Revenge of the Book Reports
Dec. 28th, 2005 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetHad a wonderful holiday weekend, which included: brunch with my parents and grandmothers, lunch with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
joane, shenlo, and jonofthewired, my first continuous four days off since March 2004, three (3) bubble baths, the eating of almond creme brulee, the acquisition of a brand new printer/scanner/fax/copier/shiny thing, and lots and lots of reading.
Thus, we give you:
Revenge of the Book Reports!
*all book reports have studied spoiler-fu under the watchful eyes of aged monks for seven years in the mountains
I didn't expect much out of Tamara Siler Jones's Threads of Malice: I read the first book in its loosely connected series (Ghosts in the Snow) and had some serious issues with it. Those issues, then and again now, keep growing my respect for how difficult it is to write a sharp, smart police procedural or mystery novel in any setting. One has to give away enough information to keep the reader interested, but not compromise the plot. One has to craft characters who are engaging and with whom relationships can be formed, but who can still realistically conceal enough to not just rule down to a suspect on page fifty. One has to maintain that careful tension, and think ahead or backwards about every little thing that happens in the story, and one has to have really, really done their research. Whoo.
Some of those issues have carried through from Ghosts into Threads: the curiously anachronistic knowledge of evidence handling, anatomy, and police procedure displayed side-by-side with a medieval setting, without comment on how that knowledge affects the society at all. Dubric is still a bit stiff as a protagonist, and he's still a bit coy: he seems to know a lot more about the history, the world, and general things that go on than we, the reader do. That's problematic when one is mostly in his PoV. There's still that matter of the coy villain PoV scenes, wherein we skirt identifying the perp yet are teased and teased. Certain topics are treated with an almost prurient push-pull fascination (in this case, sodomy). The prose gets clunky at times, and dialogue can be equally stiff as the characters, sometimes faux-historical formal and sometimes almost weirdly modern, not to mention all the skirting of using some good old Anglo-Saxon expletives in favour of the dumbed-down versions -- I mean, just say it. Say fuck. There, I just did it, and it didn't hurt. I could really use a denouement; books without them feel like being given the bill halfway through your dessert, 'cause it's closing time for the kitchen.
All these things irritate me.
Thing is, after about the first third of the book, I found myself really wanting to know what happened.
I think the secret to it lies in two things that Threads does really, really right: the more rooted complexity of the plot, and all the things that happen that have nothing to do with the plot. There are certain things here that are givens from page one: one of Dubric's boy scribes (Lars and Otlee) will get caught, and abused by the serial killer what kills young boys and rapes them, and the cavalry will come and save them at great cost. People will die. It'll all end off...if not okay, well, okay enough. But the why of it does get more complex, and gives the whole world some...history. We knew there was a war going back when, and that Dubric was a war hero and lost his wife. The war feels more real after Threads -- there's a better sense of what was fought for, and lost, and how it affected things both on a personal and national level. This all feels a little more real.
The second thing is perhaps more important: we spend a little time playing Getting to Know You. Half our core cast spends their time at Dien's in-laws' farm, being domestic: Lars is courting one of Dien's daughters, and so we get to see him as an awkward teenage boy who's drawn to the idea of having a tight family, and yet afraid of it. He chops wood. He cleans stables. Dien-as-father is much more interesting and vivid than Dien-as-grim-enforcer. The personal connection to the murders and Dubric's ghosts feels less manufactured, when the family's personal history is brought into it: I can care more about both the mystery and the people involved when I have more to see of them. I'm still iffy on Dubric growing crushes on people he's hardly met after all these years, but...he seems to be loosening up too. These characters are getting past the first date jitters, and I might even be able to take them for coffee in a few books.
This is still not a series I'll use as a first recommendation for anybody, but it seems to be finding its legs fast. I might pick up the next on my own steam.
On the other hand, Frances Hardinge's Fly By Night was a delight, the latest in a string of just...really, really good YA books I've read this year. Twelve-year-old Mosca Mye has been raised in a backwater village by her aunt and uncle, and is castigated because her dead father taught her how to read. She makes her escape with a travelling con man-turned-spy and a violent goose and heads for the city, where she's embroiled in political maneuverings both old and new and no small amount of capital crimes. Fly By Night manages to be poignant and ethically tricky and still dryly, nudge-winkily, wittily hilarious.
Mosca's world is one of the more interesting variations on the Generic European Fantasy model (if the urban version, not the rural) that I've seen in a while: there are so many contenders for the throne that they're cheered like sports teams, while the guilds keep tentative peace while jostling for power in the dark corners of society. The printed word is both weapon and currency: every printed document is approved and censored; mass purges and riots occur because of books; roadside schools are acts of radicalism and treason. The twist of Victorian London in the city of Mandelion is deep, but not so deep as to be instantly recognizable by its most usual phenotypes. Although Mosca is only twelve, one understands instantly why literacy makes her able to be a player in the book's events, why she's able to be seen as dangerous. The play with words, with the concept of words and ideas is really appealing to me as a writer, as a reader, as a person.
The other handling of the political element here that I really, really enjoyed is that...well, Mosca is twelve years old, relatively politically uneducated, and from a backwater village. She does not waltz into Mandelion and see things with the astute eye of a statesman because She Is The Protagonist. In fact, she gets screwed, tricked, played, used, and misreads situations badly. Repeatedly. Although by the end the repetition does get a little...well, repetitive, it's a nice change. It makes her real: it makes her feel like a kid who's come to the big city and doesn't entirely understand it, even if she's smart and she's trying. And she is smart, and she is trying -- she's just also very human.
Wry, and funny, and sharp, and generally worth reading.
There's been a lot of buzz about Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds, in both directions: I've seen reviews both very keen and not at all of this one. I picked it up despite not being a horror reader at all (horror tends just to not do much for me), so throughout please bear in mind that I'm reading outside of my genre. There are conversations that I might not be picking up on here.
Disclaimer aside, I enjoyed this well enough: it's very engagingly written, lush without obstructing the view of the action, drawing a reader in from page one. Eden Moore is an interesting protagonist, managing to balance action and thoughtfulness well: the narrative never feels like it's sagging, or rushing too fast. The characterization in general is strong: everyone in the piece (with maybe one exception) is drawn very realistically, with human foibles and flaws and quirks. The landscape itself -- Chattanooga, TN and a bit of Florida and a bit of Georgia -- is rendered with a certain...I can only call it fierce affection. There's some serious opinion snuck in there about how the South in general works, and although it's noticeable, it's not intrusive.
That opinion twigs me to one of the other conversations I'm not quite party to, and it's one that pervades this book: Eden's family is mixed-race, and this is quite a major part of her life. It stuck out as...almost excessive to me, almost unrealistic, how many of the issues and threads that start and never quite pick up again (her being hassled as a kid, her umpty-great-aunt's casual racism) had to do with race -- it seems to want to evoke the stereotyped picture of the South that Eden herself complains about people having. I'm only half-sure this isn't just me as a reader: I live in one of the most multicultural cities in the world -- mixed-race couples or people are pretty normal in my circle of acquaintances -- and American racial politics have always eluded me just because of the value system I've come up in.
So I'm not sure what's the expected baseline for talking about that, and I'm not sure what's the expected baseline for horror. Because...given all that, and given that I did go through this in a few hours and didn't leave feeling dissatisfied, I didn't really find Four and Twenty Blackbirds scary. At all.
Is horror always supposed to be scary?
Part of it is Eden herself: people get shot in front of her, she gets shot at, and she doesn't ever quite lose her cool. People die on her account and she's flippant about it. Her half-brother/cousin (yeah, the tangly family relationships don't help in that stereotype push-pull thing) is stalking her and trying to kill her for most of her life, and she's not at all bothered by him. She's just...outside the story in some ways. None of this is real threat to her, and thus it isn't real threat to me, so even though all these things happen to her I am not scared.
So...I'm still sitting at someone else's table in a lot of ways, and this was well-written and pleasant enough, but...I am not scared, and I'm not certain how I was supposed to react to this one at all. Any horror readers in the house who can chime in?
Book reports to come include: Michelle M. Welch's Chasing Fire, Gene Wolfe's The Knight, Kim Wilkins's Giants of the Frost, Karen Traviss's The World Before, The Outsiders anthology, Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain, etc. and more.
joane, shenlo, and jonofthewired, my first continuous four days off since March 2004, three (3) bubble baths, the eating of almond creme brulee, the acquisition of a brand new printer/scanner/fax/copier/shiny thing, and lots and lots of reading.Thus, we give you:
Revenge of the Book Reports!
*all book reports have studied spoiler-fu under the watchful eyes of aged monks for seven years in the mountains
I didn't expect much out of Tamara Siler Jones's Threads of Malice: I read the first book in its loosely connected series (Ghosts in the Snow) and had some serious issues with it. Those issues, then and again now, keep growing my respect for how difficult it is to write a sharp, smart police procedural or mystery novel in any setting. One has to give away enough information to keep the reader interested, but not compromise the plot. One has to craft characters who are engaging and with whom relationships can be formed, but who can still realistically conceal enough to not just rule down to a suspect on page fifty. One has to maintain that careful tension, and think ahead or backwards about every little thing that happens in the story, and one has to have really, really done their research. Whoo.
Some of those issues have carried through from Ghosts into Threads: the curiously anachronistic knowledge of evidence handling, anatomy, and police procedure displayed side-by-side with a medieval setting, without comment on how that knowledge affects the society at all. Dubric is still a bit stiff as a protagonist, and he's still a bit coy: he seems to know a lot more about the history, the world, and general things that go on than we, the reader do. That's problematic when one is mostly in his PoV. There's still that matter of the coy villain PoV scenes, wherein we skirt identifying the perp yet are teased and teased. Certain topics are treated with an almost prurient push-pull fascination (in this case, sodomy). The prose gets clunky at times, and dialogue can be equally stiff as the characters, sometimes faux-historical formal and sometimes almost weirdly modern, not to mention all the skirting of using some good old Anglo-Saxon expletives in favour of the dumbed-down versions -- I mean, just say it. Say fuck. There, I just did it, and it didn't hurt. I could really use a denouement; books without them feel like being given the bill halfway through your dessert, 'cause it's closing time for the kitchen.
All these things irritate me.
Thing is, after about the first third of the book, I found myself really wanting to know what happened.
I think the secret to it lies in two things that Threads does really, really right: the more rooted complexity of the plot, and all the things that happen that have nothing to do with the plot. There are certain things here that are givens from page one: one of Dubric's boy scribes (Lars and Otlee) will get caught, and abused by the serial killer what kills young boys and rapes them, and the cavalry will come and save them at great cost. People will die. It'll all end off...if not okay, well, okay enough. But the why of it does get more complex, and gives the whole world some...history. We knew there was a war going back when, and that Dubric was a war hero and lost his wife. The war feels more real after Threads -- there's a better sense of what was fought for, and lost, and how it affected things both on a personal and national level. This all feels a little more real.
The second thing is perhaps more important: we spend a little time playing Getting to Know You. Half our core cast spends their time at Dien's in-laws' farm, being domestic: Lars is courting one of Dien's daughters, and so we get to see him as an awkward teenage boy who's drawn to the idea of having a tight family, and yet afraid of it. He chops wood. He cleans stables. Dien-as-father is much more interesting and vivid than Dien-as-grim-enforcer. The personal connection to the murders and Dubric's ghosts feels less manufactured, when the family's personal history is brought into it: I can care more about both the mystery and the people involved when I have more to see of them. I'm still iffy on Dubric growing crushes on people he's hardly met after all these years, but...he seems to be loosening up too. These characters are getting past the first date jitters, and I might even be able to take them for coffee in a few books.
This is still not a series I'll use as a first recommendation for anybody, but it seems to be finding its legs fast. I might pick up the next on my own steam.
On the other hand, Frances Hardinge's Fly By Night was a delight, the latest in a string of just...really, really good YA books I've read this year. Twelve-year-old Mosca Mye has been raised in a backwater village by her aunt and uncle, and is castigated because her dead father taught her how to read. She makes her escape with a travelling con man-turned-spy and a violent goose and heads for the city, where she's embroiled in political maneuverings both old and new and no small amount of capital crimes. Fly By Night manages to be poignant and ethically tricky and still dryly, nudge-winkily, wittily hilarious.
Mosca's world is one of the more interesting variations on the Generic European Fantasy model (if the urban version, not the rural) that I've seen in a while: there are so many contenders for the throne that they're cheered like sports teams, while the guilds keep tentative peace while jostling for power in the dark corners of society. The printed word is both weapon and currency: every printed document is approved and censored; mass purges and riots occur because of books; roadside schools are acts of radicalism and treason. The twist of Victorian London in the city of Mandelion is deep, but not so deep as to be instantly recognizable by its most usual phenotypes. Although Mosca is only twelve, one understands instantly why literacy makes her able to be a player in the book's events, why she's able to be seen as dangerous. The play with words, with the concept of words and ideas is really appealing to me as a writer, as a reader, as a person.
The other handling of the political element here that I really, really enjoyed is that...well, Mosca is twelve years old, relatively politically uneducated, and from a backwater village. She does not waltz into Mandelion and see things with the astute eye of a statesman because She Is The Protagonist. In fact, she gets screwed, tricked, played, used, and misreads situations badly. Repeatedly. Although by the end the repetition does get a little...well, repetitive, it's a nice change. It makes her real: it makes her feel like a kid who's come to the big city and doesn't entirely understand it, even if she's smart and she's trying. And she is smart, and she is trying -- she's just also very human.
Wry, and funny, and sharp, and generally worth reading.
There's been a lot of buzz about Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds, in both directions: I've seen reviews both very keen and not at all of this one. I picked it up despite not being a horror reader at all (horror tends just to not do much for me), so throughout please bear in mind that I'm reading outside of my genre. There are conversations that I might not be picking up on here.
Disclaimer aside, I enjoyed this well enough: it's very engagingly written, lush without obstructing the view of the action, drawing a reader in from page one. Eden Moore is an interesting protagonist, managing to balance action and thoughtfulness well: the narrative never feels like it's sagging, or rushing too fast. The characterization in general is strong: everyone in the piece (with maybe one exception) is drawn very realistically, with human foibles and flaws and quirks. The landscape itself -- Chattanooga, TN and a bit of Florida and a bit of Georgia -- is rendered with a certain...I can only call it fierce affection. There's some serious opinion snuck in there about how the South in general works, and although it's noticeable, it's not intrusive.
That opinion twigs me to one of the other conversations I'm not quite party to, and it's one that pervades this book: Eden's family is mixed-race, and this is quite a major part of her life. It stuck out as...almost excessive to me, almost unrealistic, how many of the issues and threads that start and never quite pick up again (her being hassled as a kid, her umpty-great-aunt's casual racism) had to do with race -- it seems to want to evoke the stereotyped picture of the South that Eden herself complains about people having. I'm only half-sure this isn't just me as a reader: I live in one of the most multicultural cities in the world -- mixed-race couples or people are pretty normal in my circle of acquaintances -- and American racial politics have always eluded me just because of the value system I've come up in.
So I'm not sure what's the expected baseline for talking about that, and I'm not sure what's the expected baseline for horror. Because...given all that, and given that I did go through this in a few hours and didn't leave feeling dissatisfied, I didn't really find Four and Twenty Blackbirds scary. At all.
Is horror always supposed to be scary?
Part of it is Eden herself: people get shot in front of her, she gets shot at, and she doesn't ever quite lose her cool. People die on her account and she's flippant about it. Her half-brother/cousin (yeah, the tangly family relationships don't help in that stereotype push-pull thing) is stalking her and trying to kill her for most of her life, and she's not at all bothered by him. She's just...outside the story in some ways. None of this is real threat to her, and thus it isn't real threat to me, so even though all these things happen to her I am not scared.
So...I'm still sitting at someone else's table in a lot of ways, and this was well-written and pleasant enough, but...I am not scared, and I'm not certain how I was supposed to react to this one at all. Any horror readers in the house who can chime in?
Book reports to come include: Michelle M. Welch's Chasing Fire, Gene Wolfe's The Knight, Kim Wilkins's Giants of the Frost, Karen Traviss's The World Before, The Outsiders anthology, Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain, etc. and more.
