To the people of the stars, the world was called Henderson's IV, but to the seven tribes it was L'Lal'Lor, the Planet of the Grievers. Decimated by an ancient
cataclysm, the surviving natives built a matriarchal culture around grief, elevating the concept to the highest of art forms... until the offworld visitors
inadvertently altered their trajectory in a tale of miscommunication, betrayal, envy, and something the locals had no word for: love.
Review
In its time, this book, with Yolen's usual lyrical (if occasionally stiff) style, was an award-winner, a poetic glimpse of forbidden love and a dying culture
transformed by human contact. Unfortunately, I didn't read this book in its time. I read it in 2020, and there's plenty here that just plain does not age
well.
I could start with the way the "swarthy" common tribes are inherently and unquestionably inferior to the tall, pale, and slender "Royal" line of Grievers, who
only mingle with their lessers because population decline has led to serious inbreeding and fertility issues within the population. Even the humans, who are
theoretically more advanced and have been exposed to numerous alien cultures on numerous worlds, refer to the non-Royal locals as "trogs" (for troglodytes) and
"monkeys" on multiple occasions. There's a somewhat twisted and unpleasant undertone to sex and breeding throughout, not helped by characters tending to be flat
archetypes/stereotypes, to the point where I'm not even sure there's a point discussing the individuals themselves: a prodigal Master Griever with whom everyone
is enchanted at first sight, a scheming and shrewish Queen, an ambitious prince, and a human anthropologist who loses all perspective when he delves too deep
into the local culture. Even the offworld humans are rather flat... not to mention stupid on one major point. Their goal is always to avoid cultural
contamination, relying first on hidden recorders to observe and learn the local ways before first contact - but what, precisely, do they expect to happen when
they literally land a rocket ship outside a city in a pre-industrial culture and come traipsing out in their silver suits for a meet-and-greet with the leader?
How is a culture not going to be contaminated on some level... and what is the point of open contact at all? There are distinct parallels to how white colonists
tended to overwhelm local cultures, with an iffy takeaway at the ending that tends to reinforce the idea of the human way generally being the better and more
productive/progressive way, despite some lip service to how the native viewpoint deeply moved the contact crew. (This isn't really a spoiler, given that this is
generally how first contact stories go, especially when the book was written.)
Those issues aside, Yolen's prose is, as mentioned, well crafted, and the culture of the Grievers is interesting (once one gets past the racism and sexism and
flatness of the characters involved, who aren't always likable but could be interesting.) Unfortunately, Cards of Grief is a victim of its age. I'm not
even sure I could recommend it as a first contact story these days without so many caveats as to end up not being a recommendation at all, which is why I
ultimately shaved off the half-star its style almost earned it back.
Jane Yolen, illustrations by David Wilgus Harcourt Brace Fiction, MG? Collection/Fantasy Themes: Dragons, Fables, Twists ****
Description
Yolen gathers a variety of her dragon-related short stories and poems, augmented with illustrations by David Wilgus. Some are silly, some are serious,
some triumphant and some sad.
Review
I admit that I've read little of Yolen's material. I was unimpressed with her wandering, pointless Young Merlin trilogy, and thus was never
compelled to seek out further stories of hers. After reading this collection, found at Half Price Books, I feel I might have to rectify this oversight.
Yolen's dragons are not the benevolent, enlightened souls they are in so many modern tales, but hearken back to the medieval tradition of great, scaled
marauders who are justly slain by righteous humans. They aren't, however, dumb brutes. They make an interesting change of pace, even if they did mildly
annoy the dragon-loving part of me. The stories themselves are well crafted. I also enjoyed Yolen's introductions to her works. The detailed pencil
illustrations, though well rendered, rarely depict dragons, so I was at a loss to explain their presence in a dragon-themed collection. Overall, however,
this is a fine collection of tales from a fine author.
An Appalachian daughter confronts a mother risen from the grave as a vampire... a Jewish girl follows the prophet Elijah to a dark
place and time in history for an important task... a lamb nurse listens to the tales of the residents of Happy Dens, a home for
retired fairy tale wolves... an elderly woman discovers a strange old man with an ancient secret on the rocks near the lighthouse
where she lives... These and other folklore-inspired tales written by fantasy master Jane Yolen are collected in this volume, with a
foreword by Marissa Meyer and an afterword about the author's inspirations.
Review
Though her stories aren't always my cup of cocoa, nobody can dispute the mastery evident in the breadth and depth (and length) of
Jane Yolen's work. As in pretty much every anthology and collection, though, these are a mixed bag, some feeling rounded and complete
and others fragmentary and almost dreamlike. Likewise, some feel a bit long for their premises while others seem truncated. Styles
vary from the old-school storyteller cadence and repetition of classic fairy tales to lighthearted snark to darker and/or more
literary takes. I've read a few before, while others were new to me. Endings are only rarely clear-cut happily-ever-afters, several
skewing rather dark, but then the original stories were far removed from the sanitized versions many are familiar with today. I added
the extra half-star for the notes at the end, which go into a bit of "behind the scenes" details on how Yolen conceived and developed
the included stories, along with poems matching the themes.
Jakkin has been a bonder, a slave on the planet Austar IV, almost as long as he can remember. After a feral dragon killed his father, his mother sold
both Jakkin and herself into the service of Master Sarkkhan, one of the world's most prominent dragon breeders. Bonders are slaves until they can earn
enough gold to fill their bond bags and buy their way to freedom. On Austar IV, raising and training pit-fighting dragons is the quickest to fame and
fortune - or bankruptcy and ruin. Pinning his hopes on raising a champion, Jakkin steals a hatchling from his master and raises it, in secret, out in the
desert... a potentially deadly undertaking. Even if he gets away with the theft, can a fifteen-year-old slave boy with no experience train a fighting
dragon well enough to win in Austar's bloody pits?
Review
This is considered a classic young adult dragon story, though it's not as easy to find these days as it once was. Austar IV is very well realized, and
Yolen's descriptions of the dragons themselves are wonderfully detailed. Jakkin struggles not only with the young dragon, but with the awkward, uneven
growth from boy to man. I do wonder why this isn't considered science fiction instead of fantasy, as there is interstellar travel and no magic to speak of.
After all, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern books are considered science fiction, and the Pernese dragons' ability to jump instantly between
two points of space and time comes much closer to magic than anything Yolen's Austarian dragons do. Yolen also goes much deeper into how her winged reptiles
evolved the ability to fly than anything I've read in McCaffrey's works (though I admit I haven't read them all.) I guess it was a marketing move. But, I
digress. This is a very good tale. I gave it an extra mark for the depth of description and originality. Even after twenty years, nobody has tried to copy
it... at least, nobody I've read about.
Much has changed for young Jakkin since his dragon's first fight. Heart's Blood, still a champion in the pits, has laid her first clutch of hatchlings.
Jakkin is now seventeen, a master instead of a bonder, still living at Master Sarkkhan's nursery but no longer a slave. He even bought the bond of Erikkinn,
a friend from the bondhouse, though the boy's incessantly ingratiating ways soon make him wonder if that was the right thing to do. Yet, for all he has
accomplished, he doesn't feel any more like a man than he was three years ago. Still, he loves his new life as dragon trainer and breeder... so he resents
it when interplanetary politics invade his life.
Austar IV is in a delicate position - not a part of the galactic Federation, yet no longer a penal colony as it was two hundred years ago. Some colonists
would like to see the world placed under the distant Federation's rule, but some would rather meddling offworlders mind their own business (save adding
their coins to the pit fight coffers, naturally.) In the middle are growing numbers of rebel cells, dedicated to destroying the master/bond system and
building a new civilization, without any vestiges of the old warden/prisoner relationships.
Jakkin would just as soon ignore this dull political gaming, but then a Senator from the capital city of Rokk brings a message from a girl he has not seen in
ages: Akki, who helped him raise Heart's Blood, then vanished without a trace. She has become entangled in Senator Golden's plot to infiltrate the rebels, and
is apparently trapped. The young master Jakkin must learn a game other than the pit fights if he is to save his lost love and the world of the dragons.
Review
This was a longer story than the first book, with many unexpected twists that set the stage for a final book I can't wait to get my hands on. Austar IV
continues to be a well-defined and realistic alien world, and the dragons grow more believable and intriguing by the chapter. One warning, however - you might
want a tissue or two close at hand when you read.
Jakkin, Akki, and Heart's Blood's hatchlings have cut all ties with the humans of Austar IV. After their inadvertent discovery that gave them dragonsight
and telepathy, even the killing freeze of Dark After doesn't affect them. They believe that they are apart from their old lives, the world of pit dragons,
breeders, and bonders, not to mention the struggles with rebels and the interstellar Federation... until one day they spy a copter in the mountains and decide
to flee deeper into the unexplored hills. Soon, they come upon evidence of a horrible, unknown creature, capable of slaughtering even full-grown dragons. As
Jakkin and Akki investigate, they stumble across a secret nearly as old as the human colony on Austar IV, and a danger to human and dragon alike.
Review
I'm not sure why I clipped this one a point. It was a good story, with a completely different tone than the first two books. Maybe that was part of the
problem - after two books in the nurseries and pits, I was just getting the feel of this new and unexplored region of Austar IV when the story ended. I wasn't
sure if A Sending of Dragons was an unnecessary extension of the last books or the beginning of a never-finished new plotline in the dragons' world. It
felt a little like both at once. Other than that, I enjoyed this final visit with Jakkin and his dragons. Incidentally, this is a newer copy, which explains the
different publisher.
Evidently, the series is no longer a trilogy: a fourth book came out in 2009. I'll have to track it down, to see if it wraps up any of the loose threads left
over from this story.
An Appalachian girl's wicked stepmother plots her downfall... a young fairy girl inadvertently curses a royal child... a reclusive poet has a life-altering
encounter... a dying man imparts one last gift to an alien species... These and other stories by genre master Jane Yolen appear in this collection, including
the award-winning tales "Sister Emily's Lightship" and "Lost Girls."
Review
Considering my iffy anthology luck, this is a decent collection, though - as usual - the stories themselves were a mixed bag. Some felt fragmentary, like
prequels or filler taken from longer works (or which were intended to expand into novels, but never took off), or simply written more for imagery and mood than
story. Others came together decently. There's an overall bias toward dark (or at least ambiguous) endings, and a few seem to strike similar themes. They're all
well written, of course, even the ones that weren't my cup of cocoa.
Jane Yolen Magic Carpet Book Fiction, CH Fantasy Themes: Schools, Wizards ****
Description
Young Henry's life changed forever one morning when, after idly mentioning to his dear ma that he might like to be a wizard, she took him at his word,
packed his bags, and sent him out the door with a few kisses for luck. He has more than a few second thoughts, especially as he approaches the forbidding
Wizard's Hall itself, but he did promise that he'd try, so try he will. Quickly renamed (as all young wizards are upon entry), Henry-turned-Thornmallow
finds himself the last and possibly least student to enroll this year... and the least and possibly last hope of Wizard's Hall when the dark Master returns
to the school for long-awaited revenge.
Review
A very quick read, with certain hints reminiscent of Rowling's (more recent) Harry Potter series, though considering the relative publication
dates I doubt it's anything other than artistic coincidence. Yolen's tale has a lighter feel and different lessons for the protagonists to learn. It's fun,
if not especially deep or uniquely memorable.
This is the story of the boy Merlin, from the time when he is abandoned in the woods to his discovery of the boy who is destined to be king. Passager: Merlin, a nameless wild boy, is found by Master Robin and slowly returned to the world of humans. He slowly becomes aware that he
is different from other people, and that his cryptic dreams have a way of predicting the future - if he can figure out how to read them. Hobby: Four years after his salvation from the forests, Master Robin's family has been wiped out by a fire, and the boy sets out on his own
to find out who he is. He falls in with a disreputable spy and a pair of crafty traveling performers. Merlin: The boy Merlin has returned to the woods from whence he came. Here, he finds a tribe of wild people and starts upon the path that will
lead him to his place in history.
Review
I reviewed these books together partly to save space, but also because none of them has enough plot individually to be considered a story. Even taken all
together, there is no recognizable pattern of beginning, middle, and end, a pattern I have come to rely upon in my reading and writing endeavors. They read
like fragments of Yolen's telling of the King Arthur tale, stray chapters from some uncompleted larger retelling. Like everyone over the past few centuries
who writes the story, she has altered elements to suit her own particular fancy. It might have been interesting to see how she worked the tale to account for
these creative alterations, but she ends the story long before Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. It assumes that you know the Arthurian legends well
enough that this can be just a companion piece. Maybe it's because I don't know the whole story too well (I've never had much interest in the convoluted King
Arthur cycle) but I don't think it works. Various characters come and go in young Merlin's life, bringing with them various good and bad events (mostly bad),
but none really has a reason for being, let alone being in the trilogy. Yolen seems to take great pleasure in the fact that she conducted research on the
matter. These books are littered with stuff about the subject of falconry and the medieval concept of the Wild Man of the Woods. The names are all falconry
terms: a passager is a wild-caught immature bird, a hobby is a young hawk, and a merlin is a species of hawk (in case you didn't know.) In fact, she fills the
books with references to research on all manner of time-period-relevant topics. Too bad there wasn't much room left for a plot.
I didn't despise it enough to brand it with the lowest rating level; that honor is reserved for those Very Special books that are so atrocious that they make me
furious that I wasted irreplaceable time reading them. Her writing itself wasn't horrid; she just never finished anything she started. One-star books make me feel
royally hacked off at the universe and the author. In finishing these books, I just felt cheated, bored, and a little confused.
There's a reviewer quoted somewhere (I can't recall where) who claims that the Young Merlin trilogy is "great," that it "leaves you wanting more." The
former is a mistake, but the latter is a serious understatement.
