The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris Makes Sense of the Norse Myths in an Epic Retelling

I’ve gone through the Norse myths a few times now, including Neil Gaiman’s far-more-famous Norse Myths, and I have to say this has been my favorite retelling. Vastly preferred. Gaiman’s a wonderful writer, but he delights so in shock value that he seems to leave out these elements that make monsters more human (including Thor, who is a psychopathic brute in his stories).  Harris, on the other hand, adds elements here and there that make Loki’s actions suddenly make far more sense.  Loki doesn’t dwell--far less than I would—but seems to merely shrug these triggers off, for the most part, in the moment.  But when he retaliates, you understand better why he does, maybe even better than Loki does himself—after all, Loki identifies as the quintessential ‘bad boy’, really. For example, I’d never put together that Loki’s son Fenris Wolf was tricked by the other gods and bound eternally shortly before Loki had Balder, Odin’s golden son, killed.  I am not sure if that’s always the sequence it’s written in, but this was the first time I’d even made that causal association.  It seems obvious now, and somehow Harris managed to convey that association even though Loki seemed to shrug off Fenris’s fate and declare once again how unpaternal he is.

Truly, I was delighted by The Gospel of Loki audiobook, which was not at all what I expected.  A few years ago I had enjoyed Runemarks, and this was ‘in that series’, so I delayed listening to it because I wanted to first refresh myself on Runemarks.  I finally, however, just put on this audiobook, which turned out to be only a distantly-related novel; Odin was a character in Runemarks, but that is an entirely fictional story based around an odd girl living in a village.  The Gospel of Loki, however, is an epic retelling of the Norse myths from Loki’s perspective, and the girl is not part of the story at all.

I believe Joanne Harris may have added some major origin elements of her own creation—such as that Odin pulled Loki’s human-form manifestation from his wildfire aspect in chaos, which had previously served the Lord of Chaos—but such additions served to make imminent sense of Loki’s story and remained consistent with known elements of the stories, which have only come down to us in part.  I tend to think she may have tapped into some of the original myths, it makes so much sense!  Also, Joanne Harris somehow, magically, manages to maintain Loki’s witty, persuasive voice throughout this entire novel, which must have been quite a feat.  Only once did I feel that she slipped just slightly in keeping up Loki’s voice, and that could be... godly error/variation? 

Loki is such a charming, brilliant character that you find yourself sympathetic even when you know he’s guilty as sin—or chaos, as that may be.  He suffered so much at being punished, and you hate to see it, and it sort of reinforces the fruitlessness of punishment, per se, beyond the mere practicality of preventing further crimes.  Especially in Loki’s case, as Joanne Harris subtly delivers the message that Loki’s mistreatment/punishments are what bring them all to Ragnarok.  He is brilliant, after all, and the punishments make him desperate. 

On a personal authorial note, my two as-yet-unpublished YA Fantasy manuscripts-in-progress are linked to aspects of Norse mythology, but I’ve as yet never so much as mentioned the Trickster (Loki) at all. After this magnificent retelling, I wouldn’t be surprised if he inserts himself into any future manuscripts in my own series, thanks to Joanne Harris’s amazing storytelling!  I already liked her writing, but she has just gone up several notches in my list of favorite authors.  By the way, the narrator, Allan Corduner, was absolutely fantastic as well, and I highly recommend the audiobook version.

Shelf Unbound Indie Book Awards Finalist

Silk: Caroline's Story was named as a finalist for the Shelf Unbound Indie Book Awards, and they interviewed me for their magazine, too! Read it here on page 24.

Royal Town Rambles Blows Author Over With Surprise Photo

I was beyond delighted to see this review of Silk: Caroline's Story on Royal Town Rambles, a blog centered on Kingstree's history. Linda did some digging and discovered a photograph of my own family tree's real-life Caroline, who was the inspiration for my very fictional character in my very fictional story. I didn't even know such a photo existed, and I'm thrilled beyond measure. I'd only had a description of her by writer Bessie Swann Britton as blond and pretty, but it seems she was more of a brunette, actually, like me!

  

Prohibition Museum Experience

My husband and I went to the Prohibition Museum in Savannah yesterday for a date day. I was drawn to it after a recent visit to the county museum in Florence, SC, where I learned that South Carolina had enacted statewide Prohibition years before the national ban--a fact which required a small, emergency edit to my Tapestry manuscript!  Phew! Thank goodness I took the time to visit that museum!  I was surprised how much I didn't know before going in the Prohibition Museum, too, such as: When Georgia also enacted statewide Prohibition (yes, way before national Prohibition, eight years before South Carolina), Savannah and residents of neighboring counties considered seceding from the state!

The museum was so well done, quite entertaining! It starts a bit on the side of Prohibition and gradually goes extremely anti-Prohibition, winding up in the historic Speakeasy. The visit to their Speakeasy incorporates the senses better than most museums with historic drinks like the Aviation and the Mary Pickford (a fruity cocktail). Totally sympathetic with women of the Temperance movement, but I enjoyed the Aviation, too!  I’d seen the violet drink made just in June during the Historical Novel Society conference as a popular early-20th-century drink.

A couple invited us to sit with them at their table in the Speakeasy (they’d nabbed it when my hubby stepped away, and I think they may have heard us lamenting losing our table). Anyhow, they were from Houston, visiting for the weekend for an annual tourist trip to Savannah. So nice talking with them, but the gist of it for me was a bigger appreciation for actually living in Savannah, as it really is quite lovely. Mostly.  I always get tickled when I meet people who've traveled from afar to experience what I get to do at a fraction of the cost.  Not that they don't have their own nearby attractions that they likely avail themselves of, as well, but I do think we have more than most, being such a tourist destination (and near to others like Charleston and St. Augustine, Orlando and beaches...).

Definitely a fun outing. There was so much information and all these amusing/entertaining cartoons and such of the era. Loved it! My one criticism, I suppose, is that a fantastic exhibit somewhere in the middle, a main feature, has Mr. Busch arguing fairly persuasively for anti-Prohibition, whereas the Temperance speaker focused more on God than practical arguments, making her seem an extremist--not helped by that being in the same room where they feature Carrie Nation, who did not represent most of the Temperance movement. I think perhaps that's where the shift occurs... The displays over the course of the museum really did follow the historical sequence, including with the shift in public reaction. And even though perhaps it seems a waste to us that Prohibition was enacted, it drastically reduced rates of child abuse and likely alcohol-related deaths overall, and I had the sense that alcohol consumption never returned to the pre-Prohibition levels.  Yet despite my Temperance leanings, I was so charmed with the crowded Speakeasy's ambiance. Bars are generally lined with TVs these days, and all the flickering lights are distracting and obnoxious, in my personal opinion. Perhaps it's for the best that they repulse me, as I suspect this near-teetotaler could easily become a lush!

Overall, a wonderful experience for two whose maternal grandfathers were both bootleggers--a topic also well-addressed at the museum, of course!

The Inkheart Trilogy by Cornelia Funke

I’ve just completed the fantastic Inkheart Trilogy (novels published 2003-2008) audiobooks. I’ve been weeks about it, but they are truly quite long stories.  As a writer, you can imagine how I adore the premise: a writer’s novel turns out to actually be another real world, which he seems to control (if not create altogether!). 

Funke’s storytelling is rich and meandering. Aside from the part of the story set in Europe in modern times, she’s truly created another universe, a complex one that seems rather medieval. Her characters are faulty, and very little is truly ideal. I listened to it probably over a decade ago and liked it more this time than last time, though perhaps that’s because I knew better what to expect.

Twelve-year-old Meggie is the main protagonist (if these stories can be said to have one), not the old Inkweaver, and of course she’s my favorite character. Her father, a bookbinder called Silvertongue, is warm-hearted and steadfast, tall and handsome (I suspect Funke was somewhat gone over him—and he’ll forever be Brendan Fraser in my mind, as that’s who played him in the movie version). The aged scribbler is likeable—fiesty and warm-hearted and full of himself to a ridiculous, perhaps justifiable, degree. You never know exactly how people are going to behave, yet it’s always believable—and sometimes breaks your heart with disappointment. Yet you often get happy endings of a sort.

During the process of listening to these novels, I was seized with the notion of rebinding some of my falling-apart study manuals from my naturopathic school days, and only as I was in the midst of rebinding them did I realize that I must have been inspired by Silvertongue’s craft!  I was sometimes hours on a single volume—but that was nothing next to the painstaking rebinding Silvertongue did, usually taking days, which was rather a consolation.  So not only was there bookbinding going on (albeit mostly just replacing tattered covers and old, broken plastic-comb spines on the books), but at least some of the manuals were in part about herbal therapies, an occupation of Roxanne, one of the most beautiful women imaginable. She is associated (being vague here to try to avoid spoilers!) with Dustfinger, the fire dancer. Yes, I suppose I should have said there is very powerful magic in the Inkworld. Fairies, giants, and enchantments—of course.  Most of the story does center on the adults, and it seemed to me that Funke was fairly realistic (as realistic as a fantasy story can be) in the process of giving Meggie her time in the spotlight; Meggie is quite subject to the whims, expertise, and authority of the adults, but she inevitably plays an essential role, if not always the key role, in the stories. I appreciate that Funke’s plots are hard to predict that way—and in many other ways.

I very much recommend this YA Fantasy Trilogy for anyone who appreciates this genre. Be forewarned that it’s more emotionally complex than most YA Fantasy, and the meandering style of storytelling is reminiscent of historical novelist Phillipa Gregory’s writing, in my opinion. I highly recommend both authors to about the same degree, depending on your genre preference—and mind you, Gregory is one of my favorites!

Indian Summer by Kellyn McClarry

 

A writing friend’s novel came out on Indigenous Peoples Day (October 11, 2021) and immediately hit #1 bestseller rankings on Amazon for Children’s Time Travel and Children’s Colonial Historical Fiction!  So proud of her!  Here is the blurb I provided for her novel. Click the cover photo to check it out on Amazon!:

In Kellyn McClarry’s Indian Summer, an ordinary boy of the 1970s spirals back to a time of Quakers and Native Americans near his Pennsylvania hometown. Struck with amnesia, he resides with a generous, hard-working Quaker family who are baffled by his strange ways. Meanwhile, he gets to know a small, peaceful Conestoga tribe, then is struck with horror at the atrocities committed against them.

With infinite patience, McClarry lulls readers into assuming Indian Summer is simpler than it really is. This holds true for both the plot line and for the character of Jack. McClarry’s timing is diabolically impeccable—revealing plot twists and new depth to characters only after readers have entirely convinced themselves of the story’s trajectory. Don’t underestimate this debut novel. Kellyn McClarry cloaks a brilliant wit in the guise of this story about a seemingly hapless, helpless, impatient, utterly ordinary boy. McClarry revels in how very ordinary he is, though, liking him quite well that way, I suspect. But McClarry’s inspirational streak does eventually come through, shining all the more for the timing of it all.

Chronicles of Chicora Wood by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle: A Fascinating Memoir

I ran across this gem of a family memoir made available as a free e-book by the Gutenberg Project. It was written by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle (1845-1921), who was a teenager at the time of the Civil War and went on to become a rice planter in her own right.  Apparently she’s written a whole book about that, too, but I haven’t yet read it. Chronicles of Chicora Wood (published 1922) was of particular interest to me because the author wrote about a locale fairly close to where my ancestors lived—and to where The Silk Trilogy is based.

I originally found the book when I was researching the word Chicora. I’d read that the SC Native Americans called the region Chicora, and I was quite curious to know exactly what Chicora encompassed, so I was delighted when I saw a book that might shed some light on it for me. It didn’t, of course, but I’m still quite glad I found it. Chicora Wood was actually the name of the rice plantation that Bessie was raised on, apparently renamed when she was a girl by her father for the Chicora Indians who (had) lived in the area. It seems that they once occupied the entire coastal area of South Carolina all the way inland to the Piedmont—according to the tribe’s Facebook page, anyhow, though many tribes live(d) in that broad area. I’d already had the notion that Chicora included much of the Lowcountry, though, and so this does confirm my inkling there.

I actually rather adore Bessie, the author of this work.  I found some criticisms of her ‘racism’ in reviews of her book, but I find her to be vastly less racist than, say, Mary Chestnut, or even Fanny Kemble Butler, who was an ardent abolitionist!  Bessie expressed at once how relieved she was at not having inherited the responsibility of the ownership of people—how she felt that that age had ended, and she was glad of it.  Some of the terminology she uses was not terribly flattering for the slaves in their care (and who took care of them), and perhaps Bessie whitewashed some of the darker moments from her mind, but I do believe that she found the entire institution of slavery to be rather awful. One of the criticisms of her that I ran across was that she acted as though the slaves wanted to be owned, and YES, she did present those awful scenarios—of families desperate to stay together, begging her father to buy all of them; of an old man begging to be able to stay with their family after the war, where he’d lived his entire life.  She was sympathetic to them, and she cried terribly when her now-nearly-penniless mother turned the wonderful old man away, saying she couldn’t afford to pay him. A slave woman named Phoebe sat with them as Sherman’s troops were nearly upon them, and they encouraged her to leave, but she insisted that she was going to protect them—Bessie was showing the complexities of the situation, how Phoebe was loyal to them even though she could easily have left them there. No, Bessie doesn’t in any way suggest that Phoebe should have left them there, nor does she ever overtly express sympathy for any rage on their part—nor does she go on about the injustice of slavery, even.  Certainly I would not describe her as any sort of abolitionist nor activist. She was just an intelligent and somewhat typical daughter of a slave-owner who loved her family and tells about life as it was, from her perspective. The end of the book is actually an interview with one of the older male slaves—it was interesting, and I think it was meant to reinforce that her father was a good man, as in part it related yet another time that her father bought slaves due to requests by others to keep those families together (I though it was a different time when I read it, but maybe not).  In fact, Bessie goes so far as to say right off that her father mortgaged the properties for this purpose, and that’s why they lost almost everything after the war.  Maybe she is an apologist for her father—okay, I suspect that much—but she’s not an apologist for the institution of slavery itself, not beyond praising how her West-Point-educated father managed the plantation and slaves, proud of his executive skill. There is a difference.

For descendants of slaves around Georgetown, SC, who are interested in genealogy, if you can get past the awful-but-typical situation those folks were in—and some of the common, now-offensive lingo of the day—then you might find some of the descriptions of the individual slave folks of interest.  For instance… Hagar isn’t such a common name, right?  She was only a bit older than Bessie, and there is a great story about her trying to help Bessie out—sneaking the little girl out onto the roof to get inside another room to see her dead baby brother, whom Bessie didn’t think she’d get to ever lay eyes on; Hagar was quite annoyed, however, with the girl’s lack of self-control when Bessie started to scream (despite having promised she wouldn’t).  Perhaps Hagar’s descendants, if there are any, would be interested in this anecdote. [Note that Hagar is the name of the key ancestress of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. I wonder if her parents practiced Islam? Hagar’s name is actually in the Bible itself, too, though...]

There were some other anecdotes about the (ex-)slaves as well, and Bessie mostly seemed to feel friendly towards them so long as she didn’t feel personally injured by them.  No, that’s not to say that the situation was okay for the slaves, but both Bessie and they were born into it, and she was glad when it was over—even if she wasn’t on the Yankee side. At all. She speaks with relief of having an uncle who was against secession—and therefore his family was able to help hers a bit after the war—but she makes sure to clarify that his wife, her aunt, didn’t actually agree with him.

Bessie was indeed the daughter of a rice plantation owner who made money off of the labor of slaves.  He was governor of South Carolina only a couple of years before the war started—and was an ardent secessionist, right along with most of the rest of the white population of the state. If Bessie is an apologist for him, it runs deep—she also relates how he gave her two severe switchings when she was little, and she seems to have convinced herself that those switchings made her adore her father even more.  So I’m not even saying that her father was a good man, but it does seem there were much worse people out there, and if Bessie is to be believed at all, he did seem to have a sort of moral code within the societal framework he’d been raised within.  He died of illness during the war, owning more than one plantation. Bessie and her mother didn’t have too difficult a time with the ex-slaves on the plantations where they had resided, but when they first visited a seldom-seen site, they actually did face a quite scary arrival, with the ex-slaves taunting them for hours, encircling them with hoes, singing about killing.  So Bessie was NOT saying that all the slaves were delighted to be slaves—not at all.

Whew… I didn’t mean to go on about that so much, but it is a touchy issue, and I can’t very well blog about Bessie’s book without addressing it—not without seeming obtuse at best.  And Bessie certainly addresses it!  However, she also talks so much about daily life, from well before the war—and after—and I loved being immersed in this primary source for how life actually was for someone of her social standing at that time.

She talks about wearing overshoes.  She talks about the schoolhouse on the plantation, then how she boarded in Charleston. Actually, I associated with so many of her mentions!  I play piano (pitifully--she was better) and have a weak but nice voice, and I journal and love the ocean, like so many people—but she also lived in a boarding school on Meeting Street, and I lived on Meeting Street for a year when I was at the College of Charleston (where her brother attended).  Her husband studied in Heidelberg, and I’ve done quite a bit of research around my supposed ancestress Sophia of Hanover, whose father’s people ruled as electors from there for centuries. Bessie has Huguenot ancestry, and my family claims to have some French ancestry (most likely Huguenot, given that area’s history). 

I even ran across the name of a woman who could possibly be my ancestress in these Chronicles of Chicora Wood. Mary Holland took care of Bessie’s mother when she was gravely ill. “[A]n old woman, but still tall and stately in figure, and with great dignity and poise. She was about the color of an Indian.” I was so excited to read this, though of course Mary is a common name…  and those are actually only the first and middle names of my ancestress, who was an old woman at the time, mind you! Bessie often refers to her cousins, at least, by only their first and middle names, and with all the Mary Janes and Mary Anns, why not a Mary Holland? My own Mary Holland’s granddaughter is the darkest-skinned of my great-grandparents hands-down, according to the one photograph I have of her, at least, so that description only intrigues me.  It’s so hard to find anything describing our ancestors in 1840 for the most part, unless they were public figures or otherwise news-worthy.

One of the broader take-aways I gleaned from this memoir is how very brief our country’s history is as an independent nation.  I was a little stunned, actually. Bessie was talking about how she was named for her great-aunt Elizabeth who lived with them, who had died about five years before the author was born.  Bessie’s mother was very close to the woman and missed her sorely. There are some tales about this great-aunt in her old age, but here is the part that so surprised me:  The older Elizabeth had married a man who was a doctor during the Revolutionary War.  Not a baby, even. A grown man!  Elizabeth herself was a teenager at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and was 21 years old at the end of it.  She had actually grown up in a colony of Great Britain!  So this woman had lived with Bessie’s parents, nearly crossing dates with Bessie, and then Bessie lived through the Civil War (only 19 years old when it was over). Bessie lived on well into the 20^th century—she’ll have died exactly 100 years ago on December 5^th of this year, actually!  All of my grandparents were born by then.  I think I already had a fairly good grasp already of how few generations there have been since the Civil War, but I hadn’t really thought about how there was even less time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. They were fairly close, less than a century apart.  Undoubtedly some people actually lived through both.

Mind you, though… the American colonies existed for almost as long under the rule of England as they have as an independent nation (with much fewer people, of course), so for a vast number of us, our ancestral history here is far longer than just going back as far as Bessie’s great-aunt!

I can’t say how interesting these memoirs would be to a person from outside the area, who has no personal connection to that region, but I found them fascinating.  For instance, as a child, Bessie went through a 3-day fast to treat her awful dyspepsia, drinking only a half-glass of milk topped off with water each day—and it worked!  Their English governess straightened her sister’s posture with having her lay on a board at an angle. The boarding school they went to in Charleston spoke only in French! She was advised by her uncle not to speak to non-uniformed men on a train ride alone, advice that nearly left her without her trunk (and she praised how things had changed since then for young women travelers).  So many riveting tidbits, and I both laughed at Bessie’s admissions and sympathized with her plight quite often.  She’s a much nicer person than so many others I’ve read, at least so far as she has presented herself.