Terry Griggs

The Discovery of Honey is a sequence of linked stories narrated in “hyper-precocious” fashion by a girl named Hero Young. The setting is somewhere in Northern Ontario at an unspecified time some years ago, far enough in the past that the town’s telephone system relies on a switchboard operator. The thirteen stories in the collection describe Hero’s development and accomplishments from birth to her late teens and introduce the reader to a cast of eccentrics that includes her inattentive parents and various relatives and residents of the town. In these stories Hero delivers a high-energy personal narrative filled with puns, jokes and endless wordplay. The events that constitute the stories are often so loosely connected that they occasionally seem random; so much so that the reader will eventually begin to suspect that what is happening on the page is not really all that important. Hero’s effusive narrative is so heavily laden with lengthy tangents, sardonic commentary and extraneous detail that the stories themselves become a distraction. If this is a stylistic choice that the author has made, it is worth noting that almost two hundred pages of her narrator’s long-winded and frequently sarcastic observations has, in the end, an exhausting effect on the reader. Hero has very little of a positive nature to say about the town where she lives and the people in her life. Most adults she encounters are depicted as luckless, badly dressed, intellectually deficient buffoons. Far too often the impression that Hero leaves is of a brat with a low opinion of everyone and everything. For all her precocious wisdom, she does not seem to realize that ridiculing other people’s shortcomings while proclaiming her own superiority is not the best way to endear herself to the reader. Despite all of this, it’s probably fair to assume that fans of Terry Griggs will find much to enjoy in The Discovery of Honey. The new collection, consistent with her previous output, is a spirited, fanciful and highly imaginative romp. But readers who have not found her past work to be to their taste are unlikely to be swayed by the stories in this volume to a more favourable way of thinking.… (mere)

Magic is most interesting when it works like a physical weapon: the character is given it (or learns she has it), and has to learn how to use it. It behaves according to rules, and she has to learn those rules in order to use it effectively. In a historical novel, you never see a character pick up a sword for the first time and “just know” exactly how to best the powerful enemy. So why does this happen so often with fantasy magic? (Full review at rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://www.parenthetical.net/2010/03/30/nieve-by-terry-griggs/.)… (mere)