More reading roundup catching up + Hidden Figures
15. Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology -- I hadn't really been planning to pick this one up in any sort of urgent fashion: I'm a Gaiman fan, but the books after The Graveyard Book haven't really clicked for me -- but a lot of my flist was reading it, and then ikel89 very graciously dumped it on me, and, even though I was in the middle of like five other books across 3 devices (including an actual physical hard copy of a book), it seemed like the low-key, easily-interruptable thing to pick up when I was getting on my flight to Arizona at 6 a.m. after 1 hour of sleep. And mostly I didn't read it then, but finished it up over the next week or so of commutes, and it really was what I needed -- familiar enough to be cozy, both because I know a lot of the myths and because it is an author whose style I like, returning to the kind of storytelling of his that I like best, and exciting enough to keep my attention.
I discovered Norse myths when I was 9 (I think), the summer my mother and I spent in Khorol, and they instantly became a favorite, though not quite to the degree of the Greek myths I'd grown up on for as long as I could remember. I love Odin, a rather different leader of the gods than Zeus (whom I also love, just in a different way), and I LOVE Loki, a different sort of trickster than my beloved Hermes, but one that I appreciate even more, since he's a much more complex character. So I've liked Norse myths ever since, in a Russian kid-treatment edition, and then got the chance to read a less adapted version in college, in my Medieval Lit class, when we read some Snorri Sturlson. I got the rodents a book of Norse myths at some point, and happily reread my favorite stories as they discovered them -- even more than the Greek myths, there's a lot of funny stuff there that a kid can appreciate, especially when it comes to Loki and Thor's adventures, which might as well be a Looney Tunes cartoon. And most recently, the rodents and I both read and really enjoyed Rick Riordan's treatment of the mythology with the first Magnus Chase book. So, anyway, that's my history with the underlying material.
So as it turns out, it was a good mix: I remember some of the stories really well, well enough to be able to chortle in anticipation as um, spoilers? Thor wrestles old age or tries to lift the world serpent. But even in the familiar stories there were some interesting touches, new/different info or the author choosing to throw different things into relief than I'd ever focused on: Ymir the first giant being genderless, or focusing the scene of Baldur's death on Hod, the blind brother who accidentally kills him, and telling it from his POV. And then there were the stories I hadn't been familiar with -- either because they weren't in the sources I read, or just because those sources glossed over them in not a lot of detail, or maybe I just forgot: the story of the mead of poetry (and where bad poetry comes from), the story behind Frey giving away his sword, Kvasir's forensic analysis with the ashes of Liki's salmon-catching net, and how the root of the Aesir being able to follow and catch him was in Loki's own cleverness and paranoid planning, and what happens after Ragnarok. (And for Ragnarok, I was really struck by how... modern-day apocalyptic the description of Fimbulwinter and the other things at the start of Ragnarok sounded, seas rising and the places of humans falling into flames and all that.)
One thing I was very happy to see, and pleasantly surprised by, was just how much Loki was the protagonist of the book. I mean, he is the most interesting of the lot, I do think -- not just to me, but objectively -- but he felt humanized here in a way I haven't seen before, got an inner voice and a lot more description than any of the Aesir, which I was perfectly happy with. And there's a lot of added pathos to some of the stories and people surrounding Loki, some of which I always found emotionally compelling already, like Sigyn and the bowl, some of which had only been glossed over for me before -- Loki being bound with his son's entrails is pretty horrible even just in concept, but the way his sons actually get to speak here, and we see the whole thing, or getting a more sympathetic POV of Fenrir (which made me like Tyr even more than I've always already liked him), and some just plain brand new, like Loki's problem apparently being that he can't hold his liquor and that gets him into trouble.
But in addition to Loki, I also liked Odin in this (my other favorite), and Thor was fun, and I did feel like there was a real sense of other characters as well, Tyr being quietly brave, and Freya being exasperated with all the male gods who seem happy enough to think of her as a thing, and the more episodic characters, too, Utgardaloki and Brokk the dwarf and even Fenrir.
I liked the way Gaiman chose to tell these stories, the way allusions to the earlier ones come into the later ones, or the way whole new stories are sometimes mentioned parenthetically, without having ever appeared. I also liked what he's chosen to do with names, offering translations in most cases, and sometimes just choosing the translated names, like with Thor's goats -- I thought the balance worked really well, giving a feel for the real words and for the meanings, sufficiently familiar and alien.
Quotes:
"And the clouds you see by day? These were once Ymir's rains, and who knows what thoughts they are thinking, even now."
"'Because,' said Thor, 'when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki's fault. It saves a lot of time.'"
"Loki said nothing. He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself." (about his three monstrous children, but, really, it could be about anything XP)
Thor, to Loki: "You're better at persuading people to do things than I am when I'm not holding my hammer."
"Loki would say something, something cutting and clever and hurtful, but his life will have gone, and all his brilliance, and all his cruelty, and he will say nothing, not ever again."
16. Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us -- this book! I really loved the first half of it, and it was the first book in a good long while that I actually made time to read, until I got to the end, rather than just sort of reading when I had time/wasn't distracted by other things, and I finished it like, two days. But the second half of the book worked considerably less well for me than the first, and I didn't much care for the (sequel-hook) ending. Overall, I still liked it a lot, and plan to read the rest of the series, but it was so close to being a book I LOVED rather than just merely liked, and then... wasn't.
First of all, I loved the worldbuilding. I had been worried about the "fucking ships" effect, because almost the entire book takes place at sea, but (true to cyanshadow's reassurance), that mostly didn't bother me. It probably helps that the POV character is a "shoregirl", and she's not really that interested in the ships, either, except inasmuch as they pertain to her actual charge/job. And her job was awesome! She is a Reckoner trainer, which means she gets to raise and train to fight genetically engineered sea monsters. So, same appeal as Temeraire, basically, except that sea monsters are not as cool as dragons. But still pretty cool! And I find that I like the "genetically engineered critters" sub-genre, especially when used in a military setting, which I'm not sure has a name, but I was calling it "gene-punk" in Westerfeld's Leviathan, by analogy with the steampunk it also contains. Anyway, gene-punk sea monsters! Which can take the form of a giant turtle, or squid, or whale, or serpent (and apparently there are smaller simian ones, which are presumably used as, IDK, shock troops? It's not made clear what they are for, just that they are creepily intelligent). I loved everything the book shared about Reckoner breeding and training, the industrial and political and environmental implications of giant bred sea monsters (like the fact that the Reckoner breeding industry also had to breed a genetically engineered food supply for them, in the form of ~whales). There's enough of it there that it feels well thought out and that Cas comes across as someone who is believably an expert, someone who grew up in the trade (her mother is a Reckoner breeder, he father is a long-time trainer) , but never felt infodumpy or Show Your Work to me. There are some non-Reckoner aspects of worldbuilding, too, although I found those less exciting. This is a post-climate change cataclysm world, but, interestingly, it's not like there was a single apocalyptic even or even a chain reaction of them, and the resulting worlds doesn't FEEL dystopian, although the fact that piracy is rampant, Reckoner justice is accepted on the high seas, slavery is a common thing, etc. means it's not exactly a happy world, either. But technology is high, and there's the interesting concept of the Schism: apparently big countries just decided to sort of... break up into smaller ones, for... reasons? There was a lot of polemic that nobody believed, but it wasn't clear to me why it ACTUALLY happened, but Cas doesn't really care, and neither did I, really. Just that usually you see that sort of thing in combination with devastating events that sever communications, but there was no such sense of it here.
Let me just get out in the open the part that soured me on the book: the love story trope. Spoilers from here! This is basically a captive/captor love story, and I'll try to be fair -- describing it like that does not do justice to the complexities we get to see about Swift (the pirate girl love interest), and grey morality of both the pirate and Reckoner industries, or the very careful way both the author and the characters navigate the unequal power dynamics inherent in that trope. As far as captive/captor love stories go, it was probably about as non-problematically handled as possible while still retaining some moral complexity and not just sweeping the whole piracy and kidnapping people thing under the rug. But ultimately, it's still a captive/captor love story, and once Cassandra starts taking actions that are motivated by her desire to protect Swift and/or the crew of the Minnow on the whole, it started feeling too Stockholm Syndrome-y to me, and made it hard for me to root for the same things Cas wanted (in her admittedly conflicted way), or for her and Swift as a potential couple, or to relate to Cas herself, because I just wanted to tell her, "It is not your responsibility to try to defend the boat full of pirates that kidnapped you, even if they do have children on board, nor the hot pirate girl with the family who depends on her. They kidnapped you. Ditch them AND RUN."
I appreciated that, despite their clear mutual attraction and being aware of it, Cas and Swift don't do anything about it because both are clear they are not on equal footing (and the '"equal footing" by which she meant "I love you"' scene at the end was pretty sweet -- except for, you know, the feelings of Stockholm Syndrome). I did like the way Cas gets to know Swift, how there are moments of closeness and setbacks throughout their relationship, and the complicated way their lives are tangled. But, frankly, the way Cas way at the beginning had to basically mentally flip the switch in the way she was thinking about Swift from "the girl who led to her being kidnapped" to "the girl who saved her life" is... very much not conducive to me buying a love story between these two later on, even if they do have some really cute moments looking at the stars, meeting Swift's younger siblings, etc. and go through a slew of shippy tropes like "bed-sharing" and "handcuffed together". And so it's really hard for me to buy that Cas would sacrifice her shot at freedom for Swift -- or, at least, that this is a GOOD thing.
I'm not sure that I fully buy Cas's motivations in the second half of the book in general. She is herself conflicted, but this was one aspect where the book's narration did not work for me particularly well. Cas sounds very rational throughout, but some of the decisions she makes don't seem to BE rational. Like, a big turning point, the one after which she feels she cannot go back to her old life, is when she has Bao attack the copters which are attacking the Minnow -- and is then horrified that this kills people. Like, what did she expect to happen? I could buy this sequence of events -- Cas wants to do SOMETHIING, uses the weapon she has to hand (i.e. Bao), and is then horrified to see the destruction first hand -- I mean, that is actually what happens, more or less -- but in her POV it came across to me as a much more rational than emotional decision, and that felt really jarring and difficult to swallow for me. (I think this might be a limitation of the first person present tense narration, which did not feel like a very natural choice for this book for me in general. Usually it ends up being transparent to me, after a while, but it never did here, which is why I'm thinking that. Though possibly I'm just out of practice reading that style, since the bubble of it which The Hunger Games had kicked off seems to have abated somewhat, or at least I stopped coming across them as much.) And then Cas continues to do things that don't make much sense to me, culminating with her going back to sign on with the Minnow, which I just plain don't understand. There's some handwaving about how she realized nobody would believe her if she went back and tried to expose the corruption in the industry, and she needs to take down the whole system (somehow...), but really it just felt like a forced authorial decision to have her and Swift reunite and have Santa Elena plant the hook of conflict for the sequel by revealing that Swift was the one who poisoned Durga, rather than something that felt like a natural decision.
This was really a pity, because up until she started feeling Stockholmed, I had really liked Cas. One thing that came as a pleasant surprise to me was just how TOUGH she was. Which makes perfect sense given that she grew up helping raise and train SEA MONSTERS, but I guess I was expecting the tough pirate girl/swooning captive dynamic, subconsciously, especially given that Cas seemed to come from an upper-middle-class sort of family while Swift was pretty clearly gutter trash, and it was awesome to see that, no, Cas maybe couldn't fight hand-to-hand, but she was just fine carrying on with broken ribs, was happily sassing back Santa Elena and other pirates, and was, you know, really good at her highly dangerous job, so that totally wasn't the dynamic at all. Another thing I really liked about early!Cas, along the same lines: the way she was able to function among the dangerous pirates by basically thinking of them as the dangerous creatures she IS used to, i.e. Reckoners -- the way she used the same techniques for bluffing or avoiding them was a really nice touch. (In general, I liked how clear the book made it that raising Reckoners is a dangerous, physically taxing job -- and how unflinching it was about the mess and carnage of both the Reckoner industry and the pirate life. It never felt gratuitous or over the top on the author's part (sometimes Santa Elena went overboard, but that was clearly intentional, and remarked on). I hadn't been expecting all the bodily fluids and scars in a YA book, but the description of Durga's awful death right at the start reset my expectations pretty quickly.)
Another thing I really liked was Cas's relationship with Bao, which is also nicely complex. The way she hates him at the start, because she is tied to him, and because he reminds her of Durga and isn't Durga (and making the choice to teach him Durga's code), the comparisons to motherhood, which she rejects, the way she feels responsible for him, and then powerful through him, and how the relationship just grows in complexity. The way she starts out thinking of him as "little shit" and that becomes a phrase of both fondness and continued exasperation, the way she names him. It's not exactly a feel-good critter story, but it's definitely an interesting one. (And I imagine Cas and Bao will meet again, despite the ending of the first book.)
I should talk about other characters besides the giant turtle, shouldn't I. It's actually a pretty tight cast, and of the secondary characters, I think I only liked Varma, although Lemon and Chuck have interesting backstories and I would like to get to know them better in the sequel. Swift herself didn't do a whole lot for me, actually. There is definitely more to her than just the tough pirate girl trope, and meeting her family was nice, but I didn't find her interesting enough to root for her and Cas on her behalf. Who I did find interesting was Santa Elena, and I really, really wonder what kind of arc she is heading for, because I feel like that is a wide open field. She is striking and admirable in some respects and cruel and kinda crazy in others, and that blend is really, really intriguing. I also have a soft spot for "working mothers", which she is, of course (although as far as pirate moms go, I do prefer Zamira in Red Seas Under Red Skies, where we see her actually interacting with her children more). I am definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with her, and how Cas's relationship with her evolves.
It was quite interesting to read TASU right on the heels of Not Your Sidekick, because there are quite a few superficial similarities that highlight just how different these books are. Both are f/f love stories with an Asian(-American) POV/protagonist (who are even pretty much the same age) and fairly diverse casts, set in the future. Heck, both even have a "pet" character named after a foodstuff from Asian cuisine (though, obviously, Bao is a much more prominent participant in the plot than Cha the Roomba little robot). But the books take very different approaches to how they deal with the protagonists' identities. NYS engages very explicitly (if not always elegantly) with the immigrant/Asian heritage experience. In TASU, it's clear from early on that Cas is Asian (from her mother's last name), and there a little reminders of it throughout -- her picking out "Canto" from the polyglot yammer of the Flotilla, naming Bao after the buns her mother bakes -- but that's pretty much it. Similarly, Jess's bisexuality, and figuring out if her crush likes girls, and where she fits into the LGBT community is a big part of NYS (sometimes, I felt, to the detriment of the flow), while in TASU it's totally a non-issue: Cas likes girls and has dated girls before, without any undue angst; Swift likes girls, as becomes clear to Cas once she sees her making out with a girl in celebration, and the thing that presents a challenge between them has nothing to do with whether or not they have compatible sexualities but is totally unrelated to any of that. A number of secondary and tertiary characters are also POCs (Varma is Indian, Chuck is (Pacific, presumably) Islander, Lemon is Aleutian, Santa Elena is something unspecified (but has brown skin and black curls), the cruise ship passenger from whom Cas gets some worldbuilding backstory is Japanese-American -- but while their ethnicities are signaled, they are not dwelt on/underlined in the same way that I thought Bells' and Emma's were in NYS. And I guess it takes all kinds, and I did appreciate, like I said, some of the things NYS did with those topics -- but TASU was definitely much more elegant and subtle about handling a diverse cast. (Although it may not be a coincidence that the author of NYS is Asian herself and Skrutskie is not. While I don't subscribe to the idea that you can only write your own kind of protagonist, it does make sense that an Asian author may want to write more explicitly about an Asian protagonist.)
As a random aside, there sure are a lot of Greek/Classics allusions in this book -- EpiTas (which is an awesome name for a suicide pill), the guns Phobos and Deimos, Cas's doomed cruiseship, the Nereid. I wonder if Cas's own Very Mythological full first name is going to be significant in the sequels, especially as she is already thinking, at the end of this book, that if she went to the Reckoner industry to tell them about Murphy and his corruption, nobody would heed her warnings.
And as a second random aside, The Abyss Surrounds Us is a really amazing title, my favorite in quite a while.
Other than the first person present tense choice, I quite enjoyed the writing. One quote I particularly liked:
"The Minnow blazes from within, promising life and warmth and villainy, but out here I'm mighty. Or at least Bao's mighty, and I'm with him."
Overall, I was really impressed by the worldbuilding and the ethical complexity of the story, and the general craft (especially considering this is the author's first novel, and she is a kid fresh out of college). It was disappointing that the main relationship trope got in the way of me loving the book unreservedly, but this is absolutely a series and an author I'm going to follow. (And the sequel just came out about a month ago, so that's convenient.)
Apparently, she draws, too, and has a doodle of Cas, Lemon, Chuck, and Varma up, as well as Santa Elena, and Cas and Swift, the teens, Cas and Bao
*
And L and I got a chance to watch Hidden Figures on Friday: finally, a good movie I actually enjoyed! (and finished watching) I had read enough reviews/write-ups of the movie and the book both (ms_geekette and cyanshadow had read it, IIRC) that I knew what was going to happen (and, well, I knew some plot points just from history), but the movie always kept my attention, and maintained tension nicely, and was just really nice. I didn't find it sweepingly uplifting or inspiring -- but I don't like those kinds of movies, so that's just fine with me -- I was happy to watch it as a story of interesting (real life but somewhat fictionalized, I knew from the nonfiction book write-ups) characters that I liked, and a story about progress, scientific and otherwise.
Of the three women, Mary was my favorite (L's, too), followed by Dorothy, but I liked all three of them, and was really impressed by the performances (especially by the Katherine and Dorothy actresses; spoilers from here! some favorite scenes were Dorothy stealing the library book, Katherine explaining why it takes her 40 minutes to go to the bathroom, and her during the apology and proposal scenes). I was a bit sad that Mary wasn't there as much during the second half of the movie, though she did get her own triumph as well. And I especially liked the way the three women supported each other through everything, Mary and Dorothy waiting for Katherine for hours when she was working late, celebrating together, Mary and Dorothy encouraging Katherine to give Jim a chance, etc.) I liked the mix of secondary characters, too -- Harrison (whom I totally did not recognize as Kevin Costner), especially (the relationship with Katherine and especially him physically knocking down the "white"/"colored" bathroom signs -- which I know was a (purely fictional) scene criticized for playing into a "white savior" trope; it didn't feel that way to me -- mostly because it felt less like "let me take a blow against this injustice, for the sake of this downtrodden person" and much more "we are way too busy doing science here to be losing 40 minutes a time to this shit, this stops now" -- but, well, I'm not part of the audience whose opinion on this really counts), and Zielinski (who is surprisingly played by a legitimately Polish actor -- that never happens!), and Sheldon Paul was appropriately odious. I liked the way it was shown that even "good" people had prejudices and opposing opinions -- the conflict between Levi and Mary over whether it was worth trying to pursue an engineering degree, Jim being skeptical of Katherine's work for NASA when they first meet, Harrison just being completely clueless about the added burdens Katherine is dealing with even though he seems quite open to relating to her as an equal in some respects.
The science/math was... Hollywoody, I guess, or at least it seemed to me to be Hollywoody, but it's not actually my field (B stopped by during one of the "Katherine writing on the blackboard dramatically" scenes and found it ridiculous, though). But, I mean, it's hard enough to make math look dramatic, so, whatever, poetic license. I did enjoy the shots of failed tests exploding, stress testing the heat shield. The IBM stuff was funny -- I giggled at FORTRAN being described as an exciting new language in Dorothy's book -- and L got to see punch cards, which she didn't know were a thing (I am old enough to have seen them, as a kid -- my parents sometimes brought them home from work, and I liked playing with them).
The historical space aspects were kind of neat, too, even though I found John Glenn's portrayal a bit TOO wholesome. I mean, I don't know the man personally, maybe he was just that aw shucks motherhood and apple pie... and, obviously, he's a national hero, so I can understand a certain amount of hagiography, but it felt a little too much like Captain America had wandered on-set of a reality-based film. Let me tell you, guys, it is a bit weird watching a movie about the space race when one has grown up in Russia -- I... am pretty much constitutionally incapable of cheering for NASA in this equation, because Gagarin is one of my historical crushes from when I was very small, and you better believe it I did a fist pump and cheered out loud when they were showing the footage of Vostok going into orbit. :D (Also, when Glenn was saying he wanted Katherine to check the IBM numbers before proceeding with launch, I turned to L and said, "See, this is why Russia beat the US into space. I bet nobody asked Gagarin if he was ready to fly. Partiya skazala -- leti.") And then, when they lose contact on re-entry, and there's the scene where they're hailing him with diminishing hope of response, and obviously I know he survived, but it was still a nicely tense scene. Randomly, L thought "Friendship 7" was a hilarious name for a spacecraft, and I kind of have to agree.
Oh, and I don't normally notice soundtracks, but I really enjoyed the one here, and the use of jaunty music for the running scenes, and the way, for example, it stops abruptly when the door slams in Katherine's face when they're about to launch.
Anyway, really nice movie which I thoroughly enjoyed and could see myself rewatching. Nicely done! And I'm really annoyed that it didn't win anything at the Oscars. I mean, I haven't seen Moonlight or Fences, which it lost the Best Picture and Supporting Actress/Adapted Screenplay awards to, respectively, but I feel like it's the kind of move that deserves an Oscar. Meh.
I discovered Norse myths when I was 9 (I think), the summer my mother and I spent in Khorol, and they instantly became a favorite, though not quite to the degree of the Greek myths I'd grown up on for as long as I could remember. I love Odin, a rather different leader of the gods than Zeus (whom I also love, just in a different way), and I LOVE Loki, a different sort of trickster than my beloved Hermes, but one that I appreciate even more, since he's a much more complex character. So I've liked Norse myths ever since, in a Russian kid-treatment edition, and then got the chance to read a less adapted version in college, in my Medieval Lit class, when we read some Snorri Sturlson. I got the rodents a book of Norse myths at some point, and happily reread my favorite stories as they discovered them -- even more than the Greek myths, there's a lot of funny stuff there that a kid can appreciate, especially when it comes to Loki and Thor's adventures, which might as well be a Looney Tunes cartoon. And most recently, the rodents and I both read and really enjoyed Rick Riordan's treatment of the mythology with the first Magnus Chase book. So, anyway, that's my history with the underlying material.
So as it turns out, it was a good mix: I remember some of the stories really well, well enough to be able to chortle in anticipation as um, spoilers? Thor wrestles old age or tries to lift the world serpent. But even in the familiar stories there were some interesting touches, new/different info or the author choosing to throw different things into relief than I'd ever focused on: Ymir the first giant being genderless, or focusing the scene of Baldur's death on Hod, the blind brother who accidentally kills him, and telling it from his POV. And then there were the stories I hadn't been familiar with -- either because they weren't in the sources I read, or just because those sources glossed over them in not a lot of detail, or maybe I just forgot: the story of the mead of poetry (and where bad poetry comes from), the story behind Frey giving away his sword, Kvasir's forensic analysis with the ashes of Liki's salmon-catching net, and how the root of the Aesir being able to follow and catch him was in Loki's own cleverness and paranoid planning, and what happens after Ragnarok. (And for Ragnarok, I was really struck by how... modern-day apocalyptic the description of Fimbulwinter and the other things at the start of Ragnarok sounded, seas rising and the places of humans falling into flames and all that.)
One thing I was very happy to see, and pleasantly surprised by, was just how much Loki was the protagonist of the book. I mean, he is the most interesting of the lot, I do think -- not just to me, but objectively -- but he felt humanized here in a way I haven't seen before, got an inner voice and a lot more description than any of the Aesir, which I was perfectly happy with. And there's a lot of added pathos to some of the stories and people surrounding Loki, some of which I always found emotionally compelling already, like Sigyn and the bowl, some of which had only been glossed over for me before -- Loki being bound with his son's entrails is pretty horrible even just in concept, but the way his sons actually get to speak here, and we see the whole thing, or getting a more sympathetic POV of Fenrir (which made me like Tyr even more than I've always already liked him), and some just plain brand new, like Loki's problem apparently being that he can't hold his liquor and that gets him into trouble.
But in addition to Loki, I also liked Odin in this (my other favorite), and Thor was fun, and I did feel like there was a real sense of other characters as well, Tyr being quietly brave, and Freya being exasperated with all the male gods who seem happy enough to think of her as a thing, and the more episodic characters, too, Utgardaloki and Brokk the dwarf and even Fenrir.
I liked the way Gaiman chose to tell these stories, the way allusions to the earlier ones come into the later ones, or the way whole new stories are sometimes mentioned parenthetically, without having ever appeared. I also liked what he's chosen to do with names, offering translations in most cases, and sometimes just choosing the translated names, like with Thor's goats -- I thought the balance worked really well, giving a feel for the real words and for the meanings, sufficiently familiar and alien.
Quotes:
"And the clouds you see by day? These were once Ymir's rains, and who knows what thoughts they are thinking, even now."
"'Because,' said Thor, 'when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki's fault. It saves a lot of time.'"
"Loki said nothing. He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself." (about his three monstrous children, but, really, it could be about anything XP)
Thor, to Loki: "You're better at persuading people to do things than I am when I'm not holding my hammer."
"Loki would say something, something cutting and clever and hurtful, but his life will have gone, and all his brilliance, and all his cruelty, and he will say nothing, not ever again."
16. Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us -- this book! I really loved the first half of it, and it was the first book in a good long while that I actually made time to read, until I got to the end, rather than just sort of reading when I had time/wasn't distracted by other things, and I finished it like, two days. But the second half of the book worked considerably less well for me than the first, and I didn't much care for the (sequel-hook) ending. Overall, I still liked it a lot, and plan to read the rest of the series, but it was so close to being a book I LOVED rather than just merely liked, and then... wasn't.
First of all, I loved the worldbuilding. I had been worried about the "fucking ships" effect, because almost the entire book takes place at sea, but (true to cyanshadow's reassurance), that mostly didn't bother me. It probably helps that the POV character is a "shoregirl", and she's not really that interested in the ships, either, except inasmuch as they pertain to her actual charge/job. And her job was awesome! She is a Reckoner trainer, which means she gets to raise and train to fight genetically engineered sea monsters. So, same appeal as Temeraire, basically, except that sea monsters are not as cool as dragons. But still pretty cool! And I find that I like the "genetically engineered critters" sub-genre, especially when used in a military setting, which I'm not sure has a name, but I was calling it "gene-punk" in Westerfeld's Leviathan, by analogy with the steampunk it also contains. Anyway, gene-punk sea monsters! Which can take the form of a giant turtle, or squid, or whale, or serpent (and apparently there are smaller simian ones, which are presumably used as, IDK, shock troops? It's not made clear what they are for, just that they are creepily intelligent). I loved everything the book shared about Reckoner breeding and training, the industrial and political and environmental implications of giant bred sea monsters (like the fact that the Reckoner breeding industry also had to breed a genetically engineered food supply for them, in the form of ~whales). There's enough of it there that it feels well thought out and that Cas comes across as someone who is believably an expert, someone who grew up in the trade (her mother is a Reckoner breeder, he father is a long-time trainer) , but never felt infodumpy or Show Your Work to me. There are some non-Reckoner aspects of worldbuilding, too, although I found those less exciting. This is a post-climate change cataclysm world, but, interestingly, it's not like there was a single apocalyptic even or even a chain reaction of them, and the resulting worlds doesn't FEEL dystopian, although the fact that piracy is rampant, Reckoner justice is accepted on the high seas, slavery is a common thing, etc. means it's not exactly a happy world, either. But technology is high, and there's the interesting concept of the Schism: apparently big countries just decided to sort of... break up into smaller ones, for... reasons? There was a lot of polemic that nobody believed, but it wasn't clear to me why it ACTUALLY happened, but Cas doesn't really care, and neither did I, really. Just that usually you see that sort of thing in combination with devastating events that sever communications, but there was no such sense of it here.
Let me just get out in the open the part that soured me on the book: the love story trope. Spoilers from here! This is basically a captive/captor love story, and I'll try to be fair -- describing it like that does not do justice to the complexities we get to see about Swift (the pirate girl love interest), and grey morality of both the pirate and Reckoner industries, or the very careful way both the author and the characters navigate the unequal power dynamics inherent in that trope. As far as captive/captor love stories go, it was probably about as non-problematically handled as possible while still retaining some moral complexity and not just sweeping the whole piracy and kidnapping people thing under the rug. But ultimately, it's still a captive/captor love story, and once Cassandra starts taking actions that are motivated by her desire to protect Swift and/or the crew of the Minnow on the whole, it started feeling too Stockholm Syndrome-y to me, and made it hard for me to root for the same things Cas wanted (in her admittedly conflicted way), or for her and Swift as a potential couple, or to relate to Cas herself, because I just wanted to tell her, "It is not your responsibility to try to defend the boat full of pirates that kidnapped you, even if they do have children on board, nor the hot pirate girl with the family who depends on her. They kidnapped you. Ditch them AND RUN."
I appreciated that, despite their clear mutual attraction and being aware of it, Cas and Swift don't do anything about it because both are clear they are not on equal footing (and the '"equal footing" by which she meant "I love you"' scene at the end was pretty sweet -- except for, you know, the feelings of Stockholm Syndrome). I did like the way Cas gets to know Swift, how there are moments of closeness and setbacks throughout their relationship, and the complicated way their lives are tangled. But, frankly, the way Cas way at the beginning had to basically mentally flip the switch in the way she was thinking about Swift from "the girl who led to her being kidnapped" to "the girl who saved her life" is... very much not conducive to me buying a love story between these two later on, even if they do have some really cute moments looking at the stars, meeting Swift's younger siblings, etc. and go through a slew of shippy tropes like "bed-sharing" and "handcuffed together". And so it's really hard for me to buy that Cas would sacrifice her shot at freedom for Swift -- or, at least, that this is a GOOD thing.
I'm not sure that I fully buy Cas's motivations in the second half of the book in general. She is herself conflicted, but this was one aspect where the book's narration did not work for me particularly well. Cas sounds very rational throughout, but some of the decisions she makes don't seem to BE rational. Like, a big turning point, the one after which she feels she cannot go back to her old life, is when she has Bao attack the copters which are attacking the Minnow -- and is then horrified that this kills people. Like, what did she expect to happen? I could buy this sequence of events -- Cas wants to do SOMETHIING, uses the weapon she has to hand (i.e. Bao), and is then horrified to see the destruction first hand -- I mean, that is actually what happens, more or less -- but in her POV it came across to me as a much more rational than emotional decision, and that felt really jarring and difficult to swallow for me. (I think this might be a limitation of the first person present tense narration, which did not feel like a very natural choice for this book for me in general. Usually it ends up being transparent to me, after a while, but it never did here, which is why I'm thinking that. Though possibly I'm just out of practice reading that style, since the bubble of it which The Hunger Games had kicked off seems to have abated somewhat, or at least I stopped coming across them as much.) And then Cas continues to do things that don't make much sense to me, culminating with her going back to sign on with the Minnow, which I just plain don't understand. There's some handwaving about how she realized nobody would believe her if she went back and tried to expose the corruption in the industry, and she needs to take down the whole system (somehow...), but really it just felt like a forced authorial decision to have her and Swift reunite and have Santa Elena plant the hook of conflict for the sequel by revealing that Swift was the one who poisoned Durga, rather than something that felt like a natural decision.
This was really a pity, because up until she started feeling Stockholmed, I had really liked Cas. One thing that came as a pleasant surprise to me was just how TOUGH she was. Which makes perfect sense given that she grew up helping raise and train SEA MONSTERS, but I guess I was expecting the tough pirate girl/swooning captive dynamic, subconsciously, especially given that Cas seemed to come from an upper-middle-class sort of family while Swift was pretty clearly gutter trash, and it was awesome to see that, no, Cas maybe couldn't fight hand-to-hand, but she was just fine carrying on with broken ribs, was happily sassing back Santa Elena and other pirates, and was, you know, really good at her highly dangerous job, so that totally wasn't the dynamic at all. Another thing I really liked about early!Cas, along the same lines: the way she was able to function among the dangerous pirates by basically thinking of them as the dangerous creatures she IS used to, i.e. Reckoners -- the way she used the same techniques for bluffing or avoiding them was a really nice touch. (In general, I liked how clear the book made it that raising Reckoners is a dangerous, physically taxing job -- and how unflinching it was about the mess and carnage of both the Reckoner industry and the pirate life. It never felt gratuitous or over the top on the author's part (sometimes Santa Elena went overboard, but that was clearly intentional, and remarked on). I hadn't been expecting all the bodily fluids and scars in a YA book, but the description of Durga's awful death right at the start reset my expectations pretty quickly.)
Another thing I really liked was Cas's relationship with Bao, which is also nicely complex. The way she hates him at the start, because she is tied to him, and because he reminds her of Durga and isn't Durga (and making the choice to teach him Durga's code), the comparisons to motherhood, which she rejects, the way she feels responsible for him, and then powerful through him, and how the relationship just grows in complexity. The way she starts out thinking of him as "little shit" and that becomes a phrase of both fondness and continued exasperation, the way she names him. It's not exactly a feel-good critter story, but it's definitely an interesting one. (And I imagine Cas and Bao will meet again, despite the ending of the first book.)
I should talk about other characters besides the giant turtle, shouldn't I. It's actually a pretty tight cast, and of the secondary characters, I think I only liked Varma, although Lemon and Chuck have interesting backstories and I would like to get to know them better in the sequel. Swift herself didn't do a whole lot for me, actually. There is definitely more to her than just the tough pirate girl trope, and meeting her family was nice, but I didn't find her interesting enough to root for her and Cas on her behalf. Who I did find interesting was Santa Elena, and I really, really wonder what kind of arc she is heading for, because I feel like that is a wide open field. She is striking and admirable in some respects and cruel and kinda crazy in others, and that blend is really, really intriguing. I also have a soft spot for "working mothers", which she is, of course (although as far as pirate moms go, I do prefer Zamira in Red Seas Under Red Skies, where we see her actually interacting with her children more). I am definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with her, and how Cas's relationship with her evolves.
It was quite interesting to read TASU right on the heels of Not Your Sidekick, because there are quite a few superficial similarities that highlight just how different these books are. Both are f/f love stories with an Asian(-American) POV/protagonist (who are even pretty much the same age) and fairly diverse casts, set in the future. Heck, both even have a "pet" character named after a foodstuff from Asian cuisine (though, obviously, Bao is a much more prominent participant in the plot than Cha the Roomba little robot). But the books take very different approaches to how they deal with the protagonists' identities. NYS engages very explicitly (if not always elegantly) with the immigrant/Asian heritage experience. In TASU, it's clear from early on that Cas is Asian (from her mother's last name), and there a little reminders of it throughout -- her picking out "Canto" from the polyglot yammer of the Flotilla, naming Bao after the buns her mother bakes -- but that's pretty much it. Similarly, Jess's bisexuality, and figuring out if her crush likes girls, and where she fits into the LGBT community is a big part of NYS (sometimes, I felt, to the detriment of the flow), while in TASU it's totally a non-issue: Cas likes girls and has dated girls before, without any undue angst; Swift likes girls, as becomes clear to Cas once she sees her making out with a girl in celebration, and the thing that presents a challenge between them has nothing to do with whether or not they have compatible sexualities but is totally unrelated to any of that. A number of secondary and tertiary characters are also POCs (Varma is Indian, Chuck is (Pacific, presumably) Islander, Lemon is Aleutian, Santa Elena is something unspecified (but has brown skin and black curls), the cruise ship passenger from whom Cas gets some worldbuilding backstory is Japanese-American -- but while their ethnicities are signaled, they are not dwelt on/underlined in the same way that I thought Bells' and Emma's were in NYS. And I guess it takes all kinds, and I did appreciate, like I said, some of the things NYS did with those topics -- but TASU was definitely much more elegant and subtle about handling a diverse cast. (Although it may not be a coincidence that the author of NYS is Asian herself and Skrutskie is not. While I don't subscribe to the idea that you can only write your own kind of protagonist, it does make sense that an Asian author may want to write more explicitly about an Asian protagonist.)
As a random aside, there sure are a lot of Greek/Classics allusions in this book -- EpiTas (which is an awesome name for a suicide pill), the guns Phobos and Deimos, Cas's doomed cruiseship, the Nereid. I wonder if Cas's own Very Mythological full first name is going to be significant in the sequels, especially as she is already thinking, at the end of this book, that if she went to the Reckoner industry to tell them about Murphy and his corruption, nobody would heed her warnings.
And as a second random aside, The Abyss Surrounds Us is a really amazing title, my favorite in quite a while.
Other than the first person present tense choice, I quite enjoyed the writing. One quote I particularly liked:
"The Minnow blazes from within, promising life and warmth and villainy, but out here I'm mighty. Or at least Bao's mighty, and I'm with him."
Overall, I was really impressed by the worldbuilding and the ethical complexity of the story, and the general craft (especially considering this is the author's first novel, and she is a kid fresh out of college). It was disappointing that the main relationship trope got in the way of me loving the book unreservedly, but this is absolutely a series and an author I'm going to follow. (And the sequel just came out about a month ago, so that's convenient.)
Apparently, she draws, too, and has a doodle of Cas, Lemon, Chuck, and Varma up, as well as Santa Elena, and Cas and Swift, the teens, Cas and Bao
*
And L and I got a chance to watch Hidden Figures on Friday: finally, a good movie I actually enjoyed! (and finished watching) I had read enough reviews/write-ups of the movie and the book both (ms_geekette and cyanshadow had read it, IIRC) that I knew what was going to happen (and, well, I knew some plot points just from history), but the movie always kept my attention, and maintained tension nicely, and was just really nice. I didn't find it sweepingly uplifting or inspiring -- but I don't like those kinds of movies, so that's just fine with me -- I was happy to watch it as a story of interesting (real life but somewhat fictionalized, I knew from the nonfiction book write-ups) characters that I liked, and a story about progress, scientific and otherwise.
Of the three women, Mary was my favorite (L's, too), followed by Dorothy, but I liked all three of them, and was really impressed by the performances (especially by the Katherine and Dorothy actresses; spoilers from here! some favorite scenes were Dorothy stealing the library book, Katherine explaining why it takes her 40 minutes to go to the bathroom, and her during the apology and proposal scenes). I was a bit sad that Mary wasn't there as much during the second half of the movie, though she did get her own triumph as well. And I especially liked the way the three women supported each other through everything, Mary and Dorothy waiting for Katherine for hours when she was working late, celebrating together, Mary and Dorothy encouraging Katherine to give Jim a chance, etc.) I liked the mix of secondary characters, too -- Harrison (whom I totally did not recognize as Kevin Costner), especially (the relationship with Katherine and especially him physically knocking down the "white"/"colored" bathroom signs -- which I know was a (purely fictional) scene criticized for playing into a "white savior" trope; it didn't feel that way to me -- mostly because it felt less like "let me take a blow against this injustice, for the sake of this downtrodden person" and much more "we are way too busy doing science here to be losing 40 minutes a time to this shit, this stops now" -- but, well, I'm not part of the audience whose opinion on this really counts), and Zielinski (who is surprisingly played by a legitimately Polish actor -- that never happens!), and Sheldon Paul was appropriately odious. I liked the way it was shown that even "good" people had prejudices and opposing opinions -- the conflict between Levi and Mary over whether it was worth trying to pursue an engineering degree, Jim being skeptical of Katherine's work for NASA when they first meet, Harrison just being completely clueless about the added burdens Katherine is dealing with even though he seems quite open to relating to her as an equal in some respects.
The science/math was... Hollywoody, I guess, or at least it seemed to me to be Hollywoody, but it's not actually my field (B stopped by during one of the "Katherine writing on the blackboard dramatically" scenes and found it ridiculous, though). But, I mean, it's hard enough to make math look dramatic, so, whatever, poetic license. I did enjoy the shots of failed tests exploding, stress testing the heat shield. The IBM stuff was funny -- I giggled at FORTRAN being described as an exciting new language in Dorothy's book -- and L got to see punch cards, which she didn't know were a thing (I am old enough to have seen them, as a kid -- my parents sometimes brought them home from work, and I liked playing with them).
The historical space aspects were kind of neat, too, even though I found John Glenn's portrayal a bit TOO wholesome. I mean, I don't know the man personally, maybe he was just that aw shucks motherhood and apple pie... and, obviously, he's a national hero, so I can understand a certain amount of hagiography, but it felt a little too much like Captain America had wandered on-set of a reality-based film. Let me tell you, guys, it is a bit weird watching a movie about the space race when one has grown up in Russia -- I... am pretty much constitutionally incapable of cheering for NASA in this equation, because Gagarin is one of my historical crushes from when I was very small, and you better believe it I did a fist pump and cheered out loud when they were showing the footage of Vostok going into orbit. :D (Also, when Glenn was saying he wanted Katherine to check the IBM numbers before proceeding with launch, I turned to L and said, "See, this is why Russia beat the US into space. I bet nobody asked Gagarin if he was ready to fly. Partiya skazala -- leti.") And then, when they lose contact on re-entry, and there's the scene where they're hailing him with diminishing hope of response, and obviously I know he survived, but it was still a nicely tense scene. Randomly, L thought "Friendship 7" was a hilarious name for a spacecraft, and I kind of have to agree.
Oh, and I don't normally notice soundtracks, but I really enjoyed the one here, and the use of jaunty music for the running scenes, and the way, for example, it stops abruptly when the door slams in Katherine's face when they're about to launch.
Anyway, really nice movie which I thoroughly enjoyed and could see myself rewatching. Nicely done! And I'm really annoyed that it didn't win anything at the Oscars. I mean, I haven't seen Moonlight or Fences, which it lost the Best Picture and Supporting Actress/Adapted Screenplay awards to, respectively, but I feel like it's the kind of move that deserves an Oscar. Meh.