Bittercon: "Forgotten Treasures"

[intertext]

What I think of as the "Harry Potter Effect" - a renewed interest in YA or children's fantasy - has resulted in the welcome recent republication of authors who had been well-known in certain circles, like DWJ, or well-known from the past, like Edward Eager. It has also seen the reprinting of some rather more obscure but equally deserving works, like A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond or Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. I've been thinking for a while of beginning a series of posts on old forgotten treasures from my own collection - not necessarily SF or fantasy, but books I loved that I wondered if anyone else had heard of, that I think deserve a bigger audience and potential reprinting. So, I thought I'd launch that series here, and invite others on my flist or from the bigger bittercon community, to link comments to posts about their own forgotten but deserving treasures.

My first oldy but goody is Ellen Kindt McKenzie's
Drujienna's Harp, which begins on a day in an unnamed city in what seems to be our world - indeed I've always assumed it was San Franciso. It is uncharacteristically hot, and the sky is a strange translucent pink. Tha and her brother Duncan visit a curio shop and pick up a bottle that the shop-owner warns them has a curse on it. They are instantly transported to another world.

Of relevance to one of sartorias's panel topics on world building, this is one of the most distinct and well developed worlds I remember encountering in children's fantasy. It has almost a quality of the surreal, with its pink sky, killing winds, geographic areas spreading out in concentric circles from a mysterious and deadly mound in the center. It is also unusual in children's fantasy for its bleak picture of political totalitarianism. The inhabitants are kept in a kind of controlled state of unknowing; asking too many questions is punishable by imprisonment or death. Yet there are mysterious Histories and a Prophecy, suppressed but not forgotten, that hint of "two" who will come and put the world right - or destroy it. This book deals with many extremely serious and important themes: ignorance, real or feigned, the importance not so much of physical courage but of moral convictions. Tha is a strong and believable heroine and there is a cast of well-drawn supporting characters, from the morose Eshone and even more grim Acheron to the delightful "Know-nothing" Zacapoos.

Like Victoria Walker's equally obscure but not entirely forgotten work, The Winter of Enchantment, this fascinating novel is now listed on ABE with absurdly high prices. I used to borrow it time and again from the library, and managed to snag a copy a few years ago at a less than astronomical price, and I treasure it. Just writing about it now makes me think I should reread it again - I suspect it will not have lost its magic.

So now it's your turn! How many of you have read any of the books I mention, especially this one? What are your own forgotten treasures? And don't forget to write a review of your favourite and link it here.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And, as an afterthought (sorry to be spamming the page, but it's a great topic and I love what everyone is saying...), I've found that The Perilous Gard is a common thread connecting many, many of my story-oriented friends on LJ. I loved it, too--down to memorizing the illustrations in the hardback edition I read (they were by Richard Cuffari. He had a particular way of doing noses and mouths, and a particular pen-and-ink style that made his work instantly recognizable).

I wanted to get instruction on how to walk, just like Kate did.

[the_rck]

I liked Taash and the Jesters quite a bit. I had my step-father check it out from the library at the university where he was attending grad school. I didn't find Kashka, the prequel (which I think was written later) until some time in the 90s.

I didn't like the two books quite as well as Drujienna, but I think that had more to do with when I read them, mid-teens for Taash and twenties or thirties for Kashka as opposed to elementary school for Drujienna.

Drujienna was a formative book for me. The other two were fun to read books that left less of an impression.

[gillo]

I particularly liked the fantasy books she wrote, like "The House of Arden" and "Wet Magic" - very little-known these days.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I recently bought both the Sherwood Ring and The Perilous Gard on Amazon. They had a buy-this-book-with deal going. :)

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Fantasy books I loved as a youngster:

+ The Great Book Raid by Christopher Leach - A boy named Jim runs into a man who claims to be Long John Silver....and they call up book heroes from the past(Jason, Robin Hood, King Arthur, etc) to save Jim's farm in Cornwall. It was the sort of book that made me want to read the books it referenced.

+ The Dragon Circle (and the other Wynd family books) - a New England family practises wizardry and witchcraft. Each kid has particular talents and their father, a professor, teaches them. Well before the Harry Potter craze. The Dragon Circle is the first one I found but I think there are three or four books total with these characters.

+ The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye. This is a favourite from my childhood. (And along with Patricia Wrede's Dealing With Dragons and Vivian Vande Velde's A Hidden Magic, got me into the feisty princess trope. Amy, the ordinary princess, was probably the most old fashioned of the group though. )

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I love The Perilous Gard, which I read last year when on a Tam Lin novel binge. As coincidence would have it, The Sherwood Ring turned up from Amazon just yesterday. Based on that precedent, I'm noting down other recommendations from this thread.

I'm not sure counts as a forgotten book, but my favourite "ought to be a household name, but somehow isn't" book is Mistress Masham's Repose, by TH White. I find that even people who are huge fans of his Arthurian books have often never heard of it, and it was out of print over here for years, until reprinted by a specialist publisher dedicated to reprinting classics that should never have gone out of print.

I first read it when I was about ten. This was when I was busy falling passionately in love with D'Artagnan and Edward Beverley and the like, so this book was never a burning love affair with me, but I have always so deeply admired it. Rereading it now makes me feel warm and fuzzy and every time.

[weatherglass.livejournal.com]

Oh, fantastic! I hadn't thought The Sherwood Ring was in print. I'm pretty sure I only had The Perilous Gard as a child because my mother found it on the Newbury lists, and I had no idea that Pope had written anything else until I stumbled on it at the library a few years ago. Now I have to think of people to buy copies for...

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

A book that was old when I first read it in my early childhood: The Little Lame Prince. (http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/craik/prince.html) It may seem intolerably preachy and sentimental now, but I loved it, and love it.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

No, the second book hadn't been published when I first read KDIT - in the early 70s, I think - and I was so excited when it came out, but then very disappointed in it. I remember one thing that annoyed me intensely was that she changed the dog, who had been a terrier mix in KD, to a poodly thing iirc. Such things are of great import to a serious dog person :)

[intertext.livejournal.com]

No - I've never heard of that one! It sounds rather good...

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Yes - isn't that interesting; I remember the Richar Cuffari illustrations, too. And yes - I agree with you that he's one of the most instantly recognizable illustrators. I liked his illustrations for Sylvia Louise Engdahl's The Far Side of Evil (another lesser known fave - I liked it better than Enchantress from the Stars)

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of either The Great Book Raid or The Dragon Circle! Both of them sound worth checking out. This is great - I'm getting all kinds of new book recommendations :)

[the_rck]

As I recall, most of my confusion in reading the books out of order came from Jetty.

I didn't notice about the dog at all, but I was never a dog person. I'm also very, very vague on visualization, so I don't notice character descriptions most of the time.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I loved Mistress Masham's Repose, and, interestingly enough, my friend lidocafe just bought it for her daughter because it's been reissued in a wonderful New York Times (? I think) series of classic children's books. Another in that series is another wonderful forgotten treasure: The Wind on the Moon, by Eric Linklater.

And speaking of Tam Lin - my still-favourite book on THAT topic is Catherine Storr's Thursday - another obscure but wonderful book.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Remind me - I know it's familiar, but I think I'm getting it confused with one by Oscar Wilde...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes!!! I was going to mention The Far Side of Evil and Enchantress from the Stars too and then didn't because they were more science fiction than fantasy ,but **high fives** Intertext! You and I were reading similar stories in our childhoods! I **loved** those too--the different levels of technological, the anthropological aspect--and then too, just the plots! Very exciting. The Far Side of Evil was where I learned about sensory deprivation :-P

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

:-) ... two that I hadn't found, I'll have to confess. I must have only found the common ones. But this is great-because now I have two more to read. Thanks!

[gillo]

You haven't lived till you've met the Mouldiwarp! Like a Psammead but a British native and even grumpier.

I seem to recall there was also "Harding's Luck" as well as "The House of Arden". She wrote quite a few more fantasies than are known these days, sadly.

But look! I found the two above on the Internet!!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yay! Thank you thank you :-D

[curtana.livejournal.com]

House of Arden was always one of my very favorites - I don't recall Wet Magic, though, I'll have to check it out :)

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I've got two. One is The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw, in which Saaski, a changeling child, struggles to understand her nature as she grows up in a medieval Scottish village. It's gorgeous and heartbreaking, and speaks to anyone who has ever felt different.

The other is The Gammage Cup, by Carol Kendall. I loved this book as a kid; as an adult, it is not quite as brilliant as it used to be, but it is still a wonderful read. It's often silly, and sometimes preachy (about being yourself and the dangers of conformity) but mostly it's clever and fun and smart, and the ending still makes me cry, every single damn time I read it.

[gillo]

It involved children going to an undersea world through an aquarium, by means of reciting "Sabrina Fair" from Milton's

Comus

. There was a bit I loved with a passion, in which heroes from their favourite books came to join in the fight.

I think I was very lucky as a child - our local library had a huge stock of elderly battered copies of Nesbit.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

**high fives** back at you! Yes, we obviously did read all the same books - though there's a whole lot of British influenced ones that I haven't mentioned yet :) I've hardly even _started_ *grin*

Have you read the "revised" edition of The Far Side of Evil? Apparently she's gone back and changed it to bring it into line with advances in technology and - I think- changes in political attitudes... not sure, but I just bought a recent reissue of Enchantress, in which she talks about both of them. I still have my old pb copy of FSoE and would hesitate to read a different version, but it might be interesting.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Oh yes - I don't think of that as YA particularly, because the later volumes got distinctly less so, but that first volume I suppose is. What I remember is having difficulty in getting into it on my first reading and then suddenly getting whooshed in.

Must re-read it!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of Arthur Calder Marshall's The Fair to Middling - I think my association here is simply that this and MMR were published in Penguin's 'Peacock' series - it's about a group of orphans from a home for orphans with various disabilities (one is albino, one colourblind - I forget exactly all the details) who are given a trip out to the fair, except it's a very odd fair...