skygiants: Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender vehemently facepalming (facepalm)
I've read a couple of Isabel Allende's books, and for the most part I have liked them! She's got some flaws, but she is awesome at creating a variety of strong and cool middle-aged and elderly female characters.

. . . this was not necessarily going to be a prominent feature in a YA fantasy novel, but I was still curious enough to read her City of the Beasts. And the book does indeed start out promisingly, with a cool elderly female character! I love the protagonist's badass safari-reporter grandmother Kate, who drags him off on safari with her to toughen him up while his mother is in the hospital after a.) throwing him in the pool as a child to teach him how to swim, b.) sending him booby-trapped chocolates, and c.) making him make his own way from the airport to her apartment in the BIG SCARY CITY of New York.

Unfortunately, after Kate and her grandson head off into the wilderness, the book rapidly descends into several levels of unfortunate and condescending cliche, as the white middle-class American kid discovers his DESTINY to save the poor lost native tribe and help them to preserve their Pure Mystical Simple In Tune With The Land way of life.

With the help of his inner jaguar spirit.

Also, his equally super-special predestined preteen soulmate, who is also Purer, More Mystical, and More In Tune With The Land than most people (she can understand the language of people's hearts, guys! And so can he, if he just tries!). And her inner eagle spirit.

Oh Isabel Allende. NO.
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (elizabeth book)
Isabel Allende's Portrait in Sepia, the sequel to Daughter of Fortune (which I read and enjoyed at the end of last year, pre-booklogging days) has helped me to confirm a pattern in Isabel Allende: her protagonists are never the most interesting part of the book. Portrait in Sepia is technically the story of Aurora, the illegitimate daughter of a half-Chinese half-Chilean model growing up in the late 1800s. However, the real dominating figure of the book is Paulina del Valle, the grandmother who raises Aurora. I find it hard to describe in words how ridiculously awesome she is, but, just to provide a few examples, Paulina del Valle:
- eloped from a convent in her teens
- dominated the San Francisco business scene
- had a giant bed sent over from Europe and paraded around the streets of San Francisco and the house of her husband's mistress
- and slept in said bed for the next thirty years
- and then became complete and total BFF with the mistress when she ran into her twenty years later; "I can't imagine why we were never friends before!"
- meanwhile, widowed at age sixty, married the butler and convinced everyone she knew that he was a wealthy English lord
- and then started a whole new successful business

One of the things I really like about Isabel Allende's books is the variety of female characters, and the multitude of different ways in which they are awesome and interesting and relate to each other. Aside from (BADASS) Paulina del Valle, I also loved the hugely feminist constantly-pregnant aunt, the revolutionary tutor, and the prim English great-aunt who makes a side living writing pornography novels. And she doesn't have to erase male characters to give her strong female characters, either - the butler, especially, is kind of brilliant. Basically, at the very least, I know if I pick up an Allende I am going to read something that passes the Bechdel Test in spades, and that is a nice comfort zone to have.
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (elizabeth book)
Booklogging backlog catchup! Mostly these were travel reads, so my depth of understanding might not have been tops, but.

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines: I had been searching for this book for a long time because I adored Larklight and Starcross (which everyone should read! NO SERIOUSLY) and was extremely curious about what he had done before. The answer: ExpandDystopian Steampunk! (Cut for length, not spoilers.) )

Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows: I love Isabel Allende! She is a badass lady! She has smuggled out political prisoners and had death threats put out on her, and moreover when she was making a living translating romance novels into Spanish she got fired for changing the dialogue and endings so as to make her ladies more independent and badass! However, this one of her books I did not love so much, mostly because I was Expandbored by the main characters; again, cut for length. )

Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards: [livejournal.com profile] rushin_doll shoved this book into my hands in a bookstore and informed me that I had to read it, and who was I to say no? I enjoyed it! It is an excellent example of a pseudo-academic authorial voice, and also a very good example of a fantasy-verse rewriting of The Three Musketeers. The author's commitment to his style kind of sacrifices depth of character, and patience is often needed to get through the long and extremely polite dialogue sequences, but if you like classic French adventure fiction, duels, scheming and intrigue (and I do) then you will probably enjoy this.

Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat: I always found The Crystal Cave books difficult to get through for some reason, but I seem to have better luck with her Gothics, possibly because I do not feel required to take them at all seriously. Bryony Ashley has a PSYCHIC ROMANTIC LINK with one of her cousins, who refuses to tell her which one he is, even though he knows who she is because she's the only girl. This means that I despised the boyfriend-in-her-head regardless of who he might be and was rooting for her to run away with the garden boy for the first three-quarters of the book. There are twin switches, and secret Shakespearian history, and a random 19th-century POV that pops up from time to time that I could really have done without, and a lot of mystery that all kind of fizzles at the end. But it makes for an entertaining airplane/bus read nonetheless.

And now I am caught up!

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