osprey_archer | Mopping Up a Few Books from November

At the end of November, I was racing to the end of a few books to finish them before All Christmas Advent. I finished reading them in time, but ran out of time to post about them, so I’m posting about them now.

First, I finished The Spring of Butterflies and Other Folktales of China’s Minority Peoples, translated by He Liyi and edited by Neil Philip. This is one of those books where the story behind the book is as interesting as the stories themselves. He Liyi started studying English in the 1940s, but during the Cultural Revolution he lost all access to his English language study materials. However, after the Cultural Revolution, he took it up again, and in the 1980s he got in touch with the BBC, which eventually arranged for this collection of translated folktales to be published.

They also held a contest in China to find an illustrator, and eventually narrowed it down to either Zhao Li or Aiqing Pan… at which point they discovered that these two illustrators were actually a married couple! So they ended up illustrating the book together.

I also finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil. What a ride! What a riot! Our heroine Rae is dying of cancer when she gets the chance to go into the world of her favorite fantasy series and steal the Flower of Life and Death. Of course she jumps at it… only to discover herself in the body of the villainess on the eve of her execution! Aided only by her wits and her somewhat vague memories of the series’ plot (cancer did a number on her memory), Rae sets herself up as a prophetess in an escalating series of schemes that keep steering the story more and more off course.

And then it ends on a cliffhanger! This is the first book in a duology. Not deep but good fun. I usually steer well clear of cancer books (well, any kind of illness books), as they tend to set off my hypochondria so I decide I’m probably dying of whatever the main character has, but in this case the cancer is a fairly light presence after the first chapter so I didn’t feel that. Much. Except maybe a little bit in the days after, whenever I forgot something. Who knew memory loss could mean cancer?

Finally, because I was concerned I would run out of reading material before December, I got Peter Beagle’s Tamsin, and then December and my all-Christmas-all-the-time resolution were barreling down on me and I still have two-thirds of the book to go. But Bramble politely lay on my legs until two pages from the end to ensure I finished, which was suitable, as Tamsin features one of the great cats in literature: Mister Cat, our heroine Jenny’s Siamese cat, who falls in love with a ghost cat and therefore leads Jenny to meet and fall in love with the ghost girl Tamsin.

skygiants recommended this book to me with a comment on Jenny’s massive crush on Tamsin, which I expected to be subtextual. But no! Two paragraphs after they meet, Jenny muses, “I think that was when I fell in love with her.” She’s a BEAUTIFUL SAD GHOST, what more could you want?

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catsamsara

I love folktales and The Spring of Butterflies sounds like a particularly interesting example! I think i'll check it out, thank you for mentioning it.

The story about the illustrators is also a lovely aside---appropriately, itself almost like something from a folktale.

Edited Date: 2025-12-26 07:18 pm (UTC)

sovay

They also held a contest in China to find an illustrator, and eventually narrowed it down to either Zhao Li or Aiqing Pan… at which point they discovered that these two illustrators were actually a married couple! So they ended up illustrating the book together.

That is really cool.

Jenny’s massive crush on Tamsin, which I expected to be subtextual. But no! Two paragraphs after they meet, Jenny muses, “I think that was when I fell in love with her.”

Yep!

The phrase old weirdness from that book went into my permanent lexicon in 1999. Re-reading it last year having since acquired some grounding in folk horror was fascinating.