The Wilful Princess And The Piebald Prince (2013)

The Wilful Princess And The Piebald Prince

Robin Hobb, il. Jon Foster

2013, Subterranean Press

For something a little different.  This book stands alone quite nicely, but also functions as a prequel of sorts to the author’s popular fantasy series, much of it centering on a dragon-plagued land called the Six Duchies, and the royal Farseer family that rules it when they're not busy killing each other.  I’ve read most of the books – there are currently 13 – and generally liked them.  They’re decent fantasy novels based on characters and convincingly portray a complicated fantasy world.  This novella is much shorter and concentrated than the sprawling enormity of the rest of the series, but has many of the same elements – strong and often unlikeable women, mysterious men, royal squabbles, high fantasy tone and a tendency toward unexpected bloodbaths. 

The backstory for this installment is that in the main series, there’s a violent dislike for one branch of magic ability.  The Wit is the ability to bond and communicate with animals in a mystic way; Witted folk can literally speak with animals.  When this book begins, years before the later books, being Witted is considered acceptable.  When the next book (Assasin’s Apprentice) in the series opens, the Wit is regarded as corrupt and evil.  In this book, it’s explained how that prejudice came to be.  It starts with a Queen-In-Waiting named Caution.  Who is, to put it mildly, quite unlike her name.  At 20, she’s refused to marry, refused to learn anything about ruling, and generally is vexing her indulgent parents.  And then the horse fair opens.  

Now among his ware this odd trader had a spotted horse – not dappled nor speckled, mind you, but blotted in great ugly spots, like a fruit that has taken blight, or a poorly-dyed blanket, or a milk cow.  Black-and-white he was, with a rolling blue eye on one side of his head and a dark staring one on the other.  Big was this beast, and a stud, unruly of temper, screaming out his challenges to any stallion that came near and snuffing and stamping after every passing mare.

Caution sees the horse, and the Witted slave named Lostler who is the only one who can control him.  She buys horse and man, and installs them in the royal stable, and you can tell where this is going.  But Caution's predictable disaster is not where the story ends. 

The story is narrated by Felicity, the plain daughter of an ambitious wet nurse.  Maneuvered into place as the playmate and personal maid of Caution, she has grown to love her.  She has little choice; taken from her family at a young age and instructed harshly by her mother on how to please a fickle princess, Felicity has virtually no one but Caution.  The princess, all unknowing, is Felicity’s family, friends and lover, all in one.  Their betrayals of each other will be impressive, especially given that Caution really doesn’t recognize that she is betraying her – for how can a princess betray a servant?

Honestly, not all that horsey.  It is interesting, though, how Hobb uses the horse to rachet up the sexual tension between the heir and the groom; as the maid watches her mistress flirt with ruin.

Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies/The Elderlings novels

Assassin’s Apprentice

Royal Assassin

Assassin’s Quest

Ship of Magic

The Mad Ship

Ship of Destiny

Fool’s Errand

The Golden Fool

Fool’s Fate

Dragon Keeper

Dragon Haven

City of Dragons

Blood of Dragons

About the Author

Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden (1952 - )

aka Megan Lindholm

Links

Megan Lindholm website

Robin Hobb website

Subterranean Press
 Tor Books - excerpt


 

Odds and ends

Am I alone in using the digital camera as a way to remember books?  Forget scribbling the name on a scrap of paper, now you can just whip out the cell phone or camera and snap a photo.  Also, while we're on the topics of using bookstores - am I alone in finding a rather smug pleasure in finding egregiously misplaced books which some previous browser hastily stuck into a shelf?  Cat care in the computer section, poetry with the car manuals, I lovingly extract them and pile them happily on the nearest bench so they can eventually rejoin their brethren.

This is the scene in February, mere moments before I took a spectacular fall.  All that snow cunningly conceals a puddle which I KNEW was there, as it's there 9 months of the year, but somehow forgot just long enough to step onto its slickly iced surface and go flying.  My experience was caught on video, as I had the camera turned to movie at the time, but I think I'll just not share that.  It's a blur as the camera makes a lovely arc through the air, and then, as it lands a short distance from my suddenly prone body,  a lot of groaning, some slightly dramatic clutching of the ground, and a final, belated shot of the dog making a sortie back to see what was taking me so long. 

The puddle complex in warmer times. 

Which is why I am rather impatient for spring.  I love cold weather, but when snow conspires with ice to maim, you really don't need a horse to hurt yourself.  It's funny; I have the typical fear issues with riding that most sane adults have, but my worst falls have been sans horse.  Which is something I reflected on after another ice slide a few years ago.  As I lay with my head in the street, watching a SEPTA bus heaving toward my skull, I resolved to never be afraid on horseback again.  I didn't think of making a more sensible pledge, and resolving to move to a climate without ice.

A winter pansy, looking beaten but unbowed.  Granted, it was a mild winter, but I'm still impressed by their survival.  Also the decorative cabbage.

My gardens have always exhibited a lack of overall cohesion.  I believe my harsher critics think this is due to some stupendous lack of vision, but they're wrong.  I'm well aware that a deep purple pansy and a pale lavender cabbage are not natural compliments.  The thing is, I like both of them.  I'm an intensely personal gardener; that it pleases my eye is the goal. 








 

The Phantom Roan (1949)

The Phantom Roan

Stephen Holt, il. Pers Crowell

1949, David McKay Company

“Shucks,” he managed to whisper, “some horses have to die of colic.  Harmon of the Double Anchor says so.”  Moving easily, he walked to a little niche beside the feed box and getting a hammer started to nail the hasp back on.  Working, he kept his eyes from roving out to the rolling Alberta hills that would remind him of the sleek bay horse.  The hills over which he and Roy H had raced, but would never race again.  For Roy H was gone.

Glenn Barnes, abandoned at a lonely ranch house as an infant, loves his adoptive parents Luce and Abbie, and their Shoestring Ranch but now he has to leave.  Generous, impulsive Luce is an easy touch for every salesman and con artist wandering through their area of Canada, and a drought killed their last cows.  Shrewd, unlikeable Uncle Walt has offered Glenn a job in his bank and Glenn, stunned by the loss of his horse, is dully resigned to taking it and leaving the land for a small city.  Also left behind, his dreams of becoming a veterinarian. 

This, of course, will not happen.  On Glenn’s final night of freedom, camped out in a ravine on the outskirts of town, he encounters a horse, a rodeo castoff with cropped ears and a rage against humans.  The horse, a blue roan, also has a stone in his foot and submits, after an initial furious attack, to having Glenn help him.  Against his will, Glenn’s determination to never care about another fickle, fragile horse gives way.

He’d found himself now, and he knew that he had found his horse.  A sense of belonging to each other and of being alike filled him. Hadn’t Luce found him on the doorstep? And hadn’t he found the roan down here in the river bottom? They’d both been foundlings.

Of course, it’s not that easy.  First, Glenn has to convince curmudgeonly local vet Doc Crane to hire him, then nurse the angry roan (now named Sky) back to health.  Crane’s a tough boss, his daughter Barbara is confusing (to readers as well, since she has the typical lack of depth of a female character in a western), and Crane’s African-American assistant Alan is all but hostile.  And that doesn’t even get to the central battle of the book, which is the fight between Crane and the area’s largest rancher, Peters, over mange.  The vet is determined to have all cattle dipped to prevent the disease, and the rancher is determined to avoid it.  So far, Peters has been winning easily, to the point where Crane’s last assistant decamped to become Peters’ new ranch hand.  Glenn, now, is caught in the middle.  And at intervals, Sky’s former owner appears, whispers ominously to himself and vanishes again.

I’m a bit of a fan of hyperbole.  I enjoy every overblown, action-packed moment of excess drama.  But I think the random appearances of Sky’s former owner really just gilded the lily on this one.   You already have a hero with four different father figures (plus one actual if non-present father), two haunting bonds to special horses, and no less than four men who we’re forced to understand – broody Alan and his painful racial past, Doc Crane and his fight to clear the range of disease, cowboy king Peters and his need to be proven right over a mouthy newcomer, and dreamy poet Luce’s desire to latch onto a lucky thing by investing in random inventions.  There’s such a thing as demanding too much of a reader, and asking them to worry about Alan’s pride and Peters’ status while also wondering if the villain will manage to steal back the already troubled Sky – well, it’s overload.  By the time we all end up in a rodeo, Glenn’s final dilemma seems less pressing than our own.  Will we make it through to the final page before we begin to just hate all the characters?

Caveat: My opinion may have been influenced by reading this too soon after another Holt/Thompson title, Spook, The Mustang, and the similarities being slightly irritating.  Like realizing that a favorite author has an unfortunate weakness for "azure eyes" or using inappropriate words as verbs (aka, "she startled at his touch.")  Also, it's March, and this is not a month that brings out the sunny side.  Literally, as it's been ungodly overcast for weeks.   

Links

Lethbridge, Alberta

Cardston, Alberta

Trivia:

Googling the place names mentioned in this book, I discovered that the two towns/cities mentioned were real places, with a couple of horsey tie-ins.  George “The Iceman” Woolf, the jockey who rode Seabiscuit in many of his races and becomes famous again after the 2001 Laura Hillenbrand book, was born on a ranch near Cardston.  And the Remington Carriage Museum is a local attraction.

Spook The Mustang (1956)

Spook The Mustang

Harlan Thompson, il. Millard Sheets

1956, Doubleday and Company

1968, Grosset & Dunlap Famous Horse Stories (edition pictured), il. Sam Savitt (cover, frontspiece)

 

After his ranch venture fails in Mexico, saddle-maker Luis Barry returns to his father’s home in central California with his 17-year-old son David and wife Victoria.  Luis is frail, recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Victoria’s a traditional Spanish wife who defers to her men, so the bulk of the driving and worrying are left to David.  And David’s sick of ranching.  The collapse of their hopes in Mexico has left him disillusioned and hoping only to get a normal job, make some money, and get his parents stable again.  But when they stop to visit  Grandy and discover the old man’s vanished, circumstances conspire to keep the little family on Grandy’s neglected ranch. 

One of those circumstances is a little black colt David tries mightily to resist.

“Black as a spook,” he whispered, “and a natural pacer.”

Then David recalled the last ranch and the bay colt who’d died of thirst on the banks of the parched Miraflores Creek just two days before the rains came.  No more colts for him, he decided, and turned his head away as the black, with a last flick of his shiny hoofs, raced to join his mother.

The family stays, and David goes to work for their neighbor, a tough rancher named King Jordan.  Grandy’s property, the Condor Ranch, has back taxes owing and David basically has two years to pay it off or lose the ranch to Jordan.  Over those two years, he works Jordan’s ranch, struggles to raise the few cattle remaining on the Condor, and trains the black colt he names Spook.

Spook, the real reason for David’s decision to give ranching another try, had a terrifying experience with the great condors and it leaves him with a permanent fear of birds.  David, determined to make a great roping horse out of him, is haunted by the fear he’ll never be able to overcome the promising colt’s phobia.

Suddenly three squaking crows, playing tag with a stick, flew directly across the corral.  They made a din.  Their wings shadowed the ground.

With a wild whinny of terror, the colt pounded over Dave and fled for the barn.

An interesting Western horse book, full of ranching stories and rodeo action, as well as the long mystery of what happened to Grandy.  The setting – near the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in California – is also interesting, as is the presence of the condors. 

Side note

David’s mother is from the same family that stars in Thompson’s 1952 novel Star Roan.

The California Condor

You can hardly blame Spook for his fear.  The California Condor has one of the largest wingspans in the world at 9.5’  In 1982 there were only 22 left in the world.  In 1987, the last one was removed from the wild, a story I remember vividly from my childhood.  There are 408 birds, 231 of them in the wild, today.

Links

Jane Badger Books

Ponymad Booklovers

US Fish and Wildlife page for Hopper Mountain NationalWildlife Complex

Friends Of California Condors Wild and Free

The Great Pony Hassle (1993)

The Great Pony Hassle

Nancy Springer, il. Daniel Mark Duffy

1993, Dial Books

“You promised!” Paisley McPherson yelled at her father.  “You told me if we had to live here, you’d get me a pony! You did!”

Two sets of twins become siblings when their parents marry.  And although big, brash Paisley is the only one who actually says it, all four girls want ponies.  As Paisley sets out to secure her equine and build him somewhere to live…

“I don’t believe this.  We go away, come back a couple days later, and the backyard’s turned into a pony farm.”

… her sisters watch with slitted eyes.  Her twin, Stirling, affects to not care.  The Fontecchio twins, Toni and Staci, also fake indifference but of course, all three are wild with jealousy.  And no wonder.

He was a palomino, a round, short-legged little palomino with a mass of forelock, like bangs that needed to be combed and trimmed, over those huge eyes.  He had enough creamy-blond mane and tail for six ordinary ponies.  His golden ears, turned at a contented sideward angle, pricked tiny through his thick mane.  His golden cheeks and pink nose moved as he selected a tuft of daisies and chewed it.  His tail, long and plump, swished almost as white as the flowers.

 

The pony, Noodles, and the silent girl-war carried out through disinformation, things left unsaid and other classic girl tactics, befuddle the doting father.  Clearing everything up, finally, is his brisk, horsey sister Caledonia, who comes to assess the pony and ends up instantly figuring out what’s going on with the kids.  It's a funny, accurate, age-appropriate book.

Links

Kirkus review – pretty accurate

Nancy Springer’s website (includes brief essay about horses)

Other books – horsey

Sky Rider

The Boy On A Black Horse

They’re All Named Wildfire (I must interject that this is possibly the best horsey title ever)

A Horse To Love

Not On A White Horse

Music Of Their Hooves: Poems About Horses

Colt

Short story

"The Boy Who Plaited Manes" (Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, October 1986)