Shannon Phillips

So I have a lot of enforced downtime these days, as Davy needs to nurse every few hours, and while I’m feeding him I really can’t do much besides read or browse the Internet. So it’s a good opportunity to catch up on my reading pile.

Here, by the way, is a photo I snapped of Davy a few minutes ago. He’s a week old today! He’s pinking up and plumping out, which is nice to see: in those first few days he bore a noticeable resemblance to Dobby the House Elf. But now he just looks like a sweet little baby.

Anyway, here’s some quick reviews of four fantasy Young Adult books. I like the YA genre; the books are short but the stories are often really good.

Karen Healey, Guardian of the Dead

This is the most substantial of the four novels. I read it after I’d bought a string of disappointing urban fantasy books aimed at adults (I’ll do separate reviews of these in another post), and so it was a great relief to drop into the competence of Healey’s writing and storytelling. I know “competence” sounds like damning-with-faint-praise, but what I mean is that her writing isn’t flashy or self-aware&#8212it just works. Her characters (especially the main) are nuanced and believable, and the magic in the book, which is drawn from native New Zealand mythology, offers a refreshing change from the standard fantasy clichés. I mean, the plot observes some conventionalities—there’s a boarding-school girl who’s sort of an ugly duckling (although not really, because although she’s heavy-set she actually feels pretty much fine about it, and she’s a tae kwon do black belt, so that’s awesome) and as Weird Stuff starts happening around her she ends up discovering some magic talents, and there’s A Boy who she fights with but really likes… But in every specific aspect the story is grounded in New Zealand culture and Maori folklore, which, like I said, makes it feel new and fresh.

Cynthia Leitich Smith, Eternal

Okay, if books were food, then Guardian of the Dead would be a hearty beef stew: chewy, filling, full of different ingredients. Eternal, on the other hand, would be a stick of cotton candy. For what it is, it’s good—light, sweet fluff that appeals on a pretty immature level. The hook is a pretty good one: what if a teenage girl was turned into a vampire, but she had a guardian angel who was willing to sacrifice everything in an attempt to redeem her soul? It’s just that the execution is very broad and obvious. There’s no surprises here: the angel is hot, the girl is beautiful (at least, after she’s vampirized), they fall in Tragic Lurve, and eventually they team up to fight crime, or at least some particularly nasty vampires.

I probably would have loved this book if I were still in the targeted YA age range: certainly it’s a big step up from the Sweet Valley High books that I was reading back in the day, and probably right on the level of a book like Darkangel, which I haven’t read in twenty years but remember being quite smitten with at the time. Now, my favorite parts were the interactions among the angels, which are quite funny in a Heavenly Bureaucracy kind of way. I also appreciated the detailed descriptions of Vampire Girl’s luxe wardrobe, although I was pretty discomfited by the equal time given over to the interior decor of her mansion: a Scottish castle with battleaxes on the walls but Prairie-style settles and rugs? Really? I don’t think Frank Lloyd Wright would have approved.

Janni Lee Simner, Bones of Faerie

This book wrecked me. It’s good proof, if any were needed, that YA doesn’t always pull its punches. To continue the books-as-food metaphor: this novel would be a lychee-fruit granita, simple but sophisticated, with a flavor both familiar and unexpected. Here’s the first few lines:

I had a sister once. She was a beautiful baby, eyes silver as moonlight off the river at night. From the hour of her birth she was long-limbed and graceful, faerie-pale hair clear as glass from Before, so pale you could almost see through to the soft skin beneath.

My father was a sensible man. He set her out on the hillside that very night…

In beautiful and savage prose, the book tells the story of a daughter who saves her mother. So there’s redemption—just not quite enough to go around. The story is haunted by the ghost of the baby who dies in the first pages, and in some ways it is simply an elegy, with a resolution that isn’t fully cathartic because it doesn’t pretend to hold an end to mourning.

Mary Borsellino, The Wolf House #3: Fair Game

I reviewed the first of this series on another blog, saying

This is an e-book, and written by an e-friend of mine. I enjoyed it a lot, so much so that I immediately started thinking it was a shame that this book wasn’t traditionally published. I think the conventional editing process would have polished the story a little; but on the other hand, this way it’s only $4.95. If you can stand reading longer works on the computer, The Wolf House is totally worth it.

Mary describes the book as “trashy vampire YA,” and I think I see why she’s slapping the “trashy” label on: this is a universe where all the teen protagonists are bisexual and hot, and there’s a fair amount of spit swapped between characters of all sexes and types, although none of it drawn in any detail (it’s YA after all!). I was personally more interested in the friendships, because these are drawn in achingly precise, if confused and incestuous, detail, making me remember in every bit of my 33-year-old bones exactly the way it felt to be 16 when your friends are your whole world.

Plus, the vampire mythology in the world is fresh and intriguing, raising many more questions that it answers (as is appropriate for book 1 in a series). The writing is professional and controlled, never dragging you out of the plot. I’m still kind of sorry that Mary chose to go with an e-publisher, because I think these books deserve a wider audience—but I can’t deny that the modern publishing structure is pretty f*cked, and so I also admire Mary for going it alone. I think anyone who liked Buffy should ask themselves whether $4.95 is too much to pay for a scrappy, passionate, well-drawn vampire story.

With Fair Game, the third book in the series, Mary is really finding her stride. She has a large cast of characters and switching between voices can produce a disjointed effect (I felt this most keenly in the second book), but in Fair Game she’s become really good at weaving the separate strands of story into a cohesive whole. The stakes are clearer—the sense of threat ramped up—and there are some good answers provided to the questions earlier books raised about the ground rules of this world.

I enjoyed Origins and Overtures, but I think Fair Game is operating on a higher level of craft. I’m itching now for the next book in the series.

So recently I’ve gotten on this random kick of reading etiquette books. Mostly the ones written by Judith Martin: my list includes Miss Manners’ Guide to Domestic Tranquility, Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children, and Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium. I’d like to range further back and read some older stuff: I know Nina has a good collection of vintage advice books, which maybe I can browse when we go out to Baltimore for our next visit. But I have to say that Judith Martin is first and foremost just a fantastic writer.

She’s enormously deft with her pen: so very, very funny that her wit almost eclipses the wisdom and humanity of her writing. But like any advice columnist, she provides little windows into the dilemmas that make up people’s real lives, and her advice builds on itself into something grander. It becomes a coherent worldview where etiquette is only another name for the great fundamental truth that sages and prophets have always taught: compassion for others is the most necessary thing in life.

In reading these books I’ve learned two things: 1) I’ve been putting the napkins on the wrong side of the cutlery all my life and 2) I have been a pretty awful person sometimes.

When I was younger I had this belief, not well-thought-out or anything, just kind of an unexamined assumption on which I operated, that any strongly felt emotion ought to be immediately expressed to those in my general vicinity. If I had ever stopped to justify this (horrible) idea it would probably have been on the grounds of honesty and authenticity, but really it was just that I had the impulse control of a two-year-old. Literally. I live with an actual two-year-old now and in some ways he controls himself about as well now as I did when I was twenty.

It’s tempting to diagnose myself, in retrospect, with some kind of brain chemistry imbalance, like mild manic-depression or something: certainly now when I experience the kind of emotional storms that made up daily existence in my adolescence and early twenties, I call it The Crazy. I am so, so grateful that my emotional landscape has evened out, and part of that is just a lucky fluke of neurology; but the thing is, back when I was a terrible drama-llama, I didn’t even try to rein it in. I don’t always succeed now, but at least I know enough to try. I’m a lot better than I was.

At the same time, though, this terrible unexamined idea that I held when I was younger seems to be pretty widespread in modern culture, maybe particularly in American culture. There are certainly plenty of people here in San Francisco who believe that the proper response to somebody accidentally jostling them on the bus is to subject everyone around them to a torrent of obscenities. And there’s a difference of scale, but not really a difference of kind, between that position and the sort that leads researchers denied tenure to unleash a hail of gunfire in the halls of their universities, or computer engineers with a grudge against the IRS to fly planes into government buildings.

It may seem dismissive to frame all these as lapses of manners. And obviously mental imbalance is at work in the larger tragedies. But I really believe that in a society where free self-expression is placed almost on a pedestal, it’s no longer obvious to everyone that self-restraint and consideration for others—the cornerstones of good manners—are not only good things and healthy things but indispensable things. Without them civilization is not possible.

Everyone in America is encouraged to express their feelings, to be open and honest, not to repress or let things fester. But every baby knows how to express its feelings! Self-restraint has to be learned. For some of us it’s very hard work and takes decades of practice. I, and I think the vast majority of my countrymen, do not need any more help in expressing our feelings. We need to be encouraged to not express them.

My favorite poem, T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, includes a passage where the speaker is a ghost. He speaks bitterly of the pains of old age, specifically:

…the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Those lines cut like a scalpel. I’m only 33 and already I look back at times in my life when I acted in the name of passionate self-expression, and I burn with shame. With the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue. If it’s already bad at 33, I can’t imagine how 70 is going to feel.

But the reason I love the poem is that those devastating lines are followed a bit later by an unless:

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

It’s almost off-handed, that last line-and-a-half: the critical unless is tossed off after a lacerating six stanzas, and there’s no elaboration afterwards. It’s just left there, the glimpse of mercy, a few words of stirring beauty and uplift to follow the meticulously constructed vision of human folly.

And while that refining fire is a spiritual reference, I think it applies just as well to the humbler practice of good manners. Over and over in her books Judith Martin will take a question, usually one that gives the details of a trivial slight and asks Miss Manners to sympathize, and she provides a devastating answer in which ego is withered to ash and all that remains is the inescapable imperative that we must be kind to each other. This is the burning core of etiquette, just as it’s the core of Christianity (the Golden Rule), Buddhism (compassion and lovingkindness), and so many other world religions. We’re allowed to choose our own company; if somebody truly wrongs us, we can exclude them from our lives. But there’s no exemption in etiquette—not one for honesty, not one for passion, not even one for extreme provocation—that allows us to be deliberately hurtful. Trying to use the rules of etiquette to put someone down or make them feel bad is the rudest possible thing to do.

And so the practice of good manners is usually one of excise rather than addition: you’ll be fine if you don’t know which fork to use (as it’s bad manners to pay attention to how others eat anyway), but if you can’t refrain from saying everything that comes into your head, you will inevitably cause offense and hurt. “Telling people what you really think of them” is pretty much never justified. To T.S. Eliot that refining fire had to do with the cleansing fires of Purgatory, but in this world the closest thing I can find are the rules of civility. They too burn away ego and self-aggrandizement and leave us with a strictly circumscribed choice of actions and speech: ones that are not, thank God, perfectly expressive of our innermost selves, but instead expressive of the better selves to which we aspire.

You must move in measure, like a dancer. What better description is there for a life lived with restraint, consideration, and care? Maybe the image of a self-controlled person should not be a pursed-mouth nofunski seething with repressed hostility, but rather somebody who dances through life, placing each step with mindfulness and joy.

This is so very far from a thing that comes naturally to me that I think those who know me well might find it very funny to hear that I now aspire to controlled restraint. But does it really come naturally to anybody? I’ve been practicing it consciously for a few years now and I have as a result a quantity of self-restraint that I can proudly describe as slightly more than none. If I keep at it, in another three decades I might be fit for polite society.

This is such a great idea! I’d love to do something similar with Robin and Davy when they’re older.

Right now Robin and I are reading the original Thomas the Tank Engine stories by the Rev. W. Awdry. They’re good! There’s a lot of genuine railway geekery that comes through, and I learned in the preface that Rev. Awdry wrote the first stories for his son, when the boy was the same age that Robin is now. So it’s not surprising that Robin really likes the book. It’s big and heavy for him, but he’ll often toddle around with it clutched to his chest.

We’re also reading a lovely book that Nonna and Pappy sent, Full Steam Ahead! by the wonderfully-named Benedict Blathwayt. It’s about the adventures of Duffy Driver and his little red train, which Robin identifies as “James.” (James is his favorite Thomas character, and also red.) There are lots of “Little Red Train” books, apparently, and the big draw for this series is the artwork. The pictures are huge and wonderfully intricate. Robin loves picking out the sheep, birds, doggies, babies, balls and other little pieces of the background action.

Oddly enough, even though these are hardback books with regular paper pages, Robin seems to be gentler on them than he is with his board books. Our collection of board books is increasingly ratty, and some of them Robin has actually ripped in half. But so far both the Thomas book and the Little Red Train book are undamaged. I wonder if that’s just an accident of them being relatively new additions to his library, or if it actually has to do with how much he likes them?