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AMERICAN PIE, by Pascale Le Draoulec.
A journalist drives across America in search of the perfect pie and the truth of the American heartland. While less sappy than it could have been, this is a surprisingly boring book. The people she meets are not described in a way which brings them to life, and while there are lots of recipes, there is a shocking lack of pie descriptions. When I buy a book about pie, I want to read about the author's personal pie experiences. Instead, what seems like every other anecdote has her hear about a great pie, track down the baker, discover that the last pie was sold yesterday, and then get the recipe and leave-- without ever tasting the pie. I didn't even finish this.
THE BEGUILERS, by Kate Thompson.
A Firebird paperback edition of a recent hardcover, with a typically pretty cover. Rilka is a girl who lives in a village where the nights are haunted by beguilers, living lights which lure travellers to their doom. But in the day, the village is filled with typical small-town complacency which Rilka, a natural-born rebel who is further set apart by her allergy to chuffies, the omnipresent fuzzy pets, frets against. One day Rilka can't take it any more, and sets off on a doomed mission to capture a beguiler.
There's a lot to admire about this book, but I was most impressed with the original worldbuilding and smooth layering-in of information about the place and society. (This is what Jo Walton calls incluing.) The nature and purpose of the chuffies, for instance, is slowly revealed without resorting to clunky infodumps.
However, as the book goes on, it becomes more and more allegorical, and the allegory is quite predictable. Rilka is alone for a lot of the book, and the one person she bonds with is defined by an overly allegorical single character trait. The conclusion is rushed and overly predictable. I'd be interested to read a straight fantasy by Thompson, though, as she clearly has a knack for it.
I think I would have liked this better if I'd read it when I was younger and hadn't already read a lot of books with extremely similar set-ups and themes, like Lois Lowry's THE GIVER and GATHERING BLUE. The only one of those which is just as good when re-read by an adult as first read by a kid is William Sleator's HOUSE OF STAIRS. That one succeeds by virtue of vivid and unsentimentalized characters and a story which is completely plausible as science fiction, but also has larger implications. The trouble with most allegories is that the story itself is insufficient if you don't relate it to the larger theme. HOUSE OF STAIRS works on full throttle on both levels.
It doesn't help that they all seem to have the same theme: individualism is good. Collectivism is bad. Suppressing your emotions is bad. Experiencing them is good. Don't be one of the herd. Follow your dreams. Since everyone in America believes all that anyway, at least on a theoretical level, there's a distinct sense of preaching to the choir. I start rebelliously wishing for a book about the Bad Land of the Libertarians, where everyone follows their own dreams to the detriment of the community as a whole, and the Good Band of Buddies who work together to create a community where people cooperate.
A journalist drives across America in search of the perfect pie and the truth of the American heartland. While less sappy than it could have been, this is a surprisingly boring book. The people she meets are not described in a way which brings them to life, and while there are lots of recipes, there is a shocking lack of pie descriptions. When I buy a book about pie, I want to read about the author's personal pie experiences. Instead, what seems like every other anecdote has her hear about a great pie, track down the baker, discover that the last pie was sold yesterday, and then get the recipe and leave-- without ever tasting the pie. I didn't even finish this.
THE BEGUILERS, by Kate Thompson.
A Firebird paperback edition of a recent hardcover, with a typically pretty cover. Rilka is a girl who lives in a village where the nights are haunted by beguilers, living lights which lure travellers to their doom. But in the day, the village is filled with typical small-town complacency which Rilka, a natural-born rebel who is further set apart by her allergy to chuffies, the omnipresent fuzzy pets, frets against. One day Rilka can't take it any more, and sets off on a doomed mission to capture a beguiler.
There's a lot to admire about this book, but I was most impressed with the original worldbuilding and smooth layering-in of information about the place and society. (This is what Jo Walton calls incluing.) The nature and purpose of the chuffies, for instance, is slowly revealed without resorting to clunky infodumps.
However, as the book goes on, it becomes more and more allegorical, and the allegory is quite predictable. Rilka is alone for a lot of the book, and the one person she bonds with is defined by an overly allegorical single character trait. The conclusion is rushed and overly predictable. I'd be interested to read a straight fantasy by Thompson, though, as she clearly has a knack for it.
I think I would have liked this better if I'd read it when I was younger and hadn't already read a lot of books with extremely similar set-ups and themes, like Lois Lowry's THE GIVER and GATHERING BLUE. The only one of those which is just as good when re-read by an adult as first read by a kid is William Sleator's HOUSE OF STAIRS. That one succeeds by virtue of vivid and unsentimentalized characters and a story which is completely plausible as science fiction, but also has larger implications. The trouble with most allegories is that the story itself is insufficient if you don't relate it to the larger theme. HOUSE OF STAIRS works on full throttle on both levels.
It doesn't help that they all seem to have the same theme: individualism is good. Collectivism is bad. Suppressing your emotions is bad. Experiencing them is good. Don't be one of the herd. Follow your dreams. Since everyone in America believes all that anyway, at least on a theoretical level, there's a distinct sense of preaching to the choir. I start rebelliously wishing for a book about the Bad Land of the Libertarians, where everyone follows their own dreams to the detriment of the community as a whole, and the Good Band of Buddies who work together to create a community where people cooperate.