Not for Trump, but...

During the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016, I had a hard time getting my social-media friends to understand what I meant when I insisted that I was not in favor of Trump being elected, but I was absolutely against Hillary Clinton becoming president.

In these post-apocalyptic days, still early in the Trump presidency, press coverage has made it abundantly clear that the nation's choice of its 45th president was a massive boo-boo. Of course, I would have predicted this even in the advent of a totally righteous, non-left-wing-cuckoo president. Recall, again, how the national news media spent most of practically every news cycle harping on what a lousy president George W. Bush was, precisely for doing or not doing more or less the same things the press had no complaint about when done by the Democratic presidents before and after him. It is sufficient not to be of the donkey party to be branded as evil, along with all your acts and omissions in exhaustive detail.

The ideological differences between the last four or five presidents have not been very significant, excepting perhaps some of Obama's apparent veers toward the far left; they've pretty much continually led the country in the same direction - with bad and good results mixed, but a definite and constant trajectory with regard to the limits of government in-reach into people's lives. Their ideological colors as reported in the mainstream press, however, contrast much more vividly. It seems to be to the press' purpose to position one shade of purple (bluish) as the good guys and the other (reddish) as the bad guys.

It plays right in with the tired old theme of modern American politics, on which 2016 was really just a very blatant variation: What is permitted for the left is forbidden for the right, or even those perceived as being on the right because the party they represent isn't as far to the left. I'm not sure there's any honesty in it. It begins to look like theater for the amusement of the masses.

For example, the press is OK with Bill Clinton's pandering to bubbly crony capitalism, but condemns W when his virtually identical policies lead to the real estate crash of 2007.

The press is all right with Clinton's firing of the previous administration's federal appointees, but jumps down W's throat for doing the same thing.

The press considers the collapse of the FBI investigation into Hillary's email scandal a vindication of their candidate, though it's really more of an indictment of a politicized Justice Department stifling the Bureau's ability to dig for evidence by refusing to issue subpoenas; if anything, the FBI's persistence is reported as a sign that Director Comey is in the Trump Campaign's pocket.

Meanwhile, there is nary a murmur from the press about the fact that the same Justice Department opened a fishing expedition into any possible wrongdoing by Trump, using recently expanded federal powers (per W's Patriot Act) that circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. This allows the department, on some national-security rationale or other, to petition a secret court to open an investigation that can continue indefinitely without any evidence of or probable cause to suspect a particular crime. How would you like having a cop watching your every move, just for the chance of catching you doing something wrong?

The press is OK with the guy from the blue party expanding executive authority and using it at will, but it's suddenly concerned about the size of government when a red-party guy is in office. It's OK with the blue party's presidential candidate lying out of both sides of her mouth, and down the middle as well, but it will gladly run a full-court press, all day, every day, about every "alternative fact" that oozes out of the new administration.

In other words, the press is saying their favored party is right to run roughshod over Americans' civil liberties, and to issue an unbroken tissue of lies as though telling the truth under any circumstances grates on their aesthetic sensibilities; but when the other party is in power, it suddenly remembers these things are wrong and a danger to the republic. I say this, dear press, dear safeguard of liberty and whatnot, not because I want to justify Trump or any Republican for doing these things. If they're wrong, they're wrong. I say this because, dear press, I am ashamed of you, and I want you to know it.

But there is an even bigger backlash against Trump's leadership this time around - louder, more forceful, even violent at times - and the press is working harder than it has ever worked to sell the perception that the whole world is uniting, as it has never united before, to combat the evil of President Trump. I'm pretty sure a great deal of this vitriol is a distillate of the left's unwillingness to accept the result of the election. But that goes hand-in-hand with the left's inability to recognize the reason Trump won, or rather, the reason he was an acceptable alternative, for the majority of voters in by far the majority of electoral precincts nationwide, to the candidate the Democratic Party offered us.

As a newspaper writer, I can find nothing more painful than to admit that I think election night 2016 was not so much a vote for the evil of Trump or against the evil of Hillary, but a vote against the press. We had it coming to us. It wasn't really a choice between a liar and a truth-teller, or a choice of which candidate was the better liar, or of which was the lesser threat to freedom, the rule of law, and government by the people. It was a choice between the candidate whose lies the press would dutifully expose, day in and day out, versus the one in whose constant prevarication the press would be a silent accomplice. It was a choice between the president against whom the journalistic media would be doing its duty to defend the public and hold up the mirror of truth, and the one for whom it would shamefully abdicate these duties. The election was, in my last analysis anyway, mostly about the press.

The Summer Tree

The Summer Tree
by Guy Gavriel Kay
Recommended Ages: 15+

Ailell, the king of the High Kingdom of Brennin in Fionavar, the first of all the worlds, is about to celebrate his 50th anniversary on the throne. As a special gift to mark the occasion, a wizard named Loren Silvercloak crosses the void between realities to bring back five special guests, one for each decade of Ailell's reign. Who are these special guests? Why, a group of modern-day university students from Toronto. Who else would you expect?

Things start to go wrong before their trip gets off the ground. First, something vicious has followed Loren and his dwarf companion Matt to Toronto. Then, one of the five students gets separated from the group on their way to Fionavar. Worst of all, they arrive at a tipping point in the history of Loren's world, when an evil god is about to break free of his thousand-year prison, while the king's reluctance to make the ultimate sacrifice causes the entire kingdom to be punished with a drought. And of course, the five young Canadian guests find themselves at the center of things, in ways even Loren did not quite foresee.

Kevin becomes a brother-in-arms to the kingdom's dissolute, dashing younger prince and heir, joining in a reckless mission to seduce the princess of a neighboring country. Kim picks up the mantle of the world's leading seer, and also discovers the true identity of Prince Diarmuid's exiled older brother Aileron. Dave, the one who became separated from the group, forges a bond of brotherhood with a band of nomadic hunters. Paul, emotionally paralyzed after his girlfriend's death, offers to make the sacrifice Ailell is unwilling to make. And Jennifer, captured by dark forces during a picnic with the elves, is fated to become a dark lord's plaything.

Though this is only the beginning of a much larger story, it is a beginning with tremendous promise. Kay juggles a large cast of characters, sustaining their conflicting motives and complex feelings seemingly without effort, and lets them move against a background of legend, history, culture, and magic that can stand scrutiny at any power of magnification. After one volume of a trilogy, it is more than possible to love these characters, to be ready to cheer them on as they step into heroic roles in a world that badly needs heroes.

Kay writes with a very distinctive voice, embracing sentence structures that may seem like mistakes until you recognize them as the marks of an individual style. In one passage, he drops mythic pronouncements as though from the lips of a bard in the full throe of epic; in another, he drops into the ironic cant of a law school professor intellectually demolishing a smart-aleck student in front of his class. Yet these changes of register work for Kay, just like the whole concept of five 20-somethings from the University of Toronto getting mixed up with kings, wizards, elves, etc. I am eager to see what miracles he works next.

This 1984 debut novel is the first book in the "Fionavar Tapestry" trilogy. Its companions are The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road. Kay, a Canadian author who helped Christopher Tolkien edit his father's unpublished notes into the fantasy epic The Silmarillion, specializes in creating fantasy worlds with a touch of real-world history. His other books include the two-book "Sarantine Mosaic" series, the two "Under Heaven" books, and the novels Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, and Children of Earth and Sky. Frequently a nominee for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature (including for this book) and the World Fantasy Best Novel award, he won the latter for Ysabel in 2008.

EDIT: I forgot to mention it, but both an Adult Content Advisory and an Occult Content Advisory are in order for this book.

208. Seven Deadly Sins Hymn

This is another one of those sermon series-inspired hymns, on which I have been meditating for quite a while. My father used to preach a Lenten midweek sermon series about the "seven deadly sins" (a medieval catholic tradition, not a biblical list of spiritual vices), and I remember it being very useful for self-examination - although the number of Wednesdays during Lent always made it necessary to combine two of the sins, I think they were gluttony and lust, into one installment. A brother in the ministry recently told me he was considering developing a similar Lenten series, though I think he decided to go a different route; but, just in case, I hope this might be a useful accompaniment to such a sermon series in the future. Like other hymns I have written to go with Advent and Lenten sermon series (and even one or two that were used as such, without having been planned for that purpose), the idea is to use the first and last stanza every week, and stick between them the stanza(s) relevant to the sin(s) of the week. Stanzas 2-8 represent, respectively, the seven traditional sins in the descending order of the circles of hell in Dante's Purgatorio: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. At this writing (watch for updates!) I have no particular hymn-tune in mind for this hymn.

Lord, lest in sin we harden,
So let Your holy passion
Your image in us fashion,
That we, Your judgment fearing,
From evil passions steering,
Might love Your hard-bought pardon!

Since You desire to save us,
Forgive the carnal longing
Wherein, our neighbor wronging,
We fall and feebly wallow;
Make firm our hearts to follow
The narrow way You gave us!

Lord, who devoutly fasted,
Your neighbor's hunger heeding
And needy thousands feeding:
Fulfill our deepest craving,
From gross excesses saving
All who Your bread have tasted!

Since You all things provide us,
Shall any need concern us?
From Mammon, therefore, turn us:
Let neither hoarding, winning,
Nor want that leads to sinning,
From Your rich grace divide us!

Lord, brook not our desertion
From any state or duty
That draws from You its beauty!
Rise, listless spirits blessing
With zeal and fire, impressing
Your cross on our exertion!

How can we rightly bless You
Who could in wrath deny us,
Yet died to justify us?
May we, with all men living
In peace, their sins forgiving,
Slay wrath, and so confess You!

Lord, o'er the city weeping
Before You drank the chalice
Filled by its bitter malice:
Let no man's gain annoy us,
Nor his loss overjoy us,
Our hearts from envy keeping!

Since You came as a servant,
Lord, to the grave descending,
Our proud delusion ending:
Implant in us Your Spirit,
Relying on Your merit
With humble faith, and fervent!

Amen! Lord, cleanse the leaven
Of sin that grows within us,
That would to Satan win us;
Ere shades of evening lengthen,
Forgive us now, and strengthen
Our faith with graces seven!

EDIT: I searched hard for any hymn tune that would fit the meter of this poem. I found none; all other "7777 77" tunes were tailored to a trochaic rhythm, rather than the iambic meter above. So I dashed off the following original tune, which I am titling COUILLARD after my great-grandparents, Alphonse and Bessie Couillard, whose example of faith and domestic evangelism is one of the reasons I find myself a Lutheran today. There is no particular reason I am associating them with the seven deadly sins; I just couldn't think of anything else to call the tune. Al was my paternal grandpa's stepfather, and Bessie (nee Erschfeldt) was a tough cookie who converted not one, but two French Canadian husbands to the Lutheran faith, and saw to it that her only child (my Grandpa Fish) and his kids were brought up in it. Thanks, God, for them!

Uprooted

Uprooted
by Naomi Novik
Recommended Ages: 15+

Agnieszka (ag-NYESH-ka) is a 17-year-old girl from the middling village of Dvernik, in a mountain-rimmed agricultural valley at one end of the kingdom of Polnya, where life is pretty simple and people tend to put down deep roots. People from the valley don't even have to serve in the king's army, which is constantly at war with the neighboring kingdom of Rosya, so that's all right. The only problems are the Wood that runs along the side of the valley adjacent to Rosya - a Wood full of malice and corruption, that is slowly trying to devour the whole valley and perhaps, in time, the world - and, of course, the Dragon, who once every ten years chooses one 17-year-old girl from the valley and takes her from all that she knows and loves, as a sort of sacrifice to pay for his protection against the Wood (and against military service, for that matter).

The Dragon (with a capital D) is actually not a dragon (small d). He is only a wizard, albeit one who has lived centuries without apparently aging. Whatever his reason for requiring a local girl to serve him for 10 years at a time, he doesn't eat them, either. Eventually, he lets them go; but in the meantime, something in them changes, and they can never go back to their former life in the valley.

All her life, Agnieszka and everyone else in Dvernik have expected the Dragon to choose her brave, beautiful best friend Kasia as his next human tribute. Both their lives, up to the day of choosing, have been shaped by that assumption. But instead, the Dragon picks Agnieszka - a willful, average-looking girl whose clothes are always torn, disheveled, and dirty, and who seems to have no aptitude for the magic that (to her surprise) the wizard begins trying to teach her. At first she puts up a struggle against the cold, irritable master of the tower at the end of the valley. But then she discovers a path to magic that he never would have expected to work, and none too soon. For the Wood is suddenly on the move, trying to take another bite out of the valley; and fatefully for all concerned, the first morsel it tries to swallow is Kasia.

Whatever happens after that is too big, too powerful, too terrifying, too emotionally complex to summarize in a brief review. Let it be enough to say Agnieszka's determination to save Kasia sets events in train that will rock the entire kingdom, and that will either save the world or destroy it. It will be a near thing either way, since the farther the Wood reaches into Polnya's affairs, the more the kingdom is seized with warfare, betrayals, assassinations, madness, monsters, and more. And the more Polnya is seized with warfare, assassinations, and whatnot, the more the Wood's power grows. Expect a climactic buildup that lacks no conceivable horror, terror, or awfulness; a passionate and adult-content-advisory-worthy romance; an all-but hopeless hope; and a ridiculous amount of strikingly original and yet totally believable magic. What I'm saying is, it's good. If it wasn't so early in the year, I would be shortlisting it for a 2017 Robbie Award.

New York-based author Novik was inspired to write this book, in part, by the Polish fairy tales she was raised on. She is also the author of the nine-book "Temeraire" series, starting with the John W. Campbell Best Book award-winner His Majesty's Dragon (a.k.a. Temeraire) and concluding with League of Dragons, and of the "Liberty Vocational" series of graphic novels, which so far comprises one volume, Will Supervillains Be on the Final?. Uprooted won the 2016 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for best adult literature and the Nebula Award for best novel.

The Steel Kiss

The Steel Kiss
by Jeffery Deaver
Recommended Ages: 14+

This is the first novel by Jeffery Deaver that I have ever read, but it is the 12th of (so far) 13 Lincoln Rhyme novels, continuing a series that started in 1997 with The Bone Collector. It features an unusual sleuth: the quadriplegic forensic consultant Lincoln Rhyme, who solves murders alongside his professional and life partner, NYPD major-cases detective Amelia Sachs (think "Kate Beckett from Castle" and you pretty much know who I mean). And in this installment, it pits them against not one, but three mysteries.

For starters, Sachs' uniformed-cop squadmate Ron Pulaski seems to be trying to score some super-shady painkillers to manage the side effects of a head injury, but actually he's (BLEEPED OUT DUE TO SPOILERS). Also, Sachs' former partner and lover, a handsome and totally non-disabled detective who has just gotten out of prison on parole, is back in her life, asking for her help proving he was innocent of the charges of corruption, hijacking, and assault for which he confessed to protect his now-dead junkie brother; the trouble is, he (BLEEPED OUT DUE TO SPOILERS). But most dramatic of all is the series of murders being carried out by a suspect nicknamed Unsub 40 (because one of his crimes took place outside a nightclub with that number in its name), a physically distinctive yet strangely elusive character who alternates between bludgeoning his victims to death with a ball peen hammer and hacking into appliances containing a wireless controller, using the Internet of Things to carry out an anti-consumer terrorist agenda. While his victims' gruesome fates leave panicky New Yorkers afraid to use escalators, smart stoves, and microwave ovens, Rhyme and his wheelchair-bound intern discover a link between the victims that means the killer is actually (BLEEPED OUT DUE TO SPOILERS).

It's obvious a lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge in this series. The recurring characters all carry wounds from previous installments. Rhyme, for his part, is in crisis because he feels responsible for the death of a suspect in a previous case who may have been innocent. His decision to quit solving crimes throws his partnership with Sachs, to say nothing of the rest of their team, into chaos. It is actually a civil suit relating to the escalator incident that brings the pair back together on the same case - and, ironically, in the end it is Sachs who (BLEEPED OUT DUE TO SPOILERS). The story is full of chilling surprises, shocking twists, gripping tension, and sinister agendas - and yet the guy who has been doing most of the actual killing turns out to be a surprisingly sympathetic and even tragic character, compared to someone else who (BLEEPED OUT DUE TO SPOILERS). Where you would expect a scene fraught with deadly conflict, you may instead find an almost friendly conversation... and vice versa. Expect the unexpected. And don't expect me to spoil it for you.

Sing & Patriots Day

A couple weeks ago, I treated myself to a movie night with the animated musical comedy Sing. It was directed by Garth Jennings, who also did 2005's star-studded (ha!) sci-fi yukfest The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the 2007 low-budget film Son of Rambow, both of which I have actually seen. (The latter is about a youth whose religion forbids him to watch movies, who partners with another boy at his school to enter a film-making contest. It's sort of like Super 8, only without aliens, military guys, or high production values.) I can't remember what other movies were on offer at the five-screen cinema I visited that night, but I don't recall the decision to go with Sing was a difficult one. These days, I'm lucky if there's even one movie playing in nearby theaters that I would care to see. So I jumped at the chance.

Sing is an uplifting, funny, toe-tapping movie combining the latest animation technology with the oldest type of musical revue: a story about a struggling impresario and his gang of misfit talents, pulling together a big show in one last, desperate attempt to save their beloved theater. Its musical numbers are mostly covers - good ones - of well-known songs, like Leonard Cohen's "Alleluia" and Elton John's "I'm Still Standing." The characters are various species of anthropomorphic animals who live in a city full of the same. The voice cast includes Matthew McConaughey as the koala theater owner, John C. Reilly (who also voiced the lead character in Wreck-It Ralph) as his sheep buddy, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous as Reilly's character's scary-diva grandma ("the meanest sheep in the world"), Reese Witherspoon as a housewife pig with big dreams, Scarlett Johansson as a punk-rocking porcupine who channels her relationship troubles into creative power, sometime American Idol contestant Tori Kelly as a teenage elephant whose shyness almost sinks her chance to show her talent, and Rhea Perlman of Matilda and TV's Cheers as a llama who works for the bank.

The voice talent doesn't stop there. Playing such characters as a young cockney gorilla trying to escape his family's tradition of bank robbery, a flamboyant German-accented pig, a caddish lounge-singer mouse, and an elderly iguana with a glass eye are Taron Egerton of Kingsman: The Secret Service, Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy, Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation, Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls, Leslie Jones of the recent Ghostbusters reboot, and her fellow Saturday Night Live cast members Beck Bennett, Laraine Newman, and Jay Pharaoh. The cast also includes Peter Serafinowicz, who voiced Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I; Bill Farmer, who has been the voice of Disney's Goofy since the 1980s; and members of director Jennings' family, including Garth himself. (His self-casting as the crazy-eyed Ms. Crawly is the funniest director's voice cameo in an animated film since Brad Bird played Edna Mode in The Incredibles.)

There's nothing much to say about the storyline that you can't guess from what I've already hinted. But it's a really fun movie, with lots of humor, some poignant moments, and great music. I'm afraid it might become a victim of Hollywood's mania for sequels. So for now, let me continue my recent practice of just recalling three scenes that really made the movie for me: (1) Buster Moon, the koala, has to resort to washing cars for a living. How does he do it? By having Ms. Crawly splash a bucket of water on him. Then, clad in a speedo, he jumps on the hood of the customer's car and rubs his sudsy, furry body against it, while his sheep pal provides drying services. (2) The porcupine girl's ex-boyfriend is dumbstruck when he sees her singing on TV. His new girlfriend goes, "She's nothing special," clicks the TV off, and leaves the room. Boyfriend grabs the controller and turns the TV back on. (3) The pig housewife invents a Rube Goldberg machine that hoodwinks her husband and 36 piglets(?!) into not noticing she is out of the house, at rehearsals. Later, it malfunctions horribly, but hilariously.

Last night, I traveled halfway around the Lake of the Ozarks to visit a cinema large enough to offer more choices than the five-plex where I saw Sing, which wasn't showing anything that interested me. Way over in Lake Ozark, however, they were screening Patriots Day, a Peter Berg-directed dramatization of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. The cast is headlined by Mark Wahlberg, playing (I assume) a fictionalized Boston police character, most likely a combination of several real people and a screenwriter's device for putting words he wants the audience to hear into somebody's mouth. Whoever Wahlberg is supposed to represent, I reckon no single cop could have been in all the places his character was, from half a block away from the first bomb blast, to the FBI command center, to right on the scene of every development in the manhunt for the two terrorist brothers whose actions resulted in four deaths, numerous injuries, and a lot of localized property destruction. Plus, he gets to deliver a too-good-to-be-true speech, toward the end of the movie, that can only be an artifact of the writers' being unable to resist getting preachy.

Joining Wahlberg are John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, etc.) as the Boston police commish; J.K. Simmons (Oscared for Whiplash) as a Watertown, Mass. police sergeant; Kevin Bacon as the FBI special agent in charge of the manhunt; Michael Beach (TV's Third Watch) as then-Mass. governor Deval Patrick; Michelle Monaghan (the Mission Impossible films) as Wahlberg's wife; Melissa Benoist (TV's Supergirl) as the American-born, stand-by-her-man wife of one of the terrorists; Rachel Brosnahan (TV's House of Cards) as a woman who, together with her husband, loses three legs in the bombing; and Alex Wolff, one of two real-life brothers featured on Nickelodeon's The Naked Brothers Band, as the younger and more assimilated of the two Chechen-American brothers, the one who was captured alive and is now on death row for his crimes. The young MIT campus cop the brothers shot to death is played by Jake Picking, who also played a musclehead in Dirty Grandpa. Another Wahlberg brother, Brandon, also plays a cop. Khandi Alexander (TV's CSI: Miami and Scandal) has a brief role as an interrogator from an unnamed agency who tries to break Benoist's character. Jimmy O. Yang of TV's Silicon Valley plays a young Chinese man who is carjacked by the terrorists. And once again, the director (who also has a lengthy list of acting credits) shows up in a hard-to-recognize cameo, as some random dude whose appearance on the scene scares the bad guys off before they can retrieve the slain cop's gun.

As the film follows the movements of several characters before, during, and after the bombing - including victims, investigators, and the villains - it comes close to portraying the terrorists in a sympathetic light, during scenes following their point of view; but once the carnage starts, the possibility of sympathizing with them rapidly slides to zero. For a moment, I thought Wahlberg's little "only love can beat terrorism" sermon sounded like a pretty weak response to the war that the enemies of free civilization have brought to us; but an epilogue, in which the real-life people portrayed in the movie deliver their own testimonials, makes it clear the movie is preaching more of the gospel of "Boston Strong" - that when a community pulls together to fight a threat from outside, it can beat the bad guys faster and leave the place, blood-spattered rubble and all, stronger for it. It's a good message, and at several points in the film I was overwhelmed by its emotional impact.

It's hard to choose my top three "scenes that made it for me," but here goes: (1) Alexander, interrogating Benoist in the person of a Muslim woman who understands her worldview all too well, keeps chipping away at the younger woman's defenses with different approaches to the question, "Are there more bombs?" When Benoist demands to see a lawyer or to be let go, and the interrogators say no to both, she tries to invoke the social order she has, until now, been only too happy to undermine. "I have rights!" she cries. At that, Alexander drops out of character and deadpans, "Honey, you ain't got shit." The audience loudly approved. (2) The young Chinese guy sits in the front passenger seat of his own car while the older Tsarnaev brother pokes at the screen of his smart phone, and the younger brother is inside a convenience store buying food for their planned trip to take Manhattan. Berg crafts a scene of unbearable suspense as the terrified carjacking victim, without a single line of dialogue, visibly thinks about jumping out of the car and running for it. In a follow-up scene, Wahlberg shakes hands with the victim-who-got-away, who suddenly drops the soft-and-blubbery act and says with a steely look, "Go get those motherf***ers." More audience cheers and laughter. (3) Kevin Bacon's FBI guy doesn't want to release pictures of the Tsarnaev pictures to the press until he has more evidence they're the bombers; he's afraid the city will go medieval on them, and anyone else of a Muslim persuasion, and it won't be take-backable if they turn out to be innocent. Then somebody holds up a cellphone and says Fox News is on the line; they already have the suspects' photos and are threatening to release them to the public with or without a statement from the FBI. Bacon, recognizing he's cornered, orders a press conference and then, for the duration of one line, his face and voice become terrifying as he says, "When this is over, I'm going to hunt down whoever leaked those pictures and f***ing RUIN THEM." I had chills.

Actually, I need to throw in a bonus fourth scene-that-made-it-for-me. It was early in the movie, before the bombings happened. It introduces the couple who both lost limbs in the bombing; but at that point, there was no telling (unless you already know the story cold) whether they're going to live, die, come to other people's aid after the bombings, or what. But I got choked up anyway as the wife, a nurse, explained to her husband how the husband of a patient who had recently died came to her ward and gave her a beautiful necklace that his wife had asked him to give her, and she held him while he cried. She wondered aloud why the wife had singled her out, since they had only known each other for a short time at the end of the lady's life. But the nurse's husband said (loosely quoting now), "I think I know why she chose you. She knew you would hold him." A day later, I can't replay that scene in my head without crying.

Queen of Sorcery

Queen of Sorcery
by David Eddings
Recommended Ages: 14+

In Book 2 of the five-book "Belgariad" series, 15-year-old Garion remains on the move with an ethnically mixed group on a quest to save their world. Zedar, a traitor to the immortal sorcerers who have watched over the west during the thousands of years since the gods withdrew, has stolen a certain stone and intends to use it to revive Torak, the god of chaos and evil. Harrassed by priests of Torak, in the disguise of traders and diplomats from the eastern Angarak nations, the Nadraks, Murgos, and Thulls, and hampered on their way by plots and conflicts the Angaraks have conjured with their mind-corrupting gold, Garion's party struggles to catch up with Zedar. They include representatives of all the western realms the group has passed through so far. While Garion struggles to understand and accept who he really is and what he is capable of, he and his friends experience the varying climates, geography, and culture of each country in turn, a feat of fantasy world-building notable in its breadth of scope and variety of detail.

Each country in Garion's world has its special charms and dangers, just as each member of his party has good qualities and character flaws. For the most part, their shared quest holds the friction within the group down to a cheerful banter, with only a few outbursts of real conflict, soon healed over by forgiveness. Around them, however, they witness gruesome murders, savage battles, horrible treatment of lower-class people, assassination plots, moral and political corruption, and doomed romances. Arendia, where the group finds itself as this book begins, is divided by a thousand-year-old ethnic grudge, and further threatened by a too-delicate sense of honor. Tolnedra faces a succession crisis as a line of emperors that has stood for millennia comes to an end, and a headstrong princess runs away from her responsibility to offer her hand in marriage to a Rivan king who may never return. In the forest of the Dryads, Garion comes face to face with an enemy who has been tracking him all his life - and with a power within him that he doesn't want to accept. And finally, in the stifling jungle country of Nyissa, the heavily drugged populace serves a queen who is both the priestess and the betrothed bride of a serpent-god, and she recognizes what Garion is becoming and makes her move before he knows how to use his power.

In this installment, Garion learns his true name, which finally makes sense of the over-arching title of the series. But there is still much he doesn't know about his true identity and his destiny. The fact that an attentive reader can probably guess things about the main character before he grasps them himself, lends an oddly picaresque touch to this adventure, along with powerful magic, shocking violence, intrigues within intrigues, and an engrossing complexity of landscapes, cultures, and politics. Besides all that, it has a touch of sweet romance, a goodly helping of humor, and some convincingly human emotions, especially within the confused brain of its young protagonist. And who would be less confused, with a dry voice residing in his head, piping up with advice from time to time? And that's beside mental messages from Garion's Aunt Pol and Grandfather Wolf, and the sinister grip of Asharak, a.k.a. Chamdar, on his mind. Though not everything Garion says and does is to his credit, credit we give him because he is growing, learning, and becoming something whose importance we can yet only guess. For its characters, for its dialogue, and for its overall richness of conception, I am sure to use any opportunity to read the rest of this series.

This sequel to Pawn of Prophecy is followed by Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, and Enchanters' End Game. Eddings (1931-2009) also wrote the five-book sequel series "The Malloreon" (Guardians of the West, etc.), among other companion novels, and several other fantasy novels and series, sometimes co-authored by his wife Leigh Eddings.