![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThis time last year, my reading went through a damp patch: part genuine synchronicity, part following through a theme.
The fluke was getting my hands on Selling Water by the River at much the same time as I found a copy of E. Nesbit's Wet Magic in an antiquarian bookshop in Keswick. I remembered Wet Magic with particular affection; re-reading it, what struck me was how dry it was, how little the magic actually had to do with water. The first half, where the children meet and rescue the mermaid, is the best bit. The incantation:
had stayed with me (though the credit for that goes to Milton, rather than to Nesbit). It was her last book for children, and not her best. (Selling Water, on the other hand, is wonderful, very much informed by the presence of water, and not for children at all - but I'll save that until it's available.
This coincidence was an excuse to take another childhood favourite off the shelf: Edward Eager's Magic by the Lake. Eager writes very much in the tradition of Nesbit: the relationships between the children, the mixture of excitement and fear that the magic brings, the absent or distracted parents who must be protected from awareness of the magic, the irascible magic creature who acts as a guide, the humour - but Magic by the Lake is a distinctly wet book, and has fun demonstrating its compliance with its own rule. There are mermaids and pirates, but also polar explorers, because ice is another form of water.
I'll add to this list one I had read earlier: Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley's Elementals: Water. Half a dozen tales, three by each author, linked by the theme of water, and mostly not remarkable. Peter Dickinson is wonderful, but nothing in this volume shows him at his best: in fact my favourite story in the collection is also the driest, Robin McKinley's A Pool in the Desert.
All this came to mind today, because I had been reading Fiona Cooper's Empress of the Seven Oceans, and only gradually realising that while this book fitted many categories - it is a lesbian romance, a feminist bodice-ripper, a piece of glorious wish-fulfillment - it is also a fantasy steeped in water magic. It's wonderfully written, with passages of lush description punctuated by sheer fun; there is darkness in it, but I realised with surprise that the single word that best summed up my impression was "cheerful".
The fluke was getting my hands on Selling Water by the River at much the same time as I found a copy of E. Nesbit's Wet Magic in an antiquarian bookshop in Keswick. I remembered Wet Magic with particular affection; re-reading it, what struck me was how dry it was, how little the magic actually had to do with water. The first half, where the children meet and rescue the mermaid, is the best bit. The incantation:
Sabrina fair
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
had stayed with me (though the credit for that goes to Milton, rather than to Nesbit). It was her last book for children, and not her best. (Selling Water, on the other hand, is wonderful, very much informed by the presence of water, and not for children at all - but I'll save that until it's available.
This coincidence was an excuse to take another childhood favourite off the shelf: Edward Eager's Magic by the Lake. Eager writes very much in the tradition of Nesbit: the relationships between the children, the mixture of excitement and fear that the magic brings, the absent or distracted parents who must be protected from awareness of the magic, the irascible magic creature who acts as a guide, the humour - but Magic by the Lake is a distinctly wet book, and has fun demonstrating its compliance with its own rule. There are mermaids and pirates, but also polar explorers, because ice is another form of water.
I'll add to this list one I had read earlier: Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley's Elementals: Water. Half a dozen tales, three by each author, linked by the theme of water, and mostly not remarkable. Peter Dickinson is wonderful, but nothing in this volume shows him at his best: in fact my favourite story in the collection is also the driest, Robin McKinley's A Pool in the Desert.
All this came to mind today, because I had been reading Fiona Cooper's Empress of the Seven Oceans, and only gradually realising that while this book fitted many categories - it is a lesbian romance, a feminist bodice-ripper, a piece of glorious wish-fulfillment - it is also a fantasy steeped in water magic. It's wonderfully written, with passages of lush description punctuated by sheer fun; there is darkness in it, but I realised with surprise that the single word that best summed up my impression was "cheerful".
