book: Uprooted

[psocoptera]

Uprooted is a new standalone fantasy novel by Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire books and a lot of fantastic fanfic. It's really good! Very fairy tale without being any one exact fairy tale. I always like to do the you-might-like-this-if thing, so:

- if you love Howl's Moving Castle.
- if you liked the parts about how different wizards cast spells differently in the classic HP fic "Transfigurations".
- if you have fond memories of Snape/Hermione stories like "The Fire and the Rose" or "Roman Holiday".
- if you like things like The Dark Crystal, So You Want To Be A Wizard, The Magician's Land, or, in general, the fantasy tradition that puts forth an act of imaginative healing rather than destruction/defeat as the climax of a fantasy story (and by the way I've had terrible tip-of-the-tongue over this list for the past couple days - there's something very obvious I'm missing that I want to put on it, please share your suggestions in the comments).

To the best of my knowledge, this book is a standalone - it certainly reads like a standalone, reaching a conclusion and stuff. A fine feature in a fantasy novel in itself. ::grin::

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

the fantasy tradition that puts forth an act of imaginative healing rather than destruction/defeat as the climax of a fantasy story

Neverending Story?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Movie or book? I thought about the movie, although I'm maybe curious whether you could draw a distinction between climactic healing and, like, apotheotic creativity, and whether the movie should fall under the latter. (Possibly Magician's Land, too, hrm.) I don't remember the ending of the book at all now :(.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Movie, I guess. I, too, no longer remember how the book ended. But I looked it up on Wikipedia just now, and it looks like if you are going to draw a distinction between climactic healing and apotheotic creativity, the book ending falls in the first category, while the middle semi-climax of the book that became the movie ending falls in the second.

And, of course we don't remember the book's ending. We've read too many other stories since then, and in order to do that we've had to give up some of our other memories.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

As I've mentioned to you (but not psocoptera), I actually did reread the book last year. My sense is that the semi-climax of the book/movie ending is ambiguous between the two categories, because, while it's based on Bastian's creativity in imagining new Fantasia/Fantastica, in practice that creativity does not cause an entirely new Fantasia/Fantastica to come into being, as the book (more explicitly, as you get towards the end and read about the fate of the past wishers which makes it very clear that in Bastian's theoretically new Fantastica he is actually passing through the exact same locations that previous wishers went to) and the movie (in showing Atreyu and Falcor at the end) both indicate that the new realm is very heavily based on the old . I would say that the storyline thus blurs the lines between creativity and healing, maybe even suggesting creativity as the only truly successful method of healing - given that only people from outside of Fantasia/Fantastica can heal the land with their imagination, and nothing any of the beings within the realm can do without this creative power will ever heal it.

The book's ending would not come to mind for me as fitting into the framework of the examples psocoptera gave, or at least the first two, since I haven't read the last one, because it's on an intimate personal scale. It certainly involves healing, but the healing of a single person rather than of a country, world or universe (which, again, I think the mid-book climax does involve). psocoptera, do you count narratives where the climax involves psychological healing for a single character within your list, or are you only looking at larger-scale healing?

[randysmith]

please share your suggestions in the comments

The problem here is that if I share a suggestion that you *haven't* read, I'm pretty solidly spoiling it, so I'm unlikely to do so if it isn't completely obvious. Having said that, yes, this is a neat change run on the standard fantasy tropes.

(I've now thought of two books in this category I've liked, but I don't think are obvious enough to be your tip-of-the-tongue. Maybe something by Charles DeLint?)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Well, I absolve you of spoilers, I'd rather have the conversation (and the book rec, if I turn out not to have read it) than avoid spoilers for something I might or might not ever even be going to read/watch.

The only DeLint that ever stuck with me much was Memory & Dream, and even that I haven't reread in so long I cannot now tell you how it ends. :(

[randysmith]

Ok. The pme "denouement healing" book that I thought was Patricia Brigg's _When Demons Walk_ (I had another when I first posted, but I can't remember it now :-J).

I'd argue that _The Serpent Mage_ (Greg Bear) also counts, though there's a fight scene after the denouement healing, it's just less important to the overall arc of the book. Also maybe _A Wrinkle in Time_?

[motyl.livejournal.com]

Oh, this book gave me such great happiness. It's like I finally found a successor to McKinley, only while she's still writing, but that's still great as she has never been as prolific as I'd like.