Dhan Gopal Mukerji: Kari, the Elephant, and Hari, the Jungle Lad.

[sanguinity]

11. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Kari, the Elephant.

Adventures of a boy, his elephant, and their monkey. The plot rather rambles -- I'm not sure you could even say it has a plot, as such -- but if you're looking for fantasy fodder of having your very own elephant (and who isn't?), this works very nicely.

Written in 1922, and very much falls into the genre of the old-school boys adventure novel, which is a genre that I have always enjoyed. Each chapter is more-or-less a separate adventure, where "adventure" can variously be defined as "something I tried to train Kari to do," "trouble Kari and Kopee and I got into," "that one job we took," "yet another time that Kari was a hero," and "when Kari fell in love." I would have eaten this up when I was a kid. As an adult, I still eat it up, I just use a spoon and napkin while I do.

Warning for animal harm. (skip spoiler)

Training Kari to get along with dogs doesn't work out so well for the dogs; big game hunting; and in the set-up for the sequel, Kari is abused by Englishmen, and the boy can't put a stop to it.

Also, available from Project Gutenberg, if you like such things.


12. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Hari, the Jungle Lad.

Sequel to Kari the Elephant, written fifteen years later. Mukerji grew as a writer in that time. This one has a plot! And characterization! In all other respects, it is very much in line with the first.

Hari is the lazybones son of a fairly well-to-do farmer: when we meet him, he is shirking work, hiding up under the eaves, pulling out the roof's thatch in lazy-day boredom. Then the village and the farm are destroyed, his life is saved by a mysterious elephant, and Hari and his father take to the jungle to make their living as hunters. The elephant, of course, is Kari -- the most famous and wisest and best elephant EVAR (um, did we read the same prequel?) -- and the novel gradually becomes a quest to reunite Kari with his boy/owner/trainer from the first book.

There are things in Hari that make me go hmm a bit. Hari's mother is killed when the village is destroyed, and her death seems to have no effect on Hari and his father. Me, I don't much like the trope of Killing Mom So That Adventures Can Be Had, and the effortlessness of her disposal rankles a bit extra. Furthermore, Hari has a deeply-entrenched case of hero worship for his father; normally that wouldn't bug me, but his father is unfailingly portrayed as ACTUALLY REALLY THE BESTEST AND WISEST AND MOST KNOWLEDGABLEST AT EVERYTHING EVER FOR ALWAYS. I keep poking at the characterization of the father, not believing that he could really have been as perfect as all that. Also, some of the hunting and jungle lore makes me wonder if Mukerji actually knew anything about hunting? Or if maybe the hunting lore is rooted in the same heroic non-reality as Jack London writing about sled dogs? Of course, people who know more about India than I do (many!), might find more things that they go hm about.

...but if you can put the above aside: lions and tigers and elephants and buffalo and sleeping in trees and sekrit jungle knowledge and quests and ADVENTURES!

Catching-up post: Jemisin, Love, Okorafor, Swee-Lin Price, Franklin

[dorothean]

I haven't posted here in a long time, but I've been reading! I have a few longer reviews to post later, but this is a round-up of books I didn't have much to say about.

N.K. Jemisin, the Inheritance Trilogy: Delightful, with reservations. Folks have already posted a lot about these novels in this community, so I'll just link to my rather inadequate written reactions on Goodreads for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of the Gods.

Jeremy Love, Bayou, Volume 1: Why doesn't my library have Volume 2? From Goodreads,

...the LIGHT. Underwater. Yellow sunlight. Red-orange sunset. Pink dawn. The black of a jail cell. Murky brown at the bayou. Blue to carry a shotgun across the field.

This is a beautiful story to look at, often at the same time it's horrifying.

I want to claim that Bayou, at least as of this first volume, isn't fantasy as much as magical realism. The fantastic elements aren't part of normal life (except insofar as they're the gigantic iridescent shadows of normal life) but neither are they more terrifying or abnormal to Lee, the protagonist, than those parts of her reality that she must deal with at the side of her father or other adult relatives.

My favorite pages are those on which we see Lee through Bayou's eyes. In one, as she prepares to do something Bayou hasn't the courage for, she isn't wearing her patched dress but a flowing gown and gold around her neck and in her ears and hair. Later, when she cries for Bayou to help her, he sees her straining against a chain. Whom is Bayou remembering?

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch: Enjoyed greatly, but I've seen so many other people's writing about this book that I couldn't think of much to say for myself. On Goodreads, comparing Akata Witch favorably to Harry Potter.

Fiona Swee-Lin Price, Success with Asian Names: This is a reference work for people with English as their first language who encounter people with Asian-language names professionally. Since I'm in the target audience, I have no idea how accurate the information is, but it seems very helpful! My post here mostly just explains what kind of information the book contains.

John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988: My review is rather dull, but I <3 <3 <3 John Hope Franklin and definitely recommend checking this book out from the library and reading the essays that seem interesting to you, if you're into U.S. history or historiography.

There are accounts of Franklin's experiences as a historian, from conducting research while being racially segregated to helping to shape public policy that ended segregation. There are several very interesting essays that deal with the historiography of the Reconstruction period and popular ideas about the South. There are essays that show how history can help us evaluate current political questions, and there are essays that delve into the minutia of minor historical figures' lives.

Franklin was a rather dry writer, and it took me a very long time to finish all of these essays. But he's also capable of deep and extended irony, especially when discussing rationalizations for slavery and segregation. Some of these passages come from his addresses to various historical societies. I would have liked to hear him deliver these speeches.

Sherry Thomas, Beguiling the Beauty

[dorothean]

Beguiling the Beauty is a romance novel set in 1896. It's the first in a trilogy about three women -- this novel's heroine, her sister, and their sister-in-law. Beguiling the Beauty came out last week and the other two will also be published this year.

I actually enjoyed most of the experience of reading Beguiling the Beauty. At first, I rated it three stars (out of five) on Goodreads. Then I started writing my review. Thinking harder about what I didn't like about the book, I took off one star, then another. The part of me that said, "Damn, this is a pretty terrible story" defeated the part of me that cried "But the dinosaur fossils! The boundary negotiation! The way the ending is like the ending of a play!" It was a strange experience, and somehow disapproving of this book doesn't make me any less devoted a fan of Sherry Thomas.

Here's most of my review from Goodreads -- I've just left off the first couple of paragraphs, which complain about the cover art.

...if someone had told me that the next Sherry Thomas book would involve two people who grow affectionate towards one another thanks to their shared love of paleontology, I would have been ecstatic.

Then, if someone had told me that it was going to have one of those plots that I'm a bit sick of -- the kind where the hero tricks the heroine into falling in love with him because he actually hates her (or someone close to her) and he's just using her emotions to get revenge -- except with the gender roles swapped, I would have been cautiously intrigued.

What I actually knew is the beginning of the back cover blurb: Duke blahdiblah meets mysterious Baroness soandso while traveling, hot passionate affair, then she disappears because she's secretly "a proper young widow," YAWN. Good job I already love Sherry Thomas's writing!

Despite the dinosaurs, however, I did not love this book. Well, I loved the dinosaurs (look, in this story, the act of sending a massively heavy set of fossilized dinosaur footprints to the other person is highly fraught with emotional significance), and Thomas as always has her moments of very beautiful prose. But it's hard to really get into a romance if you dislike the people who are having the romance.

It turns out that switching the gender roles doesn't really make me like revenge plots anymore. ( Spoilers from here on down )