the storytellers

So myths used to be the fabric of people's lives. Not just the big ones, like, arguably religion or patriotism or trickle down economics (okay. That really isn't arguable anymore). You could argue that today many scientific theories are our belief system. The big ones, I could offend anyone by keep on talking. I probably already have. I'm talking the every day myths. The folktales. The stories blood to the bone were told around fires when it got too dark to work. The folktales and myths that happened before the Grimm brothers called them children's work. If you look close enough at Joseph Campbell, we're still enraptured by these stories. Even Hollywood sometimes lives them out. We have a hero. The hero defeats great challenge. He gets his just rewards. Simplistic, I know. What Hollywood and other mass media often miss out on is the essential moment I left out above. That great challenge in someway changes our hero. It happens more often in fiction. But what better place to look than in fantasy? Or what I call a mish mash of fantasy, anyway? These are the stories, the good ones, that would have been told around those fires. Our magic and mayhem can't quite hide those metaphors and myths. Those Jungian archetypes--where these figures and moments in our lives are so bred in, they are bred in. It's subconscious each one of us share. The times when the delight of the story is how perfectly executed the new tale has distilled the old. And where the perfect delight is the slight twist--that end moment that turns the story into something it was never meant to be, but might start to be after this. Our stories are in the marrow of humanity. The fad in Literature (with that snide capital letter) is to more examine a philosophical turn or a lit crit method of writing. Fantasy bleeds. You see our meat from times past. You see us pay homage to those stories again as we tell them over and over with our slight twists, changes, and rearranges. How many times have we read Tam Lin? Patricia Dean (part of Teri Winding's Fairy Tale Series) Tam Lin. Peter S. Beagle's masterful Tamsin. Hell, Diana Wynne Jones felt it necessary to write it twice in Fire and Hemlock and Dog's Body. Mine's quite a set of twists, but at the end, all Weaver's Web is, is Tam Lin. Have we read Beauty and the Beast a lot? Have we read it so often we don't even realize it is a Beauty and the Beast retelling unless the back cover mentions it? Did Robin McKinley, always prone to fairy tales, have to write both Beauty and then much later Rose Daughter? Our unconscious brings us back to these places over and over again. Every time there is a little change because every time a new writer writes, and has a different point of view. Stories changed all the time and were born in dozens of ways around those fires. It's the printed word that has us thinking a story is one thing. Every time a reader reads, or listens, they interpret a different thing today. These are the grist of our lives, so it is no surprise that new material, material yet to be trapped. Yet to be accepted--the new grist--we are the ones who set it to paper, read it, and don't finch. Because we are not in the "real" world, we are allowed to explore concepts most genres lag behind on for years. Feminism and feministic worlds appeared in general fantasy when they still would have been stuck in women's literature if we didn't examine feminism through that particular class of sorcerous priesthood. These days, no one ever blinks when the first three paragraphs introduce you to the fact you will be in a matriarchal society. Sheri S. Tepper's fusion fantasy of fantasy and science fiction taught us around fifty years ago. Her books went on into feminism and from there to general fiction and from there to college classes. But we took her on first. She's ours. Margaret Atwood turned gender so tightly on it's head that general literature co-opted her and then put her in college courses. But we published her. Those feminists and college professors "found" her by hanging with us. If you write a book with gay characters and no magic, you still go in that special section for gay writers. Since I started reading fantasy, and I started in the single digits, if you wrote a book with gay characters and magic you were merely alphabetized with the rest of the fantasy. Mercedes Lackey has made a career of gender bending her characters any which way she can think of. And her career has been good. Because we aren't "real" we get to play with concepts that the "real" world scorns. Yet we are real. We're as real as it gets. We can shift and play and examine more concepts and include more of the "real" world that the "real" world can take because we are the storytellers. Our mythos of heros (those are female in fantasy, too. No heroines these days) face moments when the world challenges and changes them just as their readers meet challenges that change them.

Tempest and a comment (which is a bit like a teapot)

First off, I've been getting this buzz that the site cannot be commented upon.  It looks pretty easy.  There is this box that says comment that lets you type, but then it gets tricky.  A polite few words ask you to "comment as:" and a scroll bar gives you a little list with Google and AIM and Live Journal and the like on it.  Because we all know nobody is anybody unless that nobody has profiles on line.  I tried to make that sentence weirder, but I couldn't think of a way.  Basically, you have to sign up with one of those web communicating system.  Since I am hanging on blogger, and since it is direly easy, I suggest "Google."  I believe if you hit "Google" on that bar it should lead you forward to get your very own id with just a few questions.  If not, google google, I mean "gmail."  The steps are painless.  Basically pick out a unique name and a password.  Once you have those two items, you may sign into google, and onto my comments.  Click, bling, and post.

Okay, meat of the post:

Tempest Rising, Nicole Peeler.

Summary:  Jane True, 26, lives with her slightly feeble father and takes care of him, despite the fact she is a pariah in the small main town in which she lives.  Her mother was a pariah, so her daughter is a pariah.  Also because her boyfriend drowned trying to save her from the deadly whirlpool, the Sow, she swims next to every day.  But he didn't know that.

So when another body shows up in the Sow while Jane is cavorting beside it, she feels a bit put upon, plus guilty, scared and like puking as she fishes him out.  After that, she figures her weird quotient for her life.

Little knows Jane, that is only the beginning.  The next day Jane heads home from her job at Read 'Em and Weep--the local bookstore run by fabulously butch, Tracy, and lipsticky-porn star, Grizelda, lesbians and some of her only friends and supports in town--when she is chased to meet a gnome and a demented sea pony/seaweed pubes almost human Kelpie.  Short and the long of it, Jane True has splashed into a conspiracy beyond her belief where a world of supernaturals exists within and without the world of humans.  Jane is dragged headlong into it, most of which she doesn't mind since a) she's part of it, since her mother was a selkie, and b) the dragging is done by a really, really hot investigator/baobhan sith, more commonly known as vampire.  But he feeds mostly off emotion and only a little blood.

Review:

I started off with Jane True a while ago before the girl was the shit.  I read her quietly as I did not review then.  Heading into Jane True's small town world in Rockabill, Maine, and her book store life made me warm and fuzzy inside, as a pleasant two years of my life were spent shelving books.  Tracy and Grizelda were at once my favorite part of the book as they were well drawn characters and brought the life out of a bit annoyingly cowed Jane.  At the same time, I felt a bit guilty as I did not see why they had to be the butch and lipstick lesbian cliché.  True, Peeler took it to the hilarious max as Tracy carried herself like she played rugby and Grizzy dressed like she was David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days.  Couldn't one of them have just been an average woman, not screaming one form of lesbian or the other?  So that irked me a bit, but they were also fun, dynamic characters, so I gave them a pass.

I found the first three quarters of the book rollicking good fun.  I really enjoy Peeler's sense of humor.  I like that our heroine isn't a supermodel, thought I was annoyed this busty, curvy girl turned out to be a petite six--for all us REAL big boned grrls out there.  One of the only things I liked about Ryu is that he liked her despite Peeler often points out she is imperfect.  Jane does a great job of fainting, reviving, taking on faith, and slowly owning the supernatural world.  The progression of her emotions feels quite real and valid.  And she does it all with a saracastic vibe I adore.

Peeler does the type of world building I think a lot of people don't much notice.  She creates a small main town, used to be fishing, now tourism of the Sow.  Her people reflect this vibe.  The attempt to draw attention by the businesses by naming everything after pigs is laughably, painfully realistic.

I love mythology.  I love putting mythology in books.  I love reading about mythology put into books.  So I am bound to have some strong opinions, right?  Ahem.  Ryu, the vampire, as I have said, calls himself  baobhan sith, and claims to mostly feed off emotions.  I'll give it to her.  The feeding off emotions, with a little blood, is an interesting concept that allows her to have the seductive vamp act without the fear of death or becoming a vamp, since he is alive and supernatural, not undead human.  But I'm a bit of a stickler on my vampires.  I can't help it.  I was raised a vampire purist.  Many a night up past all reasonable hours I watched all manor of vampire flicks with my dad.  See, as a kid, I had horrible, screaming nightmares of vamps.  So I took control when I got older.

I'm still beating myself, kneeling down and screaming "Why??" did I make up two good vampires in Weaver's Web.  No matter I followed other vampire dictates to death and it made an interesting story and twist on an old one.

Enough with the divergence into me-land.  The fact is baobhan sith means "fairy woman."  She doesn't come out in the day.  She doesn't touch iron (being fairy).  She wears a green dress to cover what were either hooves or very sharp nails with which she sliced and then drank to death unwary travelers.

This man has not one of her traits.
He is barely a vampire.

Obviously part of what makes using mythology cool is seeing the ways in which you can use it, but slightly change and revitalize it.  But, Come on!  She made up a whole new creature, which is fine, but don't tell us vampire freaks or mythology lovers that you are doing anything else!

Plus, I love sex as much--actually apparently more--than the next girl.  So I am split here.  I love Peeler for down and dirty sex with only a few embarrassing euphemisms.  Her heat actually gets me hot.  Plus, give the girl props for not being afraid to swear.  Gut I get really bored of Ryu exuding sex.  Giving him a funny laugh and a love of Manga does not hide the fact you are creating someone, other than some emotional unavailable traits, the perfect guy.  It's annoying.  We know that in the long term of the series we are all rooting for the dog, anyway (that makes sense later, don't worry).

I'm hip to the book, despite my mythology whining, until they get out of my beloved Rockabill and go to a very fantasy-fantasy court setting.  I'm not giving away the (plot) climax, but it is lame.  Even given the fact she can't light off her big finale fireworks since this is obviously a series.  I hope this isn't saying too much, but as much as Jane was new and couldn't do the heavy lifting, I hated that after all the feminist sounding Jane (and Peeler), Jane is saved.  I just wish Jane could have saved Jane.

Well.  That concludes this catch up on fantasy.  I made an attempt to read the second book but I got turned off by the repeated perfect, turned on, and down and dirty Ryu references.  Ask anyone who knows me.  That's saying a lot.

Who knows?  Maybe I'll give it another go and let you know how we like each other this time through.