Reading roundup

[hamsterwoman]

So, it's been awhile since I've done a reading roundup, apparently...

40. Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement -- an interesting and unusual take on the "urban fantasy with fairies" genre I really enjoy. This one's even darker than the Tithe and Wicked Lovely universes, although it does get a sort of happy ending after the darkness.

Comments

[angerfish]

Before we got to Vralia, I also enjoyed Moirin's time with the Tatars, Batu's family, especially the Imperial Princess grandmother from Ch'in, Erdene (Bao's Tatar princess wife), the archer who rescues her in Vralia. I liked the Tatars' insistence that Moirin must have some Tatar ancestors to be able to shoot so well, and in general how domestic and vivid their lives were -- cooking and childbirth and drinking and shooting competitions -- they felt fun and well-rounded, the first time I thought we'd encountered a well-rounded culture in the Moirin books.

Yeah, man! I was pleasantly surprised by not!Mongolia. Maybe it's just because the Dothraki are so terribly one note/stereotypical that I cheer every time I encounter a more well-rounded version of fantasy Mongolia.

FUCKING BHAKTIPUR. FUCK. That was even more bland than Ch'in. I was bitterly disappointed. There is so much fun shit one can do with not!Northern India/Nepal (I need to squint at the map again to figure out where in South Asia Moirin was.) Also she was Might Whitey-ing all over the place and had Moirin solve the caste system. WHATEVER.

Sigh.

Anyway I like Bao quite a bit, and how un-romanticized Moirin/Bao are. I wanted those two crazy kids to make it work. :P

[hamsterwoman]

You might be right about the Dothraki setting the bar so low, that anything less one-dimensional and savage seems like a win... but, yeah, I thought they were pretty well done in general. And FUN! There was not a lot of that in the Moirin books since she left Alba, really.

I don't know much about India other than the Hindu pantheon and food, so I think I felt the missed opportunity of "it could've been so awesome but isn't!" less keenly, but oh god the BLAND. JC can defiitely write fun characters even in travelogue, so what the hell happened? She ran out of personalities for the book?

Moirin overturning the caste system is still fail, but based on her initial conversation about it with Amrita I thought it was going to be single-handed, and the fact that it was the confrontation with Jagrati (and later conversation with Laysa, apparently, offscreen) that made Amrita decide to overhaul the caste system made it actually less bad than I'd been expecting. But it was still Moirin who, based on her experiences with scripture in Vralia, planted the idea that human interpretations of divine decrees are fallible, so... yeah. Still not good. (Although Moirin's wanderings from place to place are so random, I did kind of appreciate it that her time with Vralia was somehow connected with her time in Bhaktipur, 'cos at least it wasn't totally like JC throwing darts at a world map...)

how un-romanticized Moirin/Bao are. I wanted those two crazy kids to make it work

Haha, yes, I'm with you! After the epic estabkushment-defying love stories of Phedre/Joscelin and Imriel/Sidonie, it's refreshing to have these two be all, "Oops, I kind of got married" and "Oops, I slept with my ex-lover's ghost the night before my wedding" along with the heroic stuff.