I See Noom and Noom Sees Me (original) (raw)

Lost in the Moment and Found, by Seanan McGuire – The books in this series change between being about the magical lands in which various children find themselves and about how they deal with their experiences afterwards. As with some of the others, this story deals with abuse. The young Antsy Ricci runs away from home when her mother sides with her new husband, who gaslights and grooms her. This takes place pretty early on in the tale, and she never encounters him again after that, which is a relief. Fantastic dangers aren’t usually as disturbing to read about as real-world ones, at least for me. After entering a magical door, Antsy finds herself working in a magical shop where lost things end up. Doors in this shop lead to a lot of other worlds as well. Antsy finds herself losing her childhood and being exploited in a different way by the talking animals at the shop. One thing that resonated with me was how Antsy doesn’t like broccoli but will still eat it, while she has a visceral reaction to peppers. It makes so much sense to me, but I’m not sure everyone gets it. I did think it seemed a little weird that this book and the earlier In an Absent Dream both take place in a strange marketplace, but they don’t operate in the same way.

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories, by A.S. Byatt – While the subtitle is accurate, it’s the titular tale that takes up the majority of this book. And apparently the movie from last year, Three Thousand Years of Longing, was based on it. I wondered about that when I found out what the story was about, although all I know of the film is what I’ve seen in trailers. All of the stories were originally published in different places, but they’re all about genre awareness, essentially stories about stories. “The Glass Coffin” is a take on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, where the tailor who rescues a princess gives her the choice of whether she wants to marry, and she ends up spending most of her time hunting with her brother while the tailor practices his trade. “The Eldest Princess” plays on the idea that the oldest sibling in a fairy tale is always doomed to fail, a theme also addressed in Andrew Lang’s Prince Prigio and Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Her somewhat atypical companions on her quest are a scorpion, a toad, and a cockroach. “Gode’s Story” is about a sailor trying to make a miller’s daughter jealous, and it becomes a ghost story. “Dragon’s Breath” uses an invasion of dragons as a metaphor for survival during war; it was written in response to the bombing of Sarajevo in 1994. Finally, the main story is about a scholar and lecturer in literature and storytelling freeing a jinn from a bottle and having a romantic relationship with him, with their very different perspectives emphasized throughout. There are a lot of references in this, obviously including the Arabian Nights, but also the Canterbury Tales and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The jinn tells his story, which includes his encounters with King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. One passage that I identified with was, “She had sat in Sunday school…and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true. She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made up because she had been told they were special because true.” I do think we lose something by not viewing Christian lore the same way we do mythology, but I know that’s a touchy subject.

Merlin’s Booke: Stories of the Great Wizard, by Jane Yolen – This is an anthology of stories and poems Yolen wrote about the famous mage of the Arthurian legends. I’d previously read her Young Merlin Chronicles, and two of the pieces here were the bases for those books. “The Sword and the Stone” also became the seed for a longer tale, Sword of the Rightful King, but I haven’t read that one. Not only does Merlin’s characterization change considerably from one story to another, but other elements and characters do as well. Guinevere is, at various times, a nearly mindless child brought up specifically to be Arthur’s wife, in disguise as a male knight, and the maker of a sword on Avalon. The stories also differ considerably in tone. “The Confession of Brother Blaise” is about how Merlin is said to have been the child of a nun who was raped by a demon, and how Blaise saved him. It has the monk dictating the tale to Geoffrey of Monmouth. “The Dragon’s Boy” has Merlin playing the part of a dragon in order to teach the once and future king, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz. Other tales deal with Merlin’s dream about the two dragons and his entrapment by Nimue. And “Epitaph” is about modern reactions to someone finding Merlin’s tomb in the present day. It’s a pretty good collection, although the tales vary in quality.

Cugel’s Saga, by Jack Vance – The third Dying Earth book was released almost twenty years after the previous one, but it picks up the narrative pretty much where it left off. Cugel continues with his misadventures, trying to get back to Almery and get his revenge on the magician Iucounu. He’s still just as much a scoundrel as before, often trying to rip someone off, although many of the people he encounters are as well. At one point, he steals some anti-gravity magic, and puts it to some good use, albeit not without arguing about the quality of his accommodations on the floating ship. It further develops this strange and creative world, with such oddities as a ship pulled by giant worms, and a man with four fathers who share some body parts like the Graeae. One town is home to a society that claims to keep the Sun’s route intact, with the people living in what used to be gourds but were gradually replaced with wood.

The Magical Land of Noom, by Johnny Gruelle – While best known as the creator of Raggedy Ann, Gruelle also wrote this book, originally published in 1922. It begins with two children, Johnny and Janey, building a flying machine out of wood and other scraps. Somehow, it actually starts flying, taking the kids to the far side of the Moon, hence the title.

Their grandparents follow them in a makeshift flying boat of their own, also with no explanation as to how it would work. It’s interesting that the children are accompanied by adult guardians, which seems a little unusual for such fantasies, but the grandparents are pretty whimsical and accepting of the strange place where they find themselves. It includes such children’s fantasy staples as edible landscape, a flying umbrella, and lots of enchantments.

There are two villains terrorizing the land, a rhyming magician and a nasty witch.

It’s not the most original story, I suppose, but it’s pretty charming and whimsical, and has impressive illustrations by the author, all seemingly intact in the Gutenberg version. Like a lot of other children’s books around the time, it bears some clear resemblance to the Oz books. And eventually, Ray Powell would bring Raggedy Ann and Andy into Oz, so there’s an additional connection.