Pauline’s Comments (group member since May 23, 2013)

Pauline’s comments from the Creating Settings that Make You Want to Move In group.

I want to live in Howl's Moving Castle!!! (Either the book or movie version would be fine.)

I think when I was a kid I read a lot of books with loving descriptions of food. There's a lot of food in the Narnia books, for example, and there were treats I first heard of in books, like Turkish Delight in Narnia, or treacle in Alice in Wonderland. But I'd sort of agree with Amanda that it depends how the food description fits in with the character's point of view. If characters are starving, they're going to think about food a lot, but not in the same way as a connoisseur. If the character comes from a different culture, they'll notice the way the food is different & it can be a way of exploring the way they feel about being in a strange land (excited and liberated? exiled and lost?). But I get annoyed at descriptions of food (or anything, for that matter) that seem to be there just because the author thinks lush descriptions make a work more "literary," or because s/he read in a writer's handbook that "you should appeal to all 5 senses" and they're covering their bases. Writing by the numbers.

Tolkien, of course, was the grand master of creating a world you could live in, but before I discovered Tolkien, I traveled happily in Prydain (found in Lloyd Alexander's middle-grades fantasy chronicles) and of course Narnia. Diana Wynne Jones' "multiverse" of parallel universes has endless possibilities for adventure. And I've always loved the varied magical realms in Patricia A. McKillip's "Riddlemaster" trilogy. Among more recent books, Maggie Stiefvater's _Scorpio Races_ (published 2011) created an imaginary island beset by predatory water horses that felt very much like a real place: the terrain, the myths and customs that had developed around the water horses, the divided feelings of the islanders about their homeland, all felt very convincing. While Ysabeau Wilce's alternate-San Francisco in _Flora Segunda_ feels more dreamlike than lifelike, this trippy alt-reality (where magic "Grammatica" words can get stuck in your throat and need to be coughed up in a hasty trip to the ladies' room) is a place I'd love to visit, given the chance.