Patricia McKillip

[stoutfellow]

Tom 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.

Comments

[thebluerose.livejournal.com]

I agree - transparent is completely the opposite of how I would describe PMcK. Her work is lyrical and subtle and as transparent as a brick, as in when it hits you smack in the face all of a sudden like :)

Ive never read Fools Run, I dont know why, I think Ive read everything else she has written with varying degrees of like. Sometimes its just a little out there for me to really get to grips with first time round. ombria springs to memory.

Glad to find someone else who didnt quite get the end of S&C.

I must read those again..........

[filkferengi]

So, instead of "I must go down to the sea again," it's "I must go to the McKillip shelf again", eh? "For it's a wild call, and a strong call, that will not be denied."

Hey, it's McKillip; no wonder I'm bursting out in poetry. ;)

Binging is good, especially on good stuff. But then I'd say that, because of being in the middle of it myself. For example, I just got the newest Parnell Hall Puzzle Lady mystery from the library. In order to read it, I'm forced [forced, I tell you!] to reread the first four in the series. :)