Reading Roundup

[hamsterwoman]

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

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

See, I think Fire really succeeds on this level -- it's clearly a deconstruction of the "beautiful and everybody loves her" Mary-Sue type, and I think it works beautifully as that -- sort of taking the concept to its logical conclusion and exploring all the downsides. Plus, I found Fire to be a really likeable protagonist in her own right, someone I could respect and whose dilemmas I found affecting.

Graceling may have been trying for something similar, but didn't work for me as a deconstruction or subversion at all, because Katsa never made sense to me as a character. Her obliviousness to certain things and general lack of subtlety made very little sense to me in the context of her other role where she was masterminding the covert Council. Her prejudice against mind-readers didn't seem to match the rest of her personality, either. Oh, and the way everyone seems to love her for reasons that I had a hard time understanding, because I didn't find anything likeable in her, at least in the way she behaves early on. Basically, her strengths and flaws didn't seem to me to go together, but felt like picking a few from column A and a few from column B and calling that a character.

Part of the reason I like Graceling least of the three is that the worldbuilding feels flattest there, and the writing was least interesting (which is not surprising, with a first book). And also I feel like the way Leck's storyline is handled is just ridiculous in whichever book it crops up, and it's most prominent in Graceling. But part of it is definitely that I just can't stand Katsa, which makes me sad, because there are important ways in which she can be a pretty unusual role model (her speech to Po about marriage, e.g. is something I really respect and something that I'm glad exists in the field of YA fantasy). I've read people complaining about Katsa because she is not girly, is too stubborn, rejects marriage/children, which of course is silly, and it's sad to see those brought up as criticism (especially when some of those were actually aspects of her character I liked best). But if she was intended as a deconstruction/subversion of a Mary-Sue type ("rebellious princess", presumably?) it definitely didn't work for me...

I hope you're enjoying Fire! I genuinely loved that one, and think it's also objectively the best of the three.