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Patricia McKillip
Aug. 4th, 2004 07:01 pmTom Easton, writing in Analog, describes Patricia McKillip as a "gracefully transparent writer of young-adult fantasies". Now, I enjoy her books a great deal; I've got just about all of them, from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddlemaster trilogy on. (I don't have her latest, but I'll be ordering it soon.) But "gracefully transparent"? What does he mean by that? McKillip's prose is delicate and her plotlines subtle, but I'd hardly call her work transparent. (After three readings, I'm still not sure what happened at the end of The Sorceress and the Cygnet.)
And while we're on the subject, what on Earth does the label "young adult" mean? I suppose I can understand it as a marketing category, but as a literary classification, what does it betoken? Can anyone enlighten me on this?
I've returned to SF/F with, as you might guess, one of McKillip's books, Song for the Basilisk. She seems to have settled into a groove; her last few books have been set in similar worlds. The political and cultural details vary, but the underlying mythos seems pretty much the same. (That feeling may be an artifact of reading them only at long intervals, I'll concede.) She writes them well enough, but I think her greatest successes have been rather more daring. Fool's Run I regard as possibly her best (and, to date, her only SF), and the Cygnet books, confusing though I find them, are quite powerful. (I'm still very fond of her early works, but she's improved greatly as a stylist since then.)
I'm probably going to go on a McKillip binge.
And while we're on the subject, what on Earth does the label "young adult" mean? I suppose I can understand it as a marketing category, but as a literary classification, what does it betoken? Can anyone enlighten me on this?
I've returned to SF/F with, as you might guess, one of McKillip's books, Song for the Basilisk. She seems to have settled into a groove; her last few books have been set in similar worlds. The political and cultural details vary, but the underlying mythos seems pretty much the same. (That feeling may be an artifact of reading them only at long intervals, I'll concede.) She writes them well enough, but I think her greatest successes have been rather more daring. Fool's Run I regard as possibly her best (and, to date, her only SF), and the Cygnet books, confusing though I find them, are quite powerful. (I'm still very fond of her early works, but she's improved greatly as a stylist since then.)
I'm probably going to go on a McKillip binge.
