MindsBase

This is the first book in a new series by Orson Scott Card (author of Ender’s Game). It is (I think) his first book that they’ve actively marketed as YA, although Ender’s Game is admittedly loved by all ages and stages.

Pathfinder is a bit of a genre blend, with some mystical/fantastic elements like (more-or-less) magical talents and some sci-fi tropes like space and time travel.

Main character Rigg has always had a unique ability to see living things with a path trailing behind them. Initially, this is only helpful in tracking animals with his father, but soon he finds that the luminous trails are echos of where that person (or animal) has been in the past.

Once he teams up with another boy who has the ability to manipulate time, things get pretty interesting.

The scope grows with the story, becoming heroic – epic, but in the hands of such a seasoned storyteller I didn’t get lost, nor did I stop caring what happened to the individuals I started the journey with.

If you are familiar with sci-fi / fantasy, I think you’ll enjoy Pathfinder. If you’re used to mainstream YA, you may struggle with the pacing. He explains the background of civilizations, though not in as thick a way as old sci-fi. It does feel like modern sci-fi, but I have to argue with the designation of YA.

It isn’t paced as YA. The jacket and dimensions definitely don’t feel YA. It doesn’t contain any R-rated content so it works nicely as a crossover, but if I were a sixteen-year-old sci-fi lover, I would be looking for this book on the regular adult sci-fi shelf, not among the girly vampire romances that still plague the young adult section.

I picked Pathfinder up off a center display table at Barnes & Noble that featured discounted big-name books… so I fear Pathfinder has not been selling well. I feel sure this is because of the jacket treatment, et al. Also, I didn’t find a word count on this tome, but it feels to be well over 100k, thickness akin to Harry Potter 7, which also may dissuade readers.

Which is too bad. It’s a well-handled story that you can sink into and enjoy for a week of evening reading. None of those false, tricky hooks that make you blaze through it at lightening speed (like Hunger Games) while neglecting house and home — those types of books are starting to really annoy me. I do have a life, after all.

My only complaint was that after the satisfying “end”, Card has a final reveal and sets us up for book 2 in a sort-of tacked on way. This is something that always makes me want to wait until a series is all written before I begin. But oh, well. I’ll be reading book 2 to see how Rigg and his cohorts meet their next big battles.

Enjoy!

I like to read widely, but for some reason, I haven’t picked up too many high fantasy books, let alone high fantasy mixed with YA romance. So it was a nice surprise that I enjoyed Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt.

The story starts on the day sixteen-year-old Keturah meets death — but death comes in the form of a stately, cloaked man. She tries (as many have surely done) to talk her way out of the inevitable, but because her storytelling is better than most — and she refuses to tell him the ending — he stays her sentence for a day with the promise that she’ll come back and tell him her story’s ending the next night. Her only way to avoid death on the morrow is to find her true love.

Now, as a rather gentle heroine, she must help her town and seek her true love in order to get out of going with Lord Death full-time. Especially because he has promised to take her to wife when she returns.

The strength of this story is in the language the author uses. It’s warm and pleasant like a candlelit bath, you just want to sink into it. It’s a fairly quick read at 52k words so it’s a great way to whet your appetite for more high romance.

Great for younger teens, too, sweet love and no raciness. If you’re a middle-schooler who likes romance, this is better reading than Twilight, IMO. Stake and burn me now, if you dare.

I couldn’t sleep before adding my first thoughts about the newest Narnia movie: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which they seem to be using as subtitle in favor of namedropping Narnia, but either way you peel it, it’s a multilayer cake of fun!

Now, you already know what it’s about, right? If not, please go read the (rather short) book (and all other Narnia books by C.S. Lewis), you won’t be sorry. Then go see the preview to whet your appetite for sweeties.

One sentence run-down, in case you’re really that lazy (like me, most of the time): The two younger Pevensie children, Edmund and Lucy, along with their useless cousin Eustace, end up in Narnia again to join King Caspian and his crew in a seafaring quest.

I was worried at first, for when the Pevensie’s (now looking like young adults) first step aboard Dawn Treader, they are greeted by a truly horrible suited minotaur — is that what they are? I’m too tired to check. A suited somebody that looked like a gorilla, anyway.

Fortunately, after that shot, they did have a bit of nice CG on the faces of the talking animals. Much better than the first movie, for sure. And the fur was much nicer on Reepicheep the mouse as well as Aslan the lion, particularly in the last scene where Lucy gets her fondest wish of a hug from Reep.

But I’m getting ahead of myself!

The movie was wonderful. All the Holy-wood adjustments were fine, even pleasant. The evil green mist resonated of the way the Harry Potter death eaters are depicted when flying. It suited the movie.

One of my very favorite Narnia scenes of all the books occurs in this one, so let me comment on that. It is when Eustace tells about being turned by Aslan from a dragon back into a boy. I’ve often read it aloud to my children, it’s a speech that begs to be done that way. It’s beautiful. The whole movie, I worried they would skip this, but they in fact gave us a nice, though short, in-person view of that happens, as well as Eustace’s words about it in a subsequent scene. I was happy. Couple more seconds of it — of Eustace uncomfortable in the dragon skin and trying vainly to remove it himself — would have had me in actual tears.

You’ll enjoy this one very much, if you’re any kind of Narnia fan. If you’re not, get on the wagon, there’s still room even after half a century.

Oh, I’m going to add one line of dialog where it was sorely missing in the movie. It happens during a scene with Lucy and a younger girl. The girl’s mother was earlier taken away in the evil green mist. The girl says that “Aslan couldn’t stop my mother being taken.” To which Lucy gives some innocuous answer that I didn’t hear because I was writing my own dialog for her. The books say this so often, surely the movies have used it at least once, but here was the moment for a repetition:

Lucy: He’s not a tame lion.

This is what they say in Narnia. Aslan is a wild lion, good, but wild. They say this when they mean that His ways are not man’s ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. But he is great and good and we can trust that he knows best and will make all things right in the end.

Ah, good literature. I sincerely hope that in spite of the entirely different cast of characters, they go back and do The Horse and His Boy, my favorite of the books. But I am content, for tonight. Good night!

Enjoy!

I was first introduced to Neil Gaiman — or perhaps I should say, Neil Gaiman’s works — when a full-size cardboard cutout of Claire Danes stared glossily down at me at the movie theater. I hadn’t seen her in a few years, and never satisfyingly since her brilliant role in short-lived TV series My So-Called Life*.

So here she was, dressed head-to-toe in a silver gown with long, silver-blonde hair, obviously starring in a magical story of some sort. Well, I was more than right, as she was playing a LITERAL star, in a quirky fantasy based on the novel Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Check out the movie if you haven’t, you’ll be treated to Robert De Niro in a corset and Michelle Pfieffer with one sagging breast.

I later picked up my first Neil novel of the same title and enjoyed it very much. Technically, I listened to it, and he is an excellent reader of his works, as well. I went on to sample a few more of his works for children, but didn’t get into much of his adult fiction.

Until this past week.

I needed more audio for my trip to Yellowstone, and on the library shelf was Anansi Boys. I was hoping for the flashier, much-talked-about American Gods, but I grabbed Anansi Boys anyway.

I was disappointed when I put in the first CD and realized Neil was not reading this audiobook, but in time I realized that it was perfect having it read by Lenny Henry. His voicing of the Carribean accents was wonderful.

But on the story itself — I get the feeling that this book is not people’s favorite Gaiman story. It’s strange, it’s quirky, it deals with the gods of African tales and ghosts and sweet old-lady witches. I get the feeling there’s been some confusion about where to shelve this book, though it is clearly adult fiction with an adult main character, Fat Charlie. Fat Charlie is leading a kind of ho-hum life, but he loves and wants to marry a sweet girl who insists on him reconnecting with his father for the upcoming wedding. He soon finds out that his father has died, and when he goes to Florida for the funeral he finds out that the father he was always so embarrassed by was actually the trickster god Anansi — the spider.

From there, a major can of spiders is opened when Fat Charlie invites the “brother”** he never knew he had to come visit him. Interspersed in the narrative is the occasional story about Anansi the spider and the other gods, and I have to say, the first one left me and my family roaring… gales of laughter, I tell you. It was then we knew this was a specially-woven fabric of story. It’s not just about one man — though you do cheer for this poor guy by the end — it’s about a bunch of ordinary people experiencing extraordinary things. It ties up neater than a professional gift-wrap at the end, too. I loved it.***

* Note that I don’t  usually link you to some boring summary of media I reference in my reviews… I usually hand-pick a youtube clip that I feel represents it… and so it is, here. So follow them, often! (they open in new windows)

** You’ll see why I quoted “brother” when you read (or hear) the book.

*** I’d say this is a 14 and up read for language and some sexual inferences. Didn’t bother my kids, though.

Have you read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger? Me neither. But I did flip through it and read several passages. I was intrigued by the premise, being a sucker for both (light) science fiction and (some) romance.

I also liked the way the book was told in alternate first-person, sort of as a series of journal entries… but more like word snapshots. My son’s first-grade teacher would call them “small moment” scenes. Short but detailed. It was a great way to keep us invested in what would otherwise be a rather confusing, tangled story.

If you are the sort of person that just can’t get past the paradoxes that the whole premise of time travel deals with, then this story isn’t for you. If you can, you’ll enjoy either the book or the 2009 movie, or both.

Hey, that’s funny. I just realized that the movie’s main actor, Eric Bana, his last movie was about time travel, too — the new Star Trek.

I’ve had a hard time liking Bana since he played in the 2003 screen version of The Hulk, a movie I absolutely hated. I wanted to like it, because I liked the TV show and think the Bruce/Hulk is one of the most interesting super heroes. He’s not simply Jekyll and Hyde — good and bad. I like to think of Hulk as misunderstood. And that there are times for the use of anger and physical power, like to protect the weak and innocent, not to be a victim of a vilified military. The 2008 version looked exactly the same — Hulk vs. the military and I think that’s really boring.

(I also wanted to like the 2003 Hulk movie because of my long-time love of the movie Labyrinth in which Jennifer Connelly also starred. But I digress.)

But, in The Time Traveler’s Wife, Bana is really good, as of course is Rachel McAdams, who I liked in this performance better than in The Notebook.

Back to time travel.

It is nearly impossible to create a good story that centers around time travel, because first you have to deal with what happens when you change something in the past or future. This movie didn’t attempt to grapple with it, which makes it a little unusual. It laid out, very early and very clearly, that Henry, the time traveler, didn’t have the power to change anything significant in the past or future. Of course, the things he does throughout the movie change things as far as his relationship to his wife, but still… I could accept these boundaries and enjoy the movie within them.

This made the movie really a story about a man’s relationship with his wife.

Their relationship reminded me a bit of Lois and Clark (Superman), where she is the stability that anchors him, domesticates and humanizes him. Poor Henry, though, instead of having super-powers, has a super curse, in that he cannot control when or where he travels in time. There are some redeeming factors, though, and I enjoyed how these things made room in the story for other elements. After all, a guy that time travels at random can hardly hold down a job, so it’s very helpful that he can win the lottery so as not to be worried about money on top of his other issues.

I found it particularly interesting that the story took on infertility as a main issue. It made the otherwise rather perfect Clare more real, that she had serious issues of her own to grapple with.

So, Henry and Clare ended up being, for me, one of the more relatable couples I’ve seen onscreen. They are experiencing a great love, but not an ideal life, and I get that. Awesome love doesn’t equal perfect life. Not until we’re all behind the pearly gates, I guess.

The screenplay writer is Bruce Joel Rubin, who also wrote Ghost and several others. I liked this screenplay well enough that I’m tempted to check out his lesser-known films like My Life and even Stewart Little 2! Well, we’ll see, since he also wrote the Last Mimzy which I found rather silly.

On a more visual design note, the movie had a lovely look. You get a feel for it in the movie poster, isn’t that image beautalicious?

This movie gets four and a half nods from me!

enjoy!