My swordhand is out of practice

You know what? You can blame puzzles for the blondiereads.com hiatus. Those things...they insinuate themselves into your lives and there's really nothing you can do. It's addictive. Puzzles are SO annoying, and yet here I am puzzling over a giant 1,000 piece photograph of a waterfall. a WATERFALL.

Ugh.

Book 6: My Swordhand Is Singing (Marcus Sedgwick). This Young Adult novel has two main things going for it--the title and the spooky atmospheric setting in a Polish forest many, many years ago. No, I don't know exactly how long ago, but to give you a bit of an idea, Peter and his father are woodcutters. (Though Peter ends up doing most of the work, as his father devotes plenty of time to a side job as an alcoholic.)

So we're in the forest deep in winter and the local village seems to be a pretty smallminded place dominated by fear. It reminds me a bit of the M. Night Shamylan movie The Village, cloaks and lanterns and whispered meetings of the elders.

They are afraid of something and guess what it is. Things that come out at night and feast on the blood of the living. Can you guess now? The local gypsies refer to them as "hostages," and we come to find that Peter's father used to be very good at fighting them. The gypsies want his help again ..and that's the central tension of the story: getting Peter's father to help.

Which seems pretty sad to me: the father's dormant heroism can only be applied to fighting vampires, apparently. Why not give up drinking for the sake of your kid? We don't even have to weave a story of magic for that kind of heroism. But alas, no, this is one of those magic stories of the Old World, so we get some complicated "magical ideas" such as this choice item from page 162:

If a virgin rides a horse over a grave where a hostage lies, the horse will
know and refuse to cross.

Wha? Is it the virgin who gives the horse this extrasensory power or...how does this work? Magic is supposed to be magic. When I need a diagram to figure it out, my suspension of disbelief is sorely tested. Luckily this magical procedure has the added benefit of informing Peter that Sofia, the gypsy girl scout he's been hanging out with, is pure.

So, Peter learns to wield a sword. And we are treated to the AWESOME title phrase: My swordhand is singing. This is the phrase you use when you're really kicking some vampire ass. But I think it could be applied to all kinds of daily situations. Just the other day, I'm cranking away on a report, and I couldn't help but think, my swordhand is singing.