The Tillerman series
I now have broadband and a car and, apparently, the vital piece of paper I need for such trivial matters as a salary is not more than 700 kilometres away from me, thus (almost) solving all my previously mentioned problems apart from my outstanding booklog. This post finishes off 2007 in books, and then I have a half-written best of post before launching myself into 2008, and also sorting out all my half-written manga posts. Oh man. This is not made any less challenging by the fact that, according to my records, somehow I have already read over 60 volumes of manga this year.
And I round out the year with another series. Homecoming is definitely a re-read, as is The Runner, and the last three are definitely new. I’m not sure about the other two - I could have read them, and I’ve certainly looked at them, but they didn’t feel all that familiar. Anyway, in the first book, Dicey’s mum leaves her and her three siblings in a car in a supermarket parking lot, unable to cope any more with them and her own mental illness; Dicey takes them all on the long walk to an aunt’s place, in the hope of finding refuge there, but on arrival their welcome is strained, and the longer they stay the less it feels like home.
The subsequent books follow the family and their friends, and the characters stand up well to the changes in viewpoints that this requires; The Runner, my personal favourite, actually breaks with chronology and goes back to Dicey’s uncle Bullet when he was a teenager, around the time of the Vietnam War. The aftermath of this is in Come a Stranger, which is otherwise more about Mina, one of Dicey's friends, and focuses on race, a key issue in The Runner. I'm not so sure about the latter books; the last one in particular feels thinner than the rest, and the plot is difficult; it sets up a problematic situation that if solved, would make the story feel contrived, but left unsolved (as it is) the story feels unfinished, lacking the shape of fiction. I'm also not all that keen on teenage marriage as a plot line, or at least not when it's presented as an ending and comes after a miscommunication sequence that feels so true to the characters that I'm not actually sure that marriage is a good idea.
Anyway. They’re well-constructed books about three-dimensional characters, and they show how people can be trapped - by lack of resources, by circumstances, by their own natures - and, sometimes, how they can break free. I mentioned that The Runner was my favourite, and this is partly because it's practically one of my platonic ideals for a story - people do heroic things while never indulging their own feelings, and it all ends tragically (hence my favourite movies, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia), but also because it could be such an appallingly well-meaning mess (the main plot involves Bullet, a superb cross-country runner with little consideration for others, being asked to train one of the school's black students) and it isn't. Bullet is almost painfully self-sufficient, not part of his school's cliques, but he still refuses to train Tamer when the coach asks him; he does what he wants, yes, but what he can want is limited.
And I round out the year with another series. Homecoming is definitely a re-read, as is The Runner, and the last three are definitely new. I’m not sure about the other two - I could have read them, and I’ve certainly looked at them, but they didn’t feel all that familiar. Anyway, in the first book, Dicey’s mum leaves her and her three siblings in a car in a supermarket parking lot, unable to cope any more with them and her own mental illness; Dicey takes them all on the long walk to an aunt’s place, in the hope of finding refuge there, but on arrival their welcome is strained, and the longer they stay the less it feels like home.
The subsequent books follow the family and their friends, and the characters stand up well to the changes in viewpoints that this requires; The Runner, my personal favourite, actually breaks with chronology and goes back to Dicey’s uncle Bullet when he was a teenager, around the time of the Vietnam War. The aftermath of this is in Come a Stranger, which is otherwise more about Mina, one of Dicey's friends, and focuses on race, a key issue in The Runner. I'm not so sure about the latter books; the last one in particular feels thinner than the rest, and the plot is difficult; it sets up a problematic situation that if solved, would make the story feel contrived, but left unsolved (as it is) the story feels unfinished, lacking the shape of fiction. I'm also not all that keen on teenage marriage as a plot line, or at least not when it's presented as an ending and comes after a miscommunication sequence that feels so true to the characters that I'm not actually sure that marriage is a good idea.
Anyway. They’re well-constructed books about three-dimensional characters, and they show how people can be trapped - by lack of resources, by circumstances, by their own natures - and, sometimes, how they can break free. I mentioned that The Runner was my favourite, and this is partly because it's practically one of my platonic ideals for a story - people do heroic things while never indulging their own feelings, and it all ends tragically (hence my favourite movies, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia), but also because it could be such an appallingly well-meaning mess (the main plot involves Bullet, a superb cross-country runner with little consideration for others, being asked to train one of the school's black students) and it isn't. Bullet is almost painfully self-sufficient, not part of his school's cliques, but he still refuses to train Tamer when the coach asks him; he does what he wants, yes, but what he can want is limited.