Touch

Claire North is an author and, I think, should be a legally controlled substance. The novel Touch is all-encompassingly good. Don't pick it up unless you have a chunk of unallotted time, because once you begin to read you may not be able to stop reading.

The fantasy element of Touch is that some people --- some consciousnesses --- can transfer from person to person via physical contact. This makes those consciousnesses effectively immortal, given the prevalence of hospital-bed goodbye kisses, emergency first responders, and their own clever contrivances not to be stranded alone at death.  (The action scenes thus enabled have a number of unusual elements layered over the usual dramatic side-switching reveal, as one might imagine.) There are many such consciousnesses, and they sometimes meet, and they of course become intimately entangled in the lives of people they inhabit.

Like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, this book seamlessly blended hook into explanation-of-the-gimmick into plot-development. The writing is solid, it caught my attention, and the plot and characters and meta-characters were fascinating. I wanted to know what happened! --- and not in the artificial Da Vinci Code sort of way. There are no cheap tricks here.

Highly recommended.

[Side note: Surprisingly little discussion or consideration of gender identity, class politics, etc., for a book in which these things are fluid and also by choice. Lots of discussion of degenerative joint pain in knees and hands. Arthritis is a much bigger deal than womanhood.]

This post's theme word is theurgy, "a system of magic to procure communication with beneficent spirits". Were you talking with that theurgic salesman?

The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland --- For a Little While

Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland --- For a Little While is a delightful prequel to her other Fairyland novels. It tells the story of a girl who slips into Fairyland --- as so many storybook-children seem to --- and attempts to right the governmental problems they are having. Why are distant fantasy realms always suffering under oppressive monarchs? This is where the parallels to traditional fairytales end. Valente's Fairyland delightfully upsets the fairy status quo, and reading it is like the joy and wobbly experience of first reading Alice in Wonderland.

The titular girl is one protagonist Mallow, who is not prone to the usual protagonist's follies: "I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement." Most protagonists are a bit silly or dense as plot motivation, but Mallow can simply recognize that "the story had to start sooner or later. I had only hoped it would be a little later, and I could rest for another spring in my library. ... But there's no practice like real living, and anyway it's mandatory." So clearly the nonsense situations that befuddled Lewis Carroll's Alice will be no obstacle to this modern post-Alice protagonist. A girl who knows what she wants and says so, acts in her own interest, is neither shy nor retiring (yet wants to peacefully read on her own, thank you very much) --- a heroine after my own heart. Mallow, and the entire story, is bait for bookish, practical types --- exactly the sort of person who would read the lengthy expository title and begin to read at all. (Valente is a pied piper of readers; I'd follow her out of town, dancing merrily.)

This modern narrative awareness is lovely, delightful, like a brain tickle.

The capital of Fairyland has always been accustomed to moving however it pleased, drifting across glaciers or beaches or long, wheat-filled meadows. It moved at the need and pace of narrative, being a Fairy city and thus always sharply aware of where it stood in relation to every story unfolding in Fairyland at every moment.

A quick, whimsical read. Recommended. (The entire thing is online at the link above!)

This post's theme word is concinnity, "a harmonious arrangement of various parts." Fairyland's parts stand in perfect verbal, geographical, and narrative concinnity with each other.