Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, by Sheri S. Tepper

[rachelmanija]

Marianne is a young woman whose parents were from the tiny country Alphenlicht, but was raised in America. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she found that her traditional father had left his substantial estate to her... in a trust controlled by her horrible half-brother Harvey, who attempted to rape her when she was thirteen. He withholds the money from her, forcing her to squeeze every penny. However, she sells her mother's jewels to buy an old house, which she lovingly restores by herself, in between studying for a graduate degree and working in the campus library.

Marianne meets Makr Avehl, the Prime Minister and Magus of Alphenlicht, when he comes to campus for a lecture series. (Alphenlicht is so tiny that "Prime Minister" doesn't have quite the usual meaning or importance.) He looks exactly like Harvey but is much nicer. Realizing that they must be distantly related, they immediately bond and flirt.

He discovers that Harvey has been attempting to work evil magic on her by sending her unpleasant gifts, such as a painting of a girl being menaced alone at night and a Japanese wood carving of a creepy ghost, and replaces them with similar but positive ones, like a painting by the same artist of happy girls lighting up the night and a Japanese wood carving of two mice gnawing a nut, to break the spell in a way that won't alert Harvey that it's been brokem.

Marianne begins learning more about Alphenlicht and its magic and her heritage, while she and Makr Avehl try to figure out who's been teaching Harvey magic...

The first half of this book, which is the part I described above, is a favorite comfort read of mine, and I've re-read it many times. Despite the dark elements, it has a powerful atmosphere of coziness and healing.

Sometimes a book strikes a chord with me that doesn't have much to do with its objective merits. Writing out the story of the first part of this book, it has a weird quasi-incestuous theme with her love interest looking just like her abusive half-brother, and being related to her albeit distantly. No idea what's up with that. But Marianne is charming, I could read forever about her restoring the house she loves, I adore her getting taken out for dinner and lavished with affection and good food, and the Alphenlicht lore and magic is fascinating.

Halfway through the book, Marianne is whisked into a series of bizarre, surreal, dreamlike otherworlds. Until now, I never managed to get very far into the second half of the book, despite re-reading the first half multiple times, even though the entire book is under 200 pages long. This time I determinedly plowed through to see if it ever gets back to the charm of the first half. The answer is no. It ends very abruptly with a transfer to a different timeline, which I assume is picked up in one of the sequels which I've never read.

So this is an extremely odd book, only half of which I even find readable let alone good. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've taken it off the shelf to re-read Marianne's date with Makr Avehl, or the box of evil gifts and its replacement box of similar good ones, or her happiness at waking up in a house she's made beautiful.

Do you have any books that you love only in part, but you love the parts a LOT?

Comments

[sartorias]

I mostly did that with biographies. I liked reading the beginning, especially if it outlined hard work that led to eventual success. But especially when the person either got ill or became addicted in some way and ended up miserable or ended badly, I'd read it the once and never again.

That's kind of the pattern I'd follow in fiction, if the main arc matched. I do remember that I reread the first half or maybe 3/5ths of Gone with the Wind>/I> several times, always ending when the war was over, and Scarlett had defended her kids and Melly and her boy and the rest of the household. But the carpetbagger sections, the rise of the KKK, and the whole Rhet Butler marriage was a once-read and never again. And when I began to see how problematical the whole was, it lost its comfort read magic; at most that book has become a curiosity, in how much of it was informed by Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Especially Becky Sharp/Scarlett O'Hara. Only Mitchel managed to be tone deaf to the very sharp satire as she mourns the "glam" life of the south, forever gone.

[rosanicus]

Not quite in the same level of adoration, but when I was about eleven I really loved the first portion of I, Coriander in which the titular protagonist is a young girl drawn into fairyland. Then she gets older and (I think?) some romance enters the plot, at which point I lost interest. But I reread those first few chapters often enough that I didn't turn out my copy of it until I left home for university.

[movingfinger]

I hadn't thought of that book in years, but, it does go askew in the typical Tepper way, which is interesting. I had kind of forgotten about everything but the objects to counter spells.

I've only finished The Once and Future King a couple of times. The first parts of The Sword in the Stone, the country manor life, I love.

[yhlee]

I love the bits about falconry in the T. H. White and ignore everything else lol.

[rachelmanija]

Those parts are wonderful.

[minoanmiss]

When I was a kid I had to buy_The Once and Future King_ 2.5 times -- I read The Sword in the Stone in my omnibus edition so many times it broke off the paperback, so I bought a copy of it alone to reread and another omnibus edition to keep.

[muninnhuginn]

Interesting. Even as a child I found "The Sword in the Stone" irritating. Can't get through it now. But I go back to the Book of Merlyn regularly: the best of the animal transformations (geese, bees!) with melancholy.

[larryhammer]

Bujold's A Civil Campaign, which I frequently reread from Miles' letter of apology to the end.

[wateroverstone]

Magician by Raymond Feist. I got part way through reading a friend's copying the train. I was totally engrossed at the point I had reached when I had to hand it back. Bought my own copy as soon as I could and discovered there was a change a few pages further on and I didn't like the new setting. I've started it a few times but never enjoyed it all the way through

[starlady]

So is the Manticore her half-brother?

There are several movies I recommend that people stop watching at a certain point--Die Hard 3 after Jeremy Irons appears to get away, Mission: Impossible 3 before they head to Shanghai. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom after they leave Shanghai.

[rachelmanija]

I'm not sure. It was confusing.

[yhlee]

I realize my sister and I are the only people who like this book but L. E. Modesitt Jr's The Magic of Recluce. I don't dislike the rest of the book, but I'm basically there for the CARPENTRY APPRENTICESHIP. I almost changed my career path to CARPENTRY despite not having clue one.

Also Carl West & Katherine MacLean's Dark Wing, which is a YA I think you'd love if it weren't out of print and super hard/expensive to find. I thought in HS that its depiction of a future US where "if you get sick it's because you didn't think positively and it's all your fault, healthy people are healthy because they're WINNERS" is septic EVERYWHERE was completely implausible *hollow laughter* but it's ABOUT the protagonist stumbling about an older paramedic kit/expert system (in the older sense of computer tech extant at the time it was written), then ILLEGALLY becoming a self-trained doctor. I could have read the doctoring bits forever. (It ends very very depressingly - not for the protagonist but his friend.)

[edenfalling]

The carpentry sections are SO GOOD. The rest of the book is, you know, there.

[yhlee]

Oh - kids' book Mail Order Wings (exactly that - mail order pills cause heroine to grow wings). I wanted her to KEEP her wings. Instead she starts getting literally bird brained and has to reverse the process and lose her wings. I just wanted her to fly away and be FREE.

[kareila]

Oh, wow, I read that and had forgotten all about it! Thanks for the blast from the past!

[sovay]

Do you have any books that you love only in part, but you love the parts a LOT?

I am confident the answer to this question is yes, and almost certainly something from my childhood, but since I am trying to think about it, whatever it is has deserted my brain.

I'm so sorry the book falls down in the second half! I like the set-up.

[eglantiere]

There's a book named The Phoenix and the Mirror by uhhh Davidson, I think? It's a weird mix of alt!antiquity and questing fantasy with magic and questionable gender mores (very classic sff, very dude), but there's a whole sequence in the first part of the book where the main character, an alchemist (and in this world alchemy actually works as intended), along with his colleagues and apprentices, creates a "pure mirror" - a mirror that's made of such alchemically pure materials that the very first person who looks into it will see their heart's desire or somesuch. and this sequence, described in loving and exhausting and practical detail, is GORGEOUS. it's my go-to example of how to ground and immerse the reader in the unfamiliar setting. i still remember the bits and pieces of the techniques they used, and the precautions they took, and the kilns they built for some of the steps, and so on. not quite by heart, but i can probably recreate a description if you took me some time with pen and paper - and the mirror is literally only needed for the quest, and the quest is so meh i to that day don't quite remember what the twist was about and why was it ever needed.

[yhlee]

I've heard of this but have never managed to track down a copy! Ahahahahaha.

[thomasyan]

I remember enjoying that trilogy, but almost no details. I should try rereading it.

(Possibly, part of the enjoyment might be a defense mechanism because it was a pain to hunt down used copies, so it would have been a bit payoff if they had sucked. That said, I have not enjoyed all the hard-to-find (for me) books I've read.)

[ethelmay]

Not quite the same thing, but as a child I read and reread the beginnings of Jane Eyre and David Copperfield over and over, abandoning them shortly after the titular characters entered early adulthood. (I still find David Copperfield getting drunk and what not very unfunny.) Eventually I got further and further in and started enjoying the rest.

[rushthatspeaks]

I can pinpoint to the sentence where I stop considering Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn perfect. Before that point it is perfect in every way. Unfortunately, there are two and a half further books. The beginning, with the protagonist growing up in her witch mother's strange fortress with her literal pet peeve, and finding the black unicorn's bones in the sand and piecing them together, is comforting and eldritch and homey and numinous all at once. Then, unfortunately, in following the unicorn, she leaves the desert behind and starts interacting with other people, and I no longer care.

[coffeeandink]

I remember being fond of the entire Marianne trilogy, but each book is weaker than the last. I still love the Kinuko Craft covers, though.

[skygiants]

Half of Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man is perhaps my favorite Discworld book! The other half is also there.

[genarti]

Oh, great call and great point, yes.

[cgbookcat1]

I love the first sections of Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree. I hate what she did with the ending.

[minoanmiss]

I used to do that a lot as a child (reread only parts of books) and my inner ten year old feels very vindicated.

I don't do it so much as an adult but then I don't read nearly as many books as I used to sobs

[genarti]

I loved Robin McKinley's Outlaws of Sherwood with my whole heart... up to the point when the Guy of Gisbourne plot kicks in. As a kid I reread it time after time, and usually stopped there, or only skim-read the rest for the parts I did like. (It's not that it's badly written at that point, or anything, but it wasn't what I wanted the story's ending to be, and even as an adult I do think that it's grim in ways it doesn't have to be and that don't work for me.)

Edit: oh, and also, CS Lewis's The Last Battle! Parts of it worked SO well for me, but kid me hated everything to do with Shift the Ape, and so I'd skim-read for the parts with Tirian and Jewel and Eustace and Jill.

[rachelmanija]

I feel exactly the same about both books. I could not stand to read about Shift, and The Outlaws of Sherwood went in such a weirdly depressing direction. Robin and Marian get separated! Everyone else is sent off to die in the Crusades!

[ambyr]

I have probably spent more time rereading the Service Fair section of Anne Bishop's Queen of the Darkness than I have spent reading her entire combined other output, and the woman has written a lot of words.

[rachelmanija]

What's that part about?

[nnozomi]

I reread Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary fairly often, but I invariably stop after the New Year's party; after that it feels like throwing away all the good things that have been set up so far, and I find it too depressing. (If there were a sequel I might not mind...).

[anna_wing]

The carpentry section is the only thing I remember about that book. I looked at book 2, found that it had no more carpentry and lost interest. I still remember the lesson about the Moral Significance of making a good breadboard.