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juushika(The Fierce Keeper of the Castle of Otranto's Yellow Border—"The" titles are common because they're effective, but wow are they common.)
Title: The Castle of Otranto
Author: Horace Walpole
Published: Project Gutenberg, 1996 (1764)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 310,220
Text Number: 1059
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook via Project Gutenberg
Review: When a gigantic helmet crushes the bridegroom, an interrupted wedding calls into question the succession and legitimacy of Otranto's ruler. The gigantic helmet sets the tone: bombastic, supernatural, frankly ridiculous. Succession defines the content: talky and contrived but surprisingly readable, considering the mishmash of elements and the text's age. This is effectively the first gothic novel, and while some genre-establishing works come to feel hackneyed in retrospect this still feels unique. It's raw and exaggerated, and it's easy to see why it made such an impression at the time. But it's also sketched and disjointed, a hollow melodrama; any other classic gothic novel, including very early and equally ridiculous examples, would be more satisfying. This is interesting mostly in historical context.
Title: The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin
Author: Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrator: Richard Egielski
Published: HarperCollins, 2003 (1938) (sort of, it's a super-posthumous publication, but I take it the text comes from these papers)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 310,250
Text Number: 1060
Read Because: reading the author, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: This is thoroughly adequate. The use of repetition is effective without being simplistic or irritating (I find that repetition works better in longer prose picture books as opposed to simpler rhyming texts), and the text and art evoke autumn, particularly the "burning smell of leaves in the air" and the panel of flying crows; I appreciate gently-creepy but also empowering jack-o'-lantern PoV. But, as usual for me in picture books, it goes downhill when the human element is introduced: the children (and the mice, which are weirdly humanoid) are rounded and offputting, and the instructional elements, while better than the average seasonal instructional picture book, strip away much of the atmosphere.
Title: The Border Keeper
Author: Kerstin Hall
Published: Tor.com, 2019
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 240
Total Page Count: 310,490
Text Number: 1061
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A man journeys to the distant home of the women who guards the border between worlds to beg her aid. This reminds me of early supernatural and weird travelogue narratives, like Hodgson's The House on the Borderland or Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the protagonist wanders in and out of a fantastical foreign world: a vague questing narrative (vague here because character motivations are withheld until the book's midpoint) and repetitious, visual-heavy descriptions which are dreamlike but also distant and inaccessible. I appreciate those older works but see them in—and forgive them on account of—historical context. This doesn't have that benefit, and so while it does some things well (like the restrained worldbuilding of the mundane world, which builds a diverse and convincingly large backdrop) it feels ungrounded either by place or character. It's difficult to grow invested and the final reveals are empty without on-page repercussions. I wanted to like this and in many ways feel like the right audience for it, but it failed to grab me.
Title: The Castle of Otranto
Author: Horace Walpole
Published: Project Gutenberg, 1996 (1764)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 310,220
Text Number: 1059
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook via Project Gutenberg
Review: When a gigantic helmet crushes the bridegroom, an interrupted wedding calls into question the succession and legitimacy of Otranto's ruler. The gigantic helmet sets the tone: bombastic, supernatural, frankly ridiculous. Succession defines the content: talky and contrived but surprisingly readable, considering the mishmash of elements and the text's age. This is effectively the first gothic novel, and while some genre-establishing works come to feel hackneyed in retrospect this still feels unique. It's raw and exaggerated, and it's easy to see why it made such an impression at the time. But it's also sketched and disjointed, a hollow melodrama; any other classic gothic novel, including very early and equally ridiculous examples, would be more satisfying. This is interesting mostly in historical context.
Title: The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin
Author: Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrator: Richard Egielski
Published: HarperCollins, 2003 (1938) (sort of, it's a super-posthumous publication, but I take it the text comes from these papers)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 310,250
Text Number: 1060
Read Because: reading the author, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: This is thoroughly adequate. The use of repetition is effective without being simplistic or irritating (I find that repetition works better in longer prose picture books as opposed to simpler rhyming texts), and the text and art evoke autumn, particularly the "burning smell of leaves in the air" and the panel of flying crows; I appreciate gently-creepy but also empowering jack-o'-lantern PoV. But, as usual for me in picture books, it goes downhill when the human element is introduced: the children (and the mice, which are weirdly humanoid) are rounded and offputting, and the instructional elements, while better than the average seasonal instructional picture book, strip away much of the atmosphere.
Title: The Border Keeper
Author: Kerstin Hall
Published: Tor.com, 2019
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 240
Total Page Count: 310,490
Text Number: 1061
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A man journeys to the distant home of the women who guards the border between worlds to beg her aid. This reminds me of early supernatural and weird travelogue narratives, like Hodgson's The House on the Borderland or Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the protagonist wanders in and out of a fantastical foreign world: a vague questing narrative (vague here because character motivations are withheld until the book's midpoint) and repetitious, visual-heavy descriptions which are dreamlike but also distant and inaccessible. I appreciate those older works but see them in—and forgive them on account of—historical context. This doesn't have that benefit, and so while it does some things well (like the restrained worldbuilding of the mundane world, which builds a diverse and convincingly large backdrop) it feels ungrounded either by place or character. It's difficult to grow invested and the final reveals are empty without on-page repercussions. I wanted to like this and in many ways feel like the right audience for it, but it failed to grab me.
