Operation Read All the Sutcliff
Nov. 21st, 2013 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerA collection of short Sutcliff reviews for the mostly short Sutcliff books I have been reading.
1. The Minstrel and the Dragon Pup. Basically this is a vintage Sutcliff “boy with dog” story, except with a baby dragon instead of a dog. It’s a picture book, so the story part is pretty short, but the illustrations (by Emma Chichester Clark) are gorgeous and the dragon is all sorts of adorable, so if you run across it, it’s very cheering.
2. Chess-Dream in a Garden, which is totally trippy. So this chess set - actually, only one half of a chess set - lives in a garden, under the watchful eye of a stone bird, and the queen dreams she’s a unicorn and the knight dreams he’s a zebra (and he’s also totally in love with the queen) and the pawns dream that they’re armadillos, and then the knight confesses his love and causes discord in the garden which brings in the evil half of the chess set, but the queen...somehow summons up the force of the garden...and all the good chess pieces transform into their animal selves and defeat the evil chess pieces!
Yes. It’s kind of trippy.
3. Brother Dusty-Feet, which is about Hugh, who joins a troupe of traveling players in Elizabethan England. I would have bet money that Hugh was going to run into Shakespeare at some point, and I would have been wrong; he doesn’t so much as perform a cobbled-together form of any of Shakespeare’s plays, as Hugh’s troupe trades mostly in miracle plays.
This seems to be written for a slightly younger audience than most of her historical fiction: there are lots of asides to explain customs to readers, which the Roman Britain books don’t do. But it's still rather fun: I particularly liked the pilgrim-piper who might be one of the fairy folk.
1. The Minstrel and the Dragon Pup. Basically this is a vintage Sutcliff “boy with dog” story, except with a baby dragon instead of a dog. It’s a picture book, so the story part is pretty short, but the illustrations (by Emma Chichester Clark) are gorgeous and the dragon is all sorts of adorable, so if you run across it, it’s very cheering.
2. Chess-Dream in a Garden, which is totally trippy. So this chess set - actually, only one half of a chess set - lives in a garden, under the watchful eye of a stone bird, and the queen dreams she’s a unicorn and the knight dreams he’s a zebra (and he’s also totally in love with the queen) and the pawns dream that they’re armadillos, and then the knight confesses his love and causes discord in the garden which brings in the evil half of the chess set, but the queen...somehow summons up the force of the garden...and all the good chess pieces transform into their animal selves and defeat the evil chess pieces!
Yes. It’s kind of trippy.
3. Brother Dusty-Feet, which is about Hugh, who joins a troupe of traveling players in Elizabethan England. I would have bet money that Hugh was going to run into Shakespeare at some point, and I would have been wrong; he doesn’t so much as perform a cobbled-together form of any of Shakespeare’s plays, as Hugh’s troupe trades mostly in miracle plays.
This seems to be written for a slightly younger audience than most of her historical fiction: there are lots of asides to explain customs to readers, which the Roman Britain books don’t do. But it's still rather fun: I particularly liked the pilgrim-piper who might be one of the fairy folk.
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Date: 2013-11-23 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:48 am (UTC)