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malkaNina Kiriki Hoffman is one of my favorite authors. I recommended The Enchantment Emporium, by Tanya Huff (another favorite author) to relevant people by saying, "Tanya Huff ate Nina Kiriki Hoffman's brain! Eeeeee!" I was just musing on what, exactly, identifies a NKH book to me.
Part of it is the down-to-earth drifty numinousness of it. I hesitate to call it urban fantasy, a) because I wasn't entirely sure what that term meant even before paranormal romance took over and b) because most of it is set in various small towns in Oregon. It's got that reality-crossover feel, though. I'm going to community college and my mother cast a spell on me. I drive a taxi and I can fly people. That sort of thing. She doesn't spell the systems out the way D&D-influenced fantasy does. They stay more or less mysterious, while simultaneously being part of everyday life. I really adore this way of writing, and I wish more people than Hoffman, Charles de Lint, and now Huff, would do it.
Another part is the family-centered-ness of her characters. Even the characters who aren't surrounded and defined by siblings, parents, and cousins, are enmeshed in long-term deep social connections. Sf/f is so often the language of the rootless adolescent that I didn't think there was any other way to be. Hoffman seems to usually write about adolescents, but she writes about adolescents who are part of a larger social contract. Even in [giving the book's name would be a spoiler], the man who has been running away from connections finds a woman who has been running away from her connections and together they settle down as part of her extended family with some of her previous connections in the mix. One of the main subthemes in [giving this book's name might also be a spoiler] is how the main character learns to deal with her mother, not by running away, but by asserting herself sometimes, giving in other times, and generally finding a balance point.
I want more social-connection-centered sensawunda f/sf. I will be sad when I've read through all that Hoffman's published and I can't find any more new.
Part of it is the down-to-earth drifty numinousness of it. I hesitate to call it urban fantasy, a) because I wasn't entirely sure what that term meant even before paranormal romance took over and b) because most of it is set in various small towns in Oregon. It's got that reality-crossover feel, though. I'm going to community college and my mother cast a spell on me. I drive a taxi and I can fly people. That sort of thing. She doesn't spell the systems out the way D&D-influenced fantasy does. They stay more or less mysterious, while simultaneously being part of everyday life. I really adore this way of writing, and I wish more people than Hoffman, Charles de Lint, and now Huff, would do it.
Another part is the family-centered-ness of her characters. Even the characters who aren't surrounded and defined by siblings, parents, and cousins, are enmeshed in long-term deep social connections. Sf/f is so often the language of the rootless adolescent that I didn't think there was any other way to be. Hoffman seems to usually write about adolescents, but she writes about adolescents who are part of a larger social contract. Even in [giving the book's name would be a spoiler], the man who has been running away from connections finds a woman who has been running away from her connections and together they settle down as part of her extended family with some of her previous connections in the mix. One of the main subthemes in [giving this book's name might also be a spoiler] is how the main character learns to deal with her mother, not by running away, but by asserting herself sometimes, giving in other times, and generally finding a balance point.
I want more social-connection-centered sensawunda f/sf. I will be sad when I've read through all that Hoffman's published and I can't find any more new.
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Date: 2010-07-24 07:08 am (UTC)McKinley has said that Beauty and the Beast is her favorite story. I...understand how she got from there to the fixation on older, personality-full man helping and bonding to younger woman. (As a side note, if you find a differently-gendered version of B&tB that's not the one about the prostitute, I will love you forever. I can't even come up with one myself, that's how hard it's gender-stuck in my head.) I can even ignore it, much of the time, because I hard-core adore her writing style. (I would buy any phone book she cared to write. I would also get a boring phone book if I ever wanted to look any numbers up, but such is life.) But yeah, it's wearying.
I look forward to flinging your book. :) I hate it when the inferior (to me, at least) person influences the superior, instead of the other way around.
(Also, tiny rant: she got the physics of spinning and spindles utterly, utterly wrong in _Spindle's End_. Not just not how anyone does it, but not how anyone *could* *ever* do it. Argh. And I still love that book.)