A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

A few weeks ago I sort of acted like it was kind of a revelation that watching the movie The Princess and the Goblin led to reading books by George MacDonald, that reversal of the usual “read the book, watch the movie thing.” It’s definitely not an isolated case, because after watching HBO’s Game of Thrones this summer I went out and bought the first three books in George R. R. Martin’s series: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords.

It was a really weird experience. Watching the series as a television show, I was seriously shocked and intrigued by the way the plot unfolded. I hadn’t heard that much about Martin’s series except for when I worked at a secondhand bookstore and I’d sell a couple of used copies every once in a while. It’s very rare with books, TV, and movies that I go into them completely blank slate, without having seen a trailer or read a synopsis or a least having looked at a few photos released ahead of time. But with Game of Thrones, the only thing I really knew going in was that it was a fantasy series on HBO. And that was definitely enough.

Game of Thrones is a work of high fantasy by George R.R. Martin that takes place largely in Westeros, a sprawling kingdom separated by boundaries, borders, and rulers. Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark lives at Winterfell in the North, and he leaves for the south when he is summoned by the King, this sort of old friend that he can’t say no to (and he’s the king. There isn’t really something like the answer of “no”). North of Winterfell is the Wall, which is really just that: a wall that separates the wild and fantastical north from the rest of the kingdom and is guarded by a motley collection of men who have “taken the black” to protect the kingdom. The books largely center around Ned’s family as they find themselves going their separate ways and having their own adventures, much like how in Lord of the Rings the Fellowship starts out all together but then splinters and leads to several small factions traveling in different directions.

When I started reading the book after the series ended, I was kind of like, “Hmmm, is this just going to be a reiteration of everything that I just saw on television.” Well, to a certain extent it was, which says a lot about how faithful the book to movie adaptation was. Almost all of the dialogue in the book makes a straight leap into the script for the television show. And even though I knew what was coming up this time when reading the book, I sort of felt like reading it fleshed out a lot of what I missed or didn’t get or skipped over in the TV show. For one thing, it’s a lot easier for me to keep track of characters, particularly characters in high fantasy with names and titles and lineages, when I read a name instead of just hear it. I felt like I had something like one of those police identifications, where some poor witness has to stand in front of a glass wall and say, “That one! It was that man right there!” or “Her! She’s the one! I’d recognize that nose anywhere!” I’d get a new piece of information from the book about a character and I’d have the actor/actress do a quick materialization in my head like, “That one! This information goes right there! That makes so much sense, wow, I mean, I really wish I had picked up on that while watching this on TV.”

I was really hooked after finishing Game of Thrones. Most of the impetus was to get to the next one, A Clash of Kings, where all of the new material was. And I really loved that one. I’m halfway through A Storm of Swords now and I really love the way perspectives change from chapter to chapter. When you’re dealing with thousand page books, it’s awesome to switch back and forth between characters so that everything still seems new. I love multi-protagonist books as it is, but Martin really uses perspective to his advantage. He lets his characters have pretty good coverage of the world he has created to hold the story, which means that he is always actively world building through the perspective of several different characters. It’s very effective and you get a sense of geography, character, and plot filtered through various ways of looking at the world.

I’m not alone in having gone out to the store to pick up the series after HBO aired the first season. There are a lot of reports that purchases of Martin’s books are giving the publishing industry a small boost right now and really, on the bus or subway it’s all George R.R. Martin paperbacks all over the place being read. Which is impressive. They are not small books. They are quite hefty. 

The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce

These aren’t new books at all, but sometimes I think the reason I read so much fantasy now sort of goes right back to all of those quartets by Tamora Pierce. Tamora Pierce writes young adult fantasy, and for a really long time they were in the form of these four-book quartets that would overlap characters, setting, and story. I think a few years ago she wrote two books in a series instead of four because she had said that Harry Potter kind of really proved that young readers would pick up and read much longer books. It was this model that caused her to reorganize the structure of her novels.

The first quartet, The Song of the Lioness, begins with Alanna: The First Adventure. That book started this binge reading of Tamora Pierce for me that ended twenty-four books later. I started reading them in elementary school and continued right through until high school – whenever a new one came out I’d pick it up, no matter which quartet it was part of or who the characters were, or what world and setting Pierce placed them in. I knew I’d be reading exceptional fantasy, and importantly, exceptional fantasy with a strong female character. I can think of a lot of fantasy books that do have well-written, well-rounded, and engaging female characters – Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Abarat by Clive Barker, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman – but there was something in the fact that Pierce writes high fantasy, completely separated from the real world, and she chooses to populate the world that she builds with compelling female characters.

The thing about Alanna, the very first of Pierce’s books that I picked up, is that you’re immediately immersed in the character Alanna’s thoughts and experiences. The choices that she makes are recognizable; even when it seems like she makes the wrong decision, Pierce immerses the reader so fully within Alanna’s way of thinking that at least it is possible to see how she gets there. This is a point that has been brought up frequently with Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: sometimes protagonist Katniss Everdeen makes decisions that seem really unwise to just about everyone else around her, however, because Collins spends so much time inside Katniss’ head, it is possible to at least understand the reasoning that leads to a lot of it.

Alanna begins with the protagonist, Alanna, and her twin brother Thom switching places in the fantastical world of Tortall. This allows Alanna to adopt the name “Alan” and travel to court to become a page (and eventually a knight), while Thom is free to go to the City of the Gods to train to be a sorcerer. Disguised as a boy, Alanna begins training and quickly makes both friends and enemies at court. Two of her friends are sort of unique in that one is Jonathan, a prince, and the other is George Cooper, the Thief King.

Alanna’s story progresses through four books and follow her progression from page to squire to knight. I can’t help but always come back to the fact that the thing about Alanna is that she really is a strong female character, and it’s impossible not to be completely drawn into this world where she has to pretend to be someone she’s not in order to do the one thing she wants to do, while all the while using the one thing that she keeps like a secret to herself – that she is a girl – to make it happen. Pierce’s world-building is impeccable. Tortall is such a tactile place with it’s own politics, rules, borders, and history. As Pierce continues to write, this place becomes even more fleshed out and brilliant, as new characters provide detail of very specific areas of the kingdom.

These books hooked me on fantasy really early. I’ll go back and read the entire quartet every once in a while, and I’m always fascinated by how the story and characters work so well together. I’m still on the lookout for new Tamora Pierce novels. Twenty-four books in and I’m always so excited for the next one.

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

There were A LOT of different monster trilogies coming out around the same time  – Stephenie Meyer’s depiction of vampires in Twilight, Maggie Stiefvater’s use of werewolves in Shiver – but Generation Dead by Daniel Waters really stood out as something to watch for. And it was something with zombies.

Generation Dead imagines what would happen if teenagers all of a sudden started coming back from the dead. And if they did, what would that mean for confronting the friends and families that they left behind, for returning to school, for trying to be normal when their situation was anything but that. And then on the other side, how everyone else reacts to them. The novel primarily revolves around Tommy, a newly reanimated teen returning to high school, and Phoebe, the living girl who kind of falls for him. 

There are a handful of things that really stayed with me after I read the book the first time. And they’re kind of important in that I can remember them and be transported right back into that “something is not right” feeling of the book:

1. There is this forest that borders the high school where Tommy disappears after a football game and there is something about a forest by a high school that seems all at once creepy and chilling and dreamlike.

2. Waters writes one of the most horrifying zombie death scenes that I think I’ve ever read in a book or seen in a movie. It isn’t just the method of how it’s done, it’s the way Waters writes a handful of teenage characters who have this sort of overwhelming hatred that can lead to murder.

3. The love triangle between protagonist Phoebe, the teenage zombie Tommy, and Phoebe’s best friend (who is also living), Adam. Phoebe's interest in Tommy and her desire to show that she doesn’t discriminate against the new zombie teenagers at her school ends up causing her to confuse love with just caring deeply about Tommy and his situation. And the ending of this book is really not to be missed.

4. Zombie Tommy decides to try out for the football team. He isn’t as fast as everyone else and there are more serious consequences for being hit too hard (such as losing limbs that don’t really have a great chance of coming back), but he does it anyway. It enacts this sort of instant sympathy in readers while also creating the animosity and tension that drives the book towards its surprising conclusion.

5. That anyone comes back to life in a book provides the occasion to talk about a lot of important things to do with death. However, because Generation Dead is about deceased teenagers coming back to life, Waters has the opportunity to raise quite a few important questions. He introduces many reasons for the deaths of the teenagers who come back: suicide, disease, accident, etc. Teenagers inhabit a very transitory space in development. It is a temporary place that's just sort of between childhood and adulthood. When Waters makes the temporary permanent by bringing back deceased teenagers, he also raises the issue of aging and maturing without growing older. And for the character who commits suicide and is then forced back into living, Waters brings up  this sort of “return to” the problems that death allowed this character to leave behind.

Generation Dead was followed by Kiss of Life and Passing Strange. Both books are set in the same world that Generation Dead introduces to the reader, one where teenagers mysteriously come back from the dead and live in a half-state of life and death. Waters succeeds in making a world that seems familiar: we can almost believe in the events that he imagines even though they belong firmly entrenched in fantasy. It kind of reflects that same in-between of the zombie teenagers who are unable to be young or old, without being able to be one thing or the other. 

Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

Lynne Rae Perkins’ Criss Cross follows two fourteen-year-old protagonists, Debbie and Hector, as their experiences of young adulthood “criss cross” with one another throughout the novel.  Hector is learning how to play guitar. Debbie is trying to will something magical to happen. Both are surrounded by a larger group of friends who are similarly trying to navigate the space between childhood and adulthood. Allusions and references identify the setting as the 1970s, but Perkins' ability to write character and dialogue makes Criss Cross almost timeless. She connects character with character and makes their actions affect how the story plays out for others in the novel. In this way, Criss Cross feels like it connects outwards as a larger story than is contained to the novel. Perkins becomes deeply involved in the uncertainty of the characters, and the universality she enacts through the story allows readers to connect with this uncertainty while crossing reader experience with character depiction.

Although the story is a very strong point of this novel, Perkins also does a lot with form. For example, she scatters hand drawn illustrations throughout. My favorite comes at the beginning of the novel, an illustration of “The Spectrum of Connectedness” which places 0% connection at one end and 100% connection at the other. And at either end Perkins writes, “No one is here – no one.” In between “people move back and forth in this area like molecules in steam.” The images support the story, but more importantly, Perkins seems to use them when a visual depiction is more effective than words. She chooses the moments of illustration carefully instead of using them as a gimmick.

One section of the book employs a sort of newspaper column format where the page splits in half to follow the action of Debbie on one side and of Lenny on the other. Debbie is reading Wuthering Heights. Lenny is reading Popular Mechanics. The parallel structure does a compare/contrast thing between the content each character seeks out to read while also offering a really complementary chapter that takes both sides of character perspective and makes them look like one. 

Perkins also uses haiku to tell story. Debbie thinks that the senior photos in the yearbook should use haikus instead of quotes, such as “Jeff White is handsome, / but his hair is so greasy. / If he would wash it --.” The poetry of haiku is supported by Perkins' inclusion of song lyrics in the novel. All of these formal innovations really show how adolescent and young adult literature push against generic conventions.

Although Hector and Debbie are the main characters in this book, Perkins also introduces Debbie’s missing necklace as something that is sort of like a character and sort of like a plot point. Debbie’s necklace physically travels from place to place as the book progresses, and it encounters other characters and situations that border Debbie’s and Hector’s. Chapter Nineteen is called “Where the Necklace Went,” which makes it possible to map out the journey of Debbie’s necklace physically by location in the book, but also in terms of plot, character, and story. This reminds me a lot of Daniel Handler’s forthcoming book Why We Broke Up. I received an advanced reader copy and loved the premise of the book. Narrator Min Green fills a box with things and leaves that box at the door of Ed Slaterton’s house. Each item allows Min to tell the story of why her and Ed broke up. I really like the way that "things" inspire story, or they make the story known by the presence that they leave behind. Debbie’s necklace was a lot like that - it had a physical presence in the novel that was almost like a spare character or setting.

After I finished Criss Cross, which won the Newbury Award in 2006, I picked up Perkins' other adolescent novels, All Alone in the Universe and As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth. Both reflect the same connection that Criss Cross evokes. Books can be largely about making connection – between people, stories, and experience – and Perkins seems like she knows exactly how to make that happen. 

The Golden Key by George MacDonald

In a funny reversal of how it usually works, I found out about the author George MacDonald through a movie adaptation of his book, The Princess and the Goblin, instead of the sort of standby of “Read the book, watch the movie, complain maybe a little bit about how stuff gets left out of movie adaptations all the time, although maybe, when I think about it, Lord of the Rings did a pretty good job.” What I mean to say is that this was one of those funny happenings where watching a movie led to reading a book. And The Princess and the Goblin, this animated children’s movie that had these small goblins who had six toes on each foot, led me to George MacDonald.

Actually, watching Game of Thrones on HBO has caused me to read George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Sword of Storms, but that is another small post altogether, so sometimes I guess television adaptations lead to reading books as well, or maybe just HBO series because now that I think about it True Blood swayed me into reading the first five Sookie Stackhouse books.

The Golden Key by George MacDonald is actually nothing like True Blood or Game of Thrones. I don't even think it was turned into a movie. Published in 1867, the novella is now in the public domain and you can find the text all over the internet. The Farrar, Straus, and Giroux edition of the novel was published in 1967, and boasts an impressive collaboration of text by MacDonald, illustrations by Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and an afterword by W.H. Auden. The novella, or story really, is about Mossy and Tangle, a boy and a girl who become engrossed by the search for a golden key. The key is the subject of many stories that Mossy is told by his aunt as a child, a mysterious object and no one quite knows what it opens. Mossy lives “on the borders of Fairyland” and his search for the key leads him straight into the path of magic, supernatural people and beings, and strange otherworlds that Mossy and Tangle travel between.

I find this story difficult to go back to and explain other than to say that it takes the form of a fable/hero's quest. But it’s layered with example and allegory and metaphor, and is a story that seems to need to be taken and experienced instead of reiterated in summary. The closest comparison I can think of to The Golden Key is The Little Prince, another book that I can’t explain except for to say that there is something in it that stays with you for quite a while after the book is finished. I’ll get to the end and find that I say in this little voice, “Oh. Well. That’s really cool. And also really sad. And also ridiculously perfect.”

If this is an obtuse review, it’s only because I think it’s more about saying, “The Golden Key. It’s amazing. Please read it” instead of going ahead and saying just why exactly. Because the why is written right into the entire novel. It forms this scaffolding behind every word and has to be read, beginning to end, to feel that structure, form, and meaning.

There’s this small section of the novella where Tangle is talking to the Old Man of the Earth as she tries to figure out how to find Mossy again, since she’s been separated from him over the course of the journey. And the way the Old Man answers her, it’s these kind of exchanges scattered throughout the story:

Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.

“This is the way,” he said.

“But there are no stairs.”

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

She turned and looked him full in the face – stood so for a whole minute, as she thought: it was a whole year – then threw herself headlong into the hole.