Review: Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan

Tags: young adult, fantasy, short story collection

Summary

Yellowcake brings together ten short stories from the extraordinarily talented Margo Lanagan--each of them fiercely original and quietly heartbreaking.

The stories range from fantasy and fairy tale to horror and stark reality, and yet what pervades is the sense of humanity. The people of Lanagan's worlds face trials, temptations, and degradations. They swoon and suffer and even kill for love. In a dangerous world, they seek the solace and strength that comes from family and belonging.

These are stories to be savored slowly and pondered deeply because they cut to the very heart of who we are. [summary from Goodreads]

Review

Quick—someone teach me how to review a short story collection. I’m afraid I didn’t take notes on individual stories as I read this, so just a few words on the collection as a whole.

The book’s afterword explains not only Lanagan’s inspiration for each of these stories, which I found interesting to read, but also that the majority of these stories have been previously published elsewhere. If you’ve been a dedicated YA short story anthology reader, particularly of the SFF kind, then you may have read some of these stories already. It’s probably a good idea to know this, in order to avoid buyer’s disappointment.

The best audience for YELLOWCAKE is devoted Lanagan fans, or readers who have read a book or two by her and are curious for more. I fall into the latter, perhaps moving into the former. Like her other books, the stories in YELLOWCAKE don’t seem like they should work, but they do. In each of them is a vague echo of something familiar: I felt like I had read the essence or the ideas of some of them before. But in Lanagan’s uniquely skillful hands, the ideas turn into phantasmal sights, old and new at the same time.

I’m not sure if there’s a connecting thread running through all these stories. Sometimes I felt like I could catch hold of a connection, but then the next story comes along and dashes my tentative theories into pieces. The best I can come up with is that this short story collection persuasively argues, in a peripheral, is-it-or-is-it-not kind of way, the importance of having a little more magic—however you define it—in our lives.

Cover discussion: In this age of movie-poster-clone book covers, this quiet and slightly mysterious one stands out.

Knopf / May 14, 2013 / Hardcover / 240pp. / $16.99

e-galley received for review from publisher and NetGalley.

Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

Tags: YA, magical realism, selkies, families

Summary

Review

When you read a Margo Lanagan book, you expect it to both confuse and enthrall you. And THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND delivers that head-spinning, gut-churning, fizzy-brained mixture of “what in the world is going on?” and “did she really go there?” and “oh my goodness she is a genius.”

You can read THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND as a nontraditionally narrated snapshot of an island’s history, with no straightforward plot and no answers to what’s right or what’s wrong in this world. That’ll either confuse the hell out of you, or you will be delighted at the amount of space Lanagan allows readers to bring in their own values and interests to the story. Those who want to find a depiction of the complex meanings of domestic loyalty get that. Or you can also read it for its marvelous craft, its characterization and worldbuilding. It’s a story that gives no clear answers, and is all the more special because of that.

Much like Thisby Island of The Scorpio Races, Rollrock Island feels like an entity of its own. Lanagan skillfully weaves a picture of an island suffocated by yet dependent on its claustrophobic living conditions, neighbors knowing one another’s businesses and knowing who marries who and who’s doing what with who else’s woman. I find stories contained in a small area, where each inhabitant must be developed with his or her unique idiosyncrasies, so much more interesting and realistic than plain-Jane YAs set in Anywheretown, America. The people and the island setting force one another to reveal their imperfect, weird aliveness.

For those who appreciate great writing and are tired of the repetitious plots and characters that appear in so much YA, THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND will renew your faith in the magic of writing.

Similar Authors
Maggie Stiefvater

Knopf Books / Sept. 11, 2012/ Hardcover / 320pp. / $17.99

e-galley received from NetGalley and publisher.

Waiting on Wednesday (120)

Long time no WoW! YA and I have been working through potholes in our relationship lately. I'm telling it that it hasn't been trying hard enough to become a better being, and in return it's telling me that I can't think of it as a single being, that there are some diamonds in the increasing rough. But anyway. On to the main feature. Here's an upcoming book that I hope will put the "wow" back into WoW.

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

On remote Rollrock Island, men go to sea to make their livings—and to catch their wives.

The witch Misskaella knows the way of drawing a girl from the heart of a seal, of luring the beauty out of the beast. And for a price a man may buy himself a lovely sea-wife. He may have and hold and keep her. And he will tell himself that he is her master. But from his first look into those wide, questioning, liquid eyes, he will be just as transformed as she. He will be equally ensnared. And the witch will have her true payment.

Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire, despair, and transformation. With devastatingly beautiful prose, she reveals characters capable of unspeakable cruelty, but also unspoken love.

When you have Melina Marchetta saying, "It's my favourite Margo Lanagan and that's saying something. It's truly beautiful writing," what more do you really need?

The Brides of Rollrock Island will be published in hardcover in the US by Random House on September 11, 2012.

Guest Post + GIVEAWAY with Margo Lanagan!

Today I have the incredible opportunity of being a stop on the blog tour for Margo Lanagan, internationally renowned Aussie YA author and recipient of the 2009 Printz Honor award for her book Tender Morsels. I'm in the middle of reading this book right now, and while it's far from an easy read, it's a beautiful book ripe with lots of points for discussion. I'm literally taking a pencil and underlining passages that struck me as beautiful or meaningful, and I rarely do that for anything other than school texts!

A review of Tender Morsels will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, you get to hear from Margo herself, and have a chance to win a copy of this ambitious and one-of-a-kind book! Welcome, Margo, to Steph Su Reads!

What I Do When I Get Stuck

Lots of people (including many schoolchildren) ask me what I do when a story stops working, or just stops - stops feeding itself through my brain onto the paper. Behind this question are many hours of suffering, and I have to say, behind my answer there's plenty of time being anxious and wondering “However will I fix this?”—this story, this plot problem, this knotted sentence.

Usually what’s happened when I get stuck is that I’ve lost perspective; I’m in too close to the story to see all the strands in the knot I’ve created. I lose the sense of a way forward, and that opens a little hole in my brain through which anxiety flows in freely. This leads to flooding of my problem-solving faculties. To sit in front of the story being anxious is fruitless. I need to go off and do something practical, unrelated to writing or story, preferably unrelated to any words at all. I need to put the problem so far out of my head that I forget the anxiety entirely, forget the details of the problem, and with them the details of the fears that are so expertly immobilising me.

Sometimes just time will fix things; after my break I’ll turn my mind back to the story and, because I’m no longer crouched tensely over it, the awkward story-bits will unlock themselves from their death-grip and let me push them around and find a solution.

Sometimes, if I’m writing to deadline and in a flat panic, there’ll be a clear need for me to get oxygen to my brain. In those cases, aiming for a state of relaxed disengagement is futile—there just isn’t time. What I do then is go for a swim, or a bike ride, or at least a very brisk walk. Breathe hard, focus on the exterior world, walk/pedal/swim ... and wait. Look at dogs, trees, other people’s faces, the sky; get a sense of how small I am, how slight this task is, how transient. You can do this, Margo; you’ve sorted out bigger problems before. It’s never as hard as you fear; take courage. Reassure myself with a bit of the real world. Ten minutes or so out from the end of the aerobic exercise, I’ll turn my mind back to the story, and make an answer of some kind happen. Again, having relaxed a bit usually lets some constructive thought in.

Sometimes I have to admit: Oh, that’s as far as this idea goes. There’s nothing more to it; it was simpler than I thought. This can be surprising, but it need not be disappointing. Hunting around for ways to reanimate an idea, to build a story with a longer tail, using all the extra material that I’ve already built onto the original idea, can be the most fun part of the project. Just how far can you take this?

I’ve learnt to recognise when I can’t take things further, when an idea has simply died on me, or I’ve fallen out of the frame of mind where I can make something of it. And again, this doesn’t have to be a disaster. Another idea will come, another story will nudge at me and start telling me how it wants to be written. If the spark of one idea has died, I won’t waste breath blowing and blowing on it, desperate for it to re-ignite. It’ll light up again - given time, given thought, given absence of fear - if it’s any good at all.

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Wise words from a master storyteller to all of us aspiring writers. I'll keep Margo's advice in mind whenever I get so frustrated with my own writing that I just want to put the pen down forever. Thank you, Margo! If you want to get more of her writing, check out her blog at Among Amid While. The other bloggers participating in this tour are:

Monday, March 22nd: Through A Glass, Darkly www.throughaglass.net

Tuesday, March 23rd: Steph Su Reads http://stephsureads.blogspot.com

Wednesday, March 24th: Bildungsroman http://slayground.livejournal.com

Thursday, March 25th: Cynsations http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/

Friday, March 26th: The Story Siren http://thestorysiren.com

Saturday, March 27th: Shaken & Stirred http://gwendabond.typepad.com/bondgirl

I hope you check these other stops out!

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Giveaway Opportunity

Thanks to the marvelous generosity of K at Random House, I have THREE (3) copies of Margo's book, Tender Morsels, to give to three lucky winners! This giveaway is open to US mailing addresses only, and ends Friday, April 9, 2010. To enter, please fill out the form below. Good luck!