Retro Friday Review: Sabriel by Garth Nix

Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted at Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be an old favorite, an under-the-radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print, etc. Everyone is welcome to join in at any time! Angie includes roundups from participating bloggers in her post every week.

To be honest, I don't know how to introduce SABRIEL.  I decided to feature it this week since I reviewed A CONFUSION OF PRINCES yesterday.  But if you're reading In Bed With Books then you're probably a fan of young adult literature.  And to YA fans, the first novel in Garth Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy is not obscure.  ACROSS THE WALL, an anthology set in the Abhorsen world, is slightly obscure.  But SABRIEL?  Well known, and for a good reason.

I remember reading it for the first time during a baseball game and being utterly enthralled.  (My family enjoyed going to baseball games.  Me, less so.  Thus I always went equipped with a purse full of books.)  Almost the next day, I went out and bought LIRAEL.  Unfortunately, ABHORSEN wasn't out yet.  When it came out I bought it in hardcover, which I almost never do.  That's how good the trilogy is.

Sabriel is a necromancer, using her bells to prevent the Dead who won't stay dead from running amok in the Old Kingdom or, worse, escaping the Old Kingdom.  She's been living as a normal college student in neighboring Ancelstierre, but there's far more to her than that.  When her father, the current Abhorsen, becomes trapped in Death, it is up to Sabriel to rescue him.  Along the way she also rescues Mogget (a cat who is not a cat) and Touchstone (a ship's figurehead that is not a ship's figurehead).

SABRIEL is lush.  There's the struggle of good against evil and that of order against chaos.  There's romance, betrayal, death, humor.  This dark fantasy contains not only a richly realized world, but characters that linger in your mind long after you finish reading.

Luckily, the sequels LIRAEL and ABHORSEN live up to SABRIEL's promise.  You don't have to say good-bye to the fabulous cast when the book ends.  (You do, reluctantly, have to say good-bye after ACROSS THE WALL.  But there's always re-reading.)

If you haven't read SABRIEL, make a trip to your local bookstore or library.  You won't regret spending time with this amazing woman.  (And Touchstone ain't half bad himself.)  (Mogget is more than half bad, but he's got the humor to make up for it.)

Review: A Confusion of Princes

By Garth Nix
Available now from HarperCollins
Review copy
Read my reviews of "Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex" and TROUBLETWISTERS

Standalone.  Science fiction.  Both things I've been craving lately.

Garth Nix's first novel for older teens since ABHORSEN.  Garth Nix's first standalone science fiction novel for older teens since the classic SHADE'S CHILDREN.  Not many new releases have those bona fides.

A CONFUSION OF PRINCES is narrated by Khemri, one of the Empire's millions of Princes.  He is making a recording of the story of his three deaths, to be accessed only by a non-Prince.  ("I am presuming you're not an Imperial Prince, which you'd better not be, or I'll have wasted all the careful preparations that are supposed to make this record detonate with a ridiculously large antimatter explosion if accessed by any kind of Princely sensory augmentation." p. 3, ARC)  It neatly sidesteps the "as you know" problem, since Khemri's intended audience doesn't know the secrets of the Empire he is imparting.

The novel begins with Khemri's coming of age.  He learns, for the first time, of the vast number of Princes - and that the Princes frequently assassinate each other in order to reduce competition for the position of Emperor.  He must give up his dreams of wandering about space in a ship under his command and learn to navigate a world of intrigue.  Khemri could be completely unlikeable at this point, but there's a naïveté that tempers his arrogance. 

And yet, some of Khemri's dreams come true.  When he first links to the Imperial Mind, Khemri learns that the Emperor has special plans for him.  Of course, he is still too young to realize those plans might not be to his liking.  But A CONFUSION OF PRINCES is not just about what it means to be a Prince.  It is also about what it means to be human.

A CONFUSION OF PRINCES is not perfect.  Some of the relationships happen too easily.  I wish it were longer.  A CONFUSION OF PRINCES is, at its core, a space opera.  It's a genre that lends itself to a  sprawling, epic scope.  But many of Khemri's adventures are summarized in less than a chapter.  In LIRAEL, Nix focused on Lirael becoming a librarian for at least a hundred pages and it was fascinating.  It didn't matter that the main plot took awhile to show up.  Nix has proven that he can write an interesting lengthy digression.  I felt like A CONFUSION OF PRINCES needed more of that.  (For those who have read it, just imagine more time spent on the space cowboy world.)

At the same time, I am looking at A CONFUSION OF PRINCES through the lens of Nix's past works.  He's written some of young adult speculative fiction's greatest classics.  But not all of an author's books can be a masterwork.  A CONFUSION OF PRINCES is quite good.  Khemri's journey is fascinating.  The world Nix has invented is imaginative and I loved figuring out how it worked.  It may not be another SHADE'S CHILDREN, but it is better than many other books I've read lately.

If you're tired of series and paranormals, give A CONFUSION OF PRINCES a chance.  If you like science fiction, give it a chance.

This didn't fit in my review, but some potential readers might find it useful.  All Princes are ethnically ambiguous since they don't know who their parents are and grow up far from where they were born.  (This is also because the book doesn't take place on Earth.)  Khemri is usually described as darker, but there are a wide range of skin tones on display.  While the book is all Khemri all the time, there are a number of terrific female secondary characters.

Review: Troubletwisters

By Garth Nix and Sean Williams
Available now from Scholastic Press
Review copy



I have always loved Garth Nix's books. SABRIEL and its sequels might be my favorites, but I was never disappointed. I continued to read The Keys to the Kingdom series even though I was rather old for it because I wanted to know how Arthur solved his problems. I've never read anything by Sean Williams before, but I haven't heard bad things and I've had excellent luck with Australian authors.

TROUBLETWISTERS, strangely, didn't quite work for me. It's the tale of twins Jaide and Jack, who go to live with their estranged Grandma X after their house blows up. They start seeing odd things and notice animals behaving oddly - but no one will explain what's up. It's familiar, but that doesn't mean it can't be done well. There are some wonderful action scenes and there's a magical antique shop that's quite enchanting. But there were too few rules for me. I like it to know the bounds of magic within a story.

But the troubletwisters can't be told too much about their power by a Warden or their power might go awry. The cats know, but they swore an oath as kittens not to reveal what they know. As Jaide tells her twin brother Jack at the climax, "Who knows what [troubletwisters] can do?"

(And I might be insane, but it really bothers me that Wardens are capital-W, the Evil is capital-E, but troubletwisters are lowercase-t. Why?)

Children who enjoy fantasy will probably enjoy TROUBLETWISTERS. But it fails to live up to Nix's previous children's book series. There's nothing to hate here, but there's nothing special either.