The Twisted Ones

T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones is a novel in a genre I don't like --- maybe "haunted gothic American mid-South"? --- and it is not a good book to read alone in a quarantine. It's creepy, but the narrator's voice is reasonable and well-written. So I read it for that reason, and because it was recommended to me, and because the narrator immediately disavows the entire narration and publicly disclaims that it's going to be an unreliable-narrator sort of deal. The narrator is also a professional editor, so the tangents that she wanders off into are direct comments on the text she is writing, or on the words and punctuation she encounters in the world, and that was interesting.

There was one interesting clue early on: the use of the word "voorish" (p. 92), which I had to look up, and which led me down a rabbit-hole of references to Arthur Machen's "The White People", a horror short story which included enough clues that it was obvious that The Twisted Ones is derivative/referential and exists to reply to "The White People" in the same narrative universe.  I found this discovery comforting, as reading the summary of the short story gave me a hint about what horror might be hinted at in the book.

BUT I don't like being creeped out. I didn't like this book, but I read it to the end so that I could expurgate the tension from my brain. Otherwise it would inhabit my brain and claim brain-cycles worrying about when a haunted reanimated deer-skeleton would knock on the windows of my house late at night for unspecified creepy reasons.

Not recommended! Too creepy.

This post's theme word is numen (n), "a divine presence." "I believe them to be some kind of spirits, perhaps the numen of a place, expressed in physical form." (p. 175)

Dealing with Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons is a cute, quick young adult fantasy novel. It was suggested to me as an amusing and light chaser after a series of depressing book recommendations. (Parse that as "books with a depressing effect, which books had been recommended to me" as opposed to "the recommendation itself was depressing").

The premise is that Princess Cimorine is a nonconforming princess --- sneaking off to learn magic, fencing, Latin, and other topics not traditionally on the princess syllabus. Her parents are extremely conforming royalty and do not seem capable of predicting that their one daughter who has already secretly tried to learn magic, and been explicitly forbidden from it, might next try to learn some other unexpectedly unprincessial topic, and so the story opens with a sequence of them being surprised and astonished every time they find that, forbidden from the last interesting topic, she has simply found a next interesting topic, instead of sticking within the lines and learning exclusively courtly manners and embroidery. Cimorine's parents, never subtle or clever, make it extremely clear that she will be forcibly betrothed and also married to Prince Therandil, who is a complete dullard and not at all interested in breaking out of the narrative conventions and fairytale strictures of his life.

So she lightly runs away. I say "lightly" because everyone in all the surrounding kingdoms seems to immediately get the update on her status, and she gets all kinds of mail-forwarding (physical mail? no. knights in mail? yes. yuk yuk) at her new address, which turns out to be as an assistant-of-all-purposes to a dragon.

The book was over in a flash --- just a tiny jaunt into the traditional fantasy/fairytale Cimorene's nonspecific vaguely medieval European world --- and did manage to keep me on my toes. The ways that Cimorene chose to subvert others' expectations were not... well, what I was expecting. She was also oddly compliant in some situations, e.g. just going along with dragon culture sometimes and persistently questioning it other times.

I liked this book, and would recommend it as a palate cleanser and something playful and short. (My book-recommender said that the subsequent books in this series had diminishing returns, so I moved on to other things in my concave-up to-read stack afterwards.)

This post's theme word is toxophily (n), "the practice of, love of, or addiction to, archery." Sourdough bread is passé; the latest idle at-home craze is indoor toxophily.