The Books of Bayern

This post is being written on a Sunday because NaNoWriMo has a tendency to turn its participants into lazy bums. All week I’ve been like some sort of deranged, half-mad creature with eyes for nothing but my wordcount bar, which, unfortunately, is 2,000 words behind where it’s supposed to be. I’ve had to devise a sort of rewards-and-punishments system that is mainly reliant on whether I get to take another sip of my mocha or not. Or whether I even get to have a mocha. (I’m getting better and better at being cruel to myself, you see. Such is the NaNo existence.)

At any rate, it took until this morning for it to fully hit me that I haven’t done a freelance post this week! So, being a freshly-minted Lazy Bum and not having much idea as to my nerdy topic of the day, I glanced around my dorm room and noticed a copy of Enna Burning lying haphazardly on my desk amid all the other books I don’t have room for (between Corelli’s Mandolin and Thank You For Smoking, I believe, neither of which I’ve read yet). It’s probably out because I was re-reading it again. I love that book to pieces. I can’t count how many times I’ve read it.

I can’t really express my love for these books properly. I suppose I’ll try…

Oh, Shannon Hale. I first discovered her when I was a wee little thing of twelve, I think, irritated by all the lauding Princess Academy was getting — it had just won the Newbery Honor and was being displayed in bookstores so blatantly it was like big red arrows were pointing at them and going “Snobby adults on committees have deemed this book appropriate for your reading pleasure. Also, it’s about princesses.“

Well, I’ve never had a particularly good relationship with the Newbery, and at that point in my life, “princess book” equaled “Disney princess”, which I prided myself on being quite too old for, thank you very much. So I gave it a miss. Instead, probably to spite the bookstore people who thought they could control what I could read (I was a rather suspicious sort of child), I bought The Goose Girl, another of Shannon Hale’s novels, to read on the plane on the way to vacation in Colorado.

I don’t really remember how I felt about it at the time, but I do remember later getting hold of Enna Burning and reading it to shreds, and then finding River Secrets and wondering why it wasn’t as good as the previous two, and last year finding myself in tears over Forest Born. Like Harry Potter and Hilary McKay’s Casson Family series, they’re books I grew up with, and their meanings shift and change as I get older, despite the fact that they’re “children’s books”. It makes me furious when people try to suggest that you can’t read children’s books past a certain age, or that teenagers shouldn’t try to read adult books, or any of that age-appropriate judgmental nonsense. But that’s a topic for another post. The point is, these books are deep. They transcend the boundaries that try to stop different genres from crossing each other, and they also tell a bloody good story.

At face value, they’re a set of four fantasy novels, starting with a fairy-tale retelling of the classic Grimms’ “The Goose Girl”. It more or less follows the boundaries of the story — the ill-fated horse, the imposter posing as the princess, the princess being forced to work as a servant — except that it doesn’t, quite. The story follows its usual patterns, but the characters don’t. As a person who likes to write, I think characters are the most important thing to get right in a novel, because if you don’t care about the people to whom events are happening, neither plot nor world is going to matter to your reader. And Shannon Hale is without a doubt one of the best character-formers I’ve ever read.

Ani (whose name later changes to Isi, as it remains throughout the rest of the series), is a real person. She’s got strengths — she’s kind, she’s honest, she’s got an amazing proclivity for languages, and we find she can speak not only to birds (geese) but to the wind, which is a plot point for later books. She also has weaknesses, and they aren’t at all of the Bella Swan, I’m-perfect-except-I’m-clumsy variety — she’s crushingly shy as well as rather naive at the beginning, and she’s not at all good at standing up for herself. The people who she meets along her journey — Finn, Razo, Selia, Gilsa, Enna, Dasha, Rin, Geric — also have strengths and weaknesses, and they’re just as well-formed as Isi is. As the books carry on, this becomes clearer, as their plots shy away from classic fairy tales and become journeys for each of the characters in their own right.

Quick summaries of the four books:

The Goose Girl: Isi, born a princess, finds herself working as the palace goose girl when one of her servants pretends to be Isi in order to marry the man to whom she is betrothed. Romance and crazy comeuppance ensue. It’s the simplest and probably the sweetest of the books.

Enna Burning: Enna, Isi’s best friend, learns to speak the language of fire. She starts to be consumed by her ability, which is made worse when war breaks out and she is taken prisoner by the enemy. I don’t think I can explain it properly; I’m making it sound like obnoxious high fantasy and it isn’t at all. It’s by far the darkest of the books, the richest in terms of character development, and my favorite.

River Secrets: Clumsy, lovelorn Razo, a friend of Enna’s and Isi’s, goes to foreign lands as an ambassador, befriends a slightly loopy prince, and tries to find out who is behind a set of mysterious attacks. In my opinion it’s kind of a strange book — an interim book, almost, between brilliance of the one preceding it and the one following it — but it has some really good moments, too. The prince is hysterical, and of course the proposal at the end between Enna and Finn makes me cry every time.

Forest Born: Rin, Razo’s little sister, goes to work at the palace with her brother. We find out she has always felt there was something wrong with her, which is her main reason for leaving. At the same time, Rin, Razo and “the fire sisters” (Rin’s name for Isi, Enna and Dasha) are forced out on an adventure they’d rather not have, which turns out to have dreadfully high stakes. Though all the Books of Bayern count as coming-of-age stories, this is the best and most vivid. The scene where Rin looks into the tree (you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve read it), pushed me to sobbing when I read it last year. I should say here that I don’t usually cry at books. I’m Libby the Stoic. I don’t know what it is about Hale’s writing…

At any rate, you can see that the characters don’t shift astronomically from one book to another. Plain and simply, they’re real people. There are so many stories out there in which characters go through a battle, lose people close to them, and come out of it almost exactly as they were before. Not so in Hale’s universe. Isi’s shyness is a battle she fights throughout all four books, but eventually we see that it’s a battle she is winning. After the events of Enna Burning, it takes an entire novel for Enna to begin to trust people again. Razo is haunted by all the things he’s witnessed. Finn learns to stand on his own two feet.

Basically, I love these books. I’m sure I could go on for hours, but this blog post is long enough already and I’m sure you’ve got more interesting things to do than read about my literary obsessions. The best last word I can give you is just to go read them. They’re lovely. You’ll like them. 🙂

* images taken from Barnes & Noble’s and Waterstone’s respective websites.