Completion

I’ve listened to all but one (that one oddly not available through Library2Go and the book on CD is owned by just a handful of libraries) of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, which means that for me IanMcKellen is inextricably connected to these stories of a fantastical pre-history. McKellen is the mage, we are the members of the clan, keeping our fears at bay while we listen to the stories that help to explain our world. While he’s speaking, I can hear the fire crackling, and I can see him -- hooded eyes, sharp nose, undoubtedly wearing a cloak [Lord-of-the-Rings influenced, sorry]. This is one of those cases where it’s not a bad thing to have a person’s (actor’s) picture in your head while you read. I wonder, though, whether he is quite so well-suited to any other kind of story. (I see that he has read Homer’s Odyssey – another story where he can be the bard.)

Ghost Hunter is the last of Paver’s Chronicles of the orphan Torak, his pack brother Wolf and the sympathetic members of the Raven Clan who have adopted him. (It won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2009.) Since Torak’s Fa died at the hands of a demon bear, things have not been right in their world of forest, mountain and sea. Mages from the various clans have turned to evil, becoming Soul Eaters, in the hopes of amassing the power of the souls they eat (metaphorically?) to dominate the world. In each story, Torak has faced and defeated an evil Soul Eater. Eostra, the Eagle Owl Mage/Soul Eater, is the only one left but she is powerful, sending out sickness to the clans and magicking dogs and children to wreak havoc. The only way to defeat her is to confront her on her territory, the Mountain of Ghosts. Even though it is likely to destroy him, Torak knows that he is the only one who can face and conquer her.

I confess that while I have enjoyed these audiobooks immensely, whole swaths of clan mythology and immortal battles to the death elude regularly elude me. Am I just too dreamy listening to Ian McKellen that I lose focus on the story? They seem to build and build and then finish so quickly that I feel I’m missing something in the denouement. In Ghost Hunter, the climax builds from three different perspectives quite effectively, but then suddenly it is all over. A character (from the first novel) mysteriously appears as well (I only know this because I reviewed the synopses in Wikipedia) and I’m still not quite sure what he did. (And really, Michelle, I read that book seven years [and 1500-odd books] ago, do you honestly think I’m going to remember?)

All that being said, the listening experience is terrific. McKellen’s narration trumps the books’ flaws, as he seems to understand the epic sweep of the story and his responsibility to deliver the characters’ emotional arcs as well as the forward momentum of the adventure. Like many an actor, he knows the value of a good pause – even in the middle of a sentence. He voices the novels, but not with dramatic differentiation, and he uses volume, silence, and register to express emotion so effectively. He’s totally tuned into the anthropomorphic Wolf who feels his own suffering and that of his pack brother deeply.

One of the characters is described with a voice of rattling bones, which McKellen portrays with a hoarse, dry rasp. I also enjoyed his interpretation of the albino outcast, Dark, who is giddy with excitement upon finally connecting with his own kind. Even the tame ravens, Rip and Reck, get a little bit of avian dialogue, accurately provided.

With so little time for reading, I sometimes wonder why I stick with some authors’ whose work is kinda average. For the same reason that I insist on starting at the beginning, I’m also a bit of a compulsive finisher. Like The Ranger’s Apprentice (which I stopped listening to long ago – but kept reading – as I grew tired of the narrator), which I started around the same time as the Chronicles, I’m satisfied to be a completist, but I feel no desire to pursue additional work by the authors. It’s kinda the same with Bloody Jack, except I’m not sure that L.A. Meyer will write anything else. It might be time to move on, but sometimes our obsessions just don’t have much to do with reality.  Sorry!

[The photo of the Indian eagle owl was taken by Charles C and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.  Sir “Ian McKellen bei der Weltpremiere des dritten Teils des Herrn der Ringe in Wellington (Neuseeland)” was taken by Stefan Servos and also retrieved from WikimediaCommons.]

Ghost Hunter (Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, Book 6) by Michelle Paver

Narrated by Ian McKellen

Harper Audio, 2010. 6:19

Autumn

It must have been a review that sent me to Charles Finch's first mystery featuring his Victorian-era gentleman sleuth Charles Lenox, but it's been a long time since I read it (2007).  The September Society is next in the series and I went for it because it was an mp3 from Library2Go (there are so few).  (I inexplicably checked it out for three weeks, but just noticed that audiobooks can be returned early now.  Ah, progress.)  Lenox lives off his investments (or some such) in a nice London neighborhood, next door to his dear friend, the widowed Lady Jane Grey.  Approaching 40, he just needs a bit more confidence to ask for her hand.  He spends his days reading the newspapers and planning travel to exotic locations, which he will never visit.  Periodically, he takes cases from the upper classes, aided by his reliable manservant, Graham, and the crusty Scots physician Thomas McConnell.  He reminded me of a more socially adjusted Sherlock Holmes, but many others compare him to Dorothy L. Sayers' Sir Peter Wimsey.

The September Society begins in India in the 1840s when two British Army officers are shot -- seemingly by their fellow officers.  Fast forward 20 years and Lady Annabelle Payson is calling on Charles Lenox, in hopes that he will find her son, George, missing now from his Oxford college for several days.  Lenox is happy to visit Oxford -- his happy home for several years while he attended at Balliol (alma mater of Peter Wimsey and the second time it's showed up in an audiobook in a month!) -- and takes the case.  Although there is no sign of a struggle, he finds Payson's room in a mess, objects scattered in what appears to be a willy-nilly way.  A dead white cat -- stabbed through the neck -- is laying on top of a calling card that says "The September Society."  Mystified, but not particularly worried, Lenox begins his inquiries.  But two days later, a naked body completely shorn of its body hair, is found dead in Christ Church Meadow.

This was um, OK.  I could suggest it to readers looking for an historical mystery, or those that don't mind a somewhat meandering journey to the conclusion, which is your classic we're-all-assembled-here-and-the-big-reveal-will-shock-you-all.  (I was listening very closely at the beginning, so it actually didn't surprise me much.)  There's violence, but I'd classify this as a "cozy."  Lenox has numerous internal monologues about the beauty of and his happiness at Oxford, his love for Lady Jane and whether or not she loves him back (don't worry!), and the state of Britain and the Liberal Party.  He probably spends half of the novel actually gathering and assessing clues.  I liked it, but it's not the kind of series I'll be rushing to catch up on and breathlessly (OK, breathlessly is an exaggeration -- clearly I'm being influenced by teenagers) await the next installment.  But, if the next one is on the shelf one day when I'm browsing, I'll read it.

James Langton narrates the novel, and he knows exactly how to do it.  He reads with a hint of effete diffidence, perfect for a well-bred Englishman solving the crimes of his social peers.  His narration voice is slightly high and reedy without being unpleasant to listen to.  Women are softer spoken, and most of the men are louder and, well, more masculine than Lenox.  Langton -- who I listened to earlier this year -- has the British narrator's ease with regional and class accents, nicely evident in Dr. McConnell's Scottish burr and the quiet, forward-thinking (he's advocating for a new system that will match bullets with a particular gun) Scotland Yard inspector, among others.

Often when I listen to mystery novels I miss something that I'm likely to catch while reading.  Or, at least I have the capacity to scratch the itch of vaguely remembering something by leafing back through the print version.  I think The September Society was almost formulaic -- while having an interesting main character and beautifully rendered setting -- which means that the clues were hard to miss.  By this time in my reading life, if I don't know that I need to pay very close attention to a prologue set years earlier and then make even the most tenuous connections later on, well ... I have only myself to blame if I'm surprised.

[The view of Christ Church Meadow with the College in the background was taken by Bryan Pready as part of the geograph.org.uk project and was retrieved from that site.]

The September Society by Charles Finch.
Narrated by James Langton
Tantor Audio, 2011.  8:46

East side, west side

Let us take a moment to ponder the holds list.  The Hunger Games has 800+ holds on it right now, and the book on CD version is just tipping over the 300 mark (statewide holds on the downloadable version are at 800).  The new buzz-y book The Lifeboat has 143 holds, and the book that was featured on today's Weekend Edition, Bunch of Amateurs, suddenly has seven.  The Gods of Gotham currently has 40 holds, but the audiobook was sitting on the shelf (and is back there today) when a reader who often reads what I like recommended it to me. (Although she -- like many -- compared it to The Alienist (five holds), which I read, enjoyed but didn't think I needed another [I'm vaguely remembering a disappointing sequel?].)

I felt so lucky!  Maybe I'll move it to Staff Picks later today .... Lyndsay Faye has written a (literal) barnburner, where her command of historical research is evident in a huge cast of lively characters, an oppressive and humid, yet vivid setting, and bad deeds by pretty much everyone.  If the audiobook is residing unloved at your library, go get it now.

Timothy Wolfe was orphaned at 12 when a fire raged through his family's homestead in 1830s New York City.  Raised by his ne'er-do-well older brother, Valentine, and succored by the kindness of the Reverend Underhill and his beloved daughter, Mercy, Tim has been contentedly tending bar and saving his money so he can propose to Mercy and maybe take her to London, where she can write books.  His dreams go up in smoke again, during a conflagration on July 19, 1845 that destroys both his workplace and his home, badly scarring his face as he attempts to retrieve his savings.

Forced to take a job, courtesy of Valentine's (and the Democratic Party) patronage, with the newly formed New York City Police Department, Tim dons the copper star and makes his rounds of the Sixth Ward, home to the notorious Five Points slum (immortalized in the movie [which takes place later in time] Gangs of New York).  The Sixth Ward is where most of the Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine are settling, much to the chagrin of the City's upstanding Protestants.  One of his first cases involves sending a young Irish woman to The Tombs for strangling her infant.

Disheartened he considers quitting, but on his way home early one morning (he patrolled 16 hours a day), a little girl (a "kinchin") barrels into him.  Her fancy nightgown is soaked in blood, and she whispers, "They'll tear him to pieces."  After determining that it is not her blood, Tim takes her to his German landlady and the two of them clean her up and slowly earn her trust so that she tells them her story.  Bird has escaped from the house of a popular madam, Silkie Marsh, who claims that the children in her care are servants, not "stargazers" (prostitutes).  Silkie claims to know nothing of the hooded figure Bird has seen carrying large bundles -- bundles the size of a small child -- out of her house, not even when 19 corpses are found buried in the country, a little bit north of West 30th Street.  Police Superintendent George Washington Matsell decides to pull Timothy from his rounds and give him the job of solving the crime, not preventing it hopefully before anti-Catholic hatred reaches its boiling point.

Faye's research seems impec-cable to me.  She begins each chapter with a primary source quotation (mostly from anti-Catholic screeds), but there is not a speck of the dust of history in her story.  Everything is fully realized here -- from the privy where the insane Irishwoman stuffed her baby to the opulent dresses of Silkie Marsh to the sweet, stifling bakery where Tim rents his room.  The use of the street "flash-patter" is appropriate and doesn't get in the way of narrative (when Tim has to explain what something means, it's smoothly done).  The characters will surprise you -- no one in this book is who you think they are -- and while most are not motivated by anything other than profit or survival, they are largely sympathetic.  No one can be completely evil in a society that is so corrupted.  According to a review in the Washington Post, "Timothy Wilde is apparently polishing his copper star for a second outing."  Can't come soon enough for me!

Steven Boyer, a narrator whose steady, unglamorous work didn't immediately bring him to mind as the reader for this book, does his usual fine job here.  He's gives Timothy a calm delivery that also makes clear the many, many emotions roiling beneath the surface: his love for Mercy, his complicated relationship with Valentine, his growing affection for young Bird, and a commitment to his work that surprises him.  There's no really dramatic voicing in his narration and Boyer delineates gender and age clearly but without caricature.  That's what I mean by "unglamorous," which -- once I began listening -- I soon realized that the novel doesn't need drama from its reader, there is plenty to go around!  Following conversations isn't difficult and Boyer keeps the tension up.  (Bird is removed from Tim's care without his knowledge in one scene and his mad dash to rescue her was riveting.  It was one of those listening moments where you aren't going to stop until it's over.)

Faye's previous novel brought Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper together, and that one's narrated by Simon Vance.  I am still waiting for my transcendental S.V. experience.  Tempting ...

[N. Currier's "View of the terrific explosion at the Great Fire of New York. From Broad St. July 19th, 1845" is housed in the New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.]

The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye
Narrated by Steven Boyer
Penguin Audio (cover says Dreamscape Media), 2012.  12:11

Down under

One shouldn’t go too long without a visit with Jack.  At the same time, however, one’s familiarity with Jack can make one a bit impatient – how much more is one (or is Jack, for that matter) expected to endure before her saga comes to a satisfying close?  Are we in The Wheel of Time territory (14 and counting and he’s been dead for five years!)? During my last visit with Jack, I listened to an interview between Jack’s creator, L.A. Meyer, and her interpreter, Katherine Kellgren, which led me to the somewhat horrifying conclusion that there were many more Jacks to come before wrapping things up. 

This makes me ponder, briefly, about who authors of young adult literature are actually writing for – if we are generous, the intended audience really only hangs around for 10 years at the most, so is there any point in going on and on … and on?  Is Meyer writing for we elderly young adults, willing to keep reading whatever he churns out year after year?  There is no doubt that things in this eighth installment in Bloody Jack’s adventures, The Wake of the Lorelei Lee: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber on Her Way to Botany Bay have taken a decidedly more adult turn, even though our beloved heroine is still just going on 17.  This is most definitely not an all-ages car trip kind of audiobook. 

Jacky secured her fortune while assisting the British Navy in salvaging the wreck of a Spanish ship in the Caribbean during her last adventure.  She just neglected to tell them of all the extra gold she brought to the surface and tucked away in the hold of her own vessel.  She’s purchased her own ship, the Lorelei Lee (whose buxom figurehead bears a not-coincidental resemblance to our heroine), and – hardworking girl that she is – plans on running a for-profit but not exploitative emigration service from Ireland to the United States.  A quick stop in London leads to her arrest by the British Secret Services (a government change means that her friends are no longer in charge), who toss her into Newgate Prison to await trial for treason.  Her death sentence is commuted to deportation for life to the penal colony in New South Wales. 

In an ironic turn of events, the Lorelei Lee is confiscated by the government for the purposes of transporting a ship full of female convicts, Jacky included.  Most of the other convicts are prostitutes, and the very convivial captain encourages fraternization between crew and passengers (since he’ll earn even more payment per live passenger if she’s pregnant upon arrival), but Jacky quickly figures out a way to keep body and soul together without resorting to the world’s oldest profession.  It helps that her loyal friend Higgins has managed to come aboard as assistant purser, but Jacky’s irrepressible personality saves her as always.

Then there’s Jaimy, Jacky’s beloved, who is also convicted of treason and transport to Australia.  His ship, the Cerberus, is not the fun cruise Jacky is enjoying on the Lorelei Lee, and the boy finally shows some backbone as he attempts to wrest control of the vessel and meet up with Jacky in the penal colony.  Add to the mix Chinese pirates, burial at sea, salvaging a giant gold Buddha, cultural insensitivity in depicting the goddess Kali, a marriage of convenience, attempted rape, several murders (always of bad people, of course), the cat o’ nine tails, a miscarriage, the doldrums, a new tattoo and even a discreet lesbian interlude.  Whatever next, you ask?  Typhoon, anyone?

I did learn something from this book: Botany Bay was quickly aban-doned as a settle-ment location in favor of the more sheltered Sydney Cove.  And thus a great city was born.  

Does it sound like I don’t like Jack?  Maybe I’m a little tired of her, but I’ve got to admit that her hijinks just keep on surprising me.  The novels’ pattern stays the same (just one last thing to do before she and Jaimy can marry, and whoops! fate intervenes), but the vagaries of fate continue to entertain. 

It’s likely I’d have thrown in the towel long ago were I reading these to myself, because a large part – dare I say, 99% – of the enjoyment here is due to narrator Kellgren.  She throws herself into these novels with unflagging enthusiasm and her prodigious talents for storytelling, acting and singing.  Here is no exception; in fact, it seemed like she was working even harder (it might also have been the contrast between this narration and the one I listened to immediately beforehand – a very subdued narration of a 1960s literary masterpiece [I’ve stored up this review for Audiobook Week]).  Jacky was more vivid, Jaimy certainly came into his own (finally showing himself worthy of his fiancée), and the novel’s huge cast each made an impression – the raucous madams, the hard-partying captain, the sadistic captain on Jaimy’s ship, his Irish fellow convicts, Jacky’s posse of young Newgate denizens, the imperturbable Higgins (who gets a tad perturbed), a young Indian boy rescued from a mob in Bombay, a glamorous Chinese lady pirate and the Italian Jesuit who translates for her; and many, many more.  Kellgren sings, of course – one of the ongoing treats of these audiobooks – and I particularly enjoyed how she sang both as Jacky and as various other characters. 

I’m thrilled to see that I am almost caught up with these.  Book the Tenth is not due out until October, which gives me five months to slip in The Mark of the Golden Dragon.  About that typhoon …

["The Landing of the Convicts at Botany Bay" is a print from Watkin Tench's A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, first published in 1789.  This image was posted to Wikimedia Commons by Gaston Renard.]

The Wake of the Lorelei Lee: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber on Her Way to Botany Bay by L.A. Meyer

Narrated by Katherine Kellgren

Listen and Live Audio, 2010.  14:55  

Slippage

#$%^&* Blogger has "updated" its writing/posting interface, so I've spent some time getting slapped around and figuring out how to do the things I no longer know how to do.  (Did we ask for an update?!*)  In addition, I'm scheduling a few posts for the last week of June (which, of course, I had to work out how to do in the new Blogger) when it will be Audiobook Week at Devourer of Books.  So, it'll be quieter here for a little bit.  (Not that it's ever very noisy ...)

I also spent a long time listening to Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, recommended to me by Rachael.  She works in our fiction room (called Popular Library), where I am fortunate to be able to hang out on Sundays, and I've noticed that we have similar reading tastes.  She suggested it, it was on the shelf and so I put it in the ears.  A few days later, I learned that my favorite teen reader had stayed up all night to finish it.  All portents were good! 

It's 2054 and historians at Oxford are able to study their preferred period of history by traveling back in time to experience it firsthand. Balliol Professor James Dunworthy is a 20th century historian who has traveled himself, but now he mentors a young student, Kivrin Engles.  Kivrin wants to go back to Medieval times, and despite Dunworthy's warnings that it's too risky to travel that far back, Kivrin has connected with his academic rival to help her make the jump.  She'll leave at Christmastime to go back to 1320 because the calendar days can be more accurately measured during the holiday.  In two weeks, she'll head back to the "drop" to be picked up, hopefully full of information about Oxford and the countryside in the years before the society went to hell because of the arrival of the Black Death in 1348.  She has a "corder" disguised to look like a fingerbone, so she can record her discoveries.  She decides to call this recording the Doomsday Book, in honor of the Domesday Book, the 11th century documentation of English society in the years following the arrival of William the Conqueror.

When Kivrin is shipped off seven centuries, Dunworthy has to wait for a few hours while the technician, Badri Choudury, pinpoints the drop and the amount of slippage in time.  But when Badri shows up at the pub where Dunworthy is waiting, he murmurs something about the wrong time (I can't remember the exact quote) and collapses.  Soon, Oxford is in the midst of an epidemic and is quarantined.  Dunworthy has to wait for Badri to recover before he knows what happened to Kivrin.  But whether Badri will recover is uncertain.

Kivrin, meanwhile, has not landed in the place that Badri told her she would land.  And she's suffering from a feverish delirium as well.  Through the kindness of a village priest, Father Roche, she ends up in the care of a family of women:  Mother, daughters Agnes and Rosamund, and suspicious mother-in-law.  It's Christmas time and the women are waiting for the men of the family, who apparently have been detained by some legal matter.  Unfortunately, Kivrin was taken away from the drop before she could determine where it was, so unless she can get Father Roche to take her there, she won't be waiting in two-weeks time to be picked up.  That may not matter, as only Badri, on the 21st-century side, can tell where she was dropped .

Do you think that reference to the Black Plague was accidental?

I loved this book.  I first heard of Connie Willis just a few months ago, when the audiobook of her All Clear was named to the 2012 Listen List.  I do like a good time-travel story and so does Connie Willis as she has returned to this premise several times since.  I think Doomsday Book was the novel where she introduced the 21st century time travelers of Oxford.  Everything about this book was engaging -- the characters are fully realized human beings (and a lot of them are dead by the end of the novel), the historical detail seems impeccable, the building tension of the two time streams is exquisite as we go back and forth not knowing precisely the catastrophe but knowing that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.  Some sections will make you laugh out loud (academic politics never grows old), others will make you weep. And Willis satisfies immensely by using every hint she drops, every ounce of foreshadowing pays off.  I had it in my ears for over two weeks but never felt it was dragging.

As a generally non scifi reader, I found it amusing that in 1992 Willis simply did not see the possibility of a mobile phone.  Professor Dunworthy spends significant time in the novel trying to find telephones (and, occasionally, a "trunk" [long-distance] line).  Sure, the telephones are picture phones, but they are still very much connected to a wire in the wall.  On the other hand, the novel spent absolutely no effort trying to describe what made time travel possible, thank god.

Jenny Sterlin is the reader.  I actually have the opposite reaction to the AudioFile review finding her underprepared and lacking the "chops to communicate" the text.  She's a flawed reader, no doubt.  Her husky voice can sound tired, she gets juicy, her pronunciations are inconsistent, and sometimes I simply cannot understand her (I think that the Medieval mother's name was Heloise and mother-in-law's was Hermione).  But, oh my goodness, the woman knows how to pause.  She knows how to linger over some text and how to hurry over other sections.  When Kivrin is in distress (and the book -- taking its own sweet time getting there -- is so vivid as she fights to the last), Sterlin is riveting, with a voice full of compassion and tension.  I could not stop listening, blowing through the last four discs in a day.

Sterlin's characterizations are also terrific, handling a huge cast of characters, and two centuries, with distinction and realism.  I wasn't crazy about her characterizations of two of the novel's younger characters -- the spoiled child Agnes who was just a bit precious, and the teenaged Colin who ends up helping Professor Dunworthy in unexpected ways.  All his dialogue sounded wildly overenthusiastic, although I can still hear him declare the Black Death as "apocalyptic."  Sterlin even has to conduct authentic-sounding dialogue in the vaguely Germanic Old English, before Kivrin's automatic translator kicks in.  I've liked her work before, but I thought this was a pretty bravura performance.

There's an art to audiobook production that doesn't show up very often, but I heard it here (perhaps because it was published before audiobooks really took off and it was possible to devote real attention to production).  Nearly every one of the 21 discs breaks took place at a moment of high tension, and one (the start of Disc 19 [I think]) delivers a punch to the gut that made me pause so I could collect myself and start over.

I'm so looking forward to the next in Willis' world of Oxford time travelers, which Rachael reports is hilarious.  I think I'm going to travel to this year's ALA Annual by train, and may take the Blackout/All Clear duet to (eye) read during the many hours rattling south.  Doesn't that sound civilized?

*OK, so there's spellcheck now, I don't have to head into the html side to move images around, and it appears that I can easily caption images, but for the most part I hate it when "they" update stuff.  I still can't find anything in the "new" Word.)

[The Birmingham page from the Domesday Book is from Birmingham 1066-1625 and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.]

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Narrated by Jenny Sterlin

Recorded Books (A SciFi Audio Production [an old imprint I'm presuming], 2000.  26:30

Under the sea

When I peruse the offerings at Audiobook Jukebox's Solid Gold Reviewer page, I like to take the opportunity to read both the familiar as well as something that stretches my boundaries (although there remain places I will not go: L. Ron Hubbard). For my most recent choice, I found an author I'd never heard of who writes in a genre that I enjoy: riffing on fairy tales (adult version), even though I don't count the narrator as a personal favorite. The stretch here is the original tale: Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. The story of a young girl who sacrifices her voice for the (inconstant) love of a prince. Ick. Carolyn Turgeon's Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale arrives with a lot of baggage. Will the twist take away that bad taste of misogyny? Well, sort of.

Although it's difficult, try to erase the picture of Disney's mermaid from your head (also that calypso tune). (I realize I'm not helping here, but neither is the author with that scary mermaid image at her website.) Despite the cover image, Turgeon's mermaid has hair the color of the moon and I feel confident does not wear a seashell bra. Does that help?

OK. A young woman named Margrethe (pronounced MAR-greta) has been stashed safely in a convent in the northern part of her father's Northern Kingdom to keep her out of danger while the Northern and Southern Kingdoms brandish their swords at one another. She's standing at the edge of the desolate sea one day when she is astonished to see a woman carrying an unconscious man through the water and onto the beach. The mermaid glances at Margrethe and beckons her to save the man. The sisters of the convent bring the man to safety and nurse him back to health. When he awakens, he believes that Margrethe was the woman who pulled him from the wreck of his sinking ship and brought him to shore. He heals quickly -- although a shimmer remains on his skin where the mermaid touched him -- and leaves the convent. Only afterwards does Margrethe learn that the young man was Prince Christopher, heir to the Southern Kingdom.

Lenia is the mermaid, youngest of the daughters of the mermaid queen. On her 18th birthday, every mermaid is given the opportunity to visit the land of those ugly two-legged creatures who can't live in the beautiful ocean and Lenia looks forward to seeing the creatures -- who have fascinated her from afar -- up close. Swimming to the surface on her birthday, Lenia encounters a sinking ship and curiously watches men die. When she spots Christopher though, she knows she must rescue him. But she remains haunted by him and soon consults the Sea Witch. You may join him on earth, the Witch explains, but you will walk on your new legs feeling as if you were walking on knives and -- by the way -- I'll need your tongue to complete the potion. Lenia chooses the prince and soon is silently ensconced in his bed even though he doesn't remember that she was the one who saved him.

The twist, I suppose, is that this is also Margrethe's story. She, too, has fallen for Prince Christopher and she escapes the Northern Kingdom and proposes a political marriage, one that will unite their warring countries. Unfortunately, she arrives after Lenia -- who has become pregnant -- and must use all her diplomatic and romantic skills to ensure that the marriage goes forward.

It's a given that Christopher is a shallow rat and a bit of a cypher, which means that his sex appeal to both women seems a bit of a plot problem. To add insult, neither Lenia or Margrethe are particularly appealing characters themselves. It's hard for a feminist to ignore Lenia's doormat, er character, while Margrethe -- who at least operates in a world where she understands that bigger things happen -- is also rather conniving in her insistence that she be the bride. In her defense, her solution to the dilemma of who Christopher will marry is clever if cruel, and I came away confident that the right person would be wearing the pants in the united kingdoms.

Where the book excels is when it vividly describes its natural world. Margrethe spends a large part of the novel swathed in furs because it is so darn cold and bleak where she lives. Lenia's ocean home is a place of darting fish (which often get popped in a mermaid's mouth when she's feeling a bit peckish), mysterious and cool. And when Linea comes ashore in Christopher's warm and sun-filled kingdom, she is astonished at the light. I experienced such a sense of place in the novel that I was almost willing to overlook the rather unpleasant people living there.

Rosalyn Landor reads the novel, which alternates its point-of-view between The Mermaid and The Princess. She has a relatively deep, resonant voice for a woman and she created two natural-sounding women for this novel. Lenia was a little more conventionally feminine (and for more than half of the novel, her voice is inside her head, of course), and Margrethe sounded more controlled and regal. Landor's men speak very far down her vocal register, and -- as a result, they all seem overly formal and deliberative.

Landor's narrative experience shows in her emotive line readings and the varying pace she sets as the story builds tension. But despite her formidable skills, I tend to avoid books that she's narrated. I hear an affected quality to her voice; much as I love those English accents, occasionally she's just teddibly, teddibly British. Often her voice is pitched so low (volume-wise) that it's hard to hear her and when you crank up the volume, she's got a painful sibilance. Even though she narrates a lot of books that I like to read, the last time I listened to her was nearly three years ago. Her reading here has not convinced me to seek out some of those books.

I think my all-time favorite fairy tale is East of the Sun and West of the Moon (another Scandinavian story), which I remember reading over and over again in my well-thumbed copy of Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book. It was the inspiration for Edith Pattou's terrific East (ooh! maybe I'll listen to it), and several other teen novels. But not for adults?

Blackstone Audio thoughtfully provided me a copy of Mermaid as part of the Solid Gold Reviewers program at Audiobook Jukebox. Thanks.

[Well, find a Wikimedia image and you learn all sorts of things. The image of the statue of The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbor is still under copyright, and thus shouldn't be in Wikimedia Commons. The heirs of sculptor Edvard Ericksen evidently try to keep a tight rein on the image (even though the Harbor statue is not the original). This photograph of the statue in 1913 was retrieved from the website maintained by the artist's granddaughter.]

Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale by Carolyn Turgeon

Narrated by Rosalyn Landor

Blackstone Audio, 2012. 8:00

The next year

What happens after something momentous is usually not the stuff of story. Public interest dissipates and the people to whom that momentous thing happened are left to pick up and go on, out of the glare of television lights and political grandstanding. The events of 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas (illustrated, most famously perhaps, below) are over in Kristin Levine's The Lions of Little Rock. Not only have the television cameras gone, but so has the National Guard. The community, battered and bruised, is left to carry on. In a moment of particular enlightenment, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus decided that rather than integrate, he would deprive all children of Little Rock an education. In the fall of 1958, he closed all the public high schools.

Among the families left to figure out what to do with their teenage daughter are the Nisbets. The youngest daughter, Marlee, is only in junior high, but she's got problems of her own. She finds it very difficult to speak with all but a few close friends and family and she's not looking forward to another year of having to explain herself, so to speak. On the first day of school, a new girl comes to Marlee in the cafeteria and Marlee, to her surprise, asks her to sit down. Liz slowly brings Marlee out of her shell, teaching her some ways to overcome her fear of speaking. The two girls plan an oral presentation on Arkansas history, but when the day comes, Marlee learns that Liz won't be attending West Side Junior High any more.

Summoning all her courage, Marlee makes the presentation on her own. Later she learns that Liz was ejected from school because she is black. (I think I'm remembering the chronology correctly.) The Nisbet's Negro maid, Betty Jean, explains to Marlee how that works. At first Marlee is shocked, but she comes to realize that Liz was a true friend and she uses all her courage to try and maintain that friendship. She learns about integration and joins forces with adults -- black and white -- working to re-open the Little Rock schools. It's a book for kids, so yeah, Marlee learns a great deal about herself in the process, ultimately finding the strength to speak for herself.

Levine successfully walks a fine line here (something I didn't think she did in her previous book) of telling the story of a white heroine who doesn't fix things for the black people around her. Yes, she saves Liz and herself and a black family from a bomb tossed into their living room, but mostly this book is about how white Arkansans stood up against the supporters of segregation for their own benefit. At the end of this novel, the schools are open again but there still aren't any black kids going to Marlee's junior high.

I enjoyed this for what it is -- a sparkling piece of historical fiction with an appealing young girl at its center. Levine weaves the larger picture of history nicely into Marlee's story, and I learned a whole lot (something I like to do when I read this genre) about what happened after the larger events of 1957. It got perilously close to jumping the shark when Marlee finds herself locked in the trunk of a nasty older boy's car, but it recovered. This is no doubt because the core of the novel is not its events, but that journey that Marlee takes from one with no voice to one who learns how loud her voice can be. (How curious that the next book I listened to is also one about a young girl's voice [and can I say how little that website reflects the contents of that book!].)

Julia Whelan narrates the story. I've only heard her read once before, and I liked her. She reads Marlee with a quiet intelligence that is just right for the character. When Marlee recites prime numbers (her technique for building the courage to speak), I can hear a little edge of panic in Whelan's voice. She reads Liz with a little more intensity that provides a good contrast with Marlee.

Whelan runs into a little trouble as the cast of characters widened. Some of them had Southern accents (I tried to keep Bill Clinton in my head for comparison purposes), but these came and went: They mostly arrived in characters under stress and then they went away again. Neither Marlee nor Liz spoke with a drawl, yet their parents did. Now that I'm not an award-giving superlistener, this really didn't bother me, yet it kept coming across my consciousness while listening.

The title of this novel refers metaphorically (I'm pretty darn sure) to Marlee and Liz. The Zoo is also where Liz has Marlee practice her Arkansas history presentation to its various denizens. Unfortunately, I usually had a picture in my head of some ghastly 1950s zoo -- with the titular lions pacing back and forth in some cement, barred box -- during these sections. I hope young readers/listeners have better images in their heads.

[The photograph of Elizabeth Eckford bravely walking into Central High School in September 1957 was taken by Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It was retrieved from the National Park Service. Hazel Bryan is the as-famous white girl behind Elizabeth. A cautionary tale for all those seeking their 15 minutes. They might last longer than you like.]

The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine

Narrated by Julia Whelan

Listening Library, 2012. 8:22

More audio goodness

I've been remiss in linking to the hard-working librarians who post AudioSynced links each and every month! Check out what happened in March by making your way to Abby the Librarian!

Fun news about the Tournament of Audiobooks and a chance to predict some of the winners at the Audies.