So You Want to Be A Wizard, Diane Duane

I’ve been told to try these so often that I more or less assumed the recommendation would be apt, and got a bundle of the whole series in one of Diane Duane’s website sales. Unfortunately, something about this doesn’t work for me — I guess it feels too random and immature? Stuff like ‘Fred’, the ‘white hole’, who is the opposite of a black hole, and some of the logic of how magic worked just… I didn’t feel hooked by it. Once I got to the white hole burping up whole cars, I was more or less done; I just skimmed the rest.

I do actually like parts of the set-up: the idea of the book that starts the main character’s journey is pretty neat, for example, and I didn’t read the characters as just default white kids from the start — even if Kit Rodriguez’s name wasn’t a probable giveaway. I think maybe if I’d first read it when I was younger, and had that flexibility of imagination, I wouldn’t have questioned it so much and could have enjoyed it now if I was rereading it. Unfortunately, I come to this as a 27 year old about to get married, and so I just can’t engage with it on that level.

Not something I would recommend to someone my own age, but I might very well pass it to a kid young enough to feel the magic of waiting for your Hogwarts letter, or scanning the library shelves for books about what you can be when you grow up and finding a mysterious book which at first might seem like a joke, but turns out all too real…

Rating: 1/5

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

I had to write my review for this as soon as I was finished with it, because I know that I won’t be able to capture what I think about it if I leave it until I’m caught up on my reviews. I feel really weird about it: I know it’s a classic and I know how other people love it, and I even love some of the turns of phrase and the images and the ideas —

But the prose drives me batty. Taken as a whole, it just… it looks gorgeous, feels gorgeous on the tongue, but then falls all to bits and doesn’t seem to mean anything. Or it doesn’t suit the character, or it just obscures what the action of the scene is meant to be. The prose is beguiling and bewitching, but in the end didn’t seem to lead me anywhere. I read a part of it aloud to my partner — not even a bit I found the weirdest, just a passage that stood out to me — and reading it aloud sort of helped make it less opaque, but… But.

I really don’t know where I am with this book. It does have all the great things people have said about it, and it has all the over-exuberant piles of adjectives too. At times it feels more like poetry than prose — and like some poetry, best just absorbed and thought about later, analysed later or not at all, just savoured for the heaps of images and snippets of sense that do come through.

Rating: 2/5

Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand

Wylding Hall is a pretty short novel with an interesting structure. It’s told as if it’s a series of interviews — possibly for radio or just for someone who would later transcribe them for a book, as they’re spontaneous and involve people revealing details they’re not sure of, or don’t want to share too widely. That in itself is fascinating: the range of narrators, the different angles on the same events, the little pieces of the puzzle. And the relationships between them revealed in the way they talk about the other characters. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work for me; some of the character voices are a little too similar. But for the most part, I enjoyed it and it was well-handled.

The pacing was well-handled too, in my opinion; it slowly builds up a sense of unease, then uncanniness, and then lets little moments of horror break through — distanced by time, because of the setting, but nonetheless chilling. It never really goes beyond unsettling for me; the characters are too distant from the events.

In the end, it’s entirely inconclusive, which is something I really like in uncanny fiction. Was there a girl? Was she real or a ghost, what exactly happened? Were the experiences real or drug-fuelled? What exactly even caused the haunting — the barrow? It seems like it, and yet. And yet.

If you’re interested in folk music (I was thinking of Fairport Convention the whole time), then that aspect also adds some interest. I wish the band were real, because the music sounds awesome.

For all that it’s short and inconclusive, I found it satisfying: it leaves me with just the right amount of uncertainty, just the right amount of mystery, without feeling like it’s unfinished. It’s, in the end, a recounting of one of those senseless events that changes everything, random and wrenching, and that you then look back on and wonder how exactly it even happened. It doesn’t always have to be a ghost story — there’s unexplained events in real life too, after all — but it works well this way.

Rating: 4/5

The Book of Phoenix, Nnedi Okorafor

This is technically a prequel to a book I haven’t yet read, Who Fears Death, but it stands alone just fine. I actually think this might be the first book of Okorafor’s I’ve enjoyed this much — it shares themes with Lagoon and with what I know of Who Fears Death, shares the same anger at and examination of colonialism, racial issues, etc, but somehow Phoenix came alive for me more than any of the characters of Lagoon or Binti.

There were some aspects of this that I didn’t quite get — it just seemed so crammed full of stuff: the alien seed, the mutants, the modifications that could be done to normal humans, the political situation, the frame story… But I agree with another review I read earlier that said that this is about myth-making: that’s really the thing to remember with this one, the core of the story. Phoenix mythologises herself, and makes new mythology around her. Everything she does feels like part of a myth, so you don’t really have to question the archetypal Big Brother Government, the mad scientists, etc.

It’s a pretty easy/fast read, though not always emotionally easy; the scene with Phoenix’s mother is really effective, for example.

I think it’s not going to stick with me that much, but it was enjoyable.

Rating: 3/5