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Showing posts with label fantasy fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy fiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The Memory Garden by Mary Rickert

 


Perfect for Halloween, The Memory Garden by Mary Rickert is a treat. 

Mistaken for a witch, Nan is actually an older lady who happens to have a shoe garden. People send her cast-off shoes and they become the perfect planters for hollyhock, pennyroyal and mallow. 

Along with harsh words, people leave clothes, bread, honey. Eventually, someone leaves a baby in a shoe box. This sets all kind of figurative fireworks and changes the course of Nan's life. 

The author's use of foreshadowing is superb:

"Nan tries to hold her breath against the scent of memory, but there they are, the three of them in whispered conference, standing in the snow, promising to die with the secret of Eve's last hours, bound by the very oath that would tear them asunder."

This is a story of three old women with a dark secret and the baby (now grown into a teenager) whom Nan has adopted.

Similar titles:
Shipman, Viola. The Heirloom Garden. 

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Summerlong


In Summerlong, a girl called Lionness has uncanny abilities. She smells like meadows, enchants children and calms Orcas. She owns nothing of value and yet she lives rent-free in an older couple's garage. 

Abe thinks she looks like Botticelli's Primavera; Joanna, his live-in wife, agrees to let the girl stay in their garage. She worries, though, that her daughter, Lily, will fall in love with Lionnness.

Though they love each other, the couple's relationship is seriously strained when Lionness' husband comes looking for her at the restaurant where she works.

At this point, the novel makes a U-turn. Abe makes love to Lionness, though its never really clear why. He's in his sixties and she is presumably in her twenties but actually something non-human, Queen of the Underworld.

If Abe is unfaithful, Joanna, often called Delvechio, wants to do the same with Mr. Mardikian, who is really the God of the Underworld. First, though, she wants to shoot hoops.

Beagle combines the fantastic with the prosaic in such a superb way that none of it seems outlandish.

Peter Beagle wrote his best known work, The Last Unicorn, while in his twenties.

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