quick question

Has anybody tried to send something to my P.O. Box and had it returned?

Two people on the Month of Letters forums have contacted me to say their letters/postcards have bounced as "undeliverable." I'm not sure why that's happening (since other stuff has gotten through just fine), but now I'm concerned that other people may have had the same problem.

The DWJ Project: Power of Three

I'm way behind on posting, so expect a couple more of these soon.

This book, more than any other, illustrates how idiosyncratic my divide is between my first-tier favorites and the second tier. Power of Three is in the latter category, not because of any flaw in the story -- it's excellent, probably one of her best -- but simply because it never quite got into my imaginative foundations the way some of her others did. I don't know what made some books do that, and others not; all I know is that it isn't a question of quality. This is a wonderful book.

From the back cover copy, because my brain is too lazy to come up with its own plot summary:

Something is horribly wrong on the Moor. Gair and his people are surrounded by enemies -- the menacing Giants and the devious, cruel Dorig. For centuries the three races have lived side by side, but now suspicion and hatred have drawn them all into a spiral of destruction.

With the existence of his people threatened, Gair realizes that evil forces are at work. For the Moor is blighted by a curse of ancient and terrifying power . . .

A good summary, except that the final bit is quite wrong. I know it sounds more fantastical to talk about ancient curses, but one of the things I like about this novel is that the curse isn't ancient. It was placed within living memory -- it's the first thing that occurs in the book -- and is the simple, horrifying consequence of somebody being greedy and foolish and violent. And, as in The Magicians of Caprona, it's at least in part up to the younger generation to undo it. (Not entirely up to them, though. One of the other things I like is the role played by Gest and Adara, and Mr. Masterfield and Mr. Claybury, and at the center of it all, Hathil.)

There are lots of other things to like, too. The little grace notes in the worldbuilding, like the respect Gair's people pay to bees, and the customs of the Dorig. The perspective on what constitutes magic. The very believable relationships: not only are there lots of great sibling setups throughout this, but once again, as with Caprona, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and a few other books, we get imperfect-but-strong families, instead of abusive parents and neglected children. And the ending is a lovely balance of the mythic and the personal, which is one of the things I have always loved Jones for.

That's a lot of what I wanted to say, but a few more bits do involve spoilers.

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I think I had a few other, smaller things to say, but I've forgotten them. That's what I get for not posting as soon as I finished reading the book, I suppose. :-P Anyway, look for more posts soon!

The DWJ Project: A Tale of Time City

Okay, two things first.

1) Has anybody written the fanfic where the Pevensies get kidnapped away to Time City, and Vivian goes to Narnia? Because really.

2) OMG I WANT A BUTTER-PIE.

Ahem. No, seriously though -- maybe lactose-intolerant people and such can read the description of a butter-pie and not want one, but my god they sound good. (The name, not so much. But the description . . . yes please.)

Anyway, as for the book itself:

Time City -- built eons from now on a patch of space outside time -- was designed especially to oversee history, but now its very foundations are crumbling from age. Two boys are convinced that Time City's impending doom can be averted by a Twenty Century girl named Vivian Smith. They also know that no one will take the wild schemes of children seriously, so they violate nearly every law in the book by traveling back in time to pluck her from a British railway station at the start of World War II in 1939. By the time the boys learn Vivian's just an ordinary girl, they realize it's too late to return her safely -- unless, with her help, they can somehow manage to get Time City's foundations back on the right track. It's either that or she'll be stuck in the far-distant future forever!

"Wild schemes" is right: Vivian realizes fairly quickly that Jonathan and Sam, the two boys who more or less kidnap her from the railway station, were -- well, they were acting like kids. Kids on an adventure, and they didn't really stop to think the whole thing through before it blew up in their faces. What's great about that is, Vivian catches herself acting that way a few times, and catches some (supposed) adults at it, too. I think I love that because, really, let's face it: a lot of us are readers, and if we suddenly found ourselves caught up in events that seemed more like a story than our daily lives . . . well, depending on the events, we'd either shriek and curl into a little ball -- or start thinking of ourselves as if we were the protagonists of a book. So that part rings really true to me.

I also love the cleverness of the entire Time City premise. The history of human beings is shaped like a great horseshoe, stretching from the Stone Age up to the Depopulation of Earth, and Time City -- perched not only on its own patch of space, but time (which makes it not so much "the far-distant future" as something else entirely) -- travels backward along that span, to keep it separate from history. Then there are the polarities, whose nature has been forgotten to the point of making them near-myth, and the stories of Faber John and the Time Lady, who founded the city, and even the political question of how Time City handles tourists from the Fixed Eras, and tries to keep the Unstable Eras from spinning out of control.

(There's also one other thing that amuses the hell out of me, from the scenes where Dr. Wilander sets Vivian at translation -- but that's a long enough story, and enough of a digression, that I'll have to do it in a separate post.)

Spoiler time!

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And that's it for the last of the second-tier favorites. One more anthology to go -- I hope to post about that tonight -- and then we'll be into the final three books, all of which I have left until last for very specific reasons.