The Fantasy Hive - A U.K. Wonderland
A hub for all things fantasy (plus some SF). Book reviews, games, author interviews, features, serial fiction- you name it. The Fantasy Hive is a collaborative site formed of unique personalities who just want to celebrate fantasy. Btw, the SFF novel to the left by one of our members, Warwick Gleeson, was a "Top 150 Best Books" Kirkus pick in 2019.
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“A little bit of civilization and barbarism go hand in hand in any society. When the power of the civilized world drives an individual to desperation, they resist by resorting to barbaric violence more often than you might expect.” Bae Myung-hoon is a South Korean science fiction writer, and Tower (written in 2009 but translated into English by Sung Ryu and published by Honford Star in 2021) is his first novel to be translated into English. Bae is hugely popular in South Korea, where he has won both literary and science fiction awards, and on the basis of Tower I very much hope we see more of his work published in English soon. Tower is a mosaic novel set in Beanstalk, a…
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Good morning! I’m excited to be back here on the Hive to announce that my second novel, Exodus of Gnomes (God Core #2), will be released by Portal Books on March 10th 2021 (you can pre-order the ebook here!). I received such an overwhelmingly positive response to God of Gnomes’ cover reveal that I figured you wouldn’t mind me flinging its sequel at your eyeballs as well. I even designed the cover myself this time. Behold! “Art” by me Shockingly, my pen-and-paper masterpiece was not deemed cover-worthy by my publisher (rude, I know), and so they hired illustrator Raph Herrera Lomotan instead. A single glance at his Artstation profile is enough to reassure anyone that th…
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“Orphids are quantum computers. They don’t observe; they entangle.” “’We’re alchemists,’ said Thuy. ‘Transmuting our lives into myth and fable.’” Rudy Rucker’s Ware tetralogy is an essential cyberpunk series that over the course of its four volumes redefines the limits of the genre. Over the period of time that he was writing the Ware novels, Rucker was also writing everything from the transreal fiction of The Hacker and the Ants (1994) to the bonkers genre pastiche of The Hollow Earth (1990) to the unfiltered Ruckerian brilliance of Master of Space and Time (1984). Whilst all of these novels share Rucker’s love of the Beats, his surreal humour and his fascination with…
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We have a brand new cover to reveal to you all today! The World is at War, Again is a futuristic yet retro fantasy by Simon Lowe. Available in digital format from the 2nd of April, and in print from 7th of June, from Elsewhen Press. You can sign up for our InFlight Newsletter HERE. Blurring the boundaries between genres, check out the blurb: The World is at War, again. New technology has been abandoned, a period of Great Regression is under way. In suburbia, low level Agent Assassins Maria and Marco Fandanelli are given a surprise promotion as “Things Aren’t Going Too Well With The War”. Leaving their son Peter behind, they set sail on the luxury cruise-liner Water Li…
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We’re thrilled to reveal the striking cover for Fury of a Demon, the conclusion to Brian Naslund’s Dragons of Terra trilogy. Fury of a Demon is due to be released on 2nd September, by Tor UK. Before we show you all the cover, here’s the official blurb: “The war against Osyrus Ward goes poorly for Bershad and Ashlyn. They are pinned in the Dainwood by monstrous alchemical creations and a relentless army of mercenaries, they are running out of options and allies. The Witch Queen struggles with her new powers, knowing that the secret of unlocking her dragon cord is key to stopping Ward’s army, she pushes forward with her experiments. Meanwhile, with every wound Bershad su…
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Welcome intrepid adventurers to Tough Travelling with the Tough Guide to Fantasyland! That’s right, we’ve dusted it down and brought back this feature (created by Nathan of Fantasy Review Barn, revived by our friends over on Fantasy Faction, then dragged kicking and screaming to the Hive). It is a monthly feature in which we rack our brains for popular (and not so popular) examples of fantasy tropes. Tough Travelling is inspired by the informative and hilarious Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. Fellow bloggers are absolutely welcome to join in – just make your own list, publish it on your site, and then comment with the link on this article! This month…
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“Within these walls, we take few things. Clothes, personal belongings, photos of loved ones whether family, friends or pets; precious books, maybe a volume like this; our favourite means of hearing music, digitised or analogue. Our arts, our sports, our trinkets. Our personal effects, verifications of self. Remember this: nothing is more important than what we carry upright each day when we rise from our pods to greet the world. Ourselves.” Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time (2021) is an ambitious, confounding and thought-provoking book. Set in an alternate history in which colonialism and slavery never happened, the novel is an attempt to imagine a decolonised world…
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George Orr is afraid of falling asleep. When he dreams a particular kind of dream, what Le Guin titles an ‘effective’ dream, Orr wakes up to find reality has quite literally shifted to accommodate that dream. When we first meet him, the weight of this has turned him into a drug user, taking anything that will suppress his dreams–it is this that sends him into the private practice of one William Haber, a psychiatrist and oneirologist who will proceed to use Orr’s “effective” dreams to reshape reality in increasingly ambitious ways. Haber finds Orr almost loathsome. George awakens contempt in the psychiatrist; Haber sees in Orr a man so weak and without character as to be …
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G. R. Matthews began reading in the cot. His mother, at her wits end with the constant noise and unceasing activity, would plop him down on the soft mattress with an encyclopaedia full of pictures then quietly slip from the room. Growing up, he spent Sunday afternoons on the sofa watching westerns and Bond movies after suffering the dual horror of the sounds of ABBA and the hoover (Vacuum cleaner) drifting up the stairs to wake him in the morning. When not watching the six-gun heroes or spies being out-acted by their own eyebrows he devoured books like a hungry wolf in the dead of winter. Beginning with Patrick Moore and Arthur C Clarke he soon moved on to Isaac Asimov. H…
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SPFBO is back once again! Submissions have opened and have already been filled – and the Hive have been allocated their 30 books. That’s right, there’s no hanging about this year! I hear the faint grumbling from some of you – what’s a SPFBO? The Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off is a contest hosted by author Mark Lawrence, in which ten blogs whittle 300 self-published fantasy books down to one winner. Here are some important links for you: Rules and Submission Info SPFBO Facebook Group Now that we have our 30, we’ll be back soon with an introductory post and an insight into our process. For now though, as we wait for those entries to come in, let me introduce you…
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And here’s the text-based review, for all of you who prefer the written word to the outrageous madness of editing and internet memes that is my video. I thoroughly enjoyed 2019’s standalone Never Die, an action-driven novel I described as an anime in novel form, chock-full as it was of brilliant combat inspired by Japanese myth, legend, folklore, and martial arts. Pawn’s Gambit, surprisingly not the prequel to hit Netflix show Queen’s Gambit, does everything I enjoyed in Never Die, and a whole lot more besides. Never Die 2: Die a Little Bit is, far and away, a more memorable book than its predecessor; and a better novel, I would argue. Its chief conceit is more engaging…
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“’We’re going to start making meat bodies for ourselves, Cobb,’ said Loki. ‘So we can all go down to Earth, and blend in. It’s fair. Humans built robots; now the robots are building people! Meatboppers!’ ‘You two are asking me to help you take Earth away from the human race?’ ‘Meatboppers will be of an equal humanity,’ said Berenice smoothly. ‘One could legitimately regard the sequence human-bopper-meatbop as a curious but invevitable zigzag in evolution’s mighty stream.’” In Software (1982), Rudy Rucker drew the connection between computer software and the human brain, suggesting that the human mind could be uploaded onto a digital medium. In the sequel Wetware (1988)…
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Hello, everyone! Filip here, with another (video) review for you, this one If you prefer text, here’s the written version of the review. It’s lacking in some of the comedic elements of the video; delivery, too, is rather more…dry, as it were! Published by: Penguin Random House Genre: Space Opera Pages: 380 | Audiobook Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins Format: Audiobook Purchased Copy: From Audible.co.uk Like many, I was hopeful that this new High Republic project might do a great deal to divorce this franchise from what has proved to be a bit of a toxic relationship with the Skywalkers—and when I say this, I’m looking squarely at the Sequel Trilogy, and only occasionall…
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I’ve been hugely enthusiastic about Adrian Selby’s previous work – the enigmatic, epistolic Snakewood and the harrowing, heartfelt Winter Road – so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the third of his loosely-connected Post trilogy should have been my most anticipated book of 2021 (early in the year as it is). Especially after that cover came out, I was expecting this to be one of my favourite reads of the whole year, if not all time – as if 2021 didn’t have enough unreasonable expectation heaped on it already! Perhaps because of the weight of expectation, and undoubtedly due to wider world and personal circumstances, I didn’t quite get everything I hoped from this book – …
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“Kindred closed her eyes into the prairie wind, feeling it’s familiar whisper against her cheek, neck, eyelids. The low-slung slant of late-afternoon light might have grown too warm, but the wind tempered it until Kindred’s face felt perfectly warmed, perfectly cooled.” Joshua Johnson’s debut The Forever Sea immediately caught my eye after seeing the vibrant and quite magical cover art on both the US and UK editions. The multicoloured grass and the ship sailing upon it immediately caught my eye and lured me into finding out exactly what this tale was all about. The world of The Forever Sea has to be one of the most ingenious and completely mesmerising fantasy worlds …
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Content warnings: violence and death; mild body horror; blood magic; mention of abusive relationships. Amora is the princess of the island kingdom Visidia, and in order to take her throne, she must demonstrate full control of her family’s brutal magic in a huge performance of skill. When things don’t go quite as planned, it could mean death for Amora, unless she can escape – and willing to help her do just that is sarcastic pirate Bastian, who opens her eyes to just how rotten things are in Visidia. Amora finds herself learning more about her kingdom than she ever could as queen, and it might just come down to her to save it. This is great piratical fantasy, full of sark…
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Jane Routley has published 6 books and won two Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel. Her seventh book is Shadow in the Empire of Light. She has had a variety of careers, including fruit picker and occult librarian and she lived in Germany and Denmark for a decade. She recounts her experiences doing customer service at a railway station in the blog “Station Stories”. She is a keen climate activist and player of Fantasy Role Playing games. Welcome to the Hive, Jane Routley. Let’s start with the basics: dazzle us with an elevator pitch! Why should readers check out your work? Shadow in the Empire of Light has been described as modern Jane Austen with mag…
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A GREAT DIVE INTO FANTASY The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington is an adventure fantasy trilogy published by Orbit Books. Book One, The Shadow of What was Lost, introduces our lead protagonist, Davian who discovers he is an Auger in a prejudicial world, twenty years after the war that overthrew the Augurs and their followers. This simple premise sets into motion a series of events that feel wholly familiar to fantasy readers whilst delivering on twists and turns throughout the story. Islington’s story begins its pacing with the classic adventure archetype seen in many fantasy novels throughout the years. Whilst it would be easy to say this is another work inspired…
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“Sometimes it seemed like there was a creature inside her, lurking, trying to bust through her bones, a demented birth. Mam would be a pile of skin and guts and skeleton, and the creature, clean and bright, would never know that she used to be a mam.” Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) is a powerful and vital work of speculative fiction, one with its roots in the gothic past but with tendrils reaching out beyond the limits of the New Weird. Sorrowland explores the United States’ horrendous history of systematic racial oppression, using the modes of the gothic, the fairy tale and science fiction to show us the atrocities of history in a viscerally immediate light. Solomon…
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Images by Svetlana Alyuk, banner by Imyril Welcome to Fantasy Friday! If you’re following us on Twitter and Instagram, you’ll have had your feed completely spammed noticed that we’re taking part in the Wyrd & Wonder photo challenge. We decided that we’d take the challenge a step further on Fridays, and post about the prompts in a little more detail. This week, the prompt is fantasy in translation – we’re focusing on books that weren’t originally written in English! Check the links below for more Fantasy Fridays: Fantasy from Around the World Fantasy Voices from Around the World Underlined book titles in bold contain links to reviews on this site. — A HUGE th…
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Greetings to you, mistakes of the gods. I am here now to set your minds at ease. Do not fear, do not fret, Ulesorin has arrived and shall grant each and every one of you a steaming dollop of my indelible wisdom. You lucky, lucky creatures. It has been a long moon turn, and I can tell you that it has been difficult. I have had to mourn the loss of a great many serpentine children, and a substantial draconic lover. Though the latter was trying to murder me. Moreover, it has been absolute murder finding some minions to carry all the gold I’d pillaged from her corpse back to civilisation where I could spend it. Needless to say, I have a new tower under construction in a rat…
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The first daughter is for the Throne. The second daughter is for the Wolf. For the Wolf is the debut novel of author Hannah Whitten, and it’s being released this June from Orbit Books. Nils and I (Beth) were both fortunate to receive advanced copies (thanks Orbit!), so we decided to buddy read it and review it together. After plenty of Whatsapps and an attempt at organising our thoughts via Google docs, we bring to you our review: For fans of Uprooted and The Bear and the Nightingale comes a dark fantasy novel about a young woman who must be sacrificed to the legendary Wolf of the Wood to save her kingdom. But not all legends are true, and the Wolf isn’t the only …
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This is an occasional series of posts drawing on my excursion into the academic side of creative writing. I’ve recently started a PhD project at Queen’s University Belfast with the catchy title “Navigating the Mystery of Future Geographies in Climate Change Fiction.” The Hive has kindly given me space to post reviews of climate fiction books as well as blogging thoughts and articles on other aspects of my PhD experience. My reading (and there is a lot of reading involved in a PhD – woo hoo!) has included a lot of climate fiction, literary criticism about climate fiction, mystery fiction and non-fiction accounts of anthropogenic climate change and humanity’s response to …
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Images by Svetlana Alyuk, banner by Imyril Welcome to Fantasy Friday! If you’re following us on Twitter and Instagram, you’ll have had your feed completely spammed noticed that we’re taking part in the Wyrd & Wonder photo challenge. We decided that we’d take the challenge a step further on Fridays, and post about the prompts in a little more detail. This week, the prompt is fantasy voices from around the world – we’re focusing on authors rather than setting (see last week’s post) Underlined book titles in bold contain links to reviews on this site. Nils I’m going to pick two titles from my to-be-read because I’m thoroughly looking forward to both. My first choi…
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‘I know who they’ve accused of White’s murder,’ she whispered. Her voice sounded unfamiliar, even to herself. Thin and worn, like her nerves. Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder is the debut novel of T. A. Willberg; it’s a wonderfully imaginative mystery set in a subterranean world beneath the streets of London. Marion has been recruited as an apprentice into a detective agency which operates in utmost secrecy; beneath their book-store front, Nancy Brickett has converted a former World War II series of shelters designed for the wealthy into a sprawling organisation. Using gadgets designed and created on site, they work alongside and outside the law to assist the people …
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
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The Usherette (Historical Fiction). Meeting Orson Welles
Scene: Chapter Four. Jo returns to New York from visiting Madeleine in Florida after receiving a telegram from Orson Welles asking to meet. He wants to premiere "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater and needs someone to show him around. The scene captures Jo's passions and core decency - and why the movies matter to her. He wanted to meet at midnight.docx -
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Demystifying the Blog Tour: A Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Book Launch and Beyond
A blog tour is a marketing campaign that involves coordinating a series of blog posts and online promotions to create buzz and generate exposure for your book. It typically involves collaborating with bloggers and influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target readership. These bloggers will read your book, write reviews, host author interviews, and feature guest posts or excerpts from your book on their blogs. The goal is to reach a wider audience and generate interest in your book within their established community. The Blog Tour Framework Here's a breakdown of the framework for a typical blog tour: Identify and contact bloggers: Research and compile a list of relevant bloggers who cater to your book's genre or niche. Reach out to them via email or through their website's contact form, expressing interest in collaborating on a blog tour. Provide review copies: Offer a digital or physical copy of your book to the interested bloggers, allowing them time to read and review it before the tour begins. Create tour schedule: Coordinate with the participating bloggers to create a schedule for the tour. Each blogger will have a designated day to feature your book on their blog and share their review, interview, guest post, or any other agreed-upon content. Create content: Prepare author interviews, guest posts, or excerpts that you can provide to the bloggers to publish on their respective blogs. These pieces of content should be engaging and relevant to your book, enticing readers to learn more about it. Promote: As the blog tour progresses, actively promote each blog post across your own social media channels and any other platforms you use. This will help generate more visibility and encourage your existing followers to visit the blogs hosting your content. Engage with readers: Throughout the blog tour, make an effort to engage with readers who leave comments on the blog posts. Responding to their comments and answering their questions will help build a connection and potentially lead to more interest in your book. Blog Tour Benefits The benefits of a blog tour can be significant for your book launch or generating interest long after your book has been released. Some potential advantages include: Increased exposure: By leveraging the established audiences of bloggers and influencers, you can reach a wider audience that may not have been aware of your book otherwise. Social proof: Positive reviews and endorsements from bloggers can lend credibility to your book, encouraging readers to take a chance on it. Networking opportunities: Collaborating with bloggers and influencers can expand your network within the literary community, opening doors to potential future partnerships or opportunities. Enhanced online presence: The blog tour generates online content related to your book, increasing your online presence and searchability, which can have long-term benefits for your author platform. When to Plan a Blog Tour Determining the best time to have a blog tour for your book largely depends on your specific goals, timeline, and the nature of your book. However, there are a few general considerations to keep in mind when planning the timing of your blog tour: Book launch date: Ideally, you'll want to schedule your blog tour around your book's launch date. This ensures that the tour generates maximum buzz and attention during the critical period when your book becomes available to the public; however, a book tour can also help reignite interest in your book long after it’s been published.. Pre-launch promotion: Consider starting your blog tour a few weeks before your book's official launch. This gives bloggers and influencers ample time to read and review your book, and it allows you to generate buzz and anticipation leading up to the release. Pre-launch promotion can help build excitement and generate pre-orders or early sales. Availability of review copies: Ensure that you have review copies of your book available and ready to send out to bloggers well in advance of the blog tour start date. This allows sufficient time for bloggers to read the book and prepare their content for the tour. Consider providing digital copies for ease and quick distribution. Audience availability: Take into account the preferences and availability of your target audience. If your book caters to a specific season, genre, or holiday, it might be beneficial to align your blog tour with that theme or timeframe. For example, a romance novel might benefit from a blog tour around Valentine's Day. Other marketing efforts: Consider coordinating your blog tour with other marketing initiatives you have planned. This could include social media campaigns, advertising, or other promotional activities. A coordinated approach can amplify your book's visibility and impact. Blogger availability: Reach out to bloggers and influencers well in advance to secure their participation and confirm their availability for the tour. Keep in mind that popular bloggers may have busy schedules, so it's beneficial to plan ahead and be flexible with scheduling to accommodate their availability. Ultimately, the best time for a blog tour is when you have everything in place, including review copies, promotional materials, and a solid plan for engaging with bloggers and readers throughout the tour. Take the time to strategically plan and execute your blog tour to maximize its impact on your book launch or relaunch. Did you know WOW! Women on Writing offers blog tours as part of our marketing services? If you're interested in exploring professional assistance for your blog tour and other book marketing endeavors, check out WOW! Women on Writing's book marketing packages. We offer comprehensive and tailored solutions to help authors like you navigate the world of book promotion. Our team of experts can guide you through the process, provide valuable insights, and connect you with influential bloggers and reviewers in your genre. By leveraging the expertise and network of WOW! Women on Writing, you can enhance the effectiveness of your blog tour and ensure your book receives the attention it deserves. Learn more here or contact blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com with questions. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Whatcha Reading? May 2023, Part Two
It’s time to wrap up May with our second Whatcha Reading! It’s also Memorial Day weekend in the States, which seems like a perfect excuse to get even more reading done before the month is over. Sneezy: I’m reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. She takes no prisoners. Sarah: What’s that? The library has the next Veronica Speedwell audiobook? Don’t mind if I do! Currently listening to A Murderous Relation ( A | BN | K | AB ) and having a splendid time. The audiobook performance by Angele Masters is terrific. A | BN | KShana: I just finished a YA romcom that gave me the biggest book hangover, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert. So much banter and sweetness! I’m now reading The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, and liking it so far. Elyse: I just finished The Daydreams. ( A | BN | K ) Some of it was how awful tabloids were to young female stars in the aughts (Lindsay, Britney etc), but each of the main characters does something really shitty to another so it’s hard to really like any of leads. It was meh. Lara: Elyse recommended Loreth Anne White’s The Maid’s Diary ( A | BN ) and I’m hooked. No romance, but the suspense is phenomenal so far. Whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments! View the full article -
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Book Lovers: Know Your Tribe
Another fundamental that makes a whole lot of sense, esp marketing wise. -
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Writing Hot Sex Scenes - Saints Preserve Us!
I've been trained. It works! -
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Crucial Self-Editing Techniques - Don't be Hostage to a Line Editor
If you knew how many writers this has positively impacted, you'd say, it's no wonder. Fundamentals like this are too often neglected. -
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Podcast 564, Your Transcript has Bunny Ears
The transcript for Podcast 564. Bunny Aliens in Space: Cover Design with JL Logosz has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article -
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Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener Doesn’t See the Forest for the Trees
Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror (The Card Counter, 2021), and horticulture and racism (Master Gardener, 2022). Schrader is an accomplished, highly literary storyteller and his interests (particularly the the masculine-coded concepts of destruction and violence) have produced some of film’s most fascinating inquiries into the ills of modern society, from Taxi Driver to Affliction to American Gigolo, to First Reformed and The Card Counter. First a film critic and then a screenwriter (responsible for classics like Raging Bull and Obsession and famous for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), Schrader’s later work as a director is epitomized by the triad of films about “God’s Lonely Men,” three anti-social anti-heroes in crisis: a self-loathing pastor, a troubled gambler, and a secretive gardener, all reckoning with the sudden collision of themes, lives, selves once kept at a distance. Many of his protagonists, but especially these three, can be read as homages to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï: cool, reserved, highly-competent professionals whose whose adherence to rituals and observances leaves them unprepared to confront unforeseen cataclysms. It’s almost never useful to compare films in a director’s oeuvre to one another; despite similarities, each is its own discreet contribution. But Schrader’s films are designed to reference each other—or, really, The Card Counter and Master Gardener are designed to reference First Reformed—so please forgive me while I place them all side-by-side for a moment. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller (no, not that Ernst Toller), a cheerless reverend at a small antique church upstate who keeps a diary of his own stark life the year he happens to encounter a distraught climate activist who opens his eyes to the ravishment of God’s green earth by greedy corporations, as well as the ways God’s own church is influenced by corporatization to the point of disregarding the stewardship of the planet. That film, a simmering hagiography of a soul in turmoil, provides the blueprint for Schrader’s subsequent two films, not only thematically, but also stylistically, in the terms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. The films are dark, lonely meditations into their protagonists’ natures, told via their floridly-written, allusion-rich journal entries, as they finally confront aspects of their lives and their worlds they have kept at bay for so long. The Card Counter inherits the framework of First Reformed, but reworks it enough for it to feel distinct; Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (no, not that William Tell), a former military interrogator and now card-counter, who carpetbags from casino to casino, living out of austere motels, until he meets a young man who informs him that he knows his true identity, as a soldier who served jailtime for his role in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and asks for his help committing an act of revenge against one of Tell’s military superiors. This film slowly explores the human capacity for both empathy and cruelty, teasing out the relationship between “keeping one’s cool” and “losing it.” I don’t have as conclusive a reading of the forces at work Master Gardener, arguably the film in this trilogy with the toughest conceit. Joel Edgerton plays Narval Roth, a taciturn head gardener of Gracewood Gardens, a privately-owned estate with gardens that are open to the public. Narval manages a team of polo-clad young people, overseeing their work but also instructing them in the history, philosophy, and science of horticulture. He answers to no one, except Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), the wealthy owner of the estate, who throws his carefully cultivated world out of order when she demands he take on an apprentice, her grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya is biracial, the daughter of the “wayward” daughter of Norma’s sister, who left the family and “fell in with a bad crowd,” as Norma purrs. Maya seems to be her only relative left, so she is eager to draw her into the family—but not enough that she doesn’t insist that she work on the family’s land, first. Maya is a curious, intelligent twenty-something, surprisingly accepting of the fact that she’s a minimum wage worker on her great aunt’s estate. Norma wants Narval to educate her, teach her about the maintenance and culture and theories of horticulture, so that she might be able to pursue a career in the field in the future. Maya takes kindly to this earthy finishing school, especially because she appreciates the softspoken and passionate manner of Narval, her teacher. The movie appears to take place in the South (it was filmed in Louisiana), and the house looks like a plantation estate, so it seems like there might be some interesting explorations into contemporary white supremacy, the way Norma insists that Maya be fashioned into a more refined version of herself in order to be welcomed into her family tree, and simultaneously wants this self-improvement to take place as a farm-worker beneath her, and literally in the dirt. But the film wobbles from here on out, mostly because we learn about the haunted, Narval’s past as a soldier of a Neo-Nazi army, before turning state’s evidence against them and going into witness protection. Under his clothes, he is covered in White Pride and Hitler-fandom tattoos, which he looks at disparagingly in the mirror. He likes his current life as a peaceful caretaker of the Gracewood Gardens, is glad to have distanced himself from the silo of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and violence in which (he explains) he was raised. That Maya and Narval form a bond, while he also has flashbacks to things that his proud boy/hillbilly cult leader told him about how his job is to “pull out the weeds,” suggests that Master Gardener will become a thriller about the insidiousness of white supremacy, juxtaposing it with a reading of gardening as a kind of fascism (or at least, a way to disguise it). In other words, perhaps Narval’s solitary salvation in gardening for a racist white lady becomes an outlet for the very impulses that allowed him to thrive in a fascist cult in the first place. Master Gardener doesn’t till this ground, though, which is fine, but it also doesn’t do anything else productive with all of these rich, ripe, and (productively) thorny thematic concerns. What begins as an incredibly fruitful plot soon wilts and shrivels into a wandering love story; and the kind of discipline and restraint that Narvals brings to his gardening becomes, exactly, the element missing from the story itself. Master Gardener quickly forgets its powerful portrayals about white supremacy and racism when it becomes interested in whether or not its protagonist can be redeemed, can be saved, and, in giving him some way to carry this out, represents Maya as needing to be saved by someone, too. If this narrative shoot were to blossom into a meaningful development (unlikely as it is), we would need a clearer understanding of Narval’s life or background, a focused explaining of how he has come to be changed in the first place. But more importantly, this whole angle not only misses out on saying anything thoughtful about race in America, but also robs Maya of the opportunity to be more than a plot device, perhaps (especially in light of Swindell’s elegant performance), the greatest sin of all. What results is a confusing film, overgrown in some areas and under-seeded in others. Instead of becoming as thoughtful and risky an exploration as The Card Counter, Master Gardener becomes like a game of 52-card pickup. It’s as if Schrader has a deck of cards and instead of laying them out strategically, throws them all in the air and lets them come down where they will. Instead of become the focused sermon of First Reformed, Master Gardener becomes one of those themed themed refrigerator poem packs. It has a lot of terms on the table, but shuffles them around until they say almost absolutely nothing. View the full article
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