Inspire Me with Lou Kuenzler

As part of the Finding Black Beauty blog tour, I'm pleased to welcome the author, Lou Kuenzler onto the blog to talk about what inspired her to write this book. 

When my editor at Scholastic asked me if I would like to “revisit” or “reimagine” a classic story for contemporary readers, I knew at once that it would be Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty - a book I had read (and wept over) many times as a child growing up on a farm in Devon. The book was important to me - not just because it was about horses, which I loved - but because it felt real and gritty and sad. I loved how the book could make me cry - big heaving sobs sometimes. Crying wasn’t always something that came easily to me. I was sent away to boarding school at the age of seven (one of only two girls amongst hundreds of boys for my first few years away). Learning not to cry, not to be seen to be ‘a baby’, very quickly became a survival mechanism. After the first week of the first term, I don’t think I ever allowed myself to cry because I missed home. I did have my copy of Black Beauty though (perhaps not when I was seven, but certainly a few years later). I was happy to cry under the covers with my torch for the beautiful horse who is taken away from his mother, the spreading chestnut tree and his wonderful country home (no big heaving sobs in case anyone else heard me of course). I don’t think back then I had a clue what I was doing - that I was transferring my own sense of loss and estrangement onto the story. And anyway, it is a cracking adventure too!

Perhaps it was those childhood memories, my own association with the horse, that meant when I came to consider the best way to approach my modern version, I decided almost at once that it would not be told from the point of view of Black Beauty himself (as the original is) but through the eyes of a young girl. In my story it is Josephine, disguised as a stable lad, who talks directly to the reader. Josie has lived a happy and privileged childhood until she is forced to make her own way in the world when her father dies and she is turned out of her home. Desperate to work with horses, she has no choice (in Victorian England) but to pretend to be a boy. The minute she cuts her hair short and binds her chest, she is plunged into a world of boys and men. This again, of course, is familiar territory for me … although it is only now that I have been asked to write this blog that I am joining up the dots with quite such startling self-awareness. Thank you, Serendipity. You have really made me consider the true reason that Anna Sewell’s wonderful story may have always inspired me so much.

Finding Black Beauty by Lou Kuenzler is published in October 2016 by Scholastic. 

Summary

Told from the point of view of a young girl who masquerades as a boy in order to become a groom, this is the other side of the classic horse story BLACK BEAUTY. Aspiring groom Jo comes to love Beauty and when they are separated she travels to London to find him - on the way solving the mystery of her long-lost mother. A sweeping tale of a young girl and her love for a horse, and the circumstances that divide them.

To find out more about Lou Kuenzler: 

Website / Twitter

Have you heard about Hogarth Shakespeare?

Have you heard about Hogarth Shakespeare? No. Well let me tell you about it, because it is super exciting!

The Hogarth Shakespeare series is a selection of Shakespeare's plays that are being retold by some of the UK's finest authors. The series was launched earlier this month, with The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson. This book is a retelling of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I've been lucky enough to receive a copy and I'm very excited about reading it.

To whet your appetite, here is a summary of the novel from Amazon. 

***

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays.” It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited. 

In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.

***

Three more novels in the series will be published s during the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death in 2016: Howard Jacobson’s The Merchant of Venice in February, Anne Tyler’s The Taming of the Shrew in June and Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest in October. 

These four books will later be joined by Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear.

Now here is the good part. How would you like to win a copy of The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson? 

All you have to do is enter your details in Rafflecopter below. This is a UK & Ireland competition only. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Black Spring by Alison Croggon

Pages - 286

Published by Walker Books on the 3rd of January 2013

 

After the last long winter, I needed to get as far away from the city as I possibly could. My life there filled me with a weariness of disgust; I was tired of endless conversations in lamp-lit cafes with over-educated aesthetes like myself, tired of my apartment with its self-consciously tasteful artworks and its succession of witty visitors, of the endless jostling for status among the petty literati, the sniping envy and malicious gossip.

Goodreads Summary

Anna spent her childhood with Damek and her volatile foster sister Lina, daughter of the Lord of the village. Lina has magical powers, and in this brutal patriarchal society women with magical powers are put to death as babies. Lina’s father, however, refuses to kill her but when vendetta explodes in their village and Lina’s father dies, their lives are changed forever. Their new guardian Masko sends Anna away and reduces Lina to the status of a servant. Damek—mad with love for Lina—attempts to murder Masko, then vanishes for several years. Anna comes home five years later to find Lina about to marry a pleasant young farmer, and witnesses Damek’s vengeful return and its catastrophic consequences.

*****

It's no big secret that I loathed Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I don't think a classic has ever seriously depressed me more. So with trepidation I began reading Black Spring, keeping my fingers crossed it would greatly improve on the original, otherwise I knew I wouldn't be reading very much of it. Thankfully, this book was soooo much better. With the inclusion of witches and wizards, giving it a fantasy appeal, this book made a much disliked novel really exciting to read. The plot doesn't really deviate that much from the original but the characters are just so much more interesting and likable. It still has that strong Gothic richness to it, yet it loses the terrible depressive nature of the original, giving it much more vibrancy.

The book has two narrators. The first narrator Hammel, comes across as a pompous twit. I struggled to read the chapters in his voice, because he was just so annoying and droll. Surprisingly I felt the same anger that Damek felt towards him. However when Anna took over the narrative the story really improved. I really liked her voice - she was vibrant yet wise; obviously affected by everything she had suffered.  Her voice was clear and concise, which made it a pleasure to read her tale. From her words, you could tell how much she loved Lina and Damek, even though they continued to disobey the rules of society.

Lina came across as a spoilt, selfish yet highly spirited child who had a wicked wild side just brimming beneath her surface.  and perhaps she was, bearing in mind she was the only child of a rich land owner. She would eventually get her own way even after punishment - she knew how to control a situation. The fact that she was believed to be a  witch frightened a lot of people and they would give in to her requests. It is interesting to note how valued and honoured the wizards of the land are, yet all witches would be burned at the stake. In the end it appears that Anna is stronger than the wizard, which surprises many. I much preferred Damek in this book to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, although his mistreatment of Lina's daughter was disgraceful.

I can't review this book without discussing the vendetta that plagued the country. It was truly horrible - that one person would be killed and a chain of murders would then continually occur to avenge each previous death. Towns would lose every male relative as the murders continued until only the women were left. They all knew they would die and I found it so sad and heart wrenching to read about.

Once I moved past Hammel's part in the book, I really began to enjoy the story. Anyone who can turn my most hated read into an excellent enjoyable book is definitely an author to be explored further. I have never read any of Alison Croggon's fantasy novels but after reading this and really enjoying her style I will definitely look into her other books.  

Black Spring Blog Tour - Alison Groggon Guest Post

As the first stop on the Black Spring Blog Tour organised by Walker Books, I am really pleased to welcome author Alison Groggan onto the blog today discussing female characters in the fantasy genre. 

 Patriarchy in fantasy - letting the women shine

Along with a goodly proportion of the western world, my family and I trotted off over the Christmas break to the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of The Hobbit. We took the precaution of seeing the movie in 2D, and, truth be told, totally enjoyed ourselves. Even the indulgent opening scenes that harked back to The Fellowship of the Ring only prompted nostalgia for the days when the children were younger and we ritually attended The Lord of the Rings trilogy every Boxing Day. 

Whatever you think of The Hobbit, whether in glorious 3D HFR technicolour or on the page, one thing is unarguable: it’s a Boy’s Own Adventure from beginning to end. Aside from random feminine extras in the background, we counted two women in the film: Cate Blanchett reprising her role as Galadriel, and a nameless elf blowing a flute. Women in this world of adventure and peril, one of the ur-narratives of the modern fantasy genre, scarcely exist. 

This was par for the course back in 1937, when The Hobbit was first published. The influx of women writing SFF, from Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, to authors such as Margo Lanagan, Kate Elliott, Kate Forsyth and myself (to name a very few) signals a significant change in the Boys’ Own dominance of fantasy. 

But the presence of women (or of people of colour, or any other so-called minority) in fantasy narratives remains controversial, and the fantasy genre is still too prone to white them out as decorative, characterless, generic extras, if indeed they are held to exist at all.  The excuses given for what is actually lack of imagination (this is fantasy, right?) or plain bad writing often come down to so-called “historical accuracy”: writing about sexist worlds means that it’s perfectly acceptable for writing to be sexist. In Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical, http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/psa-your-default-narrative-settings-are-not-apolitical/ author Foz Meadows magisterially takes this idea down and shows it for the shabby, historically inaccurate laziness it is. 

Since Tolkien, an idealised (or dystopic) patriarchal society has often been the standard default setting for mediaeval fantasy, with very boring results for women, both as characters in the novels and as readers. Yet this need not follow. In Black Spring, (which is set in an imagined 19th century world) my female protagonists, Anna and Lina, live in a deeply sexist and classist society. Anna, a highly intelligent and literate woman, is a servant. Lina is a passionate, wilful aristocrat, saved by her noble birth from being put to death as a baby because she is a witch. The central tragedy of the book is in fact driven by sexism. As Anna observes: “Lina’s only real crime was to be born a woman, with powers and instincts that were thought proper to belong only to a man.” 

The viewpoints of Anna and Lina are contrasted with the opening and closing narratives of a pretentious (and rather comic) wannabe writer, Oskar Hammel. He encapsulates, if you like, the “acceptable” misogyny of this society, whereas other characters, such as the evil wizard Ezra, show its violent underpinnings. What matters for me is that this society is viewed through the eyes of the women who have to live in it, and especially through the sceptical and questioning eyes of Anna. Although, as the major narrator, she might be a little invisible to readers, for me Anna was the character I most enjoyed writing, and I think she is the real heroine of the book.

Of course it’s true that sexism is a historical reality. That doesn’t mean that historically-inspired fantasy writing need be sexist if the author chooses to imagine a patriarchal society. In fact, it’s really easy not to be sexist. All you have to do is to take your female characters as seriously as the male characters, to believe that their actions are just as significant in the story, and to ensure that the women are as complex, as interesting and as dynamic as the men. As, indeed, they have been throughout history.

Black Spring by Alison Croggon was published by Walker Books on the 3rd of January. This is the best retelling of Wuthering Heights I have ever read and I would highly recommend it.

To find out more about Alison Croggon:

Twitter: @AlisonCroggon

Website: http://alisoncroggon.com/

A Quick Interview with Paige Harbison

As part of the Paige Harbison UK blog tour, I have a quick interview with the lovely author herself lined up. Her second book, New Girl, was published on the 4th of May and is a modern retelling of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. 

1) Why did you choose to write a  modern retelling of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca?

 I was going through a Hitchcock phase, actually! I was watching the movies and watching oldTwilight Zones during a particularly rainy month with a friend, and I just got so caught up in that creepy, spooky, moody mood. I thought of Rebecca, all about one woman’s desire to be as good as another woman, and I was like…a girl is jealous of a girl and it’s fuelled by her interest in a guy? High school! I’d loved the book when I was younger, and the fact that it’s a classic that has been overlooked in this, the era of remakes, seemed like a crime.
2) Have you read many of Daphne Du Maurier's books and if so, which one did you love the best?

 I read My Cousin Rachel when I was younger, but I definitely like Rebecca best.

3) How long did it take to write from summary to final draft?

 About a year. It took a while to figure out how to weave the story just right.

4) Will you be visiting the UK soon to meet your British fans?

Oh, I’m dying to! I went to London when I was nine, and have been desperate to go back eve since. I even wanted to go to school there!

 5) Can you tell us a bit about what you are working on now??

I am working on my next book now. I can’t say too much, but that it delves into the friendship between two girls that become driven apart by their own personal fears made worse by a boy and a discovery in a creepy shop.

To find out more about Paige Harbison:

Twitter: @paigeharbison
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorPaigeHarbison
Website: http://www.paigeharbison.com/www.paigeharbison.com/Home.html