(no subject)

[skygiants]

Of the various Ursula Vernon books that I've read, Thornhedge may have been the one that I've gotten on with best so far, with one major caveat that I didn't get on with at all, on which more anon.

This is a Sleeping Beauty riff focusing on a humble toad-fairy who has spent centuries guarding an ominous castle containing an ominous sleeping maiden, and the polite young man who comes to disturb the situation by being a polite young man. A classic fairy tale retelling executed well -- I especially liked that it's set in our own world with its own history of transition through the medieval era, and the way those big historical shifts slowly filter through and impact even our heroine's closed fairy-tale world. Vernon is one of those authors who for me has such a distinctive and consistent voice and pattern of narrative interest that once I spend too long in any of her worlds it often starts to blend together with the others, but this one has exactly the right amount of weight and heft for itself.

My major caveat is I simply don't enjoy 'the child was just born evil and there's nothing to be done about it' plots, even when in this case it's because the child is a fairy changeling out of its natural habitat. Really? Born evil? NOTHING to be done? You can't take that part out of this book, it is fundamentally built around this premise, and while that's certainly legal as a building block of fiction I'm just never going to like it much. Yes, I'm talking to you, Brian Jacques, and your fundamentally irredeemable baby ferret.

Comments

[sushiflop]

JUSTICE FOR VEIL.

[geeblaster]

MANY ARE SAYING THIS!!!!!

[sovay]

MANY ARE SAYING THIS!!!!!

AMEN.

[sushiflop]

Justice for the assigned evil at birth princess while we're at it.

[sovay]

Justice for the assigned evil at birth princess while we're at it.

Maybe she likes ferrets.

[cyphomandra]

Yes, I liked the vibe of this a lot while being disappointed at the resolution for the evil changeling. I think possibly it could have worked for me if they were evil despite themselves? But just evil right through plus a rather flat denouement didn’t work.

[osprey_archer]

JUSTICE FOR VEIL INDEED.

Especially weird because some Redwall books have nice cats. So clearly being a predator on its own doesn't doom you to evil! Maybe it's just ferrets who are Just Bad.

[newredshoes]

CO-SIGN

[asakiyume]

Yeah, my kids loved Redwall EXCEPT for the born-good, born-evil thing.

I have so many problems with that, but I guess basically it comes down to poor definitions of evil. What does it mean to say something is evil if it has no volition or intent to do harm? If someone leaves a banana peel in the hall and granny slips and dies, is the banana peel evil? (Is it only evil if someone slips on it and not if no one does?) Is the person who dropped it there evil? Are bacteria evil because they make us sick?

To me, it only makes sense to talk about evil if comprehension and choice are involved.

(I mean, semantically speaking, we talk about consequences of things being evil, but that doesn't mean that the things that caused them necessarily are.)

[asakiyume]

Maybe Brian Jacques just liked cats and didn't like ferrets. (booooo)

[shati]

I'm joining the JUSTICE FOR VEIL chorus, but also the specific "but the cats" chorus!!

[sophia_sol]

it's interesting to me, because usually I do very much hate the trope of Born Evil, Unchangeably Evil. but it worked fine for me in this book, I think because it just came across to me as like...this is the story macguffin, the child as a character isn't important and we're not engaging with it on that level at all. it could have been an evil portrait given to the royal family as a gift just as easily as a person. and although of course I would have enjoyed a complication of that, I was fine with going "right, that's just the set dressing for the things the story is actually doing"

[chestnut_pod]

Not the fundamentally irredeemable baby ferret ;-;

[soosifroosh]

Like many Ursula Vernon novels this one had a quickly-abandoned side-idea that perhaps out there somewhere there could be a superhero boarding school for irredeemably evil changelings where they learned how to thrive. I thought that that could be interesting! But no she just falls off a cliff under her own power.

[skygiants]

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US IT SEEMS

[skygiants]

Yeah, the classic Disney villain "she fell off a balcony" didn't quite land for me either.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I agree! and I mean, I guess I have to give Redwall credit in that it did make me genuinely consider the question at age twelve or so of whether I believed in inborn evil, and decide that I emphatically didn't -- so thank you, Brian Jacques, for giving me (and apparently many of us!) a formative guy to argue against.

[skygiants]

yeah, that's so fair! And I enjoyed pretty much all the other things the book was doing, and it doesn't work without the macguffin, so I get it; sometimes you just need to play the story card you have to play to get everything else to fall into shape.

[skygiants]

lighting a candle in his memory

[skygiants]

classic Disney villain ending!

[sushiflop]

I recall reading an interview with Jaques around when I was into Redwall and he made some remark that kids liked the moral simplicity of the books wrt good species, evil species. Even at the time I resented that. Not THIS kid, Jaques!

[scribe]

Ah, Thornhedge! I think I'm in the camp of "born evil usually isn't my jam, but in this case the evil princess was mostly a set piece so it didn't bother me much." I just love the swamp fairies sooooooo much!!

[merit]

I kept on waiting for the story to be different and it kept on repeating the same elements again & again. The subversion was so... limited.

There are elements of her writing I quite like but I often get aggravated by some of her common and repeated themes.

[skygiants]

the swamp fairies are REALLY a delight, I was a huge fan

[skygiants]

yeah, she's definitely an author who Likes what she Likes and it's not that I dislike what she likes either, but for me it can in fact become too many cakes.

[bookblather]

I didn't mind it because I didn't read the changeling as "born evil" so much as... this is what fairies are, and she's being raised among humans, and like many small humans she doesn't have any idea that she shouldn't be doing these things, and no one can teach her otherwise. I am a huge Vernon fan, though, and may be giving her too much credit.

[lirazel]

Yes, I'm talking to you, Brian Jacques, and your fundamentally irredeemable baby ferret.

Oh my gosh, I just had such a violent flashback!!!!