I picked up The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson, after Veronica Roth recommended it on her blog. I thought it was interesting that she asked people who find religion to be disgusting and nauseating to read the book with an open mind:

I feel like I should say that if the word “religion” makes you feel squicky, I understand how that feels (I’ve felt that way at certain points in my life, and still do sometimes), but I encourage you to approach this book with an open mind.

I’m sad that she feels it’s necessary to make a special plea to those who find religion repulsive. I’m not saying she didn’t do the right thing (in fact, I’m going to do the same thing), just saying I wish people didn’t find novels squicky when there is an established religious system and a god in the story world.

At any rate, I think fantasy worlds with religious systems are richer than worlds without, so I checked the book out right away. I read one chapter and bought the book. It’s a genre I love, and it starts with a sixteen-year-old girl having to face a life-changing event, which is scenario I love.

So I snapped it right up.

The Cover

I’m afraid I would have never bought this book if I’d been browsing shelves and came across it. I would not have even picked it up to read the backcover copy. I’ve read that others like the cover. The designers and publishers apparently like it. Sadly, I am not taken with it. (I didn’t care for the cover of The Diamond of Darkhold, either, come to think of it. Maybe I have a thing against large blue gems on covers.) If you find the color and the gem with the woman’s face inside of it to be off-putting, disregard the cover and buy the book anyway. It’s a good book. A very good book.

If you like the cover, just ignore that preceding paragraph, please. (But really is it just me? What do you all think of the US cover above and what do you think of the UK cover here? I would have snapped up the UK cover to read the first chapter.)

Enough about the cover. What about the book?

A Smart Heroine

I liked Elisa from the beginning. She was smart, and self-sacrificing. She suffered from a low self-esteem, but she was a strong character from the beginning. Very strong.

At sixteen she is being married off to a king she’s never met. She feels inadequate. She also thinks that her family is getting rid of her because they don’t like her much. She’s a fat girl, and she’s afraid her new husband will hold her in disdain. But all the feelings of inadequacy don’t bring the character down because it’s clear from the begining that she’s a very smart girl. She’s studied classical literature and languages. She’s studied the art of war. She’s not sure what use can she be to anyone but the reader can see that she’s got good brains and we can guess that those are going to come in handy.

I love this kind of heroine. I was just lamenting last month on the fact that so many kick-ass heroines beat up men with their bare hands. This book gave me a kick-ass heroine who outwits her opponents. I liked it.

The Story World

As I’ve already said, I think worlds with religion feel more fleshed out. People are religious. Men have always worshiped something. But there was much more to like than the religion. The book is well-written and the world is well developed. There are forests and deserts and all of it was well painted so I could visualize the countryside and the buildings in the cities. I had a good picture of the land in my head, and I had a good understanding of the political situation.

The Theme

The religion in the book wasn’t Christianity, though it seems sure that the author was influenced by the Christian Scriptures when she wrote up some of her own sacred texts for her world. I don’t care what the religion is, I’m just saying that for people who find Christianity offensive: This book wasn’t pushing Christianity at all.

One lesson in the book that seemed important to the author was the idea that we can’t really know what God’s will is. Different people devoted to the sacred text interpreted it differently, so no one really knew what their God’s will was.  The heroine was the only one who admitted to not knowing his will and that was presented as the superior position, I think. That was an interesting comment the author made on the Church, I thought. The character went to the texts to see for herself what she believed, but she didn’t find any answers in the text, that I remember, which was also interesting.

The book also seems to hit on self-esteem, which is not a favorite theme for me. I, being a cranky Calvinist, would like to see young people today have a lot less self-esteem and a lot more of the mind of Christ which esteems others as better than itself. But I also saw a lot in the book I could get behind. I saw that fat girls aren’t necessarily stupid or lazy. I also saw that beauty is way more than skin deep. Some of the most beautiful characters, physically, were wicked and/or cowardly. The book also made of point of showing that keeping promises is important and that doing what you can do is better than sitting around saying you can’t do anything.

Conclusion

I liked this one very much. I loved several of the characters, including Elisa, and I’m buying the next one in the trilogy for sure. If you like Shannon Hale and Julie Berry, this one is for you.

(No wise cracks from the atheists about how Christianity is based on a book of fantasy. We’ve all heard that one before. Come up with some fresh material.)

If you are a Christian writer, and perhaps if you belong to some other religious group, you’re probably heard people say things like, “Why write fiction? It’s a waste of time. It’s all lies.” Or maybe, “Fiction encourages people to retreat from the real world and hide in a fantasy world.”

Some Christian readers like fiction, but they don’t want anything to do with the fantasy genre. They believe that anything that mentions schools of witchcraft and wizardry, for instance, must be evil.

We can’t live our lives in accordance with what every self-proclaimed Christian has to say, or we’ll all end up picketing funerals with the arrogant, mean, and bizarre Fred Phelps. But we do have a responsibility to listen to our friends and consider when they give us warnings. Christians are called to “submit to one another, insofar as you able,” and we are to rebuke and encourage one another. So when someone rebukes me for writing fiction and encourages me to give it up, I feel a need to stop and consider their arguments.

Many of us did that a long time ago and settled the issue for ourselves, but the conversation continues because there are new writers jumping into the crowded “wannabe published” end of the pool every day. And inevitably the question crops up: “What do you say to family and friends who think writing fiction is sinful because it’s making money by telling lies?”

You can say one of two things, I think: “I don’t care what you think, so leave me alone,” or, “Let’s discuss this.” (A third option, of course would be, “Making money? People make money writing fiction?” But we won’t go there in this post.)

If you go for the second option, I have found a couple of wonderful little videos to help you out. I found these over at Movieology, thanks to Glenda from Ascribelog.

Check them out:

What is the Biblical View of Fantasy Movies: Part 1, in which Michael Minkoff asks if the fantasy genre is the worthy product of the imagination or the rotten fruit of vain speculation. (heh heh, you gotta love this guy.)

What is the Biblical View of Fantasy Movies: Part 2, in which the same Michael Minkoff starts with a recap of part 1, telling us about how poor little Fiction, on his way to the movies, was accosted by Well-meaning Christian and his condemnation machine.

The second video is a bit more involved and I’m not sure I agree with him completely on the Pharisiees and how they understood and rejected the parables, but the entire video is worth considering. (Not surprisingly, there’s a comment on that video, dated August 13, where someone asks Minkoff to clarify what he means when he says the Bible contains much fiction. I’m not sure how anyone could watch the videos and read the comments and not understand what Minkoff believes about whether the Bible is true or what he believes “much fiction” means. Okay, sorry, that was a little mini-rant.)

When Minkoff speaks of fiction as being a Trojan Horse, he’s right on. It’s not that Christians sneak religion into novels. All good novelists want to express something meaningful, I think. It’s why we use fresh metaphors instead of clichés. We want our readers to hear us, instead of yawning because they’ve heard it all before. Sometimes we use short metaphors to describe a small element in the story, and sometimes the whole story is a metaphor.

This Trojan Horse idea is also what Laurel Snyder was doing when she wrote about her happy lesbian couple in her book, Penny Dreadful.  It’s what Jonathan Rogers talks about in How Stories Do Their Work on Us. And it’s what CS Lewis spoke of in God in the Dock when he said:

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects — with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our faith is not likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But, if whenever we read an elementary book on geology, botany, politics, or astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. (For an interesting discussion see the comments that played off this post about opinionated novelists, written by Mike Duran at the Wordserve Water Cooler.)

I say we should all put what we believe to be Truth into our fiction, painting it with fresh pictures or slipping it into the background as “Truth that is universally accepted” and then let the best man win the reader over. We need to read critically, and teach our children to do the same, we need to interact with the stories we read instead of just letting them do their work on us, and we need to write books that cause others to stop and think, “Hmm, is this true?”

That’s what I think, anyway. How about you? Are you purposely trying to put into you book something that is important to you? Homosexual rights? Environmental issues? The power of forgiveness? Do you start with a theme, make a theme stronger after you write the book and figure out what you think the theme is, or ignore theme altogether?
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This post was included in the Christian Carnival, hosted at Inspiks this month. Click over to read more great Christian articles on a variety of topics. If you want to join the carnival, get the schedule here.

It struck me the other day that as often as I think about and talk about my favorite orphaned characters, I have never put Harry Potter in the list.

How odd. I honestly think the books are brilliant. I love how easy they are to get lost in. I love the world and many of the characters. And yet, I never think of Harry when I think of favorite characters in books.

Harry seems like he’d be my kind of orphan—a kid who was abused. A smart, talented kid who was unappreciated. How could anyone read about the awful, narrow-minded, selfish, mean Dursleys and not feel for little Harry who lived in the closet under the stairs and who got a coat hanger and a pair of his uncle’s old socks for his eleventh birthday?

And yet, even though I loved the first three books, I never considered Harry Potter a friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the comical, over-the-top way Dudley Diddicums and his blind, stupid parents treated Harry. But that hyperbole made the Dursley’s feel like cartoon characters—delightful to read (Dudley is the funniest villain around), but not real.

The world seemed real. Rowling painted the place in great detail and that made it feel like she was telling me about an actual place that she knew well. I loved Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. And I grew attached to some characters in the books, too. I loved Hagrid and Fred and George from the start. But Harry and I never bonded.

As the books went on, they got less comical. Harry had real enemies. His fat, red-faced, irrational uncle moved the family to a tiny island in a stormswept sea to escape letters, dropped by owls, that kept coming down the chimney. That was idiotic (and funny and thoroughly enjoyable) but it was not real danger. Dementors? There was real danger. Harry’s godfather who was in prison for murder? That guy was scary. And yet, I still didn’t care much about Harry.

I’m not sure why.

I never thought about it before, and the books are too long for me to go back and read over to see why I didn’t love Harry. But I’m going to guess that Harry never struck me as a good boy who was suffering unjustly. Sure, the Dursley’s treated him badly, and he was stuck there through no fault of his own, but he answered the maltreatment with anger and payback. Some of what he did was accidental, but even the accidents were triggered by his anger.

There is in the little orphans I love, a feeling of unworthiness, maybe, or at least no sense of entitlement. They accept their fate as a matter of course and they desire to better their circumstances through hard work and clean living without bothering to blame anyone for the harsh worlds they inhabit. Anne is spunky and fights back, but she believes Marilla when she says Anne is “next door to a heathen” and she tries to improve herself. Grady accepts Floyd as his friend and doesn’t waste a lot of time railing against his lot in life. He tries to be an honest boy as best he can be, and he takes what life gives him. Gibby’s greatest joy is to serve his drunken, neglectful father, and he doesn’t know that good fathers don’t treat children so horribly.

So I think the orphans I love best are the ones who take their lives as from God’s hand, and they keep walking, doing what they find to do, looking for love as they go, but not really feeling like they’ve been cheated—or certainly not dwelling on it.

Harry is looking for love, too. I loved him best when he found his godfather and I really, really hated that his godfather died. If Sirius had lived it would have changed Harry drastically. When a child knows he’s loved, he reacts to the world differently than the unloved child reacts. But Sirius doesn’t live. Dobby adores Harry and that does raise him up in my estimation some. Just not quite enough. Harry keeps pining after his dead parents, and he seems to be an angry boy much of the time. He talks back to the Dursleys and gets back at them when he’s given opportunity.

Many of the children in the books were a little too bratty for my liking. They were moody and angry a lot of the time. That may be true to life for some teens. But who wants to spend eight hundred pages with children who are so disagreeable?

Harry winds up being heroic, but I think for me it came too late.

I may have to rewrite my last book, because I think my heroine may be too much of a whiner. Maybe I can fix her. If you liked Harry, what was it that drew you to him? Did you think he was too angry, or am I imagining this? What about Dudley? Are there any others out there that thought Dudley Diddicums was hysterical? I remember one scene where he whacks Harry in the head with his school stick. It was so funny. So exactly what Dudley would do. Yes, I thought Dudley and his mother were perfectly drawn.

I haven’t seen a news report, but across the Internet news is spreading that [wikipop]Diana Wynne Jones[/wikipop] has died after a year-long battle with cancer.

I haven’t read many of her books. But one, Drowned Ammet, changed the way that I write in a profound way and set me off on writing the book that later won an SCBWI grant and snagged me an agent. Her world felt so real to me because it had a history, and the people shared beliefs and traditions.

I put that together with what I loved about Hogwarts—Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, and school books, and Wizard’s Chess—all the normal, everyday things that make a world feel real. Only manifested in a way that worked with the story world.

People go to church in our world and they should go to church in the story world. People walk their dogs in our world and they should walk their dogs in the story world. People exchange marriage vows in our world and they should exchange marriage vows in the story world.

With a twist. Always with a little twist. Because the story world is not the real world.

If you haven’t read The Dalemark Quartet, you might give them a try.

I think I’ll celebrate her life by reading Fire and Hemlock.

What about you? Any Diana Wynne Jones fans out there? What are your favorite titles?

Mr. Flaherty is my hero. Not for his making of the Narnia films, though I appreciate what he’s doing there. But what I really love is the opinion piece I just read in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking about Joy Behar saying CS Lewis writes children’s books, Flaherty says:

Mrs. Palin is on the right track by giving C.S. Lewis a prominent place on her reading list. Yet Ms. Behar and other Palin critics have dismissed Lewis’s work, forgetting that Lewis was a medieval and renaissance scholar at Oxford and the author of several brilliant Christian apologetics. Ms. Behar’s dismissal of children’s books as less than important makes her a modern-day Eustace, the type of bully who mocks readers of fairy tales as simpletons.

If I were a dufflepud I’d be telling Flaherty, “Yes, chief, you got that right. You said that one perfectly, chief. No one can say this better than you have.”