Reviews and Comments

I enjoyed Zen Cho's books about the Sorcerer Royal. They were fun and they were funny. The sudden eruption of Malay witches into the staid ranks of English wizardry was an excellent and fruitful joke. But it seems that these were warming-upexercises, a joyful romp before she got down to serious business.

The protagonist of this novel has accompanied her parents back to Malaysia after spending her childhood and adolescence in the USA. This wrench - her father has returned because he failed to make it in the states, and is now dependent on family charity for employment and living quarters - accentuates her liminality. She has to face up to being neither child nor adult, neither American nor Malaysian, and, as she gloomily puts it at one point, neither straight nor gay (she has an ongoing relationship with another woman, but is unable to tell her parents, or indeed, anyone else). And most pressingly, as someone who seems not be religiously or spiritually inclined, she finds herself to be possessed, first by her grandmother's ghost, and then by the spirit of a powerful goddess. It's through her struggle with the two supernatural beings that she finally comes to recognise her own inner strengths, and determine her own pathway.

This is obstensibly weightier stuff than the earlier books - although racism and cultural confusions were already central themes. I missed the lightness of touch, the playfulness of the earlier works. There are moments of comedy in this book, but it is, for the most part, serious stuff. It is well written - Cho is a writer - and reads easily.

Naomi Novak invokes both Le Guin and Rowling as providing the seeds of this book. As it is, the author writes far better than Rowling and cracks a lot more jokes than LeGuin. She also has LeGuin's intelligence.

A Deadly Education is the first in a trilogy. It is, as with many so-called YA novels, a Bildungsroman. In the fantasy genre, this often involves the youthful protagonist discovering that they have hidden magical talents. In the case of Novik's Galadriel, the heroine already knows full well that she is an extremely powerful wizard, but she has to deal with a Dead Father and an Awful Curse.

Galadriel has enrolled in a school for magicians, despite her mother's obvious misgivings. The world is a dangerous place for young wizards, who are the preferred tasty snacks of a horde of magical nasties. Nowhere is safe, but Galadriel believes that the school provides some measure of protection. This is moot: the book opens with her being saved in extremis from one of the fell creatures by the school's white knight, Orion (the Hunter) Lake.

The school itself is a satire on meritocracy. Open to anyone who has magical talents, it has in fact been designed to ensure that the children of the patrician class are protected, while the oiks draw off the hungry monsters. Galadriel is, so far as the rich kids are concerned, an oik. Even worse, at the opening of the book she is utterly friendless. "You feel," one of the other characters tells her, "like it's gonna rain."Orion almost immediately assumes that she is a murderess, and spends a whole chapter looking forward to putting her down. Once he discovers who the true murderer is, he spends the rest of the book trying to make up for his initial poor judgement. Galadriel, for her part, is as rude to him and to his friends as she can be. (One of the book's jokes is the array of insults she throws at him). This is a dangerous game, as Orion's friends are among the most powerful of her fellow students.

Despite the feeling of doom that she inspires in others, Galadriel gradually comes to discover friendship, and by the end of the book she has built up a small but well-knit group with whom to face the terrors that the school will throw at her in the following volumes.

The curse under which the heroine lives, and which has resulted in her rejection by her father's family (they attempted to put her down like a pariah dog), is a prophecy, announced by her great grandmother, that she would destroy the enclaves. The enclaves are the sheltered spaces in which the patrician wizards seal themselves off from the rest of the world for their own safety and comfort. Galadriel's Mum is having none of this; a nurturant Earth Mother, she lives in a commune in Wales, dispensing her healing magic for free, taking in strays, and giving her powerful spells away to anyone who wants them. Despite her daughter's pleading, she refuses to seek safety in one of the enclaves, and one suspects she looks on her daughter's promised future as a blessing rather than a curse.

The fact that there are no teachers in the school is a great relief. One the reader's burdens in the school novel is having to shudder through the usual stock of masters and mistresses being authored into significance. The children in Novik's novel are faced with a magical algorithm which is both cunning and deranged. It seems designed to trap the students into wasting their energies on pointless exercises, punishing them for any deviation from the plan by exposing them to one or another of the hungry monsters. The very Ideal Type of the School, in fact.

By all means, read this book.

Ms. Waggoner has a way with words. Here she invents a thieves cant that works and which is very funny. Her heroine is a fairly standard up-from the gutter but with amazing abilities if only she would try type, with an eye for the main chance when she's not too drunk. The author gives her a lot of good lines. She has a comical mother, and acquires a comical mouse. Her main attempted acquisition, however, is an heiress, whom she sets out to seduce. (Many of Ms Wggoner's characters are resentful of the unearned privileges of the posh set, but are eager to join them, much like typical members of the British Parliamentary Labour Party).

The plot is fair, but I liked it above all for the writing. The heroine's semi-deliberate malapropisms, invented words and other verbal squibs are delightful, and the supporting cast are all allowed their moments of linguistic grace too. I recommend it.