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snugglekittyI have been re-reading The Dark is Rising sequence. They're such good books, really. I read three of them last week and will probably read the other two this week. I enjoy reading YA stuff that makes me feel warm and hopeful.
The one thing that kind of bothers me about the books is the way that women are written. Or, perhaps I should say, the way that women and girls AREN'T written. This is a bit surprising since the author is female. But, almost all of the characters in the books, and all of the major players, are male. The female characters are either mother figures or capricious goddess types. The one female character who's a kid, Jane, just doesn't seem convincing to me at all. None of them seem like real people to me. It occurs to me that the books would have been much more unusual, not if the protagonist was female, but if his magickal mentor was female.
I also just finished Powers of Detection, which was written when an author couldn't get her longwinded fantasy mystery published and so did an anthology of her own. (I agreed with Rosemary Edghill, by the way - that story was about twice as long as it needed to be.)
My favorite story in the anthology was "The Nightside, Needless to Say" by Simon R. Green, in which the protagonist wakes up dead and spends the rest of the story trying to figure out who killed him. There was also a story by Anne Bishop which I naturally liked - I like almost everything she writes. But once again, let me speak to gender roles for a moment.
Bishop is trying to write about a matriarchal society. Well and good. But she manages to make it a matriarchal society where the men have all the power, and comprise more than two-thirds of the main characters of the books. I just don't get that. And I have to say that as much as I love Bishop, I think that Melanie Rawn wrote matriachal society much more convincingly in her Exiles of Ambrai series (the third book of which should be coming out in November of this year).
The one thing that kind of bothers me about the books is the way that women are written. Or, perhaps I should say, the way that women and girls AREN'T written. This is a bit surprising since the author is female. But, almost all of the characters in the books, and all of the major players, are male. The female characters are either mother figures or capricious goddess types. The one female character who's a kid, Jane, just doesn't seem convincing to me at all. None of them seem like real people to me. It occurs to me that the books would have been much more unusual, not if the protagonist was female, but if his magickal mentor was female.
I also just finished Powers of Detection, which was written when an author couldn't get her longwinded fantasy mystery published and so did an anthology of her own. (I agreed with Rosemary Edghill, by the way - that story was about twice as long as it needed to be.)
My favorite story in the anthology was "The Nightside, Needless to Say" by Simon R. Green, in which the protagonist wakes up dead and spends the rest of the story trying to figure out who killed him. There was also a story by Anne Bishop which I naturally liked - I like almost everything she writes. But once again, let me speak to gender roles for a moment.
Bishop is trying to write about a matriarchal society. Well and good. But she manages to make it a matriarchal society where the men have all the power, and comprise more than two-thirds of the main characters of the books. I just don't get that. And I have to say that as much as I love Bishop, I think that Melanie Rawn wrote matriachal society much more convincingly in her Exiles of Ambrai series (the third book of which should be coming out in November of this year).
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About freakin' time!!
Date: 2005-03-07 08:31 pm (UTC)(oh, and I'll wait to buy it til it's in paperback, which will be another 6-8 months, right? *sigh* Freakin' authors, and publishers, and all...)