Oct. 28th, 2006

Oh. NO.

Oct. 28th, 2006 07:47 pm
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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...
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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 )

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