Monday, April 17, 2006
I have several particular favorite
kinds of book and one of them is young-adult fantasy especially when it comes in the form of a very well-written trilogy (i.e. Philip Pullman, Garth Nix; or Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series is five rather than three, but it's the same principle). I've been waiting a year for this book (#2 in the trilogy), and it completely lived up to my expectations; I bought it this afternoon & also another copy of the first volume because of course I had to read that again in order to get myself in the right frame of mind for the second (here was when I read volume one last year & loved it). So first I reread Magic or Madness and then I read Magic Lessons which I have just finished & really all I can say is that these are very near perfect books, the narrative voices & characters & settings are exactly what I most love reading and Justine Larbalestier is an outrageously good writer. Very, very appealing.
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I hadn't heard of these books, but if you're comparing them in any way to Phillip Pullman, Garth Nix or Susan Cooper (who get re-read every christmas holidays in a sybaritic refusal to grow up) then I have to devour them at once. Oh, dear. How do you get any work done?
ReplyDeleteMarina
Pullman and Cooper are among my favorites too (and Lloyd Alexander, do you like his Prydain books?). So these have to go on my list.
ReplyDelete(clicked over from Not Quite Sure)
You know, I loved Lloyd Alexander when I was a kid but I have not found those books living up to re-reading nearly as well as Cooper's. Hers are as good as any adult fiction, they are complex and satisfying and beautifully written, whereas the Alexander ones feel more like children's books (I find the writing a tiny bit clunky, the whole project works better as mythbuilding/storytelling than as sentence-writing and characterization and all that).
ReplyDeleteBut yes, these books are amazing! And you know what you must read if you have not already, Garth Nix's Sabriel books, which are wonderfully good.