(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.

The best thing about writing as much as I do right now is that you start reading books in a completely different manner. I think I first realised it when I was reading Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small Quartet (also, I can’t figure out if it’s actually a quartet of books called Protector of the Small, or if it’s a quartet of books called Protector of the Small Quartet, and it’s making me twitch). At some point through the third book (I think) a character is killed off and I remember thinking “Wait, what, she killed him off? There better be a good plot reason for that, or it’s just stupid.”

Sadly I have to report that I am still only halfway through the fourth book, so I have no idea if there was a plot reason or if it was a not so great decision in an otherwise pretty damn awesome series of books.

Reading becomes something very different once you use it to see how other writers create characters, how they describe them, how they write dialogue and how they create plot. It’s quite interesting, and I am now unable to read books without taking note of these things. (I also love taking note of editing mistakes, and once noticed that a minor character changed name halfway through a book, from Natalie to Natasha, or possible the other way around, something both the author and the editor had missed.)

One of the things that I find fascinating is unusual forms of narrating. This doesn’t only go for books, I am also a total sucker for movies that consist of cut up pieces that don’t make sense until you’ve seen the whole thing. Or should I say “used to be”? I can’t concentrate on the screen long enough to watch anything over 20 minutes anymore, and mostly find TV to be noise, and not background noise, like music, but grating, screeching, agonising noise that makes me want to kill someone.

Which means that the only TV I watch is The Guild (google it, it’s five minute episodes about a group of role players, featuring Felicia Day and occasionally Wil Wheaton, who apparently got sneakily hot) and How I Met Your Mother. The latter I like just because of the unreliable narrator. An excellent example is this one, although I have to say that I’m sad that I couldn’t find a clip of the episode where he constantly replaces “smoking pot” with “eating a really big sandwich”.

I don’t even own a TV anymore (in fact, I just had a very interesting conversation with Radiotjänst, trying to cancel my TV-license, to which they were very skeptical and ended up wanting to send a person to control that I really don’t have a TV, after asking me repeatedly “but how do you watch TV, then?”), so let’s return to books, shall we?

A while ago I read this awesome blog post with Sarah Rees Brennan. She is the author of the lovely YA urban fantasy novel The Demon’s Lexicon, and her main character is very different from many books that you read about. Far from all, I have to say, since people are writing more and more books which deviate from the usual pattern of the curious narrator who needs every step of every day explained to him (so that the reader knows what’s going on), but okay. Bear with me here.

Nick in The Demon’s Lexicon is nothing like that, which makes for a very awesome book indeed. He’s the sort of boy who keeps his swords under the sink, is no stranger to dumping a body in the river before going home to eat dinner, is constantly annoyed that people talk so much, hates explaining stuff to the newbie hanger-ons that him and his brother acquires and is basically… um, unpleasant. (And disturbingly hot, obviously, as dark, broody boys tend to be, but I think that goes without saying.)

In the blog post I mentioned above Sarah (who I don’t know, but damn, her name is long, so here I go first-naming her anyway) says the following, which made me giggle like a maniac:

High fantasy and urban fantasy and paranormal romance and all the slip-sliding books in between, he’s there: tall, dark, silent and surly, knowing a lot more about everything that’s going on than the hapless protagonist and usually, since to live in a genre novel is to live in interesting times, excellent with any weapon to hand.

He’s become so popular that he’s been watered down: mad, bad and dangerous to know becoming ‘Seems a little mean at first, but on the look-out for love: particularly enjoys long walks on the beach and talking about his feelings!’ On my four hundredth go-round with a book involving Mr Tall, Dark and Diet I thought to myself that someone should bring the original undiluted version back, and really think about what made him compelling and made him tick. And that we shouldn’t be seeing it from the point of view of a girl much taken with the muscular thighs and meanness, or a guy haplessly protagonisting behind Mr Tall and Dark’s sword, but from inside the head of That Guy, to see what he was thinking.

Besides ‘why does everyone else talk so much,’ I mean.

And that post pretty much sums up her writing, both in her books and her blog, by the way. Should you need another blog in your endless RSS feed.

In short, Nick is an interesting narrator, and after reading that one, I have been on a pretty much constant search for more books with quirky, unusual or just inventive sort of narration. So, I’ve been waiting and waiting and WAITING for the publishing of Liar by Justine Larbalestier, which I finally received in the mail a few weeks ago.

There was drama before it came out, because of the whitewashing of the cover, but it has pretty much died down by now. It’s an interesting read though, and I believe I’ve written about it before. At least once.

Anyway.

Micah is a liar. She lies about everything, just because she can. On the very first page she says: “I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies. No omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.”, which pretty much says it all.

I think we’ve all known a teenager like that, and while some seem to find Micah unpleasant, she makes my heart hurt because she reminds me of somebody I used to know.

The whole book is written under the assumption that you cannot trust a word that Micah says, and yet you find yourself believe what she says, over and over and over. Until she starts to admit what wasn’t true. What she’d made up. And even then you can’t be sure that she did lie about that or if she’s just lying about lying.

It’s so very interesting to read, and what’s even more interesting is the spoiler thread over at Justine’s blog. Do not read it unless you’ve read the book, you will regret it, but once you have… go over there and read the theories. They are almost as interesting as the book itself.

I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed these two books as much, had I not been reading them from the point of view of a writer, but as it is I loved the hell out of both of them. And people need to read them already (especially Liar!) so I have somebody to discuss them with. Seriously.