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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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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As a fan of anything Norse inspired, I’m excited to share an excerpt of Hall of Bones, The Brotherhood of the Eagle Book 1, by Tim Hardie with you. It wasn’t just the amazing cover that peaked my interest, the synopsis and excerpt sound amazing too! Check it out! “In the remote land of Laskar the seven ruling clans have vied with each other for power for over a century. The son of the Reavesburg Clan Chief, Rothgar, has been groomed all his life for a role supporting his elder brother, Jorik, in leading their kingdom when their father’s time finally comes to an end. However, the rulers of their greatest rivals, the Vorund Clan, are in the grip of something older and…
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Samantha Shannon studied English Language and Literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. The Bone Season, the first in a seven-book series, was a New York Times bestseller and the inaugural Today Book Club selection. Her next novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree, was published in February 2019 and became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She lives in London. Hi Samantha, welcome to the Hive! It’s so good to have you here! Lovely to be here. Congratulations on the release of your fourth book in The Bone Season series! How does it feel to have The Mask Falling out there in the wild? Can you tel…
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The Roman aesthetic is strong in Seven Deaths of an Empire, G.R. Matthews’ debut with Rebellion Publishing. From the Roman numerals in the chapter headings to the pila and gladius that the protagonists wield as they lock shields in battle formations, there is much to make a Pliny or Cicero feel at home. The story is told in two threads that slowly draw together, the General – Bordan – too old for campaigning left embroiled in politics in the capital, and the apprentice magician Kyron marching with the Emperor and his army far to the North through untamed forests of rebellious tribes. That setting too, has its Roman echoes, the Teutoburg forest and the fate of Varus’s thr…
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It’s been a long wait for an audiobook of Blackdog, but here it is! When Blackdog was first published in 2011 it was marketed as a standalone, though I always knew it was only the start of a longer epic. Still, it does stand nicely on its own as a completed story… with a lot of character threads leading off eastward at the end, as the original story becomes book one of the series Gods of the Caravan Road. Blackdog is the journey of a caravan-guard, Holla-Sayan, possessed by a shapeshifting dog-spirit of obsessive protective impulse and dubious sanity, bound as the guardian of Attalissa, a lake goddess whose current avatar is a powerless child. On the run, pursued by…
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Content warnings: Traditional fairy tale grimness, including violence, death and murder, child abuse, forced marriage, and so on; racism and colourism. Nothing is graphically described. You think you know these stories, don’t you? You are wrong. You don’t know them at all. Twelve tales, twelve dangerous tales of mystery, magic, and rebellious hearts. Each twists like a spindle to reveal truths full of warning and triumph, truths that capture hearts long kept tame and set them free, truths that explore life . . . and death. A prince has a surprising awakening . . . A beauty fights like a beast . . . A boy refuses to become prey . . . A pa…
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Today we’re thrilled to host a cover reveal for Clay Harmon’s debut novel, Flames Of Mira. Described as an epic new fantasy series set in a world of ice, fire and magic, this is a tale of redemption with a magic system to rival that of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. Want to know more? We got you covered, here’s the official blurb: People like Ig are born from life-threatening trials that bind periodic elements to the human body, forged in the boiling volcanoes and subterranean passages under Mira’s frozen lands. One of the most powerful known elementals, he is forced to work as an enforcer for Magnate Sorrelo Adriann — cursed with a flesh binding — magic that…
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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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The first sci-fi novel I ever read by Robert A. Heinlein got me from the very first: If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman. It is a logical necessity. His profession makes him feel like boss of all creation; when he sets foot dirtside he is slumming among the peasants. Our protagonist is the actor Lorenzo, a man whose narrative voice is immediately appealing partially because of how strongly defined it is, and in part because you can’t help but suspect Heinlein is having a go at a certain class of refined folks who project erudition yet are facile beyond belief; take the following quote, upon our protagonist observing…
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“The drink, the drums, the dance: as ever, these were the engines of the alteration of ordinary time. Xibalba felt so close, the liminal, the numinous, the unknowable. The Other World permeated this world, constantly, to be felt in art and song and dance and herb and drink; but never touched. She could never touch it.” “Xibalba exists in the very same space as we do. It is with us, it is all around us, like two circles overlapping. Xibalba is the place behind the place. We cannot reach it; we can only see it, but there are some places in time and space where the borders are thinner than others. The underworld is such a place.” Monica Byrne’s debut novel The Girl In The …
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Neither beer nor wrestling appeal to me, so why on Earth did I have so much fun with The Headlock of Destiny, a book about—what else but wrestling and beer? And it’s not your average quantities of beer either; nor are the contestants in this eponymous tournament your normal wrestlers. No, this is a fantasy novel we’re talking about: Why have average human beings wrestle when you can have titans? These titans are mighty indeed, known as ten-men, their physical prowess making yours and mine about as significant as that of the fly you’ll swat at and forget five heartbeats later. Though, between you and I, it might be the beer-drinking that the titans do well enough for ten m…
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Please note this review may contain mild spoilers for Blood of an Exile and Sorcery of a Queen. The power has shifted and as Empress Kira lay comatosed, closely watched over by Osyrus Ward, and Queen Ashlyn is believed dead, Ward seizes the opportunity to place his soldiers throughout Almira and rule over all or annihilate those who oppose him. The lands of Terra are now inhabited with skyships, acolytes and other monstrosities cooked up by the madman himself. Yet Ashlyn is far from dead, and neither is our beloved Dragonslayer, Bershad. Deep in the Dainwood forest, Bershad, Simeon, Oromir and the remnants of the Jaguar Army lead the resistance against Ward’s soldiers …
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Izumi Suzuki – Terminal Boredom (2021, translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan) “All the shitty stuff stops bothering you. Like, you realize that there’s a simple way of dealing with everything that’s been weighing on you up til now. You can just tack on an illogical ending to the story, like a deus ex machina for life. Reality feels like a TV show, and TV shows feel like reality. It’s like the boundary between them breks down, like you’re living in a dream.” Izumi Suzuki was a unique figure in Japanese speculative fiction. An actress and model who participated in the Japanese avant garde cinema of Shuji Terayam…
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Nick Mamatas is a unique author, who has been doing his own individual take on science fiction, fantasy and horror for 20 years. His novel Move Under Ground (2005), which combines the Beat poetry of Jack Kerouac with the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, became a cult hit. Mamatas’ blend of deft characterisation and sharply realised satire can be keenly felt across much of his work, including I Am Providence (2016), a murder mystery set in a Lovecraft fan convention, and The Last Weekend: A Novel of Zombies, Booze and Power Tools (2014), in which a failed science fiction writer must stave off the zombie apocalypse. His latest novel, The Second Shooter (2021), comes out la…
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Notes from an Editor: Day 122 1. Refrain, at all costs, from using any form of lie or lay. Except when people are fibbing, of course. Your editor doesn’t want to deal with remembering the correct usage between lie and laying and laid and lying any more than you do. 2. Things are only further away if they are figurative. 87%* of the time, it’s farther you want. You can be further from the truth, but if The Truth is a magical narwhal tower on the outskirts of The City, you are farther from it. I’ve heard that this differentiation is favored in American-English and doesn’t exist in British-English; I’ll be sticking with it because frankly I don’t think English is co…
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To celebrate the release of the final instalment of G. D. Penman’s Witch of Empire trilogy, THE LAST DAYS OF HONG KONG, Beth has been given clearance to interview the Witch in question herself – Iona “Sully” Sullivan. The Year of the Knife | The Wounded Ones | The Last Days of Hong Kong | Order Your Copy Welcome to the Hive, Ms Sullivan, and thank you for taking the time to join us! How was the journey through the interdimensional planes? I’ve had worse, I’ve had better. Weird to be on the other side of a portal with nobody trying to murder me. Like frosting without the cake, you know? Usually when I’m getting dragged to other dimensions, I’m heading the other way. K…
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I’m crazy about historical fantasy and She Who Became the Sun is one of the best I’ve read in recent memory, and as far removed from the previous historical fantasy novel I read, The Night Circus. Drawing the Red Turban rebellion against the Mongol Yuan dynasty into the ever so slightly fantastic, Shelley Parker-Chan rewrites history in more than one ways, the most defining that the would-be progenitor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Chongba dies at the onset of the novel, his identity—and destiny—taken up by his nameless sister, whose own fate is to become nothing. In taking up the name, Zhu believes herself capable of also claiming her brother’s destiny for herself—in some way…
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let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done… The Buddy Read Dream Team (Nils and myself, Beth) are back. Nils managed to get her hands on arcs of Alix E. Harrow’s brand new fairy-tale retelling A Spindle Splintered. It’s out TODAY from Tordotcom Publishing (you can grab a copy here) and is the first novella in a new series called Fractured Fables (omg): It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it’s the last birthday she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no one has lived past twenty-one. Her best friend Charm is intent on …
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Monica Byrne’s debut novel The Girl In The Road (2014) is a remarkable work of speculative fiction, weaving together the stories of two women in near future India and West Africa. It won the Otherwise Award and was nominated for the Kitschies’ Golden Tentacle award for debut speculative fiction novel. She is also an accomplished playwright whose acclaimed dramas have been performed across the US. Byrne has returned to long-form speculative fiction with her incredible new book, The Absolute Star (2021), which weaves together three different timelines in the past, the present day and the far future to create a powerful exploration of Mayan cosmology, utopian future and our …
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Greetings feeble whatever-you-are, tis I, Ulesorin the Green returned to you once more with wisdom beyond your mortal ken. You shall all be happy to hear that remedial construction work upon my new tower is now underway, and I find myself unwelcome there for the time being. As such, I have elected to take some rest and relaxation at the local hot-springs. While the initial temperature on offer as a result of the volcanic activity beneath the surface of this blighted land was rather tame to the tastes of a dragon rider, a few well placed fireballs have resulted in a far more pleasant temperature, with the added bonus that I now have the whole resort to myself. Anyway, b…
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Old science fiction! It can be endlessly entertaining in wholly unintentional ways—I owe linguistic drift alone for more than a few chuckles as I explored the very first novel awarded the Hugo for best sci-fi, all the way back in 1953. Despite certain antiquated notions, The Demolished Man made for exciting reading and I can see why it still holds a place in the science fictional canon. When you read a novel so old, with so much familiar already, it can be easy to lose track of some of the once-fresh elements introduced. This is one of the earliest sci-fi thrillers out there, reading almost as Philip Marlowe if a slightly less deranged Philip K. Dick had written it. Ther…
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Christopher Hinz’s Paratwa trilogy was an instant cult classic on its release, with the first novel Liege-Killer (1987) winning Hinz the 1988 Compton Cook Award. It was followed by Ash Ock (1989) and The Paratwa (1991), which continued the story of Nick and Gillian, two men woken up from stasis in a post-apocalyptic future to fight the Paratwa, deadly assassins with twinned consciousnesses who caused the apocalypse the first time round. The story made the jump to comics with Gemini Blood (1996-7), written by Hinz and illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards. Hinz disappeared off the radar for some time after that, but re-emerged triumphantly with Angry Robot, who published Binary…
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You may recall that – back in August – the judges found that the first 20% of our two “leaving home” Batch quarterfinalists did not leave them confident about which one to pick as the winning semi-finalist. Since then, the team of five judges have read further on in both books in a bid to come to a definite decision. So now we are in a position to reveal which out of His Secret Illuminations and The Ninth Scripture has won of the remaining two fantasy-hive SPBFO -7 semi-finalist spots. In order to maximise the tension we will go through with each judge in turn discussing both books and then announcing which one gets their vote for a semi-final place. The outcome to b…
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This is an (increasingly) occasional series of posts drawing on my excursion into the academic side of creative writing doing a PhD project at Queen’s University Belfast with the catchy title “Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction.” So 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. Which brings me to this review of Gun Island. There is an exuberance of intricacy and serendipity in Amitav Ghosh’s climate change novel. Like a cross between David Lodge’s Small World and Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, Gun Island takes Ghosh’s prota…
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J.D.L. Rosell is the bestselling author of the series Legend of Tal, Ranger of the Titan Wilds, The Runewar Saga, The Famine Cycle, and Godslayer Rising. He has earned an MA in creative writing and has previously written as a ghostwriter. Always drawn to the outdoors, he ventures out into nature whenever he can to indulge in his hobbies of hiking and photography. Most of the time, he can be found curled up with a delightful book at home with his wife and two cats, Zelda and Abenthy. To check out his writing for free, you can pick up a series starter story bundle at www.jdlrosell.com. Welcome to the Hive, J.D.L. Rosell. Let’s start with the basics: dazzle us with …
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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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