a necklace of souls

If I had been blogging in March 2013, I would have told you that my clever big sister's first novel, A Necklace of Souls, was being published - hurrah!  So instead, here I am 11 months later, making up lost time.

Rachel was the winner of the Storylines Tessa Duder Award for YA Fiction in 2012, which set things in motion for A Necklace of Souls to be published by HarperCollins.  It's the story of Dana, a kick-ass princess and heir to the magical Necklace of Souls, which protects her hidden kingdom from mysterious and evil foes but which exacts a terrible price on its Guardian.  Dana must come to terms with the threats to her parents' kingdom and arm herself (literally and magically) to fight this evil.  But she must also come to terms with the personal price she herself will have to pay.

A Necklace of Souls is also the story of Will, a plague-survivor and refugee in the hidden Kingdom of the Rose, who comes across the princess, becomes friends with her, and ends up fighting alongside her.  As Rachel said to the Otago Daily Times: ''What I wanted to do with Necklace was to have protagonists of both sexes who interacted at an equal level; who were both equally developed characters.''

Rachel talked to Smackfiction about the novel and its inspiration:
"I began writing Necklace after having a dream of a girl fighting in a forest. She was wearing dark clothes and fighting with swords and the light cut across her face so she seemed entangled in grey and green. Her opponents wore capes that flared around them like wings and sometimes they almost seemed to fly through the trees. They fought silently; it seemed I was watching them through a window.  I wanted to find out more about her, why she was there, how she learnt to fight… so I wrote the story."


It feels weird to review one's own sister's novel... so I'm not going to go there, although I can say that I loved the book.  What I will do is direct you to a few reviews, as they all seem to be universally glowing.  For example:

My Best Friends Are Books thinks:
"Last year’s very deserving winner [of the Tessa Duder Award] was Rachel Stedman.  I’m extremely glad she won because her book, A Necklace of Souls is a brilliant fantasy that left me awestruck. ...
"A Necklace of Souls is gripping, dark fantasy that sweeps you up takes you on a wild ride.  It has reignited my love of fantasy stories. ...
"A Necklace of Souls is a story that will stay with me for a long time and I hope that there is more of Dana and Will’s story to come.  I think that A Necklace of Souls can stand proudly beside the likes of Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, and Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina as a great fantasy story for teens and adults alike.  Everybody should go out and buy a copy for NZ Book Month and support this wonderful New Zealand author."

Reviewers for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand think:
"In A Necklace of Souls Ms Stedman has created a believable world peopled with sympathetic characters that are true to their motivations. She does not over play the magic nor rely on coincidence.
"This was a book that pleads for a sequel as there is obviously more of the story to tell."

Fangtastic thought:
"A Necklace of Souls is the debut novel from RL Stedman, and it’s excellent.
Small confession: I’m always terribly nervous reading books from local authors, or authors I know; there’s that absolute terror of how to say you detested their writing, so my relief at finding even one positive thing to comment on is profound. Thankfully local Dunedin author RL Stedman had me hooked from the first page."

Kiwifamilies thinks:
"I’ve read a lot of fantasy so sometimes it feels repetitive, but this book avoids many of the clichés of the genre. Rather than spoon feeding you every detail you’re required to think for yourself and interpret what isn’t said. This is particularly true of the magic in the book, enough detail is supplied to understand what’s happening without slowing the story down."


I'll leave it there... but I think you'll find that if you google more reviews it'll be hard to find anything but good words!

You can buy A Necklace of Souls at a variety of websites and stores... see Rachel's website, here, for some links - towards the bottom of the page.

You're welcome. :)

ursula bethell

I recently picked up a secondhand copy of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. It's got some good selections of our best poets, and I've been particularly enjoying getting a glimpse of Ursula Bethell's work recently. Bethell grew up in New Zealand, although she was born in England in 1874, and she lived here until her death in 1945. She lived in the suburb of Cashmere, in Christchurch, which is on the hills, and she often worked in her garden which overlooked the Canterbury Plains and the mountains in the distance. She is often credited with being the first NZ poet to really express an 'indigenous' New Zealand way of writing, to write poems that weren't highly derivative celebrations of Wordsworth or Keats, to write poems that expressed the unease of a young, settler nation.

Anyhow, I particularly love this poem which I am about to display for your reading pleasure. It strikes me as particularly appropriate as we in Christchurch gaze at our city in awe at the changes nature has wrought on it over the last few months.

Pause

When I am very earnestly digging
I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,
And muse upon them, muscles relaxing.

I think how freely the wild grasses flower there,
How grandly the storm-shaped trees are massed in their gorges
And the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent heaps.

Pioneer plants on those uplands find their own footing;
No vigorous growth, there, is an evil weed:
All weathers are salutary.

It is only a little while since this hillside
Lay untrammelled likewise,
Unceasingly swept by transmarine winds.

In a very little while, it may be,
When our impulsive limbs and our superior skulls
Have to the soil restored several ounces of fertiliser,

The Mother of all will take charge again,
And soon wipe away with her elements
Our small fond human enclosures.

dolci di love

[Australia/New Zealand cover]

Dolci di Love, by Sarah-Kate Lynch, is the story of Lily Turner, a "Manhattan workaholic" who discovers her husband is not only cheating on her but has another family in Tuscany. What does she do? She gets drunk and buys a plane ticket to Italy. She arrives in the tiny town of Montevedova, unaware that she is being watched by a troupe of ancient widows - the Secret League of Widowed Darners - who are planning her happy ending. 

The basic premise is pretty familiar. I don't know about you, but I've come across rather a lot of marriage-in-crisis, hop-on-a-plane-to-Tuscany stories, whether they are rom-coms or chick-lit or finding-myself-memoirs. I thought this might be rather a fun read, but nothing particularly special.

Well, in many ways I was right. This is a fun read. Sarah-Kate Lynch's writing style is gregarious, conversational and rather delightful. It's funny. It's sweet. I was hooked from the very. First. Sentence. Tuscany is brought alive to the page. This is definitely one of the most enjoyable books I've reviewed since starting this blog.

All the same, I was fundamentally wrong when I thought that because the premise was familiar this book couldn't be special. There is much more to Lily Turner than we are first told, and there is more to her cheating husband. This is also a story about the pain of being childless, and the effect it has had on a marriage. As enjoyable as the story is, it is also very thoughtful and actually quite a profound portrait of a character. I am encouraged again in the revelation that literature doesn't have to be highbrow or inaccessible to have depth. I also enjoyed the number of clichés set up by Lynch, like the gorgeous, wealthy and melancholy Alessandro, only to be dashed in pieces to the ground. It's not so familiar a premise after all.

I really enjoyed this book. I was a little disappointed with the excessive tidiness of the ending, so I'm not rating it quite so highly as I would otherwise have done, but I really liked this novel nonetheless. It was a breath of fresh air after the dark and intense weeks following the earthquake in Christchurch and the disasters in Japan - exactly what I needed to cheer me up again. I give it four stars.

[American cover]

fosterling

"A young man is found unconscious in a remote forest. He is over seven-feet tall, his skin covered in thick hair, which reminds onlookers of an animal's pelt. When he wakes in a city hospital, he is eerily uncommunicative.
"Speculation begins."

Fascinated by the myths of the yeti or the sasquatch, and the Maori near-equivalent of the maero, Emma Neale has written this novel, Fosterling. It explores the possibility of an outsider who stumbles into human society, and how humans will respond. Bu, the young man in question, has lived almost his entire life in the lush native forests of South Westland (New Zealand) with his parents, who hid from public view after bringing their adoptive son home from Nepal. Now, he arrives in the city of Dunedin, determined to learn about the world and about his own origins. Unsurprisingly, in the fashion of all classic outsider stories, he encounters difficulty after difficulty, and disappointment after disappointment.

I'm not surprised to learn, after reading the novel, that Emma Neale is a poet, because this book is written beautifully. Her writing style is very lyrical, very flowing, even as it is easy to read. It never jars and it is not at all laboured - no one phrase sticks out disproportionately, but all the sentences come together as a whole that is obviously lovely. It's a gift that can't be taught, I think. And she has it.

I liked the possibilities Neale discusses. I like the way she shows up the problems with our own society or the potential problems of shielding children too much, without ever saying these things out loud or giving easy answers. Her main characters tend to be quite vivid, larger than life, and easy to imagine.

Despite all these strengths, however, something didn't click for me. And it's hard to explain why, because so many of the components of this novel are right on target. Here are some ideas, though.

- The novel doesn't seem to go anywhere. It is, perhaps, lacking the classic story arc in all its strength. Neale spends time building up one part of the story, and one other character as if this is her story as well, and then this part and this character disappear. Other things happen. And then other things happen. And then the novel ends.

- The story switches between narrators every few pages. Much of the time it is Bu, and secondary characters, and then sometimes it is an entirely new character who we will never see again. I can certainly understand why Neale has chosen to write the novel this way. If it were all written in third person narrative, we wouldn't get glimpses into Bu's mind in such an immediate way. But if it were all written in Bu's perspective, we wouldn't understand how he appears to other people. So it seems an obvious choice to change narrators reasonably often.

This approach can work. It's a standard tool of classic Victorian authors like Bram Stoker or Wilkie Collins. However, for me, in this novel, it created a disjointed, jumpy feeling, which was especially evident in the ending. Despite the flowing prose, the plot and the structure did not flow well.

Anyway, in the end, although I think this is a novel that is worth reading, for its prose, for its characters, for its ideas, it is not entirely successful in the end. I am a little bit sad about this, because it seemed so promising. So I have given it two and a half stars.

overcoat inspiration

My review of Sue Orr's From Under the Overcoat is now posted on Halfway Down the Stairs. If I have to take it down I will re-post it on here! (I've been naughty and made a late addition to the March issue - hopefully my co-editors will not object!)

This is a short story collection that I loved - both for its interesting inspiration and its fulfilment in ten short stories. Find all the details of my love for it on HDtS. My one minor gripe with it is that almost all of its stories are called 'New Zealand stories' - however, they are all set in the North Island. As a southerner, I object!

However, parochialism aside, this is a really enjoyable collection of stories, and I recommend it highly. I give it four stars.