Book: War for the Oaks

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Author: Emma Bull

Details: (c) 1987 Emma Bull; Pub 1987 Ace; ISBN 0-441-87073-2

Verdict: War for the oaks is just delightful!

Reasons for reading it: rysmiel recommended it.

How it came into my hands: I went on a crazy book-buying spree when I was visiting rysmiel in Montreal, during which I bought a fair proportion of every single book that had been mentioned in two days' conversation. This was part of that haul.

War for the oaks just made me grin and grin, from the first sentence until the last, at which point I stopped being immensely happy and became immensely frustrated that the book is over and there isn't any more to read. The first thing that hooked me is the really lovely language; not overly florid or pretentious, but it made my skin tingle. And then I imediately liked Eddi as a heroine, and then something really dramatic happened at the end of the first chapter. So the rest of WftO lived up to that very good first impression: the writing continues at that calibre throughout, and the characterization just gets better as one learns more about the cast, and the story is really exciting and... *grin grin grin*

WftO does the urban fantasy thing exquisitely well. The urban part works; it's not just set up in the first chapter as a contrast to the more interesting fantasy setting. Eddi is very much part of this twentieth century world, but she doesn't do the cliched thing of panicking and flailing around trying to find rational explanations for the obviously supernatural occurrences. Yes, she's initially skeptical, but she believes the evidence of her senses and gets on with dealing with the situation she finds herself in. And the fantasy bit is lovely; there's solid mythological background, and there's also a really strong sense of the way the faery realm interacts with the mundane world. It isn't trapped in a timewarp of Victorian-style bucolic idyll, but it neither is it completely part of history. I loved the throwaway line about a brownie being really formidable in battle, since doing housework requires real strength.

I loved the emphasis on friendship as well as romance. WftO is rather heavy on the romance side, though; I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who gets annoyed with soppy stuff, or really to anyone male (with a very few exceptions). It's good romance, as far as that goes; Bull does really capture the emotional intensity of falling in love, and I enjoyed the portrayal of the intense, sudden coup-de-foudre as well as the kind of love that arises out of deep friendship. I did get a bit annoyed with Eddi making a big speech about how it's terrible to have sex if it's not for a Higher Purpose, but that's a minor criticism and my annoyance probably reflects my own biases. I think I would have been more prepared to buy the phouka as a romantic hero if I'd read the book when I was a bit younger, but he still does work well as a character.

The other thing that's great about WftO is the structure. I really appreciated the way that the climactic great battle between the two fairy factions happens in the middle of the book rather than at the end, and the book goes on to explore the effects on Eddi's life of having got involved with Faery and become an unwilling hero. The actual ending felt a tiny bit overdone, but the book had to end somewhere and it's one way of handling a secondary climax.

darcydodo, you so have to read this!

Comments

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even for a first novel I thought it was a little thin
Thin in what way? I didn't feel like the book needed anything more, but then I tend to prefer novels that are not ridiculously over-complicated, as a rule.

Holly Black's (blackholly) first novel Tithe was sharper and better urban-fantasy
Shall look out for it, thank you.

straight fantasy without any SF pretensions tends to appeal overwhelmingly more to female readers than male
Do you really think so?
IME, yeah. But generalizations are almost always bad.

I could take up the counter-argument that SF (especially the harder sort) appeals to more males than females, but I'm very uncertain about that
If I'm not thinking about it too carefully I do sometimes mentally file certain kinds of SF as boys' SF. I read it myself though, at least the kind that's heavy on physics (the kind that is heavy on violence and overly detailed descriptions of weapons I'm more likely to skip). I do know a lot more women who read SF than men who read fantasy, but that's purely anecdotal. I don't think a poll would be much less anecdotal, and would probably get me even more yelled at for making gender generalizations! But might be fun anyway. I'll see if I get to it.

I even like romance and romances. My only stipulation is that it has to be good
Well, that's reasonable; most people prefer good books over bad. And there's certainly an intellectual snobbery about romance, that anything based around a love story is likely to be pulp, so many people are put off for reasons that are not to do with gender. (Some people assume that all SF is sub-Star Trek trash too, mind you!) It seems to me that, in general, women have a lower threshold for what's considered good enough to be worth reading when it comes to romance, and men have a lower threshold when it comes to military stuff or SF that is all about "hey, look at the shiny tech!" Which isn't the same as saying that men never enjoy romance, obviously.

I am always interested in relationships between people - romantic or otherwise.
Me too, definitely. My main problem with overly soppy stuff isn't that the subject matter is boring, but that it's really implausible and cliched, so I don't feel I'm learning anything about relationships!

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

Thin in what way? I didn't feel like the book needed anything more, but then I tend to prefer novels that are not ridiculously over-complicated, as a rule.

Thin the sense that I didn't feel like there was a lot of real history and background behind the story, and in that I was never really left wondering. Some stories and worlds are rich and dense, and story ideas almost spin off each page about how such-and-such came to be or why so-and-so is known as blah. WftO could have felt like that, but it didn't seem deep enough to fall into, or reach out and grab my interest in that way.

I don't think a poll would be much less anecdotal, and would probably get me even more yelled at for making gender generalizations! But might be fun anyway. I'll see if I get to it.

Hmmm. It's a tool. It will give you a small sample, with real numbers. Yeah, being such a small sample it would be hard to draw any broad conclusions from, but I wouldn't regard it as quite the same as anecdotal evidence.

It seems to me that, in general, women have a lower threshold for what's considered good enough to be worth reading when it comes to romance, and men have a lower threshold when it comes to military stuff or SF that is all about "hey, look at the shiny tech!"

I think you're probably closer to it there. I can think of the odd exception to those 'rules' of course, but if you're going to talk about gender-linked preferences in speculative fiction, I think that's a looser and more accurate statement. That being said, I certainly do have a threshold for shiny tech and military stuff - if there's no plot or characterisation, and all a story relies on is gadgets and big guns, then it's still crap.