A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

He felt himself for a moment as the stump of a rotten old tree, putting up thin green shoots at strange new angles.

A gorgeous fairytale which I am pretty sure started out as Green Man/Male Folklorist. Tobias is the wild man of an English forest in Victorian times, patrolling his wood and conversing with dryads and letting his mossy hair grow long. He's lived like this for four hundred years, until a flirty, bright-eyed folklorist named Henry Silver shows up at his cottage in a rain storm, soaking wet and very friendly.

I love forests and trees and moss and green, and this novella is a love letter to them. All the details of the magic and the woods are beautifully worked out, and feel both very magical and very grounded. The romance is a sweet, low-key slow burn. It's mostly about what it would be like to be the Green Man of an English wood, and how it would feel to start getting drawn back into human affairs. It's incredibly atmospheric, and the characters are great - Tobias, Silver, a dryad named Bramble, Silver's slightly Granny Weatherwax-esque mother.

I loved the ending to this, and it works perfectly well as a standalone. There's a sequel which I don't recommend.

I listened to this on audio. The performance by Matthew Lloyd Davies is outstanding.

This Puffin children's fantasy from 1973 (the year I was born) starts out promisingly, with three children who don't know each other stuck on vacation together for a country holiday at the cottage of an amusingly tryhard couple. There's a mysterious mountain, a possibly haunted lane, and a witchy woman who asks them to climb the mountain to search for the spring she found once, years ago, and was never able to find again. But a strange vagrant warns them not to climb the mountain...

There's some beautiful imagery but the book gets increasingly incoherent as it goes along. There's a lot of talk about how the land has historical connections to King Arthur, but this never comes to anything. (For instance, when they meet a mythic figure at the climax, he's a generic mythic figure rather than Arthurian.) There's a lot of metaphysics and the kids do end up working together to overcome assorted magical obstacles, but there isn't enough attention paid to their relationship to make that feel really satisfying. And then there's the deeply peculiar climax and ending.

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Here is a fantasy novel completely out of step with nearly every other American fantasy novel I’ve ever read, a very low-key, low-stakes mystery set entirely at a fair and revolving around a valuable pendant which was either magically transformed into a fruit or else switched for one.

The mystery is nicely constructed and the characters are likable if lightly sketched, but the real star here is the equally low-key but intriguing and original worldbulding. The culture, economics, family structures, assumptions, and history are unobtrusively presented when relevant rather than info-dumped, so if you pay attention, you get a fascinating portrait of a very different world and can take some guesses as to how it came about. In the Kindle edition, Karr has an afterword where she confirms some of my guesses about what she calls “The Gentle World,” and leaves other aspects unexplained. She mentions that parts were inspired by an obscure musical, but doesn’t name it. If anyone ever reads it and figures it out, let me know.

It is indeed a very gentle novel, a mystery without murder, a portrait of conflict and its resolution in a world that lacks the worst elements of ours. There are a ton of fun and inventive details about culture and magic. The main character, Torin, is a toymaker (this includes ritual objects like “marriage toys,” which are offered as a proposal) who can imbue some of his creations with temporary life; food can be temporarily transformed into something more appetizing, but as it will revert inside your stomach you need to make sure that the original was edible and not something you’re allergic to.

For all its extremely small scale and placid surface, this is an understatedly ambitious book, though in keeping with its world where people can get physically sick from too much pride or at least believe they can, it presents itself humbly.

If this sounds like the sort of thing you would like, you will like it. Out of print, but available on Kindle for $2.99.

Many of Karr's other books are now available on ebook. I like her swords and sorcery Frostflower and Thorn and Frostflower and Windbourne novels, which also have a small scale and understatedly unusual worldbuilding. (Note: they are not that dark overall, but they do involve rape of both men and women as it's believed that sorcerers lose their power if they lose their virginity.)

At Amberleaf Fair