100 Books, #12: Obernewtyn
Dec. 10th, 2012 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerHey, remember this 100 books project? The one I dropped like a hot potato when grad school began? Yeah, I’d forgotten it too. But writing my The Sending review put me in mind of it again, because the Obernewtyn books were such an important series to me when I was a teenager.
I could write a lengthy review - indeed, a monograph! - of things that frustrate me about this series; but I have come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, and I’ll focus on the things that made me love the first three books so powerfully when I was young.
The whole idea of Misfits, for one thing: telepathically Talented young people (they all seem to be young) who are persecuted by the cruel Council, which thinks they are mutants caused by the nuclear holocaust. This was like crack for thirteen-year-old me.
Our heroine Elspeth is the arch-Misfit. She is, I own, a somewhat eye-rolly character on the face of it. Not only is she the most powerful Misfit ever (notwithstanding her lack of empathic Talent), and a guildmistress of the Farseekers at the age of fourteen, and so incredibly poised and gorgeous that 90% of the men fall in love with her; she’s also the heroine spoken of in the gypsies’ ancient promises, and at the Sadorians’ Earthtemple, and the fated deliverer of the animals who will lead them to freedom from the funaga (humans), and the savior who will prevent a second nuclear holocaust from killing all life on earth.
This is a great deal to pile on a single character. It helps that a lot of it creeps up on you: book by book, she becomes entangled in more prophecies and more strongly enmeshed in the Obernewtyn community. At the beginning, she’s just a fierce, frightened orphan girl, acerbic and lonely and aloof from the people who surround her. Although she gathers about an enormous number of friends - I honestly could not keep track of them all by The Sending - she never quite loses that sense of fierce aloofness. (No wonder her best and oldest friend is a cat!) That independence is, to me, at the center of Elspeth’s appeal.
But much as I love Elspeth, the biggest draw in the books is that community that she gathers around herself. From her isolated beginning Elspeth manages to build an enormous web of social relationships, chosen family and friends and allies who are scattered across the Land. They radiate from her like concentric circles, and at the center of it is Obernewtyn, which started as a prison for Misfits and becomes their haven.
One of the things that is good about The Sending, I thought, is Elspeth’s sense of loss as Obernewtyn opens itself to the outside world. She notes, correctly, that if the Misfits are to be accepted in the Land, then Obernewtyn can’t continue to be totally cut off from everywhere: but she’s also right that in losing that hermit aspect, Obernewtyn will lose something precious. There’s a sense of warmth and trust there, of absolute acceptance, which may not be lost entirely when it opens to the outside world - but inevitably, will weaken.
(Also, how about that ravek scene in Ashling? I thought that simply the height of romantic. I ought to do a whole post on Ashling: it’s my favorite Obernewtyn book, with Domick and the plans for the rebellion and Sador.)
I could write a lengthy review - indeed, a monograph! - of things that frustrate me about this series; but I have come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, and I’ll focus on the things that made me love the first three books so powerfully when I was young.
The whole idea of Misfits, for one thing: telepathically Talented young people (they all seem to be young) who are persecuted by the cruel Council, which thinks they are mutants caused by the nuclear holocaust. This was like crack for thirteen-year-old me.
Our heroine Elspeth is the arch-Misfit. She is, I own, a somewhat eye-rolly character on the face of it. Not only is she the most powerful Misfit ever (notwithstanding her lack of empathic Talent), and a guildmistress of the Farseekers at the age of fourteen, and so incredibly poised and gorgeous that 90% of the men fall in love with her; she’s also the heroine spoken of in the gypsies’ ancient promises, and at the Sadorians’ Earthtemple, and the fated deliverer of the animals who will lead them to freedom from the funaga (humans), and the savior who will prevent a second nuclear holocaust from killing all life on earth.
This is a great deal to pile on a single character. It helps that a lot of it creeps up on you: book by book, she becomes entangled in more prophecies and more strongly enmeshed in the Obernewtyn community. At the beginning, she’s just a fierce, frightened orphan girl, acerbic and lonely and aloof from the people who surround her. Although she gathers about an enormous number of friends - I honestly could not keep track of them all by The Sending - she never quite loses that sense of fierce aloofness. (No wonder her best and oldest friend is a cat!) That independence is, to me, at the center of Elspeth’s appeal.
But much as I love Elspeth, the biggest draw in the books is that community that she gathers around herself. From her isolated beginning Elspeth manages to build an enormous web of social relationships, chosen family and friends and allies who are scattered across the Land. They radiate from her like concentric circles, and at the center of it is Obernewtyn, which started as a prison for Misfits and becomes their haven.
One of the things that is good about The Sending, I thought, is Elspeth’s sense of loss as Obernewtyn opens itself to the outside world. She notes, correctly, that if the Misfits are to be accepted in the Land, then Obernewtyn can’t continue to be totally cut off from everywhere: but she’s also right that in losing that hermit aspect, Obernewtyn will lose something precious. There’s a sense of warmth and trust there, of absolute acceptance, which may not be lost entirely when it opens to the outside world - but inevitably, will weaken.
(Also, how about that ravek scene in Ashling? I thought that simply the height of romantic. I ought to do a whole post on Ashling: it’s my favorite Obernewtyn book, with Domick and the plans for the rebellion and Sador.)
