Green by Jay Lake
Publisher: TOR, 2009
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Swords and sorcery
Rating: 3 pints of blood
Confession time: I picked up this book solely because of the cover. It's not only really beautiful, it's very different from anything else out there. She's a ninja! In a tree! Upside-down! And she's a woman of colour! The details are really fantastic, too. The bit of blood on the edge of her knife, the pomegranates in the tree adding a splash of colour, the falling leaves. I love the wash of green, especially considering the title of the book, and it all gets better when you realize this is a rather artistic interpretation of something that actually happens. Ok, there's no need for her to be dangling upside-down, other than because it looks cool, but the pomegranate tree, the slashes on her cheeks, and the whole ninja thing are straight out of the book.
I have to admit, I didn't give plot summary more than a cursory look. I love the cover art that much. When it's that pretty, who cares what's inside, right? Just pick it up and hold it close!
When she was four years old, a child known only as "Girl" was sold by her father from the world of rice fields and poverty and taken to a country far across the sea, where she was trained to be a great lady, a courtesan to the powerful Factor. Among her standard lessons, though, were some much more dangerous ones, given in secret, lessons forming her into a human weapon for reasons she isn't told about. It takes several years before she's so much as given a name, and soon the day comes when Green must decide: will she allow herself to be used by the hands that created her, or will she take her destiny in her own hands?
Short plot summary is short. The thing is, Green is one of those stories that's more about the journey than the destination. In some ways, it reminded me of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, particularly in the way the story twists and turns until there isn't necessarily one plotline that carries from A to B, but things keep happening to the protagonist, getting her involved in matters far larger than she is. Also, both Green and Kushiel's Dart use narrators who are aware they're telling a story to an audience, focus on the childhood training in some great detail, and in both cases the training is much more interesting reading than it might sound like to summarize.
If I had to describe this book in one word, it would be "uneven." The writing, the pacing, Green's relationships with other characters... all have their strong moments and much weaker moments. At its best, the book is gripping, but it can't seem to hold to that best continuously. Near the very beginning, the young child protagonist is introduced to a man who would become a very important figure in her life:
Close by, I could see the stranger was a man. I had never seen a stranger before, and so I thought that perhaps all strangers were men. He was taller than Papa. His face was pale as the maggots that squirmed in our midden pile. His hair peekingout from behind his swaddling was the color of rotting straw, his eyes the inside of a lime.
I actually love this passage. It's full of unpleasant imagery, but it tells us a lot about the narrator and her world. Those few sentences tell us more about the protagonist and her feelings about the stranger than it does about the man she's describing, and it's done very effectively in just a few words. Unfortunately, while it continues to have its shining moments and does manage to keep to a voice that is essentially Green, the prose doesn't stay that strong, and occasionally delves into some very flat territory.
Aptly titled, Green is primarily a character study of its protagonist, a character-driven rather than a plot-driven novel. She is wonderful and complex, perhaps not always likeable but always someone you can understand, and very very flawed. Green doesn't necessarily take steps to grow past her flaws, although she does start to learn how to use them to her advantage rather than to let them dictate things for her. She's always competent and while she makes mistakes, she's never stupid.
I absolutely loved the first part of the book, which involves Green growing from a girl into a young woman, trained instead of raised by her abusive keepers in isolation. To hear it described so bluntly, you wouldn't think this would be the sort of thing to appeal to me, since the mention of child abuse is often enough to turn me off a book forever (I couldn't finish Gregory Maguire's Wicked for this reason), but I absolutely couldn't put it down. At the end of this section, however, the story takes an unexpected turn and instead of continuing with the political life she'd been raised to live, Green ends up headed in an entirely different direction, and after this point the story begins to meander all over the place. Actually, Green spends a while after this point literally wandering around aimlessly, and since her travels during this time are still documented faithfully, the story begins to drag at this point. It does pick up again, but never fully recovers to live up to the promising beginning.
I feel like I should mention here the copious amounts of sex involved. The scenes are never explicit, more mentioned after the fact, but Green has many, many lovers. Just about every woman she meets after a certain age she winds up in bed with, which can be... off-putting, especially considering she's still in her teen years when the book ends, and some of her lovers have not only been much much older, but in authority positions over her. There's also some heavy flavours of S&M, which again are not described in explicit detail, and it's a very small portion of the book, but if it's something likely to squick you out, be ye warned.
Green is an ambitious novel, and Lake starts out with some truly interesting ideas. The first segment of the book, had it drawn out the plot twist a bit more instead of creating an anti-climax, would have earned a mountain of praise as its own novel. The way it continues, though, it isn't quite able to hold up its own weight, and some of the best parts end up falling to the wayside rather than staying at the forefront where they belong.
Green is available in trade paperback
.
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Swords and sorcery
Rating: 3 pints of blood
Confession time: I picked up this book solely because of the cover. It's not only really beautiful, it's very different from anything else out there. She's a ninja! In a tree! Upside-down! And she's a woman of colour! The details are really fantastic, too. The bit of blood on the edge of her knife, the pomegranates in the tree adding a splash of colour, the falling leaves. I love the wash of green, especially considering the title of the book, and it all gets better when you realize this is a rather artistic interpretation of something that actually happens. Ok, there's no need for her to be dangling upside-down, other than because it looks cool, but the pomegranate tree, the slashes on her cheeks, and the whole ninja thing are straight out of the book.
I have to admit, I didn't give plot summary more than a cursory look. I love the cover art that much. When it's that pretty, who cares what's inside, right? Just pick it up and hold it close!
When she was four years old, a child known only as "Girl" was sold by her father from the world of rice fields and poverty and taken to a country far across the sea, where she was trained to be a great lady, a courtesan to the powerful Factor. Among her standard lessons, though, were some much more dangerous ones, given in secret, lessons forming her into a human weapon for reasons she isn't told about. It takes several years before she's so much as given a name, and soon the day comes when Green must decide: will she allow herself to be used by the hands that created her, or will she take her destiny in her own hands?
Short plot summary is short. The thing is, Green is one of those stories that's more about the journey than the destination. In some ways, it reminded me of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, particularly in the way the story twists and turns until there isn't necessarily one plotline that carries from A to B, but things keep happening to the protagonist, getting her involved in matters far larger than she is. Also, both Green and Kushiel's Dart use narrators who are aware they're telling a story to an audience, focus on the childhood training in some great detail, and in both cases the training is much more interesting reading than it might sound like to summarize.
If I had to describe this book in one word, it would be "uneven." The writing, the pacing, Green's relationships with other characters... all have their strong moments and much weaker moments. At its best, the book is gripping, but it can't seem to hold to that best continuously. Near the very beginning, the young child protagonist is introduced to a man who would become a very important figure in her life:
Close by, I could see the stranger was a man. I had never seen a stranger before, and so I thought that perhaps all strangers were men. He was taller than Papa. His face was pale as the maggots that squirmed in our midden pile. His hair peekingout from behind his swaddling was the color of rotting straw, his eyes the inside of a lime.
I actually love this passage. It's full of unpleasant imagery, but it tells us a lot about the narrator and her world. Those few sentences tell us more about the protagonist and her feelings about the stranger than it does about the man she's describing, and it's done very effectively in just a few words. Unfortunately, while it continues to have its shining moments and does manage to keep to a voice that is essentially Green, the prose doesn't stay that strong, and occasionally delves into some very flat territory.
Aptly titled, Green is primarily a character study of its protagonist, a character-driven rather than a plot-driven novel. She is wonderful and complex, perhaps not always likeable but always someone you can understand, and very very flawed. Green doesn't necessarily take steps to grow past her flaws, although she does start to learn how to use them to her advantage rather than to let them dictate things for her. She's always competent and while she makes mistakes, she's never stupid.
I absolutely loved the first part of the book, which involves Green growing from a girl into a young woman, trained instead of raised by her abusive keepers in isolation. To hear it described so bluntly, you wouldn't think this would be the sort of thing to appeal to me, since the mention of child abuse is often enough to turn me off a book forever (I couldn't finish Gregory Maguire's Wicked for this reason), but I absolutely couldn't put it down. At the end of this section, however, the story takes an unexpected turn and instead of continuing with the political life she'd been raised to live, Green ends up headed in an entirely different direction, and after this point the story begins to meander all over the place. Actually, Green spends a while after this point literally wandering around aimlessly, and since her travels during this time are still documented faithfully, the story begins to drag at this point. It does pick up again, but never fully recovers to live up to the promising beginning.
I feel like I should mention here the copious amounts of sex involved. The scenes are never explicit, more mentioned after the fact, but Green has many, many lovers. Just about every woman she meets after a certain age she winds up in bed with, which can be... off-putting, especially considering she's still in her teen years when the book ends, and some of her lovers have not only been much much older, but in authority positions over her. There's also some heavy flavours of S&M, which again are not described in explicit detail, and it's a very small portion of the book, but if it's something likely to squick you out, be ye warned.
Green is an ambitious novel, and Lake starts out with some truly interesting ideas. The first segment of the book, had it drawn out the plot twist a bit more instead of creating an anti-climax, would have earned a mountain of praise as its own novel. The way it continues, though, it isn't quite able to hold up its own weight, and some of the best parts end up falling to the wayside rather than staying at the forefront where they belong.
Green is available in trade paperback
.