by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 7, 2016 | Book Review, mythology, writing and publishing
I read Coraline last night. All of it. Every word. Wafting through my head in Neil Gaiman’s deep slow British voice. It took hours, but I couldn’t stop until the little girl had set her world back to rights.
If you haven’t met her, Coraline is a bored little girl who prefers microwaved pizza and chocolate cake; who turns up her nose at her father’s adventurous cooking, and is annoyed by her parents because they work too much and ignore her. She lives in an enormous old gothic house inhabited by eccentric people far more “interesting” than her parents.
She is bold, smart-alecky, and defiant. And like most children, Coraline is curious. She likes to explore.
That’s how she meets the “other mother”… the “beldame”… the monster who can suck a child’s soul out through her eyeballs and into a glass marble. For eyes are the heart of the soul. All the beldame leaves behind is a filmy shell with black button eyes…she sews them in with a long needle and black thread.
Emily Carr’s Guyasdoms D’Sonoqua c. 1930 museevirtuel.ca
She is D’Sonoqua, child-stealer of the Northwest Coast First People; the abusive step-mother in Cinderella who uses her new child for slave labour; the jealous poisoned apple-wielding queen in Snow White; the fire-building cannibal witch in Hansel and Gretel who cages and fattens little boys and girls with sweets before she cooks and eats them.
She is the Nightmare of a child neglected, bored, disbelieved, lonely, powerless, and vulnerable.
Coraline’s world is fraught with danger, but there is only one thing to do with a beldame that steals your parents and intends to suck your soul into a glass marble.
Fight. You must be brave and strong and smart and you must fight. You must solve the monster’s riddle; creep down the grave-dark corridor; descend into the moldy damp belly of a basement; ignore the skittering rats and spiders; and confront the monster. Even the bits that detach and creep after you, like the beldame’s clickety right hand. You must fight and win and you must do it alone. There is no other way.
All children must know this.
We cannot protect our children by locking them in glass rooms like butterflies. Glass cracks and breaks; evil seeps in like a virus; keys are lost and found; monsters lurk outside the door…and often inside. Butterflies grow sad and sick and die.
All children meet their monsters.
I did not meet the beldame as a child. My monsters were marauding pedophiles, child-stealers more Hearts in Atlantis than Coraline, but with similar intentions: to steal my soul. The crunch of tires on gravel meant HIDE. If no one is home, huddle behind father’s armchair and do not make a sound. Do not breathe. BECOME INVISIBLE. If walking to school: find a ditch, a creek bed, a copse of trees. VANISH. Take to the woods and fields. RUN. But it does not work. Monsters are strong; have powerful senses. They sniff you out…eventually, and you must fight.
I did not meet the beldame as a child. But I know she exists. I’ve met her since.
Every child has a monster. So every child must have courage and a plan and a voice. Give them magic, a mojo. An amulet for protection. An animal to confide in. Secret power words and numbers. An escape route through the woods. A hiding place. A song. Stories.
Stories in which the child confronts and beats the monster. Because as much as we try to deny it, we all know: monsters exist everywhere.
by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 4, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
I am mending from surgery and reading this giant book. Flipping page after page, devouring pretty words, precise and commanding. Sucked in by Daniel Vyleta’s command of language, his descriptions, his metaphors, a voice that purrs like Dickens, HG Wells, Jules Verne. Reading, dozing, dreaming. Once I awake from being chased through the grimy streets of London with the three teen protagonists. Charlie, Thomas, and Livia. A love triangle. The story seeps inside me like the smoke. I want to stop, but I can’t. It lulls like heroine. I must know it all, why it is how it is, how it ends…if it ends.
He hooks me on page one.
There is movement all around the dormitory. Pale figures stretching, rising, whispering in groups. Haste wrestles with reluctance. There are only a handful of candles; moonlight on the snow outside the windows, their panes milky with its ghostly glow. Soon the boys move in procession out the twin doors. Nobody wants to be first, or last: not Charlie, not Thomas, not even the handful of boys who hold special favour. Best to be lost in the crowd.
This is no Hogwarts.
Smoke is a virus: the visible manifestation of vice. There was a time before smoke, in the 1600s, when a man could sin and his body would not betray him by issuing streams of smoke. But the soot breeds like germs and as the English conquer the world, they spread it like the plague, like blankets soaked in smallpox. Now smoke is an industry, managed by the grand families through “cigarettes and sweeties.” And those looking for a cure are pursued and stopped. The upper classes do not smoke; at least, their sin is not visible like the peasants and the poor who litter London’s streets. They mask it, control it, like everything else. Of course, they are morally superior and must appear that way. There is even a bill in parliament to close the borders and contain it, to banish foreigners: a frightful link to now.
Baron and Lady Naylor, Livia’s parents, search for a cure, make it their life’s work, use science, laboratories, and pure untainted innocents captured from distant parts of the globe. But is it a cure, they seek? Perhaps, it is something else?
Warning: Smoke is no romance novel. Smoke is Steampunk, that new indescribable genre that crosses science fiction and fantasy with settings in the 1800s and modern mechanics. There is a man who has changed his niece into a clockwork girl to control her morality, her smoking. When she feels sinful she winds the screws a little tighter and hardly smokes at all.
What do you think of it, this smoke? Is it blowing our way, a black noxious virus breeding somewhere in our immorality? Or is this merely Vyleta’s crazed imagination seeking to explain what has been; or perhaps, warning us of what is to come?
431 pages
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 9, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
Why do I love this book?
Nettie Lonesome is one tough, sympathetic, orphaned in childhood, raised by abusive idiots, going-to-save humanity heroine. Her friends are shapeshifters; her quest to kill monsters. Bowen has created a world resembling America of the 1870s. There are Durango Rangers, ranchers, indigenous tribes, and one thing more: MONSTERS. All kinds of monsters—the kind mothers teach their children to fear and with reason—vampires, chupacabras, and harpies. It’s Lonesome Dove meets From Dusk Till Dawn.
But this is not just a book about a seventeen-year-old girl killing monsters. That’s what she does; not who she is. This is a sweet and tender story—a coming-of-age story, a finding out who you are and what you are kind of story, a who-do-you-love story.
Wake of Vultures is marketed as Adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy but with Nettie in the lead, it’s a great YA read too. What really sets this book apart is Bowen’s writing style. Her prose is tight, pithy, blow you away visceral. She’s a poet in stompy boots.
“Eternity was a wake of vultures, a harem of harpies, a brigade of bragging bitch-buzzards carrying her through the night, flying her toward the gaping mouth of a cave at the top of a mountain that nothing on two legs could ever reach” (313).
And it’s book one in The Shadow series. Conspiracy of Ravens picks up where this leaves off, and Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen is currently writing book three. For some real fun, follow the author on Twitter @DelilahSDawson
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 11, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
thewomensroomblog.com
Most people know that Robert Galbraith is actually JK Rowling. Her latest series chronicles the misadventures of a burly, down-and-out private detective (once SIB in the British military) named Cormoran Strike and his bold red-haired sidekick, Robin Ellacott.
I read the first two Strike books: The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, and decided to try Career of Evil as it was recommended by a librarian who said it was “good, yet rather disturbing”. (And it jumped off the shelf behind me in the library with a huge thwack!. You cannot ignore things like that.)
Disturbing it is, with its glimpse into the world of wannabe amputees and a serial killer who gets turned on by slashing bits off his female victims for titillating keepsakes. Strike, himself, is an amputee, having lost his leg in a bombing in Afghanistan. He’s a sympathetic character: a veteran who tromps through London, with an aching stump and a prosthesis, trying to solve murders while keeping his brassy sidekick safe–because, of course, they are secretly in love and can’t admit it– and his business afloat. By the end of the book, he is virtually jobless and penniless (and he could use a shower). Both Strike and Robin spend hours and hours hanging around a sick grimy landscape of poverty, addicts, and prostitutes, a place where he can blend, but she cannot. Perhaps we all need a shower.
I made the mistake of borrowing a large print hardcover thinking it would be easier on the eyes; it was, but what a nightmare to read in bed. At 752 pages, it was close to the weight of my laptop and tough on the wrists. I almost gave up part-way through. I had difficulty following the stories of the three men Strike was convinced could be responsible for the heinous hacking because they all hated him for ruining their lives. Complicated by backstory, and my late night reading habits, I’d forget who did what to who. In fact, after the big reveal, I had to leaf backwards to the pages that connected Strike to the killer in order to make sense of it.
Have you read the Strike novels? What was your experience?
Tom Burke plays Cormoran Strike (telegraph.co.uk)
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 6, 2016 | Book Review, mythology, writing and publishing
It’s been years since I was SO enthralled by a book. I was choked up at the end of the final chapter and had to stop…couldn’t read the epilogue. Didn’t want to. Didn’t want the boy to grow up—though I knew it was inevitable: he was, after all, an adult reliving his past—didn’t want to know what became of the wise and comforting Hempstock women, didn’t want to emerge from my ocean.
I don’t know exactly why this book had such a profound effect on me.
It had something to do with the fertile Sussex countryside, with the Hempstock farm—with Lettie, and Ginnie, and Old Mrs. Hempstock—with their pioneer spirit and simple sumptuous food: with their porridge and drippling honeycombs and pots of sticky berry jam; with warm unpasteurized milk straight from the cow (I’m sure I tasted that as a kid), with shepherd’s pie layered in gravy and mashed potatoes, and soup collecting in a hanging cauldron over an open fire. I wanted to join them at the scarred old kitchen table and whisper by candlelight and sleep curled up in the four-poster bed under the full moon— was both hungry and sleepy simultaneously.
It had something to do with magic realism (which I adore) and a delicate understanding of the soul and parallel worlds that know no space and time, with a reality that “was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger” (143).
Yes, it had something to do with incredible writing, perfect pacing and simple, yet powerful, descriptions that sing through the mind of the boy like an incantation. The girls and boys come out to play…
A boy that could be any seven year old boy and no seven year old boy. An unnamed boy…every boy and any boy and no boy: the “pudding-and-pie-boy”, the boy from the top of the lane, the boy running for his life in bare feet across the meadow in a lightening storm wearing red pyjamas and a soaking housecoat. He’s a boy much like I imagine Neil Gaiman to have been: a boy that reads by a glimmer in the dead of night, that dreams of Narnia and Batman, that loves the rain on his face as he sleeps, that feels and thinks and believes in a world adults have misplaced; a boy with no real friends until…a boy that fights demons and will give up his life to save the world.
And, it had something to do with a fluffy black kitten on a pillow that made me cry.
I promise I’ve not given anything away.
You must read it to know it.
Should I read the epilogue? Can I? Now? Ever?
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman, William Morrow: NY, 2013
by Wendy Hawkin | Aug 27, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
Something I’ve decided to do, to revive my passion for words, is tweet best lines from books I have loved, or am currently reading. An intriguing line does not always fit into a 140-character block, so I’m taking some license with what to cut and what to keep. Yesterday, I finished reading The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. The line I posted comes quite near the end, on the second last page. Our protagonist, Rachel, is walking along a cold deserted beach at dusk and passes some beach huts:
When the wind picks up they come alive, their wooden boards creaking against each other, and under the sound of the sea there are murmurs of movement: someone or something coming closer (315).
There may be movement; there may not. It’s hard to believe Rachel. The movement may only be in her mind–the someone or something a manifestation of her fear, her desperation. Rachel is not always believable, not always trustworthy. She drinks, she confuses things, she blacks out and forgets where she’s been and what she’s done, she fantasizes–and she’s just lived through a nightmare.
Rachel is The Girl on the Train. As she commutes each morning and evening she passes her old neighbourhood, the house she once lived in with her ex-husband, Tom. Her fantasies about the couple three doors down soon become her reality. She names these people, gives them lives. It’s all just a game until she sees something off, and then the woman disappears.
Rachel tries desperately to sort out in her muddled alcoholic brain what’s real and what’s not. But, she’s not the only unreliable character–Rachel’s ex-husband and his new wife; the couple three doors down; even the therapist–no one can be trusted. With shifting viewpoints carved out as journal entries, Paula Hawkins offers us a glimpse into the minds of several psychologically disturbed people, along with a little murder and mayhem. Curious yet?
The Girl on the Train is a breeze read. Hawkins worked as a journalist. Despite the beach sheds quote, her language is not poetic, not literary. She delivers this psychological thriller with straight-forward ease and detail as she delves into the minds of characters who appear to be normal people living a normal life on a normal London street.
Except they’re not.
Watch the movie trailer here
