East

East by Edith Pattou

Rose has always been different. Since the day she was born, it was clear she had a special fate. Her superstitious mother keeps the unusual circumstances of Rose's birth a secret, hoping to prevent her adventurous daughter from leaving home . . . but she can't suppress Rose's true nature forever.

So when a white bear shows up one cold autumn evening and asks teenage Rose to come away with it - in exchange for health and prosperity for her ailing family - she readily agrees.

Rose travels on the bear's broad back to a distant and empty castle, where she is nightly joined by a mysterious stranger. In discovering his identity, she loses her heart - and finds her purpose - and realizes her journey has only just begun.

I am a big fan of reconceptualized fairy tales. Beauty, by Robin McKinley, that one Zel by Donna Jo Napoli, the Shannon Hale Goose Girl ones, the Gail Carson Levine ones, especially Ella Enchanted, Daughter of the Forest by Marillier, some other ones . . . I can't say that I love all of them, but I do enjoy them more often than not. So East fit right in - it's based off that Norwegian fairy tale where the girl has to search for this guy east of the sun and west of the moon. In the fairy tale, she is often depicted as riding on the East Wind, West Wind, South Wind, North Wind, etc., but here she takes more terrestrial transportation.

In this version, Rose is destined to be a traveler, but because it was foretold that she would die under an avalanche of snow and ice, Rose's mother decides to lie to Rose in order to keep her close, ironically providing the impetus for Rose to leave when she discovers the lie. Ain't destiny a b? Just when you do everything to subvert it, you realize you're actually what causes it to happen!

So Rose leaves with the Bear, and betrays him, and sets herself to following him to rescue the Bear from the trolls who live east of the sun and west of the moon. As fairy tales go, this one has more depth than most. Pattou does a good job of getting you invested in the relationship between Rose and the Ice Bear, which is both difficult and essential to the book. Difficult, because Rose and the Ice Bear cannot really talk to each other, and the Bear only appears in his human form in the dead of night. Despite these setbacks, Pattou shows them communicating, through action and atmosphere, but mostly through Rose's thoughts. I could feel the connection between Rose and the Bear even though it was scarcely verbalized. It's a good thing I felt it too, or else the entire rest of the book would have been me going, "So wait, why does she feel the need to hit up the frozen north to go looking for this ex-bear?"

The parts of Rose traveling were my favs - she winds up in France after the fracas and reclaiming of the bear by the Troll Queen, travels to a seaport where she gets passage to Norway on the viking booze cruise, sails through a storm and ends up charting a course to Greenland. Of course, she also sends her family a letter, which I appreciated because I dislike stories where the main character gets out of a long confinement, and then just sets off without informing the worried family that they're okay. Consideration only takes a couple minutes, folks. Once in Greenland, she hooks up with the shaman Malmo and journeys ever northward to find the trolls. The trip through Greenland was incredible - the descriptions of ice forests and snow storms lasting days on end was really evocative. In fact, side note, all the descriptions and scenes were really well done - the sense of hushed stillness in the French castle, the brisk air and liveliness of Rose's home in Norway, the bitter chill and jagged edges of the troll landscape, everything set the tone for the book in just a few words. Additionally, the way the book is set out, even though Rose often seems set apart from the other characters, emotionally or physically, it is not until she gets to the land of trolls that she really feels "alone". She does find an ally there eventually, but it's an important emotional cue that Pattou hits to set the stage for the final section of the book.

Rose's arrival in troll-landia also precipitates what appears to be her first second thoughts about the whole process. I found it believable that after all this, when she's finally within reach of her goal, she gets pulled up short and has to say to herself, "What if he really doesn't want to leave?" It's a good thing she thinks of this eventually, because it would be pretty heavy-handed of her to storm the castle, be all, "You're coming with me now," to this guy who just wants to marry the Queen who has been in love with him for three lifetimes.

Speaking of the Troll Queen, she's such a tragic figure here - she defies her father and her people to go after the man she loves, and waits for him to be hers for a hundred and fifty years. Unfortunately, she also kidnapped this guy, poisoned him, and put up every possible roadblock to his getting out of the arrangement. Then she brings down some righteous wrath when she finds out he's leaving her. It was sad to me, because she obviously longs for this guy, maybe even loves him, but her love is sick and twisted, it poisons. It's like a fish loving a bird - doomed from the very beginning. I felt sorry for her, because yeah, she's a terrible person, who kidnaps people to make them slaves and throws them into a snow pit when they've outlived their usefulness. . . . okay, when I put it like that it sounds really bad. But I did feel badly for her, she's got such tunnel vision, and I think it speaks well of Pattou that she made me sympathize with this awful character.

Everything manages to wrap itself up, grand fairy-tale style, and you get that warm cozy feeling when you've finished it. It's a meatier book than other fairy tale adaptations I've read, although at the same time it feels easier, because it's told through short perspective chapters, which go very quickly. It's not the grandest-written book I've ever read, but it is very enjoyable, and very evocative.

There were a few nitpicks I had - the book's opening is of someone finding Rose's stuff, and hearing the voices and sounds of the story. Whatever happened to that? It was never mentioned again for the rest of the book, and why was this person hearing voices? That was weird - I don't think it added anything to the story. And Ned's "hearing" of his sister's call of distress was obviously, deus ex machina, but that didn't bother me as much, even though it had as little explanation as the other.

One other thing I wanted to add - this book is full of women. Rose, her mother, the French woman who rescues her, the Troll Queen, Malmo the shaman - all these women impel the plot and are key characters. In many (european type) fairy tales, the tension often comes from a battle between the heroine and an older scheming woman, so being female-centric is not unusual, but here the older archetype is somewhat softened - those who create the problems for Rose do not necessarily mean to hurt her, and the women who help her add a lot to the story.

And, just as a fun aside, my old version of the fairy tale (in the Reader's Digest Anthology The World's Best Fairy Tales aka The Awesome Edition) says very specifically that this takes place "late on a Thursday evening in autumn." Like, shit no, random talking polar bears do not come up to you asking for your youngest daughter on Wednesdays, that is a Thursday occurance. Get it together.

Poison Study

Poison Study, by Maria V. Snyder

Choose: A quick death or slow poison

About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace - and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.

And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust - and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.

As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear. . .

I have read Poison Study something like twice now, and unlike Poltergeist, it does not keep getting funnier on repetition. Or well, better, either. I don't know what kind of frame of mind I was in when I read it the first time - chances are something close to the Depths of Despair and/or Ennui, if I'm recalling accurately (but I am probably not) - but I really really enjoyed it. I got swept up in it from the first page, and went straight out and bought it. This was during my ultra-library phase when I was checking out, like, ten books a week, which I can no longer do because I don't live across the street from the library anymore, and words cannot express how sad I am about that. Oh, sweet Bibliothek! How I miss the dulcet whooshing sounds of your electronic doors and your 25¢ book sales! Wherefore hast thou left me! Anyway, I read it and then bought it, so you know I must have liked it. But now... I can't get that feeling back, the sense of anxiety, the rush of endorphins, the complete falling-into of the world of the book.

I do like the book still, although it's almost forced, like I'm overcompensating because of how upset I am that I no longer feel the same way about it. It's like when you're dating someone and you kinda daydream about breaking up with them, and then you feel guilty because honestly, they're not a bad person, and then you try and be extra sweet to them to make up for your thoughts. Or if you're like me, you try to be extra sweet for like, two whole minutes, then get pissed that you have to go to all this trouble because you're probably a terrible person deep down, why don't you feel guilty about that, huh, pal?

Sooooo, Poison Study. I like the main character, Yelena. She's sassy, even after spending a year in prison, waiting to be executed. She reminds me a little of Eugenides from The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner, who is also like, the least grateful prison releasee, ever. Oh, and that book is the bomb-diggity, yeah, I said it.

Also jsyk is spoilers, because how could I get through my day without a few spoilers? Exactly. Yelena has been through a metric ton of crap in her life, including being abducted as a tot (though we don't find this out until the very end), winding up in an orphanage, being tortured by General Brazell in order to provoke her into doing magic, then being raped and abused by his son, then winding up in prison, then, in short order, poisoned, betrayed, and left to die in a pool of her own vomit. So I like that her first inclination is always to run away from danger, but that she asks for defense lessons and tries to stand up for herself more. It's like she's developing as a character before my very eyes!

She's got clowns to the left of her, jokers to the right, and she's stuck in the middle with this crazy hot older assassin, Valek, the chief of security. Who, by the way, is like 14 years older than her, so it's a little creepy that they wind up . . . doing something. . . in that jail cell at the end. Okay, they probably have sex. But look, Yelena is still covered in like, shit and vomit from her day-long detox, and Valek hasn't slept, or, I'm assuming, washed, in like, a day and a half of running around trying to save her, and they're in a jail cell, in a pile of filthy straw. It says right there in the book, filthy straw, I'm not making this up. So please, I don't care if they did get it on, I don't want to imagine that. That is disgusting, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who thinks so.

It's also an intriguingly designed world - the Commander, who killed the old, corrupt king, has instituted a bunch of reforms that basically make it into, uh, like, communist China, or that world in The Giver (Lois Lowry) where everyone got assigned a job at birth. My point is, it's very rigidly structured, so that even if you kill someone accidentally, or in self-defense, you still receive the same punishment as an intentional murder. Snyder gets around this a little by showing us a scene later in the book wherein Valek shuffles an accidental killer into a new identity, but I can't imagine that he's able to do this with everyone, and I can't think a system where self-defense is not a mitigating factor is one that's destined to be of long duration. People wouldn't stand for it, you'd basically be executing innocent people, and eventually that's going to piss people off, because if you execute innocent people, then there's no way to ensure that you yourself won't wind up on the chopping block, and people are going to be all, "If I might die anyway, I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" and then really start fucking things up.

Also, the Commander is a giant hypocrite, because the system frowns on people who try to educate themselves, or spend time in a library, and yet that's exactly what the Commander did herself in order to be able to defeat the old king. It could be a smart strategy, to make sure no one else gets the knowledge necessary to overthrow her, but no one and nothing in the book makes that connection, so it mostly just seems like the Commander forgot who she was supposed to be halfway through the book. And don't even get me started on her policies towards magicians. She's sure got some hang-ups about being a lady, amirite? I mean, for someone who seems hell-bent on following the Code for fairness' sake, she's not shy about writing that Code to be self-serving in the first place. Ah, it's good to be the king!

So there are some good things about the book that are good - it's certainly gotten me to think about the mechanics of justice and a legal system which is like a penrose triangle - it looks stable enough at a glance, but you realize that there's no way that it could exist in real life. And the characters are not completely one-dimensional, although some of them are a bit. It's weird to think that Brazell must have been planning this for almost twenty years, since that's when he kidnapped Yelena to put her in his magic circle - and it's taken him this long to get a magician and a coffee candy factory going? I mean, talk about taking it slow. So there are some not-so-good parts too, obviously. Including that absolutely filthy sex scene [wink].

I was not enchanted on my second go-round, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to get that magic back. So it's a fun book to read, but go easy on the re-reading. It's better than the average teen fantasy, and it's got a bunch of good points, but it's not truly great. It's nice to have a heroine who manages to overcome both the stereotypical tough on the outside, soft on the inside character as well as the he-likes-me-he-likes-me-not waffling heroine. Yelena's got more important things to think about than boys or leather jackets. I'm talking myself into liking the book again, le sigh.