Comments, reviews & discussion
of the nominees for the Mythopoeic Fantasy and Scholarship Awards, awarded at
Mythcon XXVII,
on Sunday, July 28, 1996.
I’m including comments on this page on various nominees for the awards. For the full list, and to see which books received the awards, check out the official Society page listing. Nominees:
The Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards
The Scholarship Awards for Inklings Studies
Here’s a review by UW Tolkien Society member Phil Kaveny on:
J.R.R Tolkien Artist & Illustrator, By Wayne G. Hammond & Christiana Scull.
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston and New York.
for Fantasy Studies
When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development, by Lois Rostow Kuznets (1994: Yale U Pr, New Haven and London) 257 pp.
a mini-review by David Lenander. This is the first paragraph of a much longer review that I am submitting for consideration by Mythlore.
This is a book that transcends its possibly limited focus for those interested in fantasy scholarship or studies in children’s literature. It’s simply so well-done. I had looked forward to reading this book because I was so taken with a paper that Ms. Kuznets read at the Children’s Literature Association Conference in Mankato a few years ago. That paper was about Clarke’s Return of the Twelves, a book that comes in for more discussion in this study. It also impressed Eleanor Cameron who refers to it in her recent Seed and the Vision. It’s interesting that in her Preface Kuznets tells how this book grew from a talk that she gave in 1986, after which “Everything I have always known abou thte secret lives of toys in literature began to emerge then.” (p.xi). Her interest led her into many other fields of knowledge, and such interesting field work as reading the tiny print of Bramwell Brontë with a magnifying glass and watching Russell Hoban wind up the tiny toy mice that inspired his book. What she does for her reader is to convey not only the excitement of discovery that she found on the way to writing this book, but to make it all so interesting and worthwhile that the reader must find an interest mirroring her own, one that (s)he may previously have not discovered.
The Fantasy Awards.
for Adult Fantasy
Comments on Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings
Comments on James P. Blaylock’s All the Bells of Earth
Comments on Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon
Comments on Kenneth Morris’s The Dragon’s Path
Comments on Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe [to be added]
for Children’s Fantasy
From COWS AND CATS AND SEALING WAX, in Once Upon a Time, a children’s fantasy apa, ed. by Laura Krentz. Laura discusses Waugh’s The Mennyms and Gray’s Falcon’s Egg.
From RR#1, in Once Upon a Time, a children’s fantasy apa, ed. by Laura Krentz. Grace Funk discusses Cooper’s The Boggart, Gray’s Falcon’s Egg, Jones’s Crown of Dalemark, and Smith’s Wren’s War.
