{"id":1318,"date":"2011-06-08T00:01:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-08T04:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/08\/read-this-uncertain-places\/"},"modified":"2011-06-11T20:00:16","modified_gmt":"2011-06-12T00:00:16","slug":"read-this-uncertain-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/08\/read-this-uncertain-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This: The Uncertain Places (& Other Fantasies)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a review in Shelf Awareness<\/i> yesterday<\/a>, in which I got to talk about Lisa Goldstein\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Uncertain Places<\/i><\/a>, which takes a young man in 1970s Berkeley and drops him into a modern fairy tale. Will Taylor falls in love with Livvy Feierabend, one of three sisters who live with their mother in a large house attached to a Napa vineyard. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some unusual behavior that spurs Will\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curiosity early on, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when Livvy falls into a mysterious sleep that he becomes truly determined to find out what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on. With the help of his best friend, he uncovers a backstory that stretches over centuries, about a family that struck a bargain with supernatural creatures for fantastic wealth\u00e2\u20ac\u201da bargain that was almost recounted in the Grimm brothers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 compendium, except that it was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lost\u00e2\u20ac\u009d before it could be published\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

You probably won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be surprised to learn that Will is able to outsmart the fairies, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually only the first half of the story. He and the Feierabends will spend years looking over their shoulders, waiting for some form of supernatural payback, and when it comes, it spurs them into discovering a whole new layer of backstory along the way to completing their latest rescue mission. Goldstein does a fantastic job of making Will\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reactions to everything that unfolds around him plausible; as weird as the story gets, it stays grounded in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153real\u00e2\u20ac\u009d world. Will\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obsession with breaking Livvy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s family curse\u00e2\u20ac\u201deven if the rest of her family wants him to mind his own business\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmight strike some readers as unrealistic, but under the peculiar circumstances, it makes sense both for the storyline and for his personality. I was a huge fan of Goldstein\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brand of fantasy in the real world back in the 1980s, especially The Red Magician<\/i> and The Dream Years<\/i>, and I was excited as soon as I heard about this one. It lived up to my anticipation.<\/p>\n

I read two other fantasy books recently with the intention of writing about them for Shelf Awareness<\/i> that ultimately aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t winding up there, but which I still found awfully intriguing. Charles de Lint\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Promises to Keep<\/i><\/a> was first published in a limited edition a few years ago; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a prequel to de Lint\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Onion Girl<\/i> and Widdershins<\/i>, looking at an earlier period in the life of his protagonist, Jilly Coppercorn. In those novels, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s outlined Jilly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s horrific past; this novella focuses on the time when she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s started the recovery process and is beginning to piece together a productive life for herself. An old friend reappears with an invitation to a concert at a club nobody else has ever heard about, and accepting that invitation brings her to a mysterious city where everybody seems to have the time and leisure to pursue their most profound ambitions. Yes, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the afterlife; yes, Jilly has to decide whether she really wants to stay. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very well-told story\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe city of the dead is a fantastic setting, filled with characters who appear to possess depth even beyond what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re seeing in their exchanges with Jilly\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also a very passive story. Jilly basically wanders around and thinks about what she should do\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand since readers who are familiar with the character already know what will happen, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very little dramatic tension, and the resolution itself is subdued. A great book for fans, but maybe not the best introduction to de Lint\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s particular brand of urban fantasy.<\/p>\n

Rudy Rucker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Jim and the Flims<\/i><\/a> is also about a visit to the afterlife, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Rudy Rucker, so instead of a realistic setting into which fantastic elements subtly creep in, the way Goldstein and de Lint do it, this novel is pretty much weird and trippy from the beginning and just gets more bizarre as it goes along. Rucker has put forward the argument that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing in a style called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153transrealism<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which is basically writing about real life but using SF\/fantasy tropes to get at psychological truths about the world as the author perceives it. In practice, though, the combination of deadpan voice and dream logic in a novel like Jim & the Flims<\/i> can at times feel emotionally unrealistic, at least to the extent that readers anticipate a certain amount of mimetic polish in fiction.<\/p>\n

Yes, we chafe when characters in novels behave too predictably, but we also find it disconcerting when they behave too randomly\u00e2\u20ac\u201dperhaps even more so in fantasy, where we rely upon recognizable human psychology as a touchstone amidst the unfamiliar surroundings. (That holds true for non-human characters, too, as their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153alien\u00e2\u20ac\u009d behavior is often defined by contrast to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153normative\u00e2\u20ac\u009d human behavior.) Rucker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fiction is often filled with fascinating ideas, but in this case, knowing that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be publishing a memoir later this year, I felt like maybe that might be a better introduction to him for the general audiences at Shelf Awareness<\/i>. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see in a few months if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m right!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a review in Shelf Awareness yesterday, in which I got to talk about Lisa Goldstein\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Uncertain Places, which takes a young man in 1970s Berkeley and drops him into a modern fairy tale. Will Taylor falls in love with Livvy Feierabend, one of three sisters who live with their mother in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[42,44,41,43,40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1341,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions\/1341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}