I've finished 2 books to report on this week. First up is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip.
Book Summary: Young Sybel, the heiress of powerful wizards, needs the company of no one outside her gates. In her exquisite stone mansion, she is attended by exotic, magical beasts: Riddle-master Cyrin the boar; the treasure-starved dragon Gyld; Gules the Lyon, tawny master of the Southern Deserts; Ter, the fiercely vengeful falcon; Moriah, feline Lady of the Night. Sybel only lacks the mysterious Liralen, which continues to elude her most powerful enchantments.
But when a soldier bearing an infant arrives, Sybel discovers that the world of man and magic is full of both love and deceit—and the possibility of more power than she can possibly imagine.
My Review: I initially felt that this book was a little stilted after reading the first couple of chapters. I was never so happy to be wrong before! I LOVED this one. It's magical and mystical, has a wonderful heroine who has all sorts of layers, as well as a romance, lost and found, in the loveliest troubadour-worthy tradition. And the beasts! Such a wonderful collection of personalities and traits. I fell in love with Ter (her falcon), who is everything you might want in a protector. While there is a human love story (which is not an easy path for either of the lovers), this is also a love story of Sybel and her animals. If you haven't checked this one out, go grab is and read it. All the best bits of fantasy and epic quests in one book. Another highly recommended read from this year.
Next up is Amy Tan's Where the Past Begins.
Book Summary: n Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Cluband The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels.
Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia—the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother—and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer’s mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.
My Review: I have read a couple of Amy Tan's fiction works and enjoyed them - maybe not loved them, but enjoyed them. This nonfiction book, I'm going to be honest, was a bit of a slog for me. It's subtitled "A Writer's Memoir", but it's more of an amalgamation of bits and pieces from journals and emails and reminiscences about her mother (whose very strong and fairly unpredictable personality and behavior were the model for several characters in her fiction books). Some parts I found interesting; her thoughts on how she tackles the job of writing and things that affect her (like music and how she uses it as a creative vehicle) I found interesting. The first chapter in the Linguistics section near the end of the book was just downright painful to get through. (I skimmed most of it.)
A very mixed bag of information here. Recommended, I suppose, if you are an ardent fan of her work, but I think there are other better books on the market about the creative process of being a writer and how they pull fiction from reality and incorporate it into their writing.
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