“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Penguin Books (2005)
211 pages

I can’t make up my mind about this book. I think I like it. I can’t pinpoint what I don’t like, but I can’t say what it was about the book that I loved either.

Daisy is a troubled fifteen-year-old girl, sent from New York to England to live with her aunt and her four cousins — all of whom she’s never met. She’s met at the airport by her fourteen-year-old, smoking, driving, evading-paying-for-the-parking cousin Edmond, and immediately feels a special connection with him. She loves it in England, the idyllic countryside and kind Aunt Penn telling her of the mother she never knew, and her cousins, sweet and warm, especially little Piper, and of course Edmond. Inexplicably, the war that everyone says will not happen strikes, and with Aunt Penn away, the children have to fend for themselves.

The book is in first person, Daisy’s point of view. The lack of punctuation threw me off when I started — no quote marks for speech is still OK in my book, but when even commas go missing it kinda sends my sensibilities into a spin. But after a while I kept hearing a voice in my head reading the lines, and it’s not my voice anymore — it sounds like a girl telling a story and not pausing often enough instead of me reading about characters in the story. Huh, I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s like . . . well, not any of my younger sisters; when they speak the words almost tumble over each other because they’re speaking very fast — it’s a family characteristic; I do it too — but they pause at the appropriate places, so not like them. Maybe like some of their friends, speaking in those breathless sentences teenage girls sometimes do. Sometimes I half-expected thewordstorunontogether, that’s how some parts of the book sounded to me.

Otherwise, the descriptions are almost lyrical and dreamy at times, and careless and painfully honest at other points. The feelings of the characters are tangible and shine through the narrative — the worry and the pain and the loneliness and the love they feel for each other.

While the ending itself wasn’t abrupt, but the shift between Part One and Part Two was. It sort of stopped me in my tracks, and I had to go back a few pages, just to make sure I wasn’t missing a few pages or something. Even the tone of the book changes after Part One, and after complaining about not having enough commas, I was struggling to get used of them being in the right places.

I enjoyed reading How I Live Now. It was haunting — I kept thinking about it after I had finished the book — even if I still can’t fully make up my mind if I liked it or not. I won’t have any hesitations picking up any of Meg Rosoff’s newer books after this, missing punctuation notwithstanding.

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The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
Illustrated by David Wyatt
CollinsVoyager 2004
480 pages

OK, I’ve put this off long enough. I read this book in November 2007, and after I post this, I still have seven books backlogged from 2007. Chalk it down do laziness and being uninspired; I just couldn’t sit down long enough and type anything substantial. Also, it doesn’t help that this book isn’t exactly one of my favourites — and I don’t know why.

The Merlin Conspiracy is set in an alternate British Isles, in a world almost like our world but not quite. Well, not really “almost”. There’s a King’s Progress going around the Isles of Blest all year round, and our first protagonist, Roddy, is a member of this Progress, and her parents are wizards in the King’s court. And there’s a Merlin, who’s kind of in charge of all the magic in the Isles of Blest. Then the old Merlin dies, and is replaced with a new one, and the new Merlin doesn’t really seem cut for the job, though it seems like only Roddy and her best friend Grundo notice this.

Our other protagonist is Nick Mallory, a kid from our world. Apparently Nick has made an appearance before in another of Jones’s novels, Deep Secret, which I haven’t read but it really doesn’t matter here. He tries to go to other worlds, and surprisingly (or perhaps not), he manages to do just that, getting himself into a lot of trouble. It seems he’s the only one who can help Roddy unravel the Merlin conspiracy, so Roddy seeks his help.

The writing is good — all the things you expect from Diana Wynne Jones are there: the story is fast-paced, the characters flawed but likeable (this won’t make sense if you haven’t read the book, but good lord the Izzy twins are annoying. Jones gets an A+ for those two, since I am pretty sure she intended those two to get on your nerves), the storyline complicated but not completely bewildering. And this is where I get frustrated — I still don’t really like the book.

It’s quite possibly the format. The story is told in first person, alternating from Roddy to Nick. (I am not a fan of the first person narrative. It sets me off, and I have yet to find the reason for this.) Both get whole chapters to themselves — sometimes consecutively; it doesn’t always switch to the other’s POV at the end of a chapter — and there are some overlaps in events, but not much. I was partly amused and partly irritated that the font changes with the POV changes. Personally, I prefer the font they used for Roddy.

And I’ve groused about this for other books I’ve read by Jones before, but the ending here really made me pause. Not the actual resolution to the whole conflict — that was tied up pretty well — but the very last few lines of the books. They’re just sort of . . . hanging. I mean, if I were to expect a “THE END” at the end of a book, I wouldn’t have expected it to come after those lines.

I do think the cover is really funky, though, as well as the illustrations at the beginning of each POV change. XD (D’oh, I’ve just checked and realised that they’re by David Wyatt; of course they’re awesome.)

Probably I’ll check out Deep Secret one of these days. Probably. Not any time soon, though.

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This book is also read in conjunction with Renay’s Speculative Fiction challenge!

Olympos by Dan Simmons
EOS (2006)
891 pages

Here’s what I think: if I had viewed Ilium and Olympos as one very freakin’ long novel, it probably would’ve been better for me. I would have considered the later chapters mediocre but necessary to the story and found the whole thing readable. When I consider Olympos as a different book, I keep comparing it against Ilium and it just falls short.

What happens here is basically the last battle begins. Any summary more detailed than this will make no sense whatsoever since Olympos builds heavily on Ilium and I don’t believe it’s possible to read Olympos without reading Ilium. Which makes me wonder if Simmons actually believes this is possible, because for some absurd reason, there are recaps of what happened in the previous book in the earlier chapters of Olympos. Uh. Possibly the gap between publishing the two novels — I think it’s two years? — made someone think this was necessary, but I find it rather peculiar.

There were some narrative changes this time aroud. It’s still two separate stories this time around, about the moravecs and Hockenberry (and the Trojans and the Archaeans) on Mars, and the old-style humans on Earth. No more first person from this point, though I think I like Hockenberry’s narrative better when it was in the first person.

Other things, let’s see. The plot sort of spiralled away in Olympos. I found myself more confused as the story progressed. I suppose the whole thing’s point is to have the Iliad derail off its original course, but the more it went off-course, the more I wondered about the characters’ motivations. I still have no idea what it is Zeus wanted to accomplish, and the whole Archilles subplot left me scratching my head. And, uh, the other Odysseus. What was that all about?

Mahnmut and Orphu of Io are still my favourite characters. Their discussions about Shakespeare and Proust still go over my head.

This book was a rather bizarre experience, honestly. Coupled with Ilium the whole thing was entertaining, the whole idea clever, and the books made me curious about a lot of things, but at the same time Olympos left me going “huh?” way a little too many times. (Having sex with a woman to wake her up from suspended animation gets definite WTFs from me. What kind of fail-safe method to wake someone was that? Seriously. I mean, seriously.) I think Dan Simmons could have done better. Tied more loose ends at the end. Cut off some of the long-winded journeying going on.

Phew. I am glad I’m done with this. Now maybe I should add the Iliad to my reading list.

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Lady Friday is a bit of a disappointment, especially after all the excitement in Sir Thursday. Its pace is slower, and I never quite understood if Friday had any other ulterior motives. She hands in a resignation letter, saying that she no longer is a Trustee, much to Arthur’s puzzlement, and at the same time passes a transfer plate to Arthur, sending him to her realm.

Arthur starts off quite alone this time — he ends up meeting Denizens who don’t quite want to cooperate despite knowing who he is, and his trustworthy friend Suzy Blue is now being forced to serve the Piper, since she is one of the Piper’s Children. Suzy reappears a little later with Fred, another friend Arthur had made in the army, and surprisingly they’re being escorted by a New Nithling with dubious loyalties.

That’s not the end of Arthur’s troubles — despite having the Keys, he’s very reluctant to use them, since the more he uses them, the closer he gets to becoming a Denizen, something he’s dead set against, since he wants to retain his mortality.

Leaf also ends up in Friday’s realm as she tries to save her aunt from being “experienced” by Lady Friday. Uh. Their stories intersect somewhere near the end, and I was more interested in what Arthur was up to this time, which is probably thanks to Suzy being there.

The book seems more like a build-up to the penultimate book to the series — Superior Saturday seems rather nasty and goodness only knows what Lord Sunday is capable of — Lady Friday reads more like a bridge between the battle going on before in Sir Thursday to whatever it is Saturday will dish out next.

I’d still want to see how this ends, yes, but I’m not exactly tingling with anticipation waiting for the next book to be released.

Drowned Wednesday is the third book of Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series. I think it’s a better book than the first two, and the first two were pretty good too. The book continues with the adventures of Arthur Penhaligon as he is swept away into the Border Sea of the House, where he needs get the third part of the Will from Drowned Wednesday. Drowned Wednesday, aside being a glutton, is a duchess and a trustee of the Architect. She is also a giant whale. Whee.
(Man, that’s a lot of proper nouns. I suppose this summary makes no sense if you know nothing of the series.)

Other highlights include pirates, being stranded on an island, and spending some quality time with talking rats in a belly of a whale. Fun times.