Oh. NO.

The bad

If the fact that the guy who made 'The Path to 9/11' is director alone isn't enough to terrify you, get more details from Oz and Ends or A Fuse #8 Production. Perhaps a film of The Dark Is Rising is such a dubious proposition anyway that it doesn't matter too much, and it's impossible to get the thought of the appalling Earthsea out of the mind, but still...

I, Coriander

Just finished this today, and going to postpone writing about Shug and Dairy Queen yet again, as I want to get some thoughts jotted down before they all jumble too much. (Thinking about this one in light of Charlie's next project, on the historical in children's lit. )

I'd seen this in bookshops and been attracted by the cover (while also regularly confusing it with the equally attractive Celandine), and had thought it was a purely historical, rather than a historical-cum-fantasy or vice versa. It won the gold award in the Nestlé Children's Book Prize - though why the fact that Sally Gardner overcame dyslexia should seem the most important thing about the book I find hard to understand - and came full of glowing reviews, which I won't bother to quote. And this seemed as if it was a book I should love: set in London during the 1640s to 50s, with a trip to Faerie (and back again), a heroine determined to save her love, evil stepmothers - oh wait. That's part of what I don't love, but how to organise this, I'm not so sure. I kept thinking about the comment (quoted by Charlie in a recent talk) of Alan Garner's about the 'what if corral', as he (C.) put it - 'the idea that in fantasy, as in all fiction, there must be coherence to whatever rules you have set in place'. And I thought this 'corral' had gaps in the fantastic, in the relation of the supernatural to the realist (or historical) and in the realist strand. And possibly even more worryingly - there's a three-fold parallel in the story, which seems to me to lead to a rather unpleasant ideological end-place. I'm putting this behind a cut, as it's really not a review of any kind, but more a look at a book that was of interest for very particular reasons, through a very particular lens. And it's 100% spoiler, too, so this may be for an audience of - well, one.

( Read (a lot) more, if you wish )