Circle of Cranes, by Annette LeBox

Circle of Cranes, by Annette LeBox (Dial, April, 2012, upper middle grade), is the story of an orphaned Chinese girl, 13 year old Suyin. Her father died, and her mother disappeared when she was little, and her paternal grandfather was so angry at this that he forbid any of the women in the village to teach Suyin any of the embroidery for which her mother was famous. So she has grown up passed from one family to another, and deprived of the heritage of her Miao ancestors--the women from this minority group define themselves in large part by their skill with the needle.

But Suyin is blessed with a preternatural skill for languages. And so, when a clearly untrustworthy human trafficker offers passage to America for one of the villagers--at a steep price--Suyin, who speaks English, is chosen to go. The expectation is that American dollars will flow back to the village, paying of the dept and bringing prosperity.

Suyin does not want to go. How can she leave her beloved cranes, the birds with whom she feels a strange kinship, birds that she has actually visited and spoken with in their own dream-like land? They had promised that someday she might be one of them--a crane woman, able to fly--but how can this dream come true in America?

The voyage is hellish--children packed for weeks in the hold of a derelict vessel. And instead of being the promised Golden Land, New York is a land of sweatshops and virtual slavery for the children, a place where brutal enforcers deal with any attempt to rebel, or escape. Suyin, who cannot sew, earns only a pittance in the garment making sweatshop, and her future seems bleak indeed.

But the cranes have not abandoned her. Indeed, they are pinning their own hopes on her. For the Queen of the Cranes was Suyin's mother, who disappeared years ago, and without her, there is no future for the clan. If Suyin can prove herself worthy (and if she can learn to sew, for the cranes, like the Miao women, pass down wisdom and beauty through their stitchery), there is hope.

Except that it is hard to be worthy when being ground down by the miseries of a life of brutal labor.

But cranes teach her embroidery, and messages written in the secret language of women, passed down through the generations, and hidden in plain sight in the stitches, brings comfort and wisdom. And finally Suyin finds the courage to speak up in public about the plight of the garment workers....and it all resolves to a happy ending.

Circle of Cranes is two stories. There is the realistic story, of the horrible working conditions faced by illegal immigrants--they work in fear of the government, in fear of their bosses, and with little hope. Prostitution is the only clear alternative for these young girls. Then there is the fantasy story, a reimagining of the story of the Crane Wife (the story of a woman torn between life as a bird and her human family is Japanese, not so much Chinese, but the author's endnote says has "roots in many Asian cultures"). Each is vivid and compelling in its own right, with the realistic elements being a grippingly eye-opening story, and the fantasy elements making a magical counterpoint.

It didn't, however, work perfectly for me. Though I was fascinated, especially by the details of the embroidery, the contrast between the two aspects of the book was great, so much so that I was not always convinced by the magical reality of it as a whole! I have to confess that a personal prejudice of my own came into play--I really get creeped out when a human person starts to sprout feathers (Suyin only has one feather, and it falls out quickly, but still). But that is just me. And the tidy resolution, in which the human identities of the crane women were revealed, seemed a bit much (all the important women in Suyin's life seem to be crane women...).

But in any event, this is one I'd give to the young (11 to 13 year old) lover of fairy tale retellings, for whom the magic of the cranes might well ring true, and whose heart might be deeply moved by Suyin's horrible experience in New York. It might especially appeal to those who want a lovely, magical daydream to lift them out of quotidian, possibly unpleasant, reality....

Final though: I think this is my favorite cover of the year so far. Isn't it beautiful?

Textile fantasy books

I love craft fantasies--books in which the characters make things with their hands, books in which crafty creativity is the cornerstone of a character's being, or in which craft production drives the plot. A particular sub-genre of these that I love are textile fantasies--with weaving, sewing, knitting or other textile arts front and center.

I've just bitten the bullet and made a new "textile fantasy" label. There you'll find the following books:

Avielle of Ria, by Dia Calhoun
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Tom Ass, by Ann Laurence
Brightly Woven, by Alexandra Bracken
Silksinger, by Laini Taylor

and two that kind of stretch the boundaries of my definition:

Princess of the Wild Swans, by Diane Zahler (nettle shirts)
Princess of Glass, by Jessica Day George (lots of knitted charms)

Here are other textile fantasies that I haven't read/reviewed (many recommended by you all back when I started with this):

A Curse Dark as Gold, by Elizabeth Bunce
Weaveworld, by Clive Barker
Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry
Dragon Slippers, by Jessica Day George
The Broken Thread, by Linda Smith
Sandry's Book, by Tamora Pierce
Crewel, by Gennifer Albin (I'm not sure this is going to count, since the textiles involved seem to be the fabric of time....)

Any other recommendations? Why aren't there more books with magical embroidery?

Someday I'll have a whole nother page up at the top of Craft Fantasies...glass blowing, metal working, pottery....feel free to pass on suggestions for any of those too! Not that I have time to read and review a fraction of what I want too, but still....

Princess of the Wild Swans, by Diane Zahler

Princess of the Wild Swans, by Diane Zahler (HarperCollins, 2012), is a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales--The Wild Swans (which is just about the only Hans Christian Anderson story I actively enjoyed, as opposed to reading with kind of sick fascination) also known as The Six Swans in the Grimm version (which I read more often). It's the story of a princess who must save her brothers when they are transformed into swans by their evil stepmother. I found Zahler's version very pleasant indeed.

12 year old Meriel is the youngest child of king whose land is peaceful and prosperous, and she's had a happy life running a little wild, trying to get her five older brothers to pay attention to her, and ignoring her tutor. But when the king brings home one day a beautiful new wife, everything changes. Meriel intuitively distrusts the new queen, and small snippets of observation cause her feelings of foreboding to grow. For one thing, the queen didn't know about the five brothers...and is not at all happy that they exist. Meriel can't confide in her father, who is strangely besotted. Her fears prove justified when her stepmother transforms her brothers in swans.

Fortunately for Meriel (and the swan brothers) the evil stepmother is not the only witch in the neighborhood. With the help of one brother's sweetheart, who's half a witch, Meriel learns how she can break the spell. She must make her brothers shirts from stinging nettles. For one who has never done a day's hard work in their life, this is a daunting task. To make it worse, she must not speak until the transformation is broken.

A race against time ensues, as Meriel struggles to finish the shirts before winter comes, and before the queen suspects what she is doing. But soon it becomes clear that it is not only Meriel's brothers who are at risk. The queen is plotting to open wide the gates between the mortal and fairy realms. Already sinister creatures are crossing over. If Meriel can't break the queen's enchantment, her whole country will be lost...

The biggest change Zahler makes in her retelling is that the princess doesn't have to marry, whether she wants to or not, a prince who is besotted by her mute beauty, ending in the princess almost being burned at the stake by the prince's paranoid mother. This is a good change! Keeping the focus on the evil stepmother, without introducing complications, lets Zahler tell a tighter story, and removing the whole weird marriage element lets it stay nicely middle grade (there's a bit of hinting at a romance-to-be for Meriel, but it never directly manifests itself). It was also a wise move to cut six (or 1, if your using the Grimm version) of the original brothers. Five is plenty.

The whole story is set in and around the castle, and this gives it a rather homey feel. Instead of grand questy-ness, we get to meet brave commoners, and Meriel gains a new understanding of life outside the castle walls. The evil machinations of the bad queen play out nicely as an intrusion into the ordinary world, and the final struggle is grippingly fraught (but not so fraught as to horrify a sensitive young reader). It's easy to guess that Good will triumph over Evil, but it's rather refreshing to see that there's a price to be paid (in this case, Meriel's difficult and painful labor).

I finished the book well-satisfied that Zahler had done the story justice. I enjoyed her previous retellings--The Thirteenth Princess (12 Dancing Princess--my review) and A True Princess (the Princess and the Pea--my review), but not wildly so--both of those left me with small bits of dissatisfaction. Princess of the Wild Swans, though, didn't in the least, and is my hands down favorite! The story makes sense, both as a re-telling and in its own right, and I liked the characters and was happy to cheer for them. I'd recommend this without reservation to any young reader (I'd go with 9 to 11 years old) who loves fantasy with a strong young heroine.

Princess of Glass, by Jessica Day George

Princess of Glass, by Jessica Day George (Bloomsbury, 2010, YA, 288 pages) is a delightful Cinderella re-telling. The curse of the 12 Dancing Princess having been broken (see Princess of the Midnight Ball), young Princess Poppy and her sisters have been dispersed amongst the principalities of their European-esque world to strengthen political alliances. Marrying foreign dignitaries is, of course, one possible path toward alliance strengthening--but Poppy feels much too young to start thinking along those lines. Instead, she's trying to enjoy her visit with distant cousins. Even though she refuses to dance (she's had enough dancing to last a long time), she whiles away her time at balls and parties honing her card shark skills (which are considerable). Prince Christian's arrival from a northern court enhances life more than a little...and romance is in the air...

But a sinister magic is at work in the background. Another girl, Eleanora, forced to work as a maid after her noble father's disgraceful bankruptcy, has fallen under the thrall of dark spellworking. Her "fairy godmother" has promised her Prince Christian...and sends her off to the balls, begowned more gloriously than any princess, with her feet encased in shoes of glass.

The enchantments surrounding Eleanora blind all who see her--they can think of nothing but her charms. But Poppy, who has warded herself against dark magic (since she's been there, done that, and doesn't want to again) can see through the glamour. And so can Roger, who loved Eleanora years ago. Together Poppy and Roger work to break the magic spells that has ensnared her, but Poppy's skill with knitted charms and Roger's incomplete knowledge of potions are weak weapons against a malevolent fairy godmother, hell-bent on seeing her protege marry the prince. Whatever the cost...

This is my favorite Jessica Day George book to date, and in large part it's because I loved Poppy to pieces! It was a treat to see her in her own book. She's beautifully idiosyncratic, sweet and smart, and I cheered for her throughout. The prince comes off not so well--a bit of a stock Charming Prince--but then again, he's befuddled for part of the time by Eleanora's enchantments, so doesn't get that much page time to really be himself.

Plot-wise, there were a few things that I thought didn't work so well--in particular, I didn't understand why Eleanora ended up as a maid after her father lost all his money. It seemed unlikely that [one character in particular] wouldn't have taken her in....or at least helped her. And the motivation of the evil godmother felt a bit forced. But happily, I was able to gloss over such issues while reading the lovely descriptions of dress and balls and knitted charms and card games, and wondering if Poppy would ever dance again......and shuddering, just a little, at the glass slipper end of things--molten glass is not my own shoe medium of choice.

Speaking of knitted charms, these are so prominently featured in the book that I am tempted to count this book as a textile fantasy, which I am amassing a bibliography of (this post has my list to date). There are even instructions at the end that tell you how to knit your own! But in the end, I think not--I'm looking more for books in which the craft and art of the textiles is an integral part of the story or the main character's life. With Poppy, it's more a useful knack. Still, I'll stick the textile fantasy label on it...because it's really cool.

Here's another review, at Becky's Book Reviews.

Note on age: The age of the characters (in their teens) and the interest in romance (although very much the falling into, rather than the consummating, side of romance) makes this YA ish. But there's nothing unsuitable for middle grade readers--the dark magic side of things is not all that dark.

(disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher)

Avielle of Rhia, by Dia Calhoun (a textile fantasy)

After reading Brightly Woven a while back, I set off on the trial of other textile fantasies--stories in which weaving, or other textile arts, are an integral part of the story (because I like books where people do things with their hands, and make beautiful things). A list of the textile fantasies I've looked at so far is at the end of the post; but now, on to Avielle of Rhia.

Avielle of Rhia, by Dia Calhoun (2006, Marshall Cavendish, YA, 397 pages). Avielle is a princess in a land where it is thought that the traits of the ancestors become manifest again in their descendants. And Avielle bears an uncanny resemblance to the most cursed queen of all, Dolvoka, whose dark magic drove the birds away from Rhia. Dolvoka came from Dredonia long ago, an unwilling bride sealing a peace treaty, and Avielle has inherited the silver skin and silver hair of the Dredonia. Many, including Avielle herself, fear that she has inherited Dolvoka's dark magic as well...

Avielle grew up on the outskirts of royal life, facing prejudice and distrust, finding solace in her weaving, and in her love for her little brother. But that life comes to a crashing halt when the Brethren of the Black Cloaks, who have come to power in Dredonia, make their move against Rhia. In a hideous whirlwind, the king's castle is destroyed, killing almost all inside. By chance Avielle was in town, visiting Gamalda, the most skilled weaver in the kingdom, and so she survived.

Her family is dead, and her kingdom in jeopardy. But Avielle refuses to come forward, to face the fear and suspicion of her people--instead, she becomes Gamalda's apprentice. Gradually she learns to let her own magic come to her as she weaves dream-fraught cloth, inspired by the goddess, and gradually this leads her closer to the wisdom that will guide her as she faces her destiny. But for the most part, her days are filled with life on a busy street of crafters and printers and magic users. From her new neighbors, Avielle learns lessons of friendship, and trust, and the bonds that bring ordinary people together. It is these lessons, as well as her own magic, that will let Avielle defeat her own demons, and those of her country.

It's a rather lovely book, in its collection of diverse characters all busy with their lives, the magic that is part of life, and the textiles--lovely textiles of great metaphoric import...And it's worth reading for this aspect of it alone. As part of her plan to help Avielle gain wisdom, Gamalda sends Avielle into the lives of all the neighbors--the magical sock maker, the book-seller, with his whimsical system of organization, the silversmith and glass makers, lovely artisans both, and more. Fascinatingly detailed descriptions bring all of these characters, and their shops, to life.

Avielle's own story--one of coming to terms with prejudice, grief, and self-doubt--is compelling also, but it was not subtle. I felt that things were underlined a tad too much--the reader is not give a heck of a lot of credit. And I found this to be the case with the world building as well--falling just short of excellent because the points were driven home a tad too hard.

That being said, this is a lovely one, I think, for the 12 or 13 year old girl, for whom reading fantasy is her path toward learning about the world, for thinking about things in our world through the mirror of magical places.

And the textiles are lovely...

Thanks, Natalie, for the recommendation! I enjoyed this one.

(note on age: I put this one in both mg and ya--I think it's definitely a tween. There's no sex, but it is very much a teenage girl growing up. There's violence, but not enough to make it upper middle grade unfriendly)

Other textile fantasies I've reviewed:

The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Tom Ass, by Ann Laurence
Brightly Woven, by Alexandra Bracken
Silksinger, by Laini Taylor

Other textile fantasies that I haven't:

A Curse Dark as Gold, by Elizabeth Bunce
Weaveworld, by Clive Barker
Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry
Dragon Slippers, by Jessica Day George

Any more recommendations?

Textile fantasies cont.- The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones

Just to recap, ever since reading Brightly Woven, by Alexandra Bracken, I've been thinking about fantasies in which textiles play a key role, or are a key aspect of the central character's persona, mainly because I love books in which a hands-on craft (music, metal work, glass-blowing etc) is deeply integrated into the story. So far, as well as Brightly Woven, I've looked at Tom Ass, by Ann Lawrence, and, a while back, I reviewed Silksinger, by Laini Taylor, which has lots of textile-y goodness.

Today's Textile Fantasy, Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones (1979, suitable for older middle grade on up) has got to be the queen of them all. After all, it is the only book I know of that is actually told in weaving! The central character, a girl named Tanaqui, is using a system of woven symbols for words, to "write" in fabric the story she is a part of...resulting in the spellcoats that give the book its title. As the cloth grows on her loom, it becomes imbued with the magic of the great River that flows through story, a river whose power is being attacked by an evil mage. Tanaqui must weave the story of her family's journey down the river--a journey that brought them face to face with living gods, Heathen invaders, and the mage himself-- and use the spellcoats to free the River from his bounds.

Spellcoats was the first book by DWJ that I ever read. I don't know how many times I've reread it in the twenty five years since, but I know that each time I fall in love with it all over again. On my most recent re-reading yesterday, I was struck anew by how much I love the family dynamics of this book--five siblings stuck in a boat in pretty horrendous circumstances, by turns snapping at each other and growing up, as each realizes the part they will play in the coming confrontation and its aftermath. It's pretty superb characterization, and the dialogue often makes me chuckle. As Hern, the middle brother, says at one point (in sarcasm weaving font, if there is such a thing), "Fun and games all the way to the sea" (page 51).

And there is a wonderful Magic at the heart of the story- the "gods" are very real, and not like anything I've ever encountered elsewhere...and postscript is a must read, that, in just a few paragraphs, adds a huge temporal dimension to it all.

But here's the coolest thing about the book-- Tanaqui manages to be a kick-ass heroine without actually kicking anybody--she has to use her brains and her skill at weaving to save the day. How great is that!

This is the third volume that DWJ wrote in the Dalemark Quartet:

1. The Spellcoats (1979)
2. Drowned Ammet (1977)
3. Cart and Cwidder (1975)
4. Crown of Dalemark (1993)

I didn't realize the other three existed until they were reissued in the late eighties. Spellcoats is a perfectly fine stand-alone, taking place centuries before the other books (and if you are sick of series fiction, you can pretend the other books don't exist). But Spellcoats should most definitely be read before Crown of Dalemark!

Age wise: Spellcoats is, I think, just fine for upper middle-grade on up --there is some military violence, a bit of scary-ness, and some drowned victims of flooding that might distress a younger child.

Here's another look at Spellcoats at Fitful Murmurs.

(The cover I've shown is the most recent (I think). The others are dreadful, so I won't show them).

Tom Ass, by Ann Lawrence, "textile fantasies" continued

In talking yesterday about Brightly Woven, I realized how much I like "textile fantasies." Those would be books in which the textile arts (weaving, spinning, sewing, etc) are front and center; where along with the story qua story, the reader also gets to be part of the making process. And so in the next few days I'll be featuring some of my favorites (with more recommendations to be found in the comments on Brightly Woven).

Tom Ass, or The Second Gift, by Ann Lawrence (1972, Macmillan, middle grade, 141 pages), illustraed by Ionicus, is one of my all time favorite childhood books. Because it makes me feel awkward to recommend an old book that is out of print, I want to offer the reassurance that copies can be found on Amazon UK for a pound...and even with the shipping, I promise that it is worth it (if you like the books that I like).

Tom is the third brother of a family of farmers, but unlike his brothers, he can't be bothered to work hard in the fields. Tom is Clever, and he knows that someday he'll go off to London and find his fortune...but an encounter with a fairy lady changes everything.

"Thomas," she said coldly, "I had a mind to work some gift for your father's youngest son, seeing that I have known good faith and square dealing from him and his family these dozen generations. Now I'm not the one to change my mind, so you shall have your gift, but neither am I one to encourage wasters. My word is this: whatever work you being at sunrise, shall be sufficient to the day --and the sooner you take your road the better." (page 10)

A few mornings later, Tom begins to gather the stones from his mother's garden...and is there all day. But it's not until he spends an entire day mopping up the water he spilt just before dawn that he realizes that the fairy's gift is, perhaps, not as kindly as it might have been. So he sets off for London, and when he meets the fairy again on the road, he loses no time in telling her just what he thinks about his gift.

"You are a Great Fool, Thomas," she cried, "and nothing I can give you will change that, but I'll wish you one thing more: since you will plainly never make anything of yourself, you shall be whatever your future wife chooses to make of you." (page 21)

(Before I go on, can anyone see why Tom is a fool?)

It happens that the next person he meets is a girl named Jennifer, and when she hears the story of Gift #1, she's quick to see all the implications that he's missed. And when she calls him a donkey....that's what he suddenly becomes! Jennifer knows that somehow she's turned Tom into an ass (but not why or how), and Tom knows that Jennifer is his future wife....yoikes on both counts! But what's done is done, so the two travel off together to make their fortune, until such time as Tom is himself again.

And after some wanderings, the two of them go into the textile business, with Jennifer finding work with an old weaver in one of my favorite fictional English cathedral towns. After a happy sojourn there (in which Tom does the marketing and spends happy hours with old Father Cuthbert at the Cathedral) Jennifer decides it's time to move on to London. So she puts the fairy gift to work....and Tom is woken up at the crack of dawn to roll up all the unwanted scraps of cloth she has gathered from the weaver's work.

The roll after roll of lovely fabric that results is the kernel of their fortune, and soon they are established in a little London cottage of their own (with lots of lovely home-making detail of the furniture scrounging sort), and Jennifer begins to do her own weaving, and Tom some more rolling, until their fame and fortune is so emphatically made that one day the King himself wishes to meet the great Tom Ass, notoriously reclusive and the wealthiest man in England. Faced with the anger of the King when she refuses to bring Tom to meet him, the words Jennifer uses to defend him bring everything to a happy ending.

Gosh, I am so very fond of this book. It has just about everything my child self wanted--the historical setting (with detailed black and white illustrations), the magic, the lovely little details about home making, the smart, brave girl to serve as role-model, the romance at the end, the bits of humor...and re-reading it again, just now, was lovely too!

A fine "first textile fantasy" for the young, and a lovely read for any fan of gentle historical fantasy.

Has anyone else ever read anything by Ann Lawrence? It had never occurred to me before today to see what else she wrote...and a few others that sound good are listed on LibraryThing (although they aren't reviewed, so I am going by the titles, and I am wondering if it is perhaps naive of me to think a book called "The Hawk of May" sounds good).

Brightly Woven, by Alexandra Bracken

Brightly Woven, by Alexandra Bracken (Egmont 2010, YA, 368 pp).

Sydelle has lived her life in a dry village, one that's of no particular interest to most anybody else in the kingdom. The year she is sixteen, everything changes. A young wizard arrives in the village, bringing with him rainstorms that end the long drought. But as well as the rain, he brings a warning--an enemy army is half a day away, and war is imminent.

As a reward for ending the drought, the wizard, Wayland North, asks Sydelle's parents for her company on his mission to the Queen's city, where he is headed with information that could end the war.

"Do I have no choice in this?" I cried, as the wizard appeared behind my father. The smile on his face was small, but it was still there.

He thought he was helping me, did he? He thought that he was doing me some sort of favor. A prisoner of my village or a prisoner of a wizard. What was the difference when you could not decide your own path?" (page 24)

So Sydelle and Wayland set out on a desperate (and rather poorly funded) journey, with Sydelle, much as she had dreamed of life beyond her village, understandably put out by her circumstances. Wayland North does not make it easier for her--moody and down right difficult at times, it's not clear exactly what he wants from her. Despite this, she is intrigued...and, not long after, rather fond...as well as confused (North can be annoyingly unforthcoming) and scared (besides the fact of the oncoming war itself, there is an evil magician working against North). And then Sydelle begins to realize that she herself might have magic within her, and that she has to play a part of her own, whether she wants to or not, in the game of Queens, Kings, and Wizards in which she has become entangled. In doing so, she will finally find her own path....

Brightly Woven is an engaging coming of age/romance/fantasy quest story, combining political and magical intrigue with more personal suspense, and a pleasant dash of humor. I particularly liked Sydelle--from an ordinary girl, with ordinary dreams and expectations, she is forced to become a major player on her world's stage, all the while coming to terms with her feelings for Wayland North, and she makes this transition in a convincing and compelling way. Compared to the small experiences of Sydelle's journey and her development as a character, the epic clash of countries paled. In fact this larger plot of the book never seemed quite convincing to me, but that might be my fault as a reader, avidly following the Sydelle/North relationship arc and being less interested in more mundane things like war etc.

One of the things I liked best about Sydelle is that she is a weaver--I am a sucker for books in which the main characters skillfully practice crafts of various kinds. When North whisks her away from home, she insists on bringing her collapsible loom along...and finds time to weave at various points along her journey. But (and this is my main quibble with the book) what she is weaving is a new cloak for North, and, in as much as his cloaks are a part of his own magic, and in as much as Sydelle is able to infuse her work with her magic, I was very disappointed that, once the new cloak was finished, there was no point to it--it was just a nice cloak. Sigh. Maybe there will be a second book (there's still a curse hanging over their heads) and the cloak will come into its own.

I'm happy to recommend Brightly Woven to the younger reader of YA fantasy in particular (it's a somewhat lighter, faster read than, say, Fire, by Kristin Cashore). But because of my cloak quibble, Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones, remains my favorite Textile Fantasy (in that book, the weaving is central to the plot). Anyone else have any other good recomendations of this rather negelcted sub-genre? Or, more broadly, craft-centered fantasies?

Other reviews at Manga Manic Cafe, Lucid Conspiracy, The Book Smugglers, and Angieville

(disclaimer: ARC sent to me from the publisher)

Silksinger, by Laini Taylor

"Whisper Silksinger knew two kinds of death. There was the peaceful kind, quiet as eyelids fluttering shut, and there was the kind with teeth, sudden as a spurt of blood, a devil pounce, a scream. She had seen both. Of her whole clan only three faeries remained, and now death had come for them too.

And it had come with teeth."

So begins Silksinger, the second book of the Dreamdark series (Penguin Young Readers, 2009, middle-grade, 441 pp), by Laini Taylor, with illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo (released today!). In Blackbringer, the first book, we met Magpie Windwitch, who is now the champion of the Djinn King. Having awakened him, and begun a new age of hope, Magpie now sets off to find the other djinn, the great magical beings who had made the world, but who withdrew from it long ago. Little does Magpie know that one of the djinn she seeks is inside a small kettle, clutched to the heart of a small fairy girl, Whisper Silksinger, who has just seen her grandparents incinerated in a battle with demons.

Whisper is now the last of her clan, the Silksingers, weavers of flying carpets and guardians of the djinn Azazel. Alone, with no shoes, no money, and no friends, she sets out to restore Azazel to his far-off home in the high mountains. It is a hopeless quest, until she meets a young caravan guard, Hirik, whose own secret mission runs parrellel to hers. Together they journey by fairy caravan, borne by dragonflys up into the mountains. But armies of demons pursue them, and dark treachery awaits. Even when Magpie finds them, all her powers as the Djinn's Champion might not be enough to defeat Ethla, the hideous enemy who has set the devils against them. So it's a good thing that there's more to Whisper and Hirik than meets the eye...and a good thing that a small, miserable, abused, and utterly poignant demon slave can be a hero too.

There are many things that make this book special. There are the characters, whose emotions, motivations, and interactions make them truly people to care about. Whisper, in particular, is a wonderful character--so helpless (at least to appearances), but so brave and with so much more to her than is apparent at first. There's the story--a great arc of story--with its desperate journey, its mysteries, and its tender friendships and fierce loyalties. And then there's the worldbuilding. In Silksinger, Laini does not quite recapture the feeling of being inside a truly fairy world that she did in Blackbringer (the trading settlements with their mercenary inhabitants that are the setting for much of the story are certainly colorful places of bustling, exotic, commerce, but didn't clearly convey "fairy" to me). But the magical details that she weaves into the story, that I think are particularly delightful for the visually-oriented reader, make up for this. Little things like this:

"But the real treasure was at Iceshimmer, where the local clan laid out a sparkling array of tiaras and jewelry that looked to be made of diamonds and crystal but were really ice, spelled not to melt. There were skeins of lace knit of real snowflakes too, and magical ice mirrors that disclosed visions to the gazer." (pp 154-155)

And things like this:

"And the skeins of death-polluted silk heard, and responded. Dozens of threads rose and danced, swaying with the tide of her voice, and merged, weaving themselves together to make the edge of a carpet. Color flushed into them as she sang, blues and reds mostly, the colors of bruising and dried blood, deepening at the edges to black." (p 330)

I first read Silksinger for a 48 hour reading challenge, and happily galloped through it. It was a great book for a fast and diverting read. I next read Silksinger over the past few days, peacefully and thoughtfully, and enjoyed it even more with time to savour the details, and to revisit the characters at a more leisurely place. It was a great book for a slow and contemplative read.

I enjoyed Blackbringer very much, and happily cheered Magpie on, confident that she would prevail (and it was a pleasure to meet her and Talon again, and to see their relationship developing). Silksinger, with its underdog characters, and its message that even the small and seemingly helpless can save the world, I enjoyed even more. It is a story complete unto itself, but I'd strongly suggest reading Blackbringer first!

Other reviews (lots of them!)
Book Nut
Bound Treasures
Fantasy Cafe
Finding Wonderland
Green Man Review
Jen Robinson's Book Page
Lessons From the Tortoise
Monsters & Critics
PRES Library
Reader Views
Sonder Books
Stop, Drop & Read
The Baryon Review
Wands and Worlds

(two disclaimers: Laini is a blogging friend, and I got an arc from the publisher)