(I have a different cover, as seen here, but I love this one more!)

Book 48 on my list for the last six months (only two more to go!) is Deerskin by Robin McKinley. My Australian book fairy sent it to me, as she tends to pick up books that she thinks I would like, or that are relevant to my current writing, and sends them to me in various parcels at outrageous postage costs.

This one was relevant to Eld, which I’ve been writing on for a bit over a year, although possibly not as much as Tender Morsels, which I read this past summer. What the two books have in common is that they are based on fairytales, although reworked and twisted and turned amazing and awful and everything inbetween. As somebody who grew up on Astrid Lindgren tales, I absolutely love fairytales, and enjoyed both these books immensely.

This one is about the daughter of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, princess Lissla Lissar. Or is it Lissar Lissla? No matter, she goes by Lissar for the most part.

The book starts out slow, telling the whole story of how her parents met and how they are so splendid that nobody cares to look twice in Lissar’s direction. Even her nurse maid is enarmoured by her beautiful mother, and when she dies – the reason is rumoured to be an illness that made her less pretty, which is so not acceptable – everyone is grieving her, nobody realising that Lissar has lost her mother.

A prince in a kingdom far, far away sends her a puppy from his best dog to help her through this time (in fact, the only person acknowledging her loss), and while the kingdom mourns Lissar raises the puppy, named Ash, to a loyal, intelligent and of course beautiful dog. They play and she takes an interest in gardening, and things almost seem turn for the better. That is, until her father realises that Lissar, as she grows older, is starting to resemble her mother more and more. In the end Lissar is forced to run from his madness and violence, so traumatised by the ordeal that she has forgotten nearly everything. Indeed, for a good portion of the book she doesn’t even remember her name.

The amnesia is written beautifully; it can’t be an easy thing to write, but McKinley does so in a way that is both agonising and amazing and spot on, and the language she uses for it is very dreamy and yet direct. It’s a beautiful book, in all, and I do want to read more of her stuff. A small snippet of the vagueness:

It was slipping away even as she spoke; she could no longer remember what it was about, only that it had been horrible. The horror welled up again, but no images accompanied it; just blank, unthinking terror and revulsion. She shuddered with the strength of it, and put out a hand to seize a stick of wood, felt the dull prick of its bark against her palm gratefully. She tossed it into the fire and thrust her face so near that her eyes wept with the heat.

Ash sat down again and snuggled up against Lissar’s back, with her head on her shoulder, as she had done before the hearth in their old… “No!” said Lissar. “Whatever it is – it is over with. Ash and I have escaped, and are free.” Her words sounded hollow, but the defiance in them drove the horror back a few paces, and she lay down again and fell into sleep.

It was daylight for a while, and then dark, and then daylight again. And then Lissar began to recognise that she was waking up for good…

In all, it’s a good lesson in the school of “you don’t have to spell everything out, your readers aren’t stupid”. Which is something I need to become better at; trusting that the story carries itself and all that.

Not that I have any readers. Yet.