement. 

If you listen long enough to the whispers, you will hear the truth.

Until then, I will tell you this: the world is made safe by a woman. 

E.K. Johnson has firmly settled herself into my list of favorite authors. I cannot wait to see what new stories she will spin, and I cannot wait for you to read this and be able to discuss it with me.

   
Full review (and gushing, and an inevitable discourse on why it's so important to write diversity right) to come. 

I would be remiss to end this without thanking my lovely friend Julie, who, when she heard I hadn't been able to snag one on the first day of BEA, finished her own copy and gave it to me. Thank you so much, Julie!
 

{milky sips.} Hellisen, Cat: Beastkeeper

February 3, 2015
Henry Holt and Co.
MG Fantasy, 208 pages 

Sarah has always been on the move. Her mother hates the cold, so every few months her parents pack their bags and drag her off after the sun. She’s grown up lonely and longing for magic. She doesn’t know that it’s magic her parents are running from.

When Sarah’s mother walks out on their family, all the strange old magic they have tried to hide from comes rising into their mundane world. Her father begins to change into something wild and beastly, but before his transformation is complete, he takes Sarah to her grandparents—people she has never met, didn’t even know were still alive.

Deep in the forest, in a crumbling ruin of a castle, Sarah begins to untangle the layers of curses affecting her family bloodlines, until she discovers that the curse has carried over to her, too. The day she falls in love for the first time, Sarah will transform into a beast . . . unless she can figure out a way to break the curse forever. 

The other day, a good friend and I were talking about the middle grades we were raised on.

To properly describe it, I'd have to draw forward the example of that scene from The Lightning Thief, where Percy sips ambrosia for the first time and finds that it tastes like his mother's brownies - warm, fresh, soothing.

If I ever had the chance to taste test ambrosia for myself, I'm quite sure it'd taste like the books I chose carefully when I was younger: wild, deep-rooted in old folklore and enchantments, ancient and yet robust and timeless.

Not to say that I'd willingly drink down the taste of musty, pulpy paper and withering ink, as much as I love the real thing. I think it'd be more of a revitalizing tea or maybe a bracing lemonade laced with its fair share of sweet, earthy herbs that are wick to the very center, a few lumps of sugar to keep your spirits up as you run with wolves and hide in old hollows and maybe even find a new world where your winter coats should hang.

Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones (always, always Diana Wynne Jones) - they make up the core of my lifelong love story with children's fantasy.

And so, now, Beastkeeper.

The story drew me in as all those other books did: a young, empathetic heroine, an ancient family curse, stumbling through new circumstances and figuring out the set rules of magic with not much else than suspicious, talking animals, a questionable wild boy ally and previously untapped courage and love.

I am always won over by the promise of family devotion and love.

And lovely prose. The prose, more than anything else, made me settle down and make a nest for myself within the story.

To quote one of my own GoodReads status updates from last night (at only 30% into my e-ARC!): "I am starting to realize what a covetous creature I am. And why authors often compare themselves to ravens. I am highlighting words and perfect phrases to attempt to feather my own nest of impossible ideas. Cat Hellisen is pulling out all the stops of her mastery of words thus far, and I must enviously bow to the fact that I'm so very enchanted and my seven-year-old self is giddily spooning it all into her mouth."

(Another note I might add: I am quite picky about what goes into my nest.

I do not settle for any shade of yarn, any particular antique fork or old pocket watch or shining turn of phrase.

It has to be Just Right, like a tuning fork hitting the right frequency and jolting the rest of my heart into catching up and feeling like, "Yes, that word was meant to be right there."

Hearing from the author herself that she was very much inspired by classic fantasy, particularly Diana Wynne Jones - her favorite, Dogsbody, was also the very first I read! - and Susan Cooper also made me quite sure that she is very much my sort of people.)

Sarah tiptoed along the landing towards her parents' room and wondered what flavor silence was, and if it grew hard and brittle if you threw it away, or if people sometimes stepped on wads of discarded silence and it stuck to the soles of their shoes and made their footfalls softer.

And

Sarah tiptoed faster, the shadows clinging to her shoulders like shed ghost-skins.

Like that.

Exactly like that.

It also helps that Sarah is such a sympathetic wildwoods child. At times, I just wanted to hug her, to grasp her by her shoulders and tell her how I could see that she was trying, that she was giving it her all - in her body's strength and in her emotions - to figure out the tangled web around her family and the circumstances she was forced to shoulder merely for being born into a cursed family.

And that is something I feel children's literature can address so well: the prices paid for jealousy and hatred, how it really feels to struggle under a parent's sin and bear on as your normal world crumbles around you.

The particular details of the curse - how it devours her father and threatens her as well, even with her thinned blood and desperation not to succumb - are wrought in particularly deep and dark tones, and makes it all the more pressing for you to turn the page and find out how Sarah fares.

And now, a brief word on the ending. I am well aware that it will not be everyone's cup of tea. Approaching Beastkeeper as I did, with the understanding that fairy tales have evolved as they have, particularly with the knowledge that not every ending is happy (though, as you well know, many of these tales do and I myself am not at all averse to perfect conclusions), one twist in particular was very much expected.

Though it was still not that easy or less bitter to swallow.

To me, the entire denouement fit well with the story and the horrific curse as it stood. I won't say more and spoil it for you, but I am well satisfied with it and the hope that (to me) it offered for the characters when the curtains closed.

And, in a post-script of sorts: I just took a peek back at another middle grade fairy tale I read fairly recently, Ophelia and the Mysterious Boy. Within that review, I noted that young Kaye often had nightmares when reading particularly vicious and heart-wrenching fairy tales.

That fact and stage of my reading history still stands, and I think it's well noted that Beastkeeper will probably appeal in particular to the late middle grade and young adult set. There's a time for every story.

(As evidenced by the fact that I am positively licking my fingers post-Beastkeeper and not in a fit of torment.)


Of note: As I said before, the ending will not sit well with some. There is violence, some heart-breaking scenarios and death. There is also grizzly moments involving uncooked meat, brutal transformations (not the charming beast-to-man sequence found in Disney, mind) and a rather maddened witch or two.

I leave it up to the reader's discretion.

{milky sips.} Foxlee, Karen: Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

January 28, 2014
Knopf Books for Young Readers
MG Fantasy, 240 pages


I received an advance electronic copy of this title from the publisher, in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Unlikely heroine Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard doesn't believe in anything that can't be proven by science. She and her sister Alice are still grieving for their dead mother when their father takes a job in a strange museum in a city where it always snows. On her very first day in the museum Ophelia discovers a boy locked away in a long forgotten room. He is a prisoner of Her Majesty the Snow Queen. And he has been waiting for Ophelia's help.

As Ophelia embarks on an incredible journey to rescue the boy everything that she believes will be tested. Along the way she learns more and more about the boy's own remarkable journey to reach her and save the world.

A story within a story, this a modern day fairytale is about the power of friendship, courage and love, and never ever giving up.

To be honest, as a kid, I was never really a dark and dreary fairytale sort of person.

One time, I had nightmares because I read a version of East of the Sun, West of the Moon complete with the gory “chop off your pinkie for your true love who turned into a bird and flew off because YOLO” scene. 

 

My mom banned me from the collection of fairy tales for the next few months.

As a brief note on exactly what kind of kid I was, I then merged from fairy tales into Goosebumps. At night. With dim lighting on. (What kind of kid was Kaye back in the olden days? One who didn’t take a hint from her dreams and liked to scare herself silly.)

So, keep in mind that Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy is a story that young Kaye would have devoured, and then scoured the entire household for a flashlight or two to keep herself company afterward.

Ophelia starts out deceptively light – to the point that I nearly put it aside, because the text seemed so very simplistic and childish. I will note that I adore picture books, and they have their warm, fluffy place in my heart even now. However, once you reach the middle-grade tier of titles, you expect something a bit more mature, something a reader – even one outside of the age group – can sink their teeth into without feeling inappropriately condescended.

In picture books, we find happy, small sentences for happy, small fingers: “She went up. She went down. She went into town.”

Ophelia has similar adventures, when she first starts exploring the mysterious museum that is her temporary home, and prison to the aforementioned Marvelous Boy she will need to rescue. She ventures into big halls. She ventures into little halls. She stops to take a peek at something incredible…and then she wanders out again.

It may seem all too light and easy – at first. Because then she finds the Marvelous Boy. And then you have these morbidly engrossing recaps of his adventure and his mission against the evil Snow Queen (not at all an Elsa, mind you – a child-slaying, land-freezing, cold-hearted witch) to look forward to.

Including one brilliant segment where one of the Queen’s evil owls EATS HIS FINGER in a trade, to cast a protective spell on him. There’s more to the scene than that, and it all does make sense once you read it, but that was definitely a point where younger Kaye would start checking her closet and outside her window to see if a snowfall was starting up.

This is not a picture book, ladies and gentlemen. This is a fairy tale that Neil Gaiman or Roald Dahl or Hans Christian Anderson would be proud of. This is the story of a queen who wants to kill a boy so badly that she will lock him up, and wait years to kill him before he can kill her. (I suppose some people would point out that two wrongs don’t make a right, but still.)

This is the story of a little girl, overcoming her grief for her lost mother, and finding her own ways to be brave while facing down man-eating birds, and asthma attacks, and her own young mortality.

And it all works – deceptive language and all. Perfectly. Though I have to admit, there were times I regressed to young Kaye and squeezed my eyes shut before I pressed forward on my Kindle, ready for the worst possible scenario.

(I am only just starting to realize that I was a bit of a softie, back in the day. Considering the way that I torture my own characters now, I wonder where that went.)

The thing was, you can overlook everything that might go wrong for Ophelia. I loved Ophelia. She was the type of plucky Everygirl that you want to see in fiction – the girl who could be next door, or you, just waiting for some evil undead ruler to rise up so that you can set aside your meek and mild-mannered ways and dig down deep to the hero within.

Ophelia has her little ‘puffer’, her quirks and sensibilities – including rejecting all the fantastic beliefs of her lost writer mother – and she has her doubts about a quest for a strange little boy locked away in a museum who has to kill a snow queen. And that is another beautiful thing about this book: it turns expectations on its head.

Ophelia is the type of girl that many would pat on the head and tell her to sit down, and catch her breath, and look at the pretty museum murals while thinking of a way to convince her father to carry out the quest for her. But she doesn’t.

I’ve seen complaints from other reviewers on GoodReads, mainly along the lines of this having been done before, and being done better. The fact is, there is no new fantasy under the sun. Everyone takes out some stitches, adds a few new patches, and their own twist of whimsy locked up inside like a Build-a-Bear heart.

That is what is done here, and I won’t say that it couldn’t have been done better. But it was done the way it was supposed to be done here (though I could have done away with that gratuitous finger-eating scene. That brought back some memories. Not good ones).

If you like Claire Legrand, as I do, you’ll enjoy this. If you enjoy stories where the children win in the end – but not without a lot of gasping and cringing – you’ll enjoy this.

 
Of note: Mild violence of the fairy tale variety, threats against young children, and some hair-raising scenes that are not out of the norm for the middle-grade set. If you are timorous or faint of heart, you’ll survive. Just keep your flashlight at the ready.

Add Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy on GoodReads

Black, Holly: White Cat (Curse Workers, #1)

May 4, 2010
Margaret K. Elderberry Books
YA Fantasy/Urban Fantasy, 310 pages
Acquired and read: Off the shelves of my public library; read within two days due to the usual obligations of day-to-day life. Someday, I intend to barricade myself in my own personal reading room and read and read for weeks on end. Just my books. And my tea. And perhaps some sandwiches.

The first in a trilogy, this gritty, fast-paced fantasy is rife with the unexpected. Cassel comes from a shady, magical family of con artists and grifters. He doesn’t fit in at home or at school, so he’s used to feeling like an outsider. He’s also used to feeling guilty—he killed his best friend, Lila, years ago.

But when Cassel begins to have strange dreams about a white cat, and people around him are losing their memories, he starts to wonder what really happened to Lila. In his search for answers, he discovers a wicked plot for power that seems certain to succeed. But Cassel has other ideas—and a plan to con the conmen.

 
There is no hard and heavy rule to me liking or disliking a book. It just...happens.

I offer up White Cat as evidence.

Holly Black and I have gone through the same dance I perform with most other authors. I pick up a book by her. I skim through it. I decide it Has Promise and carry it home with me, only to abandon it within the wobbling stack of books already beside my desk. (No, it doesn't look any better than last week.) Due to an impending fine/someone else actually wanting to pay attention to it/an Act of God, I'm forced to give it back to the library. Some days later, I return to said library, notice it and pick it up again.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In this case, I was especially leery of White Cat because I've only once attained reader nirvana (or something close to it in the middle of a particularly loud and "swinging" wedding reception) with a sample of Black's writing - a piece in which a young Asian girl is forced to barter with an "evil" spirit in order to keep her sister from languishing away painfully due to unrequited love. Good stuff, really. But her faerie series just doesn't do it for me, so I wasn't quite sure if I'd like this any better.

Anyway, this time I decided I was going to sit down and give the first chapter a try - and then I ended up in the second chapter. And the third.

I finished the last chapter, closed the book, and decided I am not going out in public without gloves ever again.

Welcome to Cassel's world. Once you're in, Black makes sure you don't know which way to exit. You just hold on and clamp your eyes shut, and hope that at least by the end, you'll know your first name. This is the type of book that makes me want to write, simply to hit the same amount of sheer awesome on my own personal scale. Just so you know how quickly it hooked me.

So, forget my dramatics for a moment. Let's talk about Cassel. He's the type of guy who sits back and watches, observes, cases the joint before he makes a move. He's got a dead best friend (who he has vague memories of murdering, but has no idea how or why), two big brothers that pretty much treat him as a disposable pawn in an endless chess game for power, and a evilly crazy...or is that crazy evil...mom in jail. Also, he's not a Worker - in a world where people can crush your mind, break your bones and make you fall madly in love with an angel-faced sinner...all with the touch of a bare finger.

And he's having dreams about a haunting white cat, a cat that bites out his tongue, scratches at him and speaks in a familiar voice. Telling him things about himself that he's quite sure isn't true.


The supporting cast is as much a focus as Cassel himself. This book gives us a mafia world that Gabrielle Zevin only scratched upon within the pages of All The Things I've Done (which I relatively enjoyed - for me, but not as much as this). Everyone acts within character, you get what I mean? There's not a moment where the reader feels thrown off and goes, "Wait a minute. That type of person wouldn't do that."

Let me tell you...up until I read this book, I wouldn't be sure that an author could throw together mafia families, hereditary talents and hints of old fairytales together and get away with it (at least without sounding completely nutso and pretentious), but Black does it perfectly. There is hardly a hitch in the thread of the story. The story starts with a bang, but it doesn't go out with a whimper.

This is complete mind-bending storytelling at its best.

I'm not sure how many times I can say that without sounding completely nutso and pretentious myself.

One of the main bones I had to pick (and this is rather minor) was White Cat's category. In the inside of the book, it's classified as "Science Fiction". Mr. Scott Westerfield blurbed the back cover. That was enough to make me anticipate genetic engineering, mad inventions and lab-tech hijinks of all sort. What I did get, though, was something more along the lines of a world with a bit of fantasy within its ordinary foundation - special abilities, prophetic dreams.

Magic.

Science.

Not the same thing, people.

Unless there's something I missed. It does happen, you know.


The only other thing is the unhappy ending. For Cassel, at least. Well, maybe it's not an unhappy ending for him as much as for me, because I'm all true love perseveres and the evil witch falls off a tower and happy-happy credits rolling as we exit the movie theater. Holly Black seems to function more realistically - the hero doesn't always get everything he wants. It happens. I know it does. But if you're expecting for everything to magically fall into place and for you to close the book with a satisfying sigh and a hand clutched to your heart with sheer joy and faith in humanity...please don't.

On the bright side, there are two more books to carve through, so I'm not completely writing the poor boy off. Authors can be merciful.

Sometimes.

Warnings: Some instances of strong language and innuendo. There are cruel, unfair, backstabbing people involved here. If you think the world is made of sweetness and light, I don't want to be the one who shatters your innocence. You're better off exploring the picture books.