Excerpt: The Flower's Vanity

The lovely flower had soon begun tormenting the little prince with her rather touchy vanity. One day, for instance, alluding to her four thorns, she remarked to the little prince, “I’m ready for tigers, with all their claws!”

“There are no tigers on my planet,” the little prince had objected, “and besides, tigers don’t eat weeds.”

“I am not a weed,” the flower sweetly replied.

“Forgive me…”

“I am not at all afraid of tigers, but I have a horror of drafts. You wouldn’t happen to have a screen?”

“A horror of drafts… that’s not a good sign, for a plant,” the little prince had observed. “How complicated this flower is…”

“After dark you will put me under glass. How cold it is where you live—quite uncomfortable. Where I come from—” But she suddenly broke off. She had come to the little prince’s planet as a seed. She couldn’t have known anything of other worlds. Humiliated at having let herself be caught on the verge of so naïve a lie, she coughed two or three times in order to put the little prince in the wrong. “That screen?”

“I was going to look for one, but you were speaking to me!”

Then she made herself cough again, in order to inflict a twinge of remorse on him all the same.

So the little prince, despite all the goodwill of his love, had soon come to mistrust the flower. He had taken seriously certain inconsequential remarks and had grown very unhappy.

“I shouldn’t have listened to her!” he confided to me one day. “You must never listen to flowers. You must look at them and smell them. Mine perfumed my planet, but I didn’t know how to enjoy that. The business about the tiger claws, instead of annoying me, ought to have moved me…”

And he confided further, “In those days, I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.”

In order to make his escape, I believe he took advantage of a migration of wild birds.

On the morning of his departure, he put his planet in order. He carefully raked out his active volcanoes. The little prince possessed two active volcanoes, which were very convenient for warming his breakfast. He also possessed one extinct volcano. But, as he said, “You never know!” So he raked out the extinct volcano, too. If they are properly raked out, volcanoes burn gently and regularly, without eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney. Of course, on our Earth we are much too small to rake out our volcanoes. That is why they cause us so much trouble.

The little prince also uprooted, a little sadly, the last baobab shoots. He believed he would never be coming back. But all these familiar tasks seemed very sweet to him on this last morning. And when he watered the flower one last time, and put her under glass, he felt like crying.

“Good-bye,” he said to the flower. But she did not answer him.

(Excerpt from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, pages 23 to 25.)

This little vignette is one of many moments of wisdom in de Saint-Exupery’s slender but important book, The Little Prince. In a tale simple and imaginative enough to entertain children, the author still manages to pack observation after observation about the folly of human nature into the story. Our prince leaves his little home planet and begins to explore the vast universe, finding little more than foolish men that inhabit the neighboring planets. But when he eventually lands on Earth, he befriends a pilot who is stranded in the desert, and shares the story of his travels.

This book never ceases to make me smile, with its imagination, wit and understated wisdom. Come back tomorrow for a full review of The Little Prince.

This post participates in my Focus on Fantasy Reading Challenge. In order to learn more about the challenge and the reading contest, read my original Focus on Fantasy post.

Excerpt: The Sister Stars

I kept looking at the sky, not trusting myself to look back at you. There was a cluster of particularly bright stars, sinking down toward the horizon. They were like a small city made up of winking lights. A highway of bright stars led to them. You saw where I was looking.

“The sisters,” you said. “That’s what some folks call them.”

“Why?”

You sat up, surprised at my willingness to talk. “Those stars were beautiful women once,” you said.

“They were the first women on this land. As they walked though this country, trees and flowers sprouted up behind them; rocks emerged. A river soaked into their footsteps. But then, while the women were bathing in their river, a spirit man watched them. He decided he wanted to keep them as his wives. He chased after them and the women ran. They fled to the only place they thought was safe, the sky. They turned into stars. But he chased them up there, too, turning into a star himself, always following behind.”

You raised your arm and pointed out one of the brightest stars in the sky. “See? He’s there.” Then you traced a line between that star and the cluster of stars you called the sisters. “See it?” you asked. “He’s always there, following the sisters, chasing them eternally… but he never quite catches up.”

I shivered suddenly. “The sisters can never get away from him, then?”

“True.” You tucked my blanket tight around my shoulders. “But they’ll never be caught, either. He’s just behind them, always watching…wanting them. He chases them all around the world. You could have seen him chasing them in London, if you’d been looking.”

“You now you can’t see the stars in London, not really,” I said.

You flopped back down into the sand. “Maybe not. But he’s there all the same. Behind the clouds, behind the lights… watching.”

(Excerpt from Lucy Christopher’s novel Stolen, pages 231–233.)

This may seem like a scene from a romantic night on the beach, with the trappings of a typical YA Romance. But let me give you a little bit of context for this passage: this is a conversation between Gemma and her kidnapper Ty, a man who has stalked her for six or seven years, drugged her and forcibly taken her to his home in the Australian desert.

Knowing this, doesn’t their conversation take on a new dimension?

Oddly enough, Ty is a sympathetic character in Christopher’s novel. He has had a traumatic childhood and decided to kidnap Gemma because he believes that she is like him, that she would be much happier living out in the desert with him. In this passage, Ty is focused on the fact that the spirit man will never catch up with the three sisters; by this time, he has realized that Gemma is unhappy living in his captivity, and he is haunted by the idea that he will never fully possess her. He may have caught her, but he cannot truly keep her.

Meanwhile, Gemma is haunted by the idea that even if she can escape Ty’s home in the isolated Australian desert, she will never really escape him. He will always be there, behind her, chasing her. And although I have not read the entire novel yet (and therefore have no idea whether Gemma escapes or not), I suspect that will be true for her psychologically. She will always feel like Ty is following her, haunting her. It will be difficult for her to ever believe she is safe or free again.

I will be posting a full review of Lucy Christopher’s novel Stolen on the blog tomorrow.

Excerpt: The Knife and the Man Jack

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man was on the bedroom floor, the other child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.

. . . . .

The man Jack's eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight, so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light was not that important, after all. He had other skills.

The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery--a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck--that the child had been carrying.

The child had been here. It was here no longer. The man Jack followed his nose down the stairs through the middle of the tall, thin house. He inspected the bathroom, the kitchen, the airing cupboard, and, finally, the downstairs hall, in which there was nothing to be seen but the family's bicycles, a pile of empty shopping bags, a fallen diaper, and the stray tendrils of fog that had insinuated themselves into the hall from the open door to the street.

The man Jack made a small noise then, a grunt that contained both frustration and also satisfaction. He slipped the knife into its sheath in the inside pocket of his long coat, and he stepped out into the street. There was moonlight, and there were streetlights, but the fog stifled everything, muted light and muffled sound and made the night shady and treacherous. He looked down the hill towards the light of the closed shops, then up the street, where the last high houses wound up the hill on their way to the darkness of the old graveyard.

The man Jack sniffed the air. Then, without hurrying, he began to walk up the hill.

(Excerpt from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Chapter One: How Nobody Came to the Graveyard.)

When I was a kid, I read every Goosebumps novel that my library owned. Then I graduated to the Fear Street series, also by R.L. Stine. I look back on those books now and wonder if they weren't a little repetitive, a little cliche. Stine's plots all involved things that dripped, oozed, shuddered, bumped and jumped out at you in the night. Perfect for sending chills down the spine of an eight year old.

But what about the story? What about the writing? Were they really any good?

Neil Gaiman's Newbery winning The Graveyard Book sends me into fits of shivers, not just because the idea of "the man Jack" stalking the baby is downright gruesome, but because Gaiman's writing is by turns haunting and amusing. Tendrils of fog and muted streetlamps are the stuff of many crime fiction novels and horror movies, but Gaiman employs them beautifully, mixing them in with less common descriptions like that of the baby's scent.

Inventive and well-written, The Graveyard Book is one of the best paranormal books for kids that I've ever read. (Full review to be posted either Friday or Saturday.)

What are your favorite paranormal books for kids? And how to do you feel about Gaiman versus R.L. Stine?

Excerpt: The Nephilim

The moon set, its path whiter than the desert sands dwindling into shadow. The stars moved in their joyous dance across the sky. The horizon was dark with that deep darkness which comes just before the dawn.

A vulture flew down, seemingly out of nowhere, stretching its naked neck, settling its dark feathers. —Vultures are underestimated. WIthout us, disease would wipe out all life. We clean up garbage, feces, dead bodies of man and beast. We are not appreciated.

No sound was heard and et the words seemed scratched upon the air.

A scarab beetle burrowed up out of the sand and blinked a the vulture. —It is true. You help keep the world clean. I appreciate you.

And it disappeared beneath the sand.

A crocodile crawled across the desert, lumbering along clumsily, far from its native waters. It was followed by the dragon/lizard, who stretched his leather wings, showing off. A dark, hooded snake slithered past them both.

A small, brown, armored creature, not much bigger than the scarab beetle, skittered along beside the snake. —We are invulnerable. We have survived the fire of the volcanoes, the earthquakes that pushed the continents apart and raised the mountain ranges. We are immortal. We cover the planet.

A bat, brighter than gold, swooped low over the cockroach. —You are proud, and you can survive fire and ice, but I could eat you if I had to. I hope I never have to.

And the golden bat soared high, a bright flash against the dark.

A tiny mimicry of a crocodile, with a blunt nose, a skink scrabbled along beside the crocodile and the dragon/lizard. —I am small, and swift, and my flesh is not edible and causes damage to the brain. I am the way that I am. THat is how I am made.

On the skink's back, a flea tried to dig through the armored flesh. —I, too, am the way that I am.

A shrill whine cut across the clear air. A mosquito droned. —I, too. I, too. I will feast on your blood.

A small, slimy worm wriggled across the sand, leaving a thin trail. A slug's viscous path followed. —I am not like the snail, needing a house. I am sufficient unto myself.

A red ant crawled along the dragon/lizard's wing, and held tight as it tried to shake the biting insect off. A rat, sleek and well filled, wriggled its nose and whiskers and looked at the vulture's naked neck. —I, too, eat the filth off the streets. I eat flesh. I prefer living flesh, but I will take what I can get. I, too, help keep the world clean.

No sound was heard. Like negative light, the words cracked the desert night.

The twelve oddly assorted creatures began to position themselves into a circle.

The nephilim.


(Excerpt from Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters, Chapter 5: The Nephilim.)

I am reading Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle as part of my review series on her Time Quintet, and I am not sure whether or not I like this book at all. I'm really drawn to this passage, though. What do you all think of it? Are there any regular readers of Sci-Fi/Fantasy who can comment?

My full review of Many Waters will be posted tomorrow.