News from Nowhere

Through the LitFest connection, I got to read two of the Stravaganza books, and to hear their author, Mary Hoffman, talk about them.

The books are Young Adult fantasy, in which teenagers from our world are able to visit Talia, a sort of Renaissance period Italy-but-not-Italy, and become embroiled in various adventures. They are very far from being the worst of this genre: City of Masks, the first and establishing volume of the trilogy, rattles along most entertainingly (City of Flowers, being the third and concluding volume, relied less on the reader's desire to find out what the situation is, more on the intrinsic interest of the situation itself, and didn't carry it off as well; and I didn't manage to get hold of the intervening City of Stars, but the implication is that it is much concerned with horses...) But, as this will suggest, they are not the best either.

Mary Hoffman's talk was interesting and entertaining: she has a charming explanation of "where she got the idea from"* (which it would be mean to give away). But several of the things she said illuminated what it was about her books that didn't work for me. For example:

( "I've been accused of being a fantasy writer, but I don't think it's true, because I haven't made a world." )

( Not setting the story in the real world was a way of avoiding having to get historical details right )

( Readers would only be interested in that setting if they could see its effect on modern teenagers. )

( Who are the Stravaganti? )


*Writers joke about how they hate to be asked where they get their ideas from, and in that general form, it's a pretty silly question. But when they do know where the idea for a particular book came from, they are usually bursting to tell you...