# 40 Gracie Green, Joe Tramacchi and Lucile Gill, Tjarany Roughtail

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

# 40 Gracie Green, Joe Tramacchi and Lucile Gill, Tjarany Roughtail (1992)

I found this in the library discard pile - what a bargain at 50 cents! But then I read it and it's quite disappointing. Worth my 50 cents, no doubt, but not great.

It is a collection of traditional Aboriginal stories from the Kimberley, told in English and Kukatja. There are quite a lot of anthologies like this available now, but this was a quite early one - 1992.

Perhaps this early publication date explains the odd decision to include a six page guide to kinship rules which was so complicated that I found it difficult to follow (and I have read these guides to skin groups before). I can't believe that even the most motivated child reader - and the book was placed in junior non-fiction - would be able to wade through it. Likewise the guide to pronunciation.

Tjarany Roughtail was shortlisted by the Children's Book Council of Australia and it won the Eve Pownall Award. This surprises me as usually these are good indications of quality, age-appropriate material.

Slave to Sensation, by Nalini Singh. 38.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This novel prompted the following conversation, held with oyceter via cellphone:

Oyce: The angels-make-vampires writer also wrote a book about shapeshifter condos!

Me: Did you say shapeshifter condoms?

Oyce: Yes! Shapeshifter condos!

Me: Are they specially designed?

Oyce: Well, shapeshifters have special needs.

Me: I guess they’d need different sizes…

Oyce: Yes, depending on what they shapeshift into. Like, leopards need lots of room.

Me: And of course they’d have to be extra-resilient.

Oyce: They do need to allow for wear and tear when they turn into animals.

Me: They’d have to expand and contract really fast without breaking. Especially if some of their penises become forked or something.

Oyce: Forked??? Penises??? What???

Me: Did you say “condoms?”

Oyce: ConDOS -- condominiums!

Regrettably, the special shapeshifter condoms condos are more of a plot device than the subject matter of this paranormal romance. The condos were my second-favorite part of the book. My favorite was that the heroine has extra-special eyes that look like the night sky with stars, and when she has an orgasm, the stars explode into multi-colored fireworks.

In a world in which Changeling shapeshifters have allowed Yosemite to overgrow much of California and the telepathic Psy deal with their nasty little tendency to become psychotic serial killers by suppressing all emotion, multiracial Psy Sascha, who must hide the fact that she has emotions or be forcibly brainwashed, becomes the liaison between Psy and Changeling in order to broker a land deal for condominiums. When she meets hot Changeling Lucas, condoms also become relevant. As there’s a serial killer on the loose, the plot is actually, “He’s a werewolf with a tragic past. She’s a telepath with a deadly secret. Together, they fight crime!”

As I mentioned in my review of Singh’s angels-make-vampires novel, I have terribly mixed feelings about her books.

I love the over the top wish-fulfillment fantasies (eyeball fireworks! Totally literal angel dust!), bizarre yet inventive and detailed worldbuilding, multiracial casts (though I wish she’d stop describing her heroines of color as “exotic”) and a compellingly beach-read style.

I hate the gender roles, in which men are turned on by dominating women, and women are turned on by being dominated. (I don’t mind this if it’s BDSM role-playing, though I prefer female-dominant. What I hate reading about is when this is portrayed as the way romance normally goes.) This means I don’t like Singh’s romances. This is a problem, as romance is central to the romance genre. In this novel, the hero keeps talking about “marking” the heroine so everyone will know she belongs to him. This would be gross enough as is, but since the book involves wolf shapeshifters, I kept thinking he was planning to pee on her. (It’s actually done by biting.)

And yet Singh’s books have that same addictive quality as Laurell Hamilton’s early novels, which had me running out to buy more even though they had too much sex and not enough action and I detested both of Anita’s love interests. (I gave up on Hamilton at around the point where I had to detest all 69 of Anita’s love interests.) I… oh, I confess it… will undoubtedly read more of the Psy/Changeling series, and even went online to find out the release date of the next angel/vampire book.

Slave to Sensation (The Psy-Changelings Series, Book 1) (Berkley Sensation)

Three About the So-Called Corps of Discovery

[sanguinity]

60. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Bad River Boys.

A children's picture book of the encounter between the Sicangu Lakota and the Lewis and Clark expedition, told from the perspective of the three Sicangu boys who had swum out into the river to greet the expedition. The meeting between the Sicangu and the Corps of Discovery isn't simplified, moralized, or narrativized, which makes this book difficult to follow if you don't know the contexts or the history, and those looking for a neatly-told "story" will be disappointed. There are explanatory historical notes in the back, but they're brief.

(For those who are unfamiliar: the Sicangu controlled trade access on that stretch of the Bad River -- the Missouri -- and expected tribute from traders moving upriver. Whereas the French traders had been willing to pay such tribute, the U.S. Corps of Discovery was not only unwilling, but considered themselves forerunners of the new local authority. Add to that the fact that Sicangu authority wasn't invested in one guy and his underlings, the way the Americans kept behaving as if it was, plus inadequate translation, and the whole mess came down to an armed standoff between the Sicangu and the Discovery Corps, the only violence or near-violence of the expedition.^*)

One of the things I very much liked about the book is that it is framed as completely normal to be a Sicangu boy; there's none of the "explanatory" exoticizing one too often sees, and various details make it clear that the Lakota were not savages, but people who had a high respect for children, guests, and good manners. Similarly, I liked that the book put Lewis and Clark into an appropriate, non-mythic historical context: the boys are very familiar with white men and speak some French, while the chiefs decorate their tipis with French, British, and Spanish flags.

There are some things that I don't like, however: it is too easy, in my opinion, to misread the adults' demands for tribute appropriate to their status as merely greedy children wheedling for more candy, and York describes himself (albeit with the aid of a interpreter who has previously been established as faulty) as having "once been a wild animal," before he was captured by slave traders. One of the strengths of the book is that Sneve doesn't condescendingly tell the reader how s/he should be interpreting the story, but in both cases, I would have liked the text to be clearer about the intercultural mangling of POV that was happening in those exchanges.

I have mixed feelings about the illustrations, as well. The opening spread makes me happy, as do most of the shots of the children. (I especially like the children treading water in the river, having swum out to meet the Corps' boats and discovering them possibly not so friendly, covertly signing to each other to swim underwater if the encounter turns worse.) I adore this full-page shot of York, but the very next page is rampaging, openmouthed, braves-with-tomahawks, a la The Matchlock Gun and too many westerns. There's something a little too, I dunno, romanticized about this set of illustrations.

I feel like I'm being more critical than the book deserves -- I mostly wish there were a lot more children's books like this. Children's books that portray Indians as something that it's utterly normal to be, books that don't relegate Indians to backdrops or scenery, nor foreground them only as exotic, tragic fantasy material. I want children's books that talk about important cultural/historical markers from Indian points of view, instead of faux-Indian points of view. There's a lot that I like about this book, and some things that I wish were different, but my feelings about Bad River Boys mostly revolve around how incredibly rare it is to see a book like this.

* In his journal, Clark referred to the Sicangu as "the pirates of the Missouri" and "the vilest miscreants of the savage race." I note that it was hardly the Sicangu who were the pirates; Lewis and Clark had been trying to smuggle trade goods upriver past the Sioux!

61. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (ed), Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes.

Ten Native authors -- Geraro A. Baker (Mandan-Hidatsa), Roberta Basch (Puyallup and Coeur D'Alene), Richard Basch (Clatsop Nehalem), Roberta Conner (Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Debra Magpie Earling (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Allen V. Pinkham Sr. (Nez Perce), Mark N. Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock), and Bill P. Yellowtail (Crow) -- writing nine essays about Lewis and Clark and the so-called Corps of Discovery for the 200th anniversary of the expedition.

It's hard to sum this one up because the (white) editor deliberately exercised the loosest possible control: he selected the ten authors, then promised to publish what they wrote without editing for tone or position. Some authors brought on the snark, others wrote very personal reflections, others offered their own nations' accounts of the Corps of Discovery, others explicitly debunk aspects of the Lewis and Clark mythos. Some themes are consistent throughout the essays, however. Lewis and Clark were not the "first" anything that the mythos so often claims to be: not the first discoverers, not the first elections, not even the first white men. Also, the Corps of Discovery was a recent event, one that occurred within the stream of history, not at the beginning of it.

Two essays that I particularly wanted to mention:

Roberta and Richard Basch's "The Ceremony at Ne-Ah-Coxie," which gives the history of the Clatsop tribe, who had hosted the Corps of Discovery in their winter quarters at Fort Clatsop. There is a pizza parlor in Seaside that displays of a photo of a woman who is allegedly "the last of the Clatsop", but the Clatsop continue to exist, albeit federally unrecognized. In 1951 the Clatsop negotiated a treaty which formally ceded land and would have established a reservation; that treaty was never ratified, and the proposed reservation became a military base, and then a state park.

Bill Yellowtail's snarktastic "Meriwether and Billy and the Indian Business", full of lovely details sporking the L&C mythos -- such as L&C repeatedly arriving places to find that their trade goods had arrived months before them -- interspersed with Yellowtail's thoughts on modern Indian governance and entrepeneurship. The essay closes:

Clark was righteously sore about his loss of valuable horses, ostensibly to some nocturnal Crow Indian entrepeneurs. He vented his pique by actually drafting an extensive speech by means of which he would chastise the Crows. "Children. Your Great Father will be very sorry to hear of the (Crows) stealing the horses of his Chiefs warrors whome he sent out to do good to his red children on the waters of the Missoure." But then he goes on magnaminously: "Children. If any one two or 3 of your great chiefs wishes to visit your great father and go with me... You will then see with your own eyes and here with your own years what the white people can do for you. They do not speak with the tongues nor promis what they can't perform."

We can only wonder how the Crows would have reacted, had Clark ever found them to deliver his diatribe.

It is not so hard to imagine how we would respond to that speech today.

Probably we would say: Meriwether and Billy. Welcome back after all these years. Bring horses.

62. Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

Poem cycle by Afrilachian poet Frank X Walker, narrating the Corps of Discovery's expedition in the voice of York. These are gorgeous and subsversive snapshots of moments of the journey; taken together, they build a life-story that is very obviously operaticin its sweep.

Sprit Mound

We returned to the boat at sunset, my servent nearly exosted with heat thurst and fatigue, he being fat and unaccustomed to walk as fast as I went wast he cause.
—William Clark, August 25, 1804

Capts. Clark an Lewis together with nine mens
an me along to carry an cook
walked 'most a whole day to see Spirit Mound.

I didn't want to go no place
so sacred even the Indians afraid to step,
so I pretends to be more tired than I was.

This piece a land so full a spirits
I felt little hairs praising on the back a my neck
but Capt. Clark don't seem to understand
what be sacred to others any more
than he see the difference
between me ana pack mule.

Maybe the chief should have bade him
to think a it as the Great White Father's
mother's undergarments or that
what's under her skirt.

#22: Cindy Pon, _Silver Phoenix_

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

#22: Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix

Ai Ling is supposed to be getting married, as a good daughter should. But at the dinner that's meant to seal her betrothal, her prospective mother-in-law publicly rejects her, ruining her chances for a good marriage. In order to escape a bad one, Ai Ling journeys to the Emperor's court at the Palace of Fragrant Dreams to seek her father. Along the way, she meets Chen Yong, who is on a quest of his own. Their quests are made more challenging by the new and mysterious power emerging within Ai Ling and by the evil forces which seek to destroy her and Chen Yong.

I loved Ai Ling's rich world: the Chinese gods and creatures, the delicious food, the sights and sounds and colors and textures, all beautifully described. The plot is fast-paced but meanders a little; Ai Ling's encounters are so fascinating, though, that I didn't mind the meandering much. Ai Ling is a wonderfully real heroine, neither beautiful nor always brave, but always fighting for what she wants. She has a temper and she doesn't always make the right choices, especially when it comes to using her strange mind control powers. Chen Yong and other male characters support her and help her, but when it comes down to the climax of the book, she fights her own battle and wins, though at a cost. I wasn't entirely satisfied by the ending, which was oddly open-ended as regards the book's romance, but I've heard (I hope correctly) that Pon is working on a sequel, which I hope will be as much fun as this book was.

I originally got this from the library, but in the interests of encouraging the publisher to publish the sequel (or whatever else Pon writes), I bought a copy after reading it. Oh, and I'd also like to note that the lovely cover features an Asian girl, so good for Harper Collins for buying the book in the first place (after Pon had been told that "Asian fantasy doesn't sell") and for not whitewashing the cover.