damselfish

Today, I bring you: BOOKLOGGING FROM THE PAAAAST!

Okay, so when I was home most recently, I discovered a stack of index cards from elementary school with plot summaries of a bunch of books. I think this was from a project we did in fourth grade where we had a competition to see who could read the most books over a certain period of time, ending in some kind of prize; the dates of the books included seems to bear this out, since I think the most recent publication date of any book in the stack is 1995, when I was ten.

So: here's a list of books read in 1995 by ten-year-old Becca! Comment with a title, if you like, and I will provide a guaranteed accurate plot summary as generated by a fourth-grader. Except possibly for the ones written in crayon, because they're kind of illegible.

( The List )

Notes:
a.) the cards are not, sadly, in original archival order
b.) wait, I did read Rilla of Ingleside? Because I have NO MEMORY of that book
c.) WHO LET ME READ MERVYN PEAKE WHEN I WAS TEN NO WONDER THE NAME 'GORMENGHAST' SUMMONS UP PSYCHOLOGICAL HORRORS FOR ME

Margaret Ball's Lost in Translation, a portal fantasy about a college student who accidentally ends up in Fantasyland on her way to spend a semester abroad in Europe, is not just a nineties fantasy novel but in fact THE MOST NINETIES FANTASY OF ALL. Our Heroine Allie probably hung out with Cher from Clueless in high school; now she is in college, she totes a Walkman and a giant backpack of spare batteries all the way around Fantasyland, and Margaret Ball wastes no opportunity to remind us that she is constantly listening to Pearl Jam and Hootie and the Blowfish.

That is one of my favorite things about the book. My other favorite thing is how it takes poor clueless Allie a solid hundred pages to figure out that Fantasyland is not actually JUST EUROPE. She has a lot of conversations that go like this:

ALLIE: So everybody seems to walk everywhere here at school! I guess this town is a pedestrian zone?
FANTASYLANDER: . . . what else would we do, fly?
ALLIE: Oh, that sophisticated European sense of humor!

FANTASYLANDER: Allie, how about we go to the market to buy you a bolt of fabric for the tailor to make into a tunic and trousers for you?
ALLIE: Golly, bespoke tailors? People here are so trendy about their clothes! None of this mass-produced junk here! EUROPEANS, AMIRITE

FANTASYLANDER: I am off to magic class to learn some magic to protect our magic land from the magic monsters that beset it.
ALLIE: Huh, who knew Europeans were so into D&D?

Allie's cluelessness also extends into people skills, as her nineties Silicon Valley-child daddy issues promptly lead her to imprint like a baby duckling on the evil mage who summoned her into fantasyland to begin with. She ends up as his lab assistant, and is so haplessly excited to have a real job for the first time in her life that even the evil mage is like, "man, too bad I have to ritually sacrifice her for my evil plans, it'll be like killing a sweet dim kitten."

Allie actually overhears this conversation, with the aftermath as follows:

EVIL MAGE: I am totally not planning to ritually sacrifice you, despite having plainly said so ten seconds ago. That was ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING, would you like straight As in all your first-year classes?
ALLIE: Oh my god, you're trying to BRIBE ME WITH A GRADE?!?!
EVIL MAGE: Wait, what?
ALLIE: I bet you're going to fire me as your lab assistant too!
EVIL MAGE: Yes, because you will be sacrificed -- wait, what?
ALLIE: You never loved me at all! JUST LIKE DADDY.
EVIL MAGE: ??????

Then she trips and cracks her head open on the floor. The evil mage is so relieved that he decides to drop out for a glass of wine before completing the ritual sacrifice, which gives Our Brooding Hero With a Tragic Backstory time to conveniently drop in and rescue her so they can get on with their quest through Fantasyland.

Meanwhile, one of Allie's school friends gets tragically transformed into a sentient phallic clay pot. I just feel like this is worth mentioning.

My other other other favorite part: ( spoilers for the end )

Last time I was home, as I may have mentioned, I collected a bunch of the nineties fantasy novels I read in my misspent youth for a nostalgia reread. This was in the full expectation that the Suck Fairy would have visited most or all of them.

However, to my surprise, Cheesy Nineties Fantasy Novel A Bad Spell in Yurt turned out to be exactly the book I needed right now. Like, EXACTLY.

Our Protagonist Daimbert is a generally sweet fellow who has just graduated from Generic Eurofantasy Wizard School with a fancy degree, and gotten hired at his first job, which is in a castle full of very nice people, and he's very enthusiastic and eager to do well, but also pretty alarmed to realize that suddenly he is going to be expected to do all this technical wizard stuff that was probably in all the classes he skipped, or maybe it's in his notes but that was like a year ago, and wow it's a good thing he brought along his textbooks because HIS NICE BOSSES WANT HIM TO BUILD A TELEPHONE HOW DO YOU EVEN BUILD A MAGIC TELEPHONE oh crap how do you explain that you need like ten technical wizards for that without getting fired from this very nice first job --

-- and if you are wondering, yes, this does sound really, really familiar to someone who has just graduated from school with a middling-technical degree, and may well be having to purchase and construct a video transfer station without supervision sometime in the near future OH GOD.

Midway through the book, there is a scene where one of Daimbert's old wizard professors turns up, and is all, "well, Daimbert, it seems like you're settling in very well! Don't think you can write in to us for every little problem, ha ha!"

These words HAUNT Daimbert as he works through his problem of figuring out why someone in his very nice castle full of very nice people appears to have summoned a demon. At the very end, some harrowing and life-threatening saving of the day, he belatedly realizes that, hey, serious demonic possession is probably NOT one of the little problems his professors don't want them bothering him about and IT'S OKAY TO ASK YOUR MENTORS FOR EXPERIENCED HELP ON YOUR FIRST YEAR OUT OF SCHOOL. This is a very good moral and I think all of us graduates should take it earnestly to heart.

Aside from this, though, I also just really appreciate how sweetly good-natured the book as a whole is. Daimbert is a bit like a magical girl: he has no particularly exceptional skills and he does a lot of bumbling, but he is all about the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP, and the friendships he makes are really the center of the book.

The first of these is with the very serious and saintly young castle chaplain; wizards and priests are apparently usually antagonistic in Eurofantasyland, but Daimbert bounces in all HI BUDDY WANT TO GO HAVE A BEER IN MY ROOM BET WE'RE GONNA BE BESTIES :D :D :D :D and Joachim the Saintly Chaplain is sort of swept blinking along in his wake. Daimbert loves bad jokes and Joachim has no sense of humor, and one point they both unwillingly suspect each other of being evil, but despite these obstacles they manage to remain buddies and it's pretty adorable.

The second is with the Lady Maria, the cheerful middle-aged aunt of the beautiful young queen that Daimbert has an unrequited crush on, who is currently going through a bit of a mid-life crisis. She's basically the female lead of the book; Daimbert is really fond of her and thoroughly enjoys playing the flirtation game with her, and eventually offers to sacrifice his life for her, because, you know, she's a sweetheart! And FRIENDSHIP. All of which I actually find really refreshing?

So: A Bad Spell in Yurt! It's basically a book about nice people solving problems by being generally earnest and helpful, and if you are looking for comfortingly inoffensive nineties fantasy -- or if you are a recent graduate with imposter syndrome issues, um -- you could do a lot worse.