SO I HAVE FINISHED GRACELING.

Over a month and 480 pages later, I am not happy.

España the New State

I asked Mim for permission for rights to post on her new blog. Obviously, I got them...Now what to do with such spectaculor power? Write a book review of course.

But at another time. Since Mim resides in the states and I reside in Spain, you´re going to be getting a lot of different reviews.

Let´s just say the Spanish dubbing of Prince of Persia was not as fun as it would´ve been in English. Though the jokes were relevant to Spain culture, a lot of it went over my head (probably since I´m American...).

Plus they kept mentioning vaca (cow) over and over again.

That can´t be right can it?

-Wren

Winter is coming... in 2011 apparently

Okay, I don't even read A Song of Ice and Fire and I'm excited for this for none other than the fact that SEAN BEAN plays Eddard Stark. I will watch it (at least the pilot) though I have a feelings it's going to end up either magnificently awesome or just plain terrible (and not to mention expensive).

A Game of Thrones Teaser

~Mim

Oh shit, where did I put that book?!

I misplaced Bound by Donna Jo Napoli. I need to return all my books to the public library tomorrow, seeing as I am leaving town this weekend and won't return for a while. Shit, I know I brought it outdoors and read it while sunning myself. Hopefully, I didn't leave it outside. It's been raining recently, and the idea of soggy, lost books makes me sad.

I'm currently reading two other books as well: Little Sister by Kara Dalkey and Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Little Sister is a reread (I think I first read it in middle school) and I picked up Graceling because Wren and what seems like most of the reviewers on Amazon are mad about it.

So far, I have mixed feeling about Graceling. Frankly, I had a hard time getting through Part One and would have dropped the book if it didn't seem like an overwhelming majority of reviewers were raving about it. I stuck with it though and am glad I did because the plot started to pick up immediately after page 143.

Or at least it seemed to... Right now the events are dragging again, and the two main characters are traveling and... talking about their feelings.

Personally, I'm not feeling very emotionally invested in Katsa and Po's budding relationship. I'd rather have less romance and more Katsa stabbing people in the face. But hey, I'm on page... let's see... 237, so there's still time left to convince me.

On the plus side, my copy of The Hunger Games was returned to me today and I finally found out who has my copy of Catching Fire.

~Mim

A story about a girl who loves cats and yaks and oh, that guy as well

Review: Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

Genre: YA fantasy
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Children's Books (September 18, 2007)

Rating: 8.5/10

Summary (from book jacket):

When Dashti, a maid, and Lady Saren, her mistress, are shut in a tower for seven years because of Saren’s refusal to marry a man she despises, the two prepare for a very long and dark imprisonment.

As food runs low and the days go from broiling hot to freezing cold, it is all Dashti can do to keep them fed and comfortable. With the arrival outside the tower of Saren’s two suitors—one welcome, the other decidedly less so—the girls are confronted with both hope and great danger, and Dashti must make the desperate choices of a girl whose life is worth more than she knows.

With Shannon Hale’s lyrical language, this little-known classic fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm is reimagined and reset in a land inspired by the Asian steppes; it is a completely unique retelling filled with adventure and romance, drama and disguise.

The Spoiler-free Rundown: Anyone who's read Shannon Hale's debut novel The Goose Girl knows that Hale is brilliant at breathing new life in old fairy tales. Book of a Thousand Days is based on the Brothers Grimm story Maid Maleen, but Hale has removed it from its Western setting and created a rich fantasy land of eight realms inspired by medieval Mongolia.

Dashti, the main character through whose diary the story is told, is a mucker from the wild steppes, and swears to serve Lady Saren shortly before both are incarcerated in a tower for seven years (talk about bad timing). Dashti's strength of spirit is what propels the story and makes it engaging. While her lady is intent on withering away, Dashti is the practical one, the one who rations their food and searches for an escape. There are moments when her optimism ebbs, but she never completely loses hope. This is what makes her a marvelous character to follow, even when Hale has made her unremarkable in most other ways.

Hale is an impeccable writer and a marvelous storyteller. Her prose is succinct yet nuanced, and Dashti's voice comes off strong and clear while remaining entirely appropriate for her age. The plot is pretty linear, but the heroine and her fascinating world held my interest on every page.

Book of a Thousand Days was a reread for me, and I found myself enjoying it as much as I did the first time. I would recommend it to anyone who want a quick YA read and is interested in fantasy or fairytale retellings.

Age Group: 10 and up. This book was shelved in the Juvenile Fiction section of my local library rather than the Young Adult section. I talked with a librarian who told me that YA fiction is more geared towards teens... though what exactly those parameters involve is something that's up for debate. The story has romance but no sex in it, if that's anyone's concern. I think Dashti starts the story somewhere around 15 and by the end she's around 18. Amazon lists the book as YA.

SPOILER TIME!

Characterization: A long time ago, I remember listening to an episode of This American Life that covered the annual convention of Romance Writers of America. It introduced me to the term 'emotional justice.' Basically a happy ending involves emotional justice when a hero and heroine have to surmount numerous obstacles in order to be with each other.

Book of a Thousand Days has a lot of Cinderella elements to it. By the end of the book, Dashti, a nice girl who works hard and comes from a poor family, ends up marrying a powerful, rich man. While it's not exactly a groundbreaking storyline, it works because Hale has packed a LOT of emotional justice into her story. Dashti may get her happy ending, but oh boy, she does not get it easily. Shut up in a tower for over two years (as the title of the book implies, Dashti and Lady Saren don't actually spend 7 years in the tower) with an emotionally crippled, useless companion, she's forced to fight against extreme heat and cold, rats that threaten their dwindling food supplies, and a villainous lord who amuses himself by flicking flaming wood chips into the tower and nearly roasting the girls alive. The most devastating enemy though is despair. While Saren gives in quickly, Dashti has a much stronger will to live. Within the first few pages, I found myself rooting for her. It's hard not to like her. Here's a list of reasons why Dashti is awesome:

• Her love of food
• Her obsession with her cat
• Character development like woah
• When life gets rough, she's an expert at putting on her Big Girl Panties and DEALING WITH IT

The first two reasons amused me greatly while I was reading. Despite being bricked in, Dashti is still amazed by the tremendous amounts of food that's left for them in the cellar.

My lady is napping in her bedchamber, so I just came down here to look at the food. Seven years' worth. Such a thing I never imagined. Even though I can't see the sky, it's hard not to want to dance about, knowing that for seven years at least I won't starve. That's paradise for a mucker like me. How my mama would laugh. (pg. 5)

Is she naive? Yes, but starving has always been a reality for Dashti. I laughed towards the end of the book when Dasti marries Khan Tegus. She's grown tremendously in the interim, but some things never change.

Day 178

Today Tegus and I were wed, and Ancestors, but there was so much food! (pg. 304)

The mountain of food Dashti is so excited about at the beginning quickly comes under attack by rats. Khan Tegus, under the impression that Dashti is Lady Saren (deception plays an integral role in the romance in this story), gives her a cat to combat the plague of rats.

You know, I was on the fence about Tegus until he gave her the cat. The moment he did, I found myself warming up to him. Shows you what kind of person I am.

Dashti names the cat My Lord. No, I am not kidding. And here's where Hale cracks me up. A few times in the book, she misleads the reader into thinking Dashti is writing about her love for Tegus. But it turns out Dashti is actually talking about the cat.

Day 39

I'm in love! My heart's so light it floats and carries me so my feet don't walk. I sing all day and I don't mind the washing, and that's how I know I'm in love. Completely smitten with My Lord the cat. (pg. 49)

It's absolutely hilarious how Dashti is completely unapologetic and frank when she waxes poetic about her cat, but she spends the majority of the book convincing herself she's not in love with Tegus. There's also a yak she names Mucker which she displays similar affection for. The girl loves her animals, that's for sure.

While there are some aspects of Dashti's personality that remain consistent throughout the book, her sense of self-worth undergoes a drastic change.

The rigid social hierarchy of Dashti's world explains a lot of her submissive behavior. Dashti is a mucker, a race of people who are known for carving out their harsh lives on the steppes away from cities. On one hand, Dashti's background and upbringing have made her extremely resilient and resourceful. On the other hand, according to the primary religion of her world, she must always obey the gentry who rule the Eight Realms. They're aristocrats who are believed to be the divine descendants of the Ancestors, a group of deities that created and the world and govern it. Pissing off the gentry is a serious crime and a major sin. Hale makes this apparent when a friend of Dashti's gets hanged for striking a cousin of the khan. Even though Lady Saren gives her some ridiculous orders, Dashti obeys because her biggest fear is that the Ancestors will deem her unworthy, and she won't get to see her mother in the afterlife.

Religion plays a huge role in shaping Dashti's soceity, but she grows to question her place in the world. This takes place gradually as she sees the gentry, especially Lady Saren, prove themselves to be just as human and flawed as the commoners who serve them.

There's rather brutal scene where the villain Lord Khasar commands Dashti to stick her arm out the small dump hole in the tower wall. Because he's gentry, she does it, and he bashes her arm against the stone until Lady Saren tells her to pull back. By the end of the book, Dashti's obedience of the gentry is far from blind. Knowing that the ruse she and Lady Saren have pulled over Khan Tegus has gone too far, she prepares to leave Lady Saren.

"I order you to stay! I order you to marry him in my name. By the sacred nine, Dashti, you'll do as I say."

Strangely, her words held no sway over me. Maybe it's wrong, but I don't think I have to do what she says because I'm a mucker and she's an honored lady. I smiled to myself then, thinking that if I were in my tower now and a black-gauntleted Khasar told me to put my hand back down so he could slap it, I'd tell him to go slap himself. (pg. 274)

Atta girl, Dashti.

Most of my love for Dashti stems from the fact that she is such a resilient soul. I tend not to like heroines who are delicate flowers. I prefer the ones who are more like a weeds; sure, she gets trampled on a lot, but in the end, she always rises up out of the dust. Not to say that Dashti doesn't have her moments of weakness. There's a period towards the end of their incarceration when both Dashti and Lady Saren are going stir-crazy and the end seems nigh. But even in the depths of her misery, Dashti still manages to be her pragmatic mucker self.

Day 528

Today I thought I would like to die, so I went into the cellar and smacked a few rats with the broom. It helped some." (pp. 86)

If there's one passage that describes perfectly why I love Dashti as a character, it would be this one:

Day 918

I've decided, We're going to live. It's such a relief! I begin to feel more my mucker self just to settle my mind on it. A mucker survives. No matter that we've not enough food. We'll find a way.

A counterpoint to Dashti's resilience and strong-will is Lady Saren. Part of what makes Dashti so attractive as a character is the fact that she puts up with Saren. For years. When she ate all the sugar and dried fruit in the tower, I was hoping that Dashti would smack the crap out of her. That's what I would have done. For most of the story, Saren is sniveling, addle-brained dead weight. Dashti spends the majority of the book trying to find out what happened to her, to heal her, and it's only until the end of the book that Saren draws out of her shell. I was largely unsympathetic to Saren the first time I read the book, but now, I feel a lot more pity for her.

STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET MAJORLY SPOILED FOR THE BOOK.

It's not too hard to figure it out that Lord Khasar is a werewolf, which is the secret that Saren has been keeping all these years. When she was twelve, her father brought her to visit Khasar's estate in hopes that he would marry his daughter. One night, Khasar's war chief forces Saren to watch as Khasar strips naked, transforms into a wolf, and slaughters a tethered goat. Khasar, of course, threatens to kill her if she reveals his power to anyone else.

Considering that Saren is only twelve when this happens and her father is the kind of crazy who locks his own daughter up in a tower for seven years, she has good reason to be so fucked in the head.

Not surprisingly, Dashti finds herself continuously frustrated with Lady Saren. But even when she hates Saren, it's a feeling that never lasts long. In the end, Saren manages to begin healing and finds the strength to save Dashti's life for a turn. The dynamic between two girls is extremely compelling and well thought out. I felt happy for Saren's development as well as Dashti's.

Magic: Having read some of her other books, in particular I should mention Enna Burning and The Princess Academy, I've come to appreciate how Shannon Hale excels at creating subtle feats of magic. In Hale's worlds, the magic that tends to be of most useful usually isn't flashy or complex. In fact, Hale tends to make big magic a problem rather than a boon. Sure, Enna gets the power to create fire out of nothing, but learning to control it proves to be dangerous to her and everyone else around her. In Book of a Thousand Days, it's hard to determine whether Dashti's skills can be really considered magic at all because they're relatively mundane compared with you know, shape-shifting or the power to set things on fire.

Being a mucker, Dashti knows a variety of special songs which can help heal the body, relieve heartache, call or drive away certain animals, etc. However, rather than creating an immediate change, these songs only work when the listener allows them to work (this applies more to people than animals). Someone who hears a healing song won't recover if they don't want to get better. There are definite limits to what the songs can do. No song can bring people back from the dead. However, the songs can remind someone of the joys of living and push a soul back from the brink.

Dashti is a talented singer, but it's not a particularly remarkable or awe-inspiring ability until the book's climax. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. Dashti manages to use the song of the wolf to draw the wolf out of Lord Khasar and forces him to transform in front of his bewildered army. His stunned and terrified troops end up killing him.

Here's what makes the scene doubly amazing: Dashti meets Khasar and his entire army on her own and on top of that, she defeats Khasar naked (she took off her clothes in order to show that she was unarmed, so she could get close enough to Khasar to be heard). Also, she rides into the encounter on a yak. I don't know why that last bit amuses me so much, but it does. The entire scene certainly qualifies as a Crowning Moment of Awesome.

Romance: Most fairy tales have the girl and guy falling in love at first sight, but thankfully, Hale abandons this trope in Book of a Thousand Days and opts for a more gradural romance. Sure, Dashti and Tegus get along from the start, but it's not exactly a mindblowingly romantic encounter. I mean, she's locked up so they have no choice but to talk through the tower's dump hole. Their banter is cute though (there's a running joke about skinny ankles). Also, he gives her a cat. I mentioned this before, but like Dashti, I'm slightly fixated on the cat.

One thing Hale doesn't neglect is the class difference between the two. The society they live in is strictly stratified, and the issue of class nearly blows up in Dashti's face towards the end of the book. It all works out, but it's nice and smart of Hale not to sweep the problem of class under the rug completely.

As a love interest, Tegus is certainly compatible with Dashti. I, myself, didn't love Tegus the way I loved Dashti. I still liked him well enough (read: cat). While he wasn't a flat character, I wished Hale could have given him a few more flaws to flesh him out some more. But I can see why she didn't because romance, even though it's an important element in the book, is certainly not the central, driving force of the story. The book is much more about Dashti's personal growth than it is about her relationship with Tegus.

I did feel relieved that Dashti got her happy ending though. That would be the emotional justice at work. By the end of the book, I just thought, "Girl, you have been through enough. Take a breather, eat as much as you want, and ask Tegus to buy you a 1000 yaks. You deserve it."

Tegus and Dashti do have some adorable, squee-worthy moments together. After Khasar dies, Tegus carries an injured Dashti on horseback into the city (don't worry, she's now in a more clothed state) and they have this conversation:

"It seems, my lady, you forgot yet again to put on shoes this morning. What would you mother say?"

"I just wanted Khasar's opinion... on whether my ankles are... sturdier than yours."

"And what did he say?"

"I don't think he... liked my ankles so well. He fell on me... and broke one."

"That wasn't very kind," he agreed, talking lightly as if to distract me from the pain. "I think there are better ways to tell a person you don't approve of their ankles than to break them."

"That's what... I thought, too. His manners always were... la-lacking."

His arm held me tighter to him. "You're going to have to marry me now."

"But... I..."

"You slew Khasar, you healed me, and you have perfect ankles. I really don't think this is a question we need to debate." (pg. 265-266)

I believe their love, and hey, that's one of the primary objectives of romance isn't it?

Villain: If I had pick one aspect of Book of a Thousand Days to criticize, it would be the story's villain. Lord Khasar was pretty much a one-dimensional character who pillaged and conquered the lands surrounding his because he wanted more power and enjoyed causing suffering. His motives aren't particularly complex, and he's in no way redeemable (selling your soul to gain supernatural powers tends to be a nail in the moral coffin). He's violent and despicable, and it's hard to dredge up any sympathy for him (emotionally traumatizing little girls, anyone?). However, Khasar's lack of depth didn't bother me tremendously, and it also didn't detract from the overall quality of the book.

Cover: The cover at the top of this entry is for the hardback copy. I think it's quite lovely, and I wouldn't mind owning a copy. You can't tell from the jpeg, but the title is shiny and embossed, so it catches the light. Before I read the book jacket, I thought the story took place in Persia or the ancient Middle East. A paperback version of the book came out in September 2009 and it looks like this:

It's more apparently Asian, but I still prefer the anonymity of the hardback cover. Although this isn't a bad portrait cover at all (I find the Dashti to be believable). Sometimes it pisses me off when books I like transfer from an anonymous cover to a portrait cover because the cover model is NOT HOW I IMAGINED HIM/HER IN MY HEAD DAMMIT. This one's pretty good though.

Links of Interest:

The marvelous and talented Shannon Hale has a website called squeetus. It has a simple and clear layout, and you can find out more about her books, writing process, tips for wirters there. Hale also has a blog that she updates regularly here. I like anyone who jokingly refers to her unborn baby girls as Scylla and Charybdis.

~Mim