Reading Roundup
Ben Aaronovitch needs to write more books or something... Since finishing Broken Homes, and before that Whispers Under Ground, I've been casting aout desultorily and, I think, enjoying everything I read less for not being about Peter Grant... Be that as it may, I did manage to finish a couple of books, though my average for the year so far is pretty abysmal (but I have been reading more fic again, so myabe that's why).
32. Gail Carriger, Etiquette and Espionage -- this is a YA book set in the same world as the Soulless books, some decades earlier. I actually enjoyed it more than the two Soulless books I read, mostly because spoilers!it's more believable that a clever girl of 14 would be clueless about some things (as the plot demands) than that a grown woman who is supposed to be exceptionally clever would be. And I think even without accounting for age differences Sophronia is just less clueless than Alexia, whose obliviousness really bugged me. Sophronia is a decent protagonist -- curious, fairly sympathetic, I was fine with rooting for her though not especially in love. I wish the other characters got to be more fleshed out, but even with the rough sketches I liked Sophronia's growing friendship with the different girls (which reminded me a little bit of Gemma Doyle's gang in AGATB, although not nearly so well drawn and much more cartoonish in character), shy Agatha, gruff Sidhaeg who was literally raised by wolves (and a regiment of wolves to boot), and Dimity, who seems like a toned-down and less mock-worthy version of Ivy Hiselpenny, Alexia's friend. Monique, who turned out to be the main antagonist of this installment, was your typical Blonde Bitch type. The teachers were entertaining but not anyone I fell in love with. My favorite character was Vieve, unsurprising, because she was my favorite in the Alexia books, too. And I wonder if Soap is really being set up as Sophronia's love interest, because I can't think of very many interracial protagonist romances in genre stuff, especially outside of modern urban fantasy. I checked out this book for myself but L saw it lying around and actually read it first. I think she enjoyed it more than I did, but I would read the sequels, because the world is fun, and just about the right depth for YA fluff.
33. Ursula Vernon, Dragonbreath#8: Nightmare of the Iguana -- I think I might be done with this series, regretfully: for a book this short, it was kind of a chore to get through. I think ursulav might be done with this series, too, or at least would prefer to be, because the last couple of installments felt rather... rote. There are still occasional interesting animal fact, and cute dialogue, and adorable pictures, but I haven't felt any of the original zany charm since the one with the Jackalopes, like three books ago. This one also suffered for me because spoiler Wendell, my favorite of the cast, was mostly out of the action, and the Suki was subbing for Christiana as the female representative, and I don't enjoy her nearly as much, and also there was little presence from Danny's parents, who are my other favorites.
34. Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue -- I was wondering if my trajectory with Cashore's books would be monotonic, and, no, definitely not. You may recall I found Graceling (her debut) to be disappointing and overhyped and the protagonist -- and I don't tend to use this term lightly -- very Mary-Sue-ish. And then I read Fire and loved it, and it proved to be one of those rare books where I actually really like the protagonist, and though that book is definitely not without its flaws, it appealed to me on both the lit-crit level (the idea of monsters and how it's handled, the way the various backstories are revealed), and impact-on-society level (which is something I have to concede even Graceling does well), and on the pure id level, because Brigan! Bittterblue falls somewhere between Graceling and Fire for me. Spoilers!
It's a sequel to Graceling, so it suffers from many of the things that were set up in that first book and that never worked for me. The world-building is just ridiculous -- the geography could've been made up by a first-grader and the politics are pretty much on the same level. And the writing is, well, clunky, especially when it comes to talking about the terrible, unspeakable things that Leck did and everybody else witnessed or participated in or can barely remember. All the references to bones and cutting up animals sound so ridiculous (except in Leck's own journals, which is the first and only time in the three books that Leck felt like even a hint more than an awkward construct and plot-generator to me). I remember egelantier remarking that the writing and world of Marchetta's Lumater books (Finnikin/Froi/Quintana) couldn't really support the amount of grimdarkness the series was imbued with; well, compared to Cashore's books, the Lumatere ones have Tolkien's own depth of worldbuilding and were penned by Nabokov.
That said, I keep reading them, because they are doing important things that are seldom even attempted in YA, let alone genre YA. and I admire the dedication to the cause if not always the results.
Bitterblue tackles something that I've not seen before, except for a bit in Finnikin towards the end and the sequels a little bit, before the soap opera craziness took over -- a kingdom trying to recover from years of collective PTSD at the hands of a monstrous king. And I think Bitterblue does a better job than Finnikin, because there are no saints (partly this is because Cashore's evil king is magical and can make people do terrible things against their will) and there are not many villains, either, other than Leck himself. And it really drives home the point that being a part of terrible things, even if none of them are your fault, fucks people up, individually and collectively, for years to come, and can lead to the affected people doing terrible things of their own, and their earlier suffering does not excuse their later crimes, but also cannot be ignored in considering them. Even with the clunky writing, I really liked the way this came across with Bitterblue's advisors, especially Thiel and Darby. Bitterblue's struggle, which is only really starting to lead somewhere productive at the very end, is to 'balance memory with healing', and that's something really unusual, and really important.
As a result of the theme, of course, it's not, you know, a happy book. The castle Bitterblue spends most of her time in, and to a lesser extent the city, was designed by a madman, and there's this oppressive, labyrinthine sort of feeling -- like a dream that feels like a bad dream before anyting nightmarish starts happening. Most of the people Bitterblue is surrounded by are crazy, or lying to her about something, or she is lying to and/or for them. The feeling is not a very pleasant one to spend time in (and also, because so much stuff is intentionally illogical, it highlights that the supposedly sane actions are kind of ridiculous, too -- due to the clunky writing, but I found pretty much no-one's actions at any point believable.
As in Graceling and Fire, one of my favorite things here is the way female sexuality is dealt with -- this is the main reason I want L to read Graceling even though I personally dislike the book as a piece of literature -- because Katsa's insistence on not getting married and not having children and Po's acceptance and support of these as valid choices are worth the price of admission to me. Bitterblue doesn't have something as major as that, or as prominent as Fire breaking up with Archer, but I did like the fact that Bitterblue sleeps with Saf, wants to look at him naked when she has the chance, then comes home and takes the birth control herb (which functions as a morning-after pill too, apparently), and they part as friends -- it's a lovely experience they shared, but not a big deal, and not something tying them together when their responsibilities and desires are so different, and none of that is anything to angst about. I don't think I've ever seen that in YA, and yet, it feels believable, because while she was attracted to him, I do believe Bitterblue cared about Saf much more as a friend than a lover, and she's got much, much bigger things to angst and worry about. So, that was good, and while I liked the companionship between Bitterblue and Giddon that was being set up, I was also happy that it didn't turn into Giddon being the guy who gets the girl at the end of the book, because that's not what Bitterblue is about.
Speaking of sexuality, I had a pretty strong feeling, in Graceling, that Raffin and Bann were a couple (I even googled to see if others agreed with me, and found a few who did), so I was cheered to see that confirmed canonically here. Actually, I wonder if Cashore is trying to make up for a dearth of non-het characters in her earlier books or something, because suddenly they were everywhere -- Raffin and Bann, as mentioned, and also Teddy and Saf's sisters were apparently a couple, and Po's brother Skye is gay, and Saf is apparently bi (and, honestly, I wonder about Bitterblue herself, because the way she thinks about and is physically aware of Katsa, I can see it as a lonely, touch-starved kid who clings to that memory of Katsa protecting her on the mountain but I can also see it as a lingering more-than-platonic crush...) It's nice, but the density felt a little odd, and some of the mentions felt shoehorned, though that's got more to do with the general clunkiness of the writing, I think, than the number of LGBT characters.
There is also a very interesting bit in the Acknoledgements doing something I've never seen an author do before -- explicitly apologizing, in a book, for having written something in a potentially problematic way, thanking the people who educated her on the subject. In this case, the problematic thing is disability politics and Po's Grace to almost cure his blindness. I liked the way Po's blindness was handled here (though it didn't bother me overmuch in Graceling, either -- yes, maybe the Grace goes a little far in compensating, but it didn't feel like a magical cure to me), but I respect Cashore taking the time to talk about that in the Acknowledgement and revisit it in the sequel. It also made me think
of Toph in AtLA, and how her and Po's disability and magical workarounds are different. To me, the difference is that Toph is openly blind -- she doesn't hide her condition, and she teases her friends for forgetting about it. Po hides his blindness, and although the driver for that is the fact that he is hiding the Grace that helps him work around the limitations of sight and not really his disability, it's still a pretty big different. Of course, it's a different kind of story, too -- Toph has always been blind, while Po loses his sight -- Po's situation did make me think about a magical cure, a little, while Toph's didn't.
Oh, and speaking of Important Messages, there's a PSA about cutting/self-harm, which rather stuck out, but hey, probably not a bad topic to have in YA.
There isn't really a plot as such, but there are some twists, and mostly I twigged onto them at the same time or a little earlier than Bitterblue. I guessed Fox was Gray, Spook's granddaughter, but, really, it never felt believable that all these secret councils would take place in front of her and she'd just be wandering the palace like that without anyone really knowing more about where she'd come from. And Hava and Bitterblue being sisters was a nice touch, and I'm happy for Bitterblue to have found living family. Oh, and the twist with Madlen was nice, and I like that this is the only thing that is obscured even in the who's who in the back.
The characters are nothing special. I was happy to see Po again, who was my favorite in Graceling. Happy to see Fire, too, though she didn't feel much like herself -- well, a lot of time had passed -- and to hear that Brigan and Nash are still alive and well, and that Brigan's daughter is in charge of the army now. Katsa still annoys me to no end -- like, I literally cannot understand why people like her as much as they do, either in-universe or readers. And I was glad that Giddon got a chance to develop beyond the unflattering, one-dimensional glimpse of him in Graceling. itterblue was OK, I guess? I expected to like her more than I did, but I think it's probably the way she is floundering for most of the book, kept in the dark, unable to trust even her own memories and her own advisors. She does gain some agency, but it's the kind of agency that involves learning excruciating stories and terrible truths about her people and history, and setting up committees to deal with complicated and not very exciting matters, and coming to terms with letting people go when they need to -- not exactly swashbuckling stuff. Of the new characters around her, I really liked Thiel -- I think he was the one that came the closest to emotionally engaging me, because he is so complex -- sympathetic and heroic and pathetic and terribly guilty, full of suffering and self-loathing and love for Bitterblue. I liked Death the archivist, and Teddy. Saf was clearly bad news, and I wasn't sure what Bitterblue saw in him besides a pretty face, but I guess here was someone who was constantly acting and moving on, which I can see Bitterblue, with her constraints, being drawn to.
In short, I'm glad a book like Bitterblue was written. I wish it had been written by a master fantasist, someone like Pratchett or Le Guin, who could do justice to the weight and nuance of the themes and make a story that felt vivid and true rather than a grade school schematic, and written beautifully and memorably rather than clunkily. But for all the flaws in Bitterblue and the series in general, I'm very glad it exists, and I respect Cashore a lot for choosing to tackle it.
35. Jennifer A. Nielsen, The False Prince -- this was another birthday present from aome, a mid-grade (or YA?) book that was a lot of fun and that I think the rodents will enjoy also. MASSIVE SPOILERS from here L actually started reading it ahead of me, but because it's on my Kindle, it's harder for them to make progress. She impressed me (though not surprised me) by guessing the central twist by, like, page 40. I guessed it well ahead, too; one of the Goodreads reviews I came across posited that having read Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief makes one much more likely to guess it, which could be true. This is one of those books where guessing the twist actually makes the subsequent reading more enjoyable -- Sage is a more interesting character and it's a richer book if you read it knowing that Sage is really the missing prince Jaron. I thought both the foreshadowing and the reveal were handled quite well, especially given the target audience. What I didn't foresee was that the king, Jaron's father, had known he was alive and had in fact set up the whole thing.
Which brings me to some aspects of the book that didn't work for me as well: I had a very hard time believing that a king whose widely-acknowledged fault was that he was too soft-hearted and therefore ineffectual would plan and pull off a gambit like this -- condemning his son to life in an orphanage for an indefinite time and his beloved wife to think her child had died because someone might murder the entire royal family. Like, there are doubtless easier ways to deal with that threat if he's had an awakening of ruthlessness. In general I think I would have liked the resolution more if Jaron hadn't been instructed to reveal himself as the missing prince but had to make that choice on his own -- I thought that's where the book had been going, and I kind of wish I had been right. I thought the thing with the rock that was supposedly gold could have been handled better, too -- like, I understand what it was trying to do, but I'm not sure it went about it in the optimal way.
Other things stretched my disbelief as well, even if some of them were lampshaded in the book itself. Like, the way the boys are convinced the ones not chosen will be killed so that they cannot disclose the secret -- but all the people Conner has training them and Mott and Cregan know the truth too -- what's to prevent THEM from spilling the beans / resorting to blackmail? Or the patent absurdity of trying to turn an orphan boy (who doesn't know how to read, or fight, or ride, or use table manners, or anything) into a prince in two weeks. And if Conner was the one who poisoned the king and queen, why wouldn't he have picked and trained up an orphan boy long before that? The ridiculous 2-week timeline can kinda sorta be handwaved if it is imposed externally, as Conner explains it is early on, because the royal family has been murdered and they can't keep it hushed up for more than two weeks without selecting a new king. The only explanation I can fanwank is that he was concerned the prime regent would find out about the orphan boy and foil his plans, but he ended up having to hide the boys anyway, so it's not like the tighter timeline worked to his advantage. I did like it that there were other false princes brought forward, not just by Conner, because it would've been silly for him to be the only one with that idea if the idea is to be entertained as plausible. And then there's the thing where Conner does not twig onto the fact that Sage is the real prince Jaron. It is explained as Conner seeing what he wanted to see, but it just makes him look like an idiot.
In general, I ended up disappointed in Conner. I felt like he was supposed to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist originally, but his reasoning got progressively more bogus, and yet he didn't feel like a convining usurper as well, not even one who is lying to himself that he is doing whatever he is doing for the greater good. I guess that was my problem with this book in general -- most people's motivations did not make much sense, with the exception of Sage. Imogen's pretend muteness didn't make sense to me as a defense mechanism, and I had a hard time beliefing in Roden's betrayal (and Creegan's initiative, however much he might hate Sage) and Tobias's Heel Face Turn. But the fact that I'm even worried about motivations is an indication that I enjoyed this book and have spent time thinking about it. And I do think the intended audience is likely to just accept it, you know?
I also felt like the book had set up certain things that turned out to either be red herrings (I thought Errol was going to be somehow important, especially after his beardlessness and elf-likeness was mentioned -- I was thinking he would turn out to be a girl in disguise, and somehow relevant to Jaron's story) or had tension built up with no payoff -- like everything with Imogen. I still don't actually understand why Imogen was even in this novel, other than that Sage needed someone to tend to him and someone to protect -- she occuppies a lot of space, but I didn't feel like she went anywhere as a character, and thus her presence felt flat. And Sage feels like he needs to ask her forgiveness, but I thought his angst was totally disproportionate to what he'd actually done -- I mean, she trusted him with her big secret, that she can talk, and he didn't come clean with her about being the prince, but it doesn't seem to me something that would be in any way reasonable for him to reveal, given that it's not just his own secret but something the fate of the country is riding on. I suppose Imogen is there to set up a love interest for Jaron, but she either needed an actual story and character development of her own, or she shouldn't have even been there. (Actually, I kind of wonder if the red herring-ness of Errol and the flatness of Imogen are possibly related -- I wonder if girl-in-disguise!Errol was maybe meant to have the Imogen role originally but then Imogen got spun off. It's just that this is a book with such a spare cast, and Tobias, Roden, Mott, Cregan, and Conner all have such definite roles, and Imogen and Errol are secondary characters that are just sort of there, and it just feels weird...)
Because of the weird motivation stuff, I didn't end up feeling as close to the characters as I would've expected. I quite liked Roden, actually, before the betrayal; the excerpt in the next book shows he's still around and apparently still a bad guy, which, *sigh*. The various evil regents of various degrees of evilness all blended together. I already talked about how Imogen just doesn't feel like a full-fledged character to me. I did like Sage, though, his narration and his conflictedness about assuming the royal role, and his grief about his family and subsumed hurt from his childhood and belated regret. I read the little author interview in the back and she mentioned that Sage occurred to her as a fully formed character. Maybe that's the difference -- he feels real, but everybody else she needed to put some more work in... and didn't. Sage/Jaron and his story deserve a richer, more believable setting, I feel, but even so I'm quite glad to have met him! and I hope the aspects of this book that didn't win me over will improve in the sequel(s), which I do want to read. So, thank you for introducing me/us to this series, aome!
36. Diana Peterfreund, Errant -- a novelette I got as a free eBook, because I really think the Killer Unicorns world is great and I wish there were more books in it. I typically wouldn't count it as a standalone, but in the absence of anything to attach it to, I guess I shall. I don't know that this adds a whole lot to the world and setting, but it was an enjoyable read and it continues to do the things that the main books do well, showing different kinds of women being strong in different ways and coming to respect each other, as spoiler! gruff unicorn hunter Gitta and dainty, trapped daughter-of-the-blood Elise do. I liked Elise, gentle and fond of animals and interested in herbs, realizing bleakly what her options as an orphaned noble girl are, and I was happy for the ending she got. Bernard the suitor with his stolen poetry (also, after the line (to Gitta, after their bout of practice fighting) "You are what I always wished for. You are everything I want. And you're a girl" made me think his tru inclinations ran towards a male lover, but maybe I've been reading too much slashfic. Anyway, not revolutionary, but it was neat to see this world in a different era, and I'm happy for anything set in this universe, so, good.
32. Gail Carriger, Etiquette and Espionage -- this is a YA book set in the same world as the Soulless books, some decades earlier. I actually enjoyed it more than the two Soulless books I read, mostly because spoilers!it's more believable that a clever girl of 14 would be clueless about some things (as the plot demands) than that a grown woman who is supposed to be exceptionally clever would be. And I think even without accounting for age differences Sophronia is just less clueless than Alexia, whose obliviousness really bugged me. Sophronia is a decent protagonist -- curious, fairly sympathetic, I was fine with rooting for her though not especially in love. I wish the other characters got to be more fleshed out, but even with the rough sketches I liked Sophronia's growing friendship with the different girls (which reminded me a little bit of Gemma Doyle's gang in AGATB, although not nearly so well drawn and much more cartoonish in character), shy Agatha, gruff Sidhaeg who was literally raised by wolves (and a regiment of wolves to boot), and Dimity, who seems like a toned-down and less mock-worthy version of Ivy Hiselpenny, Alexia's friend. Monique, who turned out to be the main antagonist of this installment, was your typical Blonde Bitch type. The teachers were entertaining but not anyone I fell in love with. My favorite character was Vieve, unsurprising, because she was my favorite in the Alexia books, too. And I wonder if Soap is really being set up as Sophronia's love interest, because I can't think of very many interracial protagonist romances in genre stuff, especially outside of modern urban fantasy. I checked out this book for myself but L saw it lying around and actually read it first. I think she enjoyed it more than I did, but I would read the sequels, because the world is fun, and just about the right depth for YA fluff.
33. Ursula Vernon, Dragonbreath#8: Nightmare of the Iguana -- I think I might be done with this series, regretfully: for a book this short, it was kind of a chore to get through. I think ursulav might be done with this series, too, or at least would prefer to be, because the last couple of installments felt rather... rote. There are still occasional interesting animal fact, and cute dialogue, and adorable pictures, but I haven't felt any of the original zany charm since the one with the Jackalopes, like three books ago. This one also suffered for me because spoiler Wendell, my favorite of the cast, was mostly out of the action, and the Suki was subbing for Christiana as the female representative, and I don't enjoy her nearly as much, and also there was little presence from Danny's parents, who are my other favorites.
34. Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue -- I was wondering if my trajectory with Cashore's books would be monotonic, and, no, definitely not. You may recall I found Graceling (her debut) to be disappointing and overhyped and the protagonist -- and I don't tend to use this term lightly -- very Mary-Sue-ish. And then I read Fire and loved it, and it proved to be one of those rare books where I actually really like the protagonist, and though that book is definitely not without its flaws, it appealed to me on both the lit-crit level (the idea of monsters and how it's handled, the way the various backstories are revealed), and impact-on-society level (which is something I have to concede even Graceling does well), and on the pure id level, because Brigan! Bittterblue falls somewhere between Graceling and Fire for me. Spoilers!
It's a sequel to Graceling, so it suffers from many of the things that were set up in that first book and that never worked for me. The world-building is just ridiculous -- the geography could've been made up by a first-grader and the politics are pretty much on the same level. And the writing is, well, clunky, especially when it comes to talking about the terrible, unspeakable things that Leck did and everybody else witnessed or participated in or can barely remember. All the references to bones and cutting up animals sound so ridiculous (except in Leck's own journals, which is the first and only time in the three books that Leck felt like even a hint more than an awkward construct and plot-generator to me). I remember egelantier remarking that the writing and world of Marchetta's Lumater books (Finnikin/Froi/Quintana) couldn't really support the amount of grimdarkness the series was imbued with; well, compared to Cashore's books, the Lumatere ones have Tolkien's own depth of worldbuilding and were penned by Nabokov.
That said, I keep reading them, because they are doing important things that are seldom even attempted in YA, let alone genre YA. and I admire the dedication to the cause if not always the results.
Bitterblue tackles something that I've not seen before, except for a bit in Finnikin towards the end and the sequels a little bit, before the soap opera craziness took over -- a kingdom trying to recover from years of collective PTSD at the hands of a monstrous king. And I think Bitterblue does a better job than Finnikin, because there are no saints (partly this is because Cashore's evil king is magical and can make people do terrible things against their will) and there are not many villains, either, other than Leck himself. And it really drives home the point that being a part of terrible things, even if none of them are your fault, fucks people up, individually and collectively, for years to come, and can lead to the affected people doing terrible things of their own, and their earlier suffering does not excuse their later crimes, but also cannot be ignored in considering them. Even with the clunky writing, I really liked the way this came across with Bitterblue's advisors, especially Thiel and Darby. Bitterblue's struggle, which is only really starting to lead somewhere productive at the very end, is to 'balance memory with healing', and that's something really unusual, and really important.
As a result of the theme, of course, it's not, you know, a happy book. The castle Bitterblue spends most of her time in, and to a lesser extent the city, was designed by a madman, and there's this oppressive, labyrinthine sort of feeling -- like a dream that feels like a bad dream before anyting nightmarish starts happening. Most of the people Bitterblue is surrounded by are crazy, or lying to her about something, or she is lying to and/or for them. The feeling is not a very pleasant one to spend time in (and also, because so much stuff is intentionally illogical, it highlights that the supposedly sane actions are kind of ridiculous, too -- due to the clunky writing, but I found pretty much no-one's actions at any point believable.
As in Graceling and Fire, one of my favorite things here is the way female sexuality is dealt with -- this is the main reason I want L to read Graceling even though I personally dislike the book as a piece of literature -- because Katsa's insistence on not getting married and not having children and Po's acceptance and support of these as valid choices are worth the price of admission to me. Bitterblue doesn't have something as major as that, or as prominent as Fire breaking up with Archer, but I did like the fact that Bitterblue sleeps with Saf, wants to look at him naked when she has the chance, then comes home and takes the birth control herb (which functions as a morning-after pill too, apparently), and they part as friends -- it's a lovely experience they shared, but not a big deal, and not something tying them together when their responsibilities and desires are so different, and none of that is anything to angst about. I don't think I've ever seen that in YA, and yet, it feels believable, because while she was attracted to him, I do believe Bitterblue cared about Saf much more as a friend than a lover, and she's got much, much bigger things to angst and worry about. So, that was good, and while I liked the companionship between Bitterblue and Giddon that was being set up, I was also happy that it didn't turn into Giddon being the guy who gets the girl at the end of the book, because that's not what Bitterblue is about.
Speaking of sexuality, I had a pretty strong feeling, in Graceling, that Raffin and Bann were a couple (I even googled to see if others agreed with me, and found a few who did), so I was cheered to see that confirmed canonically here. Actually, I wonder if Cashore is trying to make up for a dearth of non-het characters in her earlier books or something, because suddenly they were everywhere -- Raffin and Bann, as mentioned, and also Teddy and Saf's sisters were apparently a couple, and Po's brother Skye is gay, and Saf is apparently bi (and, honestly, I wonder about Bitterblue herself, because the way she thinks about and is physically aware of Katsa, I can see it as a lonely, touch-starved kid who clings to that memory of Katsa protecting her on the mountain but I can also see it as a lingering more-than-platonic crush...) It's nice, but the density felt a little odd, and some of the mentions felt shoehorned, though that's got more to do with the general clunkiness of the writing, I think, than the number of LGBT characters.
There is also a very interesting bit in the Acknoledgements doing something I've never seen an author do before -- explicitly apologizing, in a book, for having written something in a potentially problematic way, thanking the people who educated her on the subject. In this case, the problematic thing is disability politics and Po's Grace to almost cure his blindness. I liked the way Po's blindness was handled here (though it didn't bother me overmuch in Graceling, either -- yes, maybe the Grace goes a little far in compensating, but it didn't feel like a magical cure to me), but I respect Cashore taking the time to talk about that in the Acknowledgement and revisit it in the sequel. It also made me think
of Toph in AtLA, and how her and Po's disability and magical workarounds are different. To me, the difference is that Toph is openly blind -- she doesn't hide her condition, and she teases her friends for forgetting about it. Po hides his blindness, and although the driver for that is the fact that he is hiding the Grace that helps him work around the limitations of sight and not really his disability, it's still a pretty big different. Of course, it's a different kind of story, too -- Toph has always been blind, while Po loses his sight -- Po's situation did make me think about a magical cure, a little, while Toph's didn't.
Oh, and speaking of Important Messages, there's a PSA about cutting/self-harm, which rather stuck out, but hey, probably not a bad topic to have in YA.
There isn't really a plot as such, but there are some twists, and mostly I twigged onto them at the same time or a little earlier than Bitterblue. I guessed Fox was Gray, Spook's granddaughter, but, really, it never felt believable that all these secret councils would take place in front of her and she'd just be wandering the palace like that without anyone really knowing more about where she'd come from. And Hava and Bitterblue being sisters was a nice touch, and I'm happy for Bitterblue to have found living family. Oh, and the twist with Madlen was nice, and I like that this is the only thing that is obscured even in the who's who in the back.
The characters are nothing special. I was happy to see Po again, who was my favorite in Graceling. Happy to see Fire, too, though she didn't feel much like herself -- well, a lot of time had passed -- and to hear that Brigan and Nash are still alive and well, and that Brigan's daughter is in charge of the army now. Katsa still annoys me to no end -- like, I literally cannot understand why people like her as much as they do, either in-universe or readers. And I was glad that Giddon got a chance to develop beyond the unflattering, one-dimensional glimpse of him in Graceling. itterblue was OK, I guess? I expected to like her more than I did, but I think it's probably the way she is floundering for most of the book, kept in the dark, unable to trust even her own memories and her own advisors. She does gain some agency, but it's the kind of agency that involves learning excruciating stories and terrible truths about her people and history, and setting up committees to deal with complicated and not very exciting matters, and coming to terms with letting people go when they need to -- not exactly swashbuckling stuff. Of the new characters around her, I really liked Thiel -- I think he was the one that came the closest to emotionally engaging me, because he is so complex -- sympathetic and heroic and pathetic and terribly guilty, full of suffering and self-loathing and love for Bitterblue. I liked Death the archivist, and Teddy. Saf was clearly bad news, and I wasn't sure what Bitterblue saw in him besides a pretty face, but I guess here was someone who was constantly acting and moving on, which I can see Bitterblue, with her constraints, being drawn to.
In short, I'm glad a book like Bitterblue was written. I wish it had been written by a master fantasist, someone like Pratchett or Le Guin, who could do justice to the weight and nuance of the themes and make a story that felt vivid and true rather than a grade school schematic, and written beautifully and memorably rather than clunkily. But for all the flaws in Bitterblue and the series in general, I'm very glad it exists, and I respect Cashore a lot for choosing to tackle it.
35. Jennifer A. Nielsen, The False Prince -- this was another birthday present from aome, a mid-grade (or YA?) book that was a lot of fun and that I think the rodents will enjoy also. MASSIVE SPOILERS from here L actually started reading it ahead of me, but because it's on my Kindle, it's harder for them to make progress. She impressed me (though not surprised me) by guessing the central twist by, like, page 40. I guessed it well ahead, too; one of the Goodreads reviews I came across posited that having read Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief makes one much more likely to guess it, which could be true. This is one of those books where guessing the twist actually makes the subsequent reading more enjoyable -- Sage is a more interesting character and it's a richer book if you read it knowing that Sage is really the missing prince Jaron. I thought both the foreshadowing and the reveal were handled quite well, especially given the target audience. What I didn't foresee was that the king, Jaron's father, had known he was alive and had in fact set up the whole thing.
Which brings me to some aspects of the book that didn't work for me as well: I had a very hard time believing that a king whose widely-acknowledged fault was that he was too soft-hearted and therefore ineffectual would plan and pull off a gambit like this -- condemning his son to life in an orphanage for an indefinite time and his beloved wife to think her child had died because someone might murder the entire royal family. Like, there are doubtless easier ways to deal with that threat if he's had an awakening of ruthlessness. In general I think I would have liked the resolution more if Jaron hadn't been instructed to reveal himself as the missing prince but had to make that choice on his own -- I thought that's where the book had been going, and I kind of wish I had been right. I thought the thing with the rock that was supposedly gold could have been handled better, too -- like, I understand what it was trying to do, but I'm not sure it went about it in the optimal way.
Other things stretched my disbelief as well, even if some of them were lampshaded in the book itself. Like, the way the boys are convinced the ones not chosen will be killed so that they cannot disclose the secret -- but all the people Conner has training them and Mott and Cregan know the truth too -- what's to prevent THEM from spilling the beans / resorting to blackmail? Or the patent absurdity of trying to turn an orphan boy (who doesn't know how to read, or fight, or ride, or use table manners, or anything) into a prince in two weeks. And if Conner was the one who poisoned the king and queen, why wouldn't he have picked and trained up an orphan boy long before that? The ridiculous 2-week timeline can kinda sorta be handwaved if it is imposed externally, as Conner explains it is early on, because the royal family has been murdered and they can't keep it hushed up for more than two weeks without selecting a new king. The only explanation I can fanwank is that he was concerned the prime regent would find out about the orphan boy and foil his plans, but he ended up having to hide the boys anyway, so it's not like the tighter timeline worked to his advantage. I did like it that there were other false princes brought forward, not just by Conner, because it would've been silly for him to be the only one with that idea if the idea is to be entertained as plausible. And then there's the thing where Conner does not twig onto the fact that Sage is the real prince Jaron. It is explained as Conner seeing what he wanted to see, but it just makes him look like an idiot.
In general, I ended up disappointed in Conner. I felt like he was supposed to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist originally, but his reasoning got progressively more bogus, and yet he didn't feel like a convining usurper as well, not even one who is lying to himself that he is doing whatever he is doing for the greater good. I guess that was my problem with this book in general -- most people's motivations did not make much sense, with the exception of Sage. Imogen's pretend muteness didn't make sense to me as a defense mechanism, and I had a hard time beliefing in Roden's betrayal (and Creegan's initiative, however much he might hate Sage) and Tobias's Heel Face Turn. But the fact that I'm even worried about motivations is an indication that I enjoyed this book and have spent time thinking about it. And I do think the intended audience is likely to just accept it, you know?
I also felt like the book had set up certain things that turned out to either be red herrings (I thought Errol was going to be somehow important, especially after his beardlessness and elf-likeness was mentioned -- I was thinking he would turn out to be a girl in disguise, and somehow relevant to Jaron's story) or had tension built up with no payoff -- like everything with Imogen. I still don't actually understand why Imogen was even in this novel, other than that Sage needed someone to tend to him and someone to protect -- she occuppies a lot of space, but I didn't feel like she went anywhere as a character, and thus her presence felt flat. And Sage feels like he needs to ask her forgiveness, but I thought his angst was totally disproportionate to what he'd actually done -- I mean, she trusted him with her big secret, that she can talk, and he didn't come clean with her about being the prince, but it doesn't seem to me something that would be in any way reasonable for him to reveal, given that it's not just his own secret but something the fate of the country is riding on. I suppose Imogen is there to set up a love interest for Jaron, but she either needed an actual story and character development of her own, or she shouldn't have even been there. (Actually, I kind of wonder if the red herring-ness of Errol and the flatness of Imogen are possibly related -- I wonder if girl-in-disguise!Errol was maybe meant to have the Imogen role originally but then Imogen got spun off. It's just that this is a book with such a spare cast, and Tobias, Roden, Mott, Cregan, and Conner all have such definite roles, and Imogen and Errol are secondary characters that are just sort of there, and it just feels weird...)
Because of the weird motivation stuff, I didn't end up feeling as close to the characters as I would've expected. I quite liked Roden, actually, before the betrayal; the excerpt in the next book shows he's still around and apparently still a bad guy, which, *sigh*. The various evil regents of various degrees of evilness all blended together. I already talked about how Imogen just doesn't feel like a full-fledged character to me. I did like Sage, though, his narration and his conflictedness about assuming the royal role, and his grief about his family and subsumed hurt from his childhood and belated regret. I read the little author interview in the back and she mentioned that Sage occurred to her as a fully formed character. Maybe that's the difference -- he feels real, but everybody else she needed to put some more work in... and didn't. Sage/Jaron and his story deserve a richer, more believable setting, I feel, but even so I'm quite glad to have met him! and I hope the aspects of this book that didn't win me over will improve in the sequel(s), which I do want to read. So, thank you for introducing me/us to this series, aome!
36. Diana Peterfreund, Errant -- a novelette I got as a free eBook, because I really think the Killer Unicorns world is great and I wish there were more books in it. I typically wouldn't count it as a standalone, but in the absence of anything to attach it to, I guess I shall. I don't know that this adds a whole lot to the world and setting, but it was an enjoyable read and it continues to do the things that the main books do well, showing different kinds of women being strong in different ways and coming to respect each other, as spoiler! gruff unicorn hunter Gitta and dainty, trapped daughter-of-the-blood Elise do. I liked Elise, gentle and fond of animals and interested in herbs, realizing bleakly what her options as an orphaned noble girl are, and I was happy for the ending she got. Bernard the suitor with his stolen poetry (also, after the line (to Gitta, after their bout of practice fighting) "You are what I always wished for. You are everything I want. And you're a girl" made me think his tru inclinations ran towards a male lover, but maybe I've been reading too much slashfic. Anyway, not revolutionary, but it was neat to see this world in a different era, and I'm happy for anything set in this universe, so, good.