Reading roundup from the last 3 months or so
It has been roughly a million years since my last reading roundup, even though I have been reading a bit. Trying to catch up on the writing up side of it:
29. Ben Aaronovitch, The Furthest Station (Rivers of London novella, # 5.7 according to Goodreads, which I guess puts it before The Hanging Tree?) -- cute, short and sweet, a sort of side story that reminded me more of the graphic novels than the real books in scope and heft, but I hadn't been expecting a Peter book this year, and won't look a gift horse in the mouth, because it was very nice to get his POV in my preferred medium again, not audio or speech bubbles. Spoilers from here!
I was all excited that Jaget Kumar was going to be one of the characters involved in this, because I love Kumar (he was my favorite thing about WuG) and have missed him, but while it was very nice to learn about his fish and chips at home date night with Mrs Kumar, bad(-according-to-Peter) taste in music, and spoilers from here his official position as "weird bollocks" liason for the BTP, I got less of him as a character than I'd been expecting, which was a little disappointing. But I had been missing Abigail, too, and it was great to see just how amazingly she'd been coming along, and how much Nightingale (and Postmartin, of all people!) respects her skills and efforts. I also wonder a bit if this novella is meant to be a hook/bridge for the YA Abigail spinoff BA had mentioned somewhere (AMA, maybe?) I also found it interesting that in the eyes of random passers by, Peter has graduated from Abigail's scary older brother to a young dad educating her on the history of England. Also interesting to get a bit of a glimpse into her side of the family's background, both how her father came to England and how exactly she and Peter are cousins (which I don't think had been mentioned before?)
Plot-wise, I quite liked this one, and thought it was tighter than the full-blown novels while still giving a feel for the layered and weird life of magical London. Major plot spoilers from here! The ghosts in jars were properly creepy, and I liked the fact that the bad guy was *not* anything supernatural this time, but just a run-of-the-mill stalker-escalating-to-kidnapper, although Peter does entertain the possibility he was pushed over the edge by the proximity of ghosts in jars. I liked the non-resolution sort of resolution -- they rescue the kidnapping victim, but she wasn't in imminent danger; they find the kidnapper, but he commits suicide before backup arrives and there's no clear motive or note or anything. We did get to see Nightingale demolish a wall again, and this time Peter got to watch to his heart's conent, heh, and even poke around to see how magic and friction get along. And I liked the B plot, too, with Chess the foundling godling and his four-year-old's rude questions to Peter, and his overmatched "grandparents" doing their best, and Peter finding them/him a 'support group'.
Random bits -- Nightingale is "aghast" at the restrictions on modern children (which is a rneat and reasonable touch!), and on a separate note shines his shoes while wearing a butler's apron and sleeve garters (somebody draw this, please!); Nightingale at Casterbrook playing pranks on the younger boys -- '"Ballantine junior and I once managed to induce the whole of 3B to wet themselves pretending to be werewolves. [...] I was caned by the headmaster personally." Which apparently was a great honour because the headmaster was known to have progressive views and to be against caning in principle.' Peter arguing with Abigail over whether ghosts can be "alive" and wanting to give them the Turing Test, Peter is studying for his National Investogators Exam, and unrelatedly has worked in a coffee kiosk. And also uses the words "harsh [her] squee" XD And routinely plays rock-paper-scissors with Jaget to determine who will have to do what (Jaget always favors paper, so Peter wins whenever he wants to, I guess). And I kind of love that Nightingale apparently has a "I'm about to do magic" tell in adjusting his cuffs:
Colombo: We'll have to get some workmen down here, then.
"That will not be necessary," said Nightingale, adjusting his cuffs. "If you'd like to stand back?"
"And turn off your mobile phones," I added.
I've been paying attention to signares, too, and here we get: "the smell of white willow and mown grass, as the sensation of rough wool and a young voice singing something choral -- high and sweet. And behind it the impression that I stood amidst the precision gears of a vast clockwork orrery -- smoothly and patiently reordering the cosmos to match its creator's design."
Other quotes:
"Don't get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features."
"I'd heard that he [Peter's classmate] had ended up in a young offenders institution or emigrated to Canada, or something equally dire."
"TVP, who are never rd to by their colleagues in the Met as the Chav Valley Police" (and they still give Peter grief about demolishing landmarks -- his fame has traveled far!)
"The woman who answered the door gave a familiar little start when she saw us and hesitated before saying -- 'Ah. Yes." We know that reaction well -- it is the cry of the guilty middle class homeowner. [...] This sort of thing always create a dilemma since the scale of guild you're dealing with ranges from using the hosepape during a ban to having just finished cementing your abusive husband into the patio."
"'Police! Police!' || The crowd parted in front of me in reluctant confusion, with, I estimate, a third wondering who I was chasing, a third wondering why the police were chasing me, and the last third thinking, This I need first thing in the morning."
"the horror that was the 1980s where every public building was deliberated to look as much like a urinal as possible."
"I personally would have liked to believe that a friendly skeleton on a white horse was waiting to carry her [he girl ghost] off." -- and speaking in all caps, right Peter?
"[N]o abandoned bags or signs of trouble. Not even a dropped brooch or packet of lembas." (<3 Peter you dork!)
"as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or later. Although these days there was likely to be some YouTube of them doing it, which at least helped with the post-mortem investigation.
I mean, quite honestly, the degree to which I love this series, I would probably enjoy a book that was just Peter describing the contents of his DVD collection and nothing else, but I do think this was objectively lovely?
30. Jordan L. Hawk, Draakenwood (Whyborne & Griffin #9) -- another loan from aome (thank you! <3), and a fast, fun read. Whyborne was spending less time second-guessing himself and everyone around him, which was pretty refreshing. Spoilers from here! The misunderstandings plot seems to have moved on to Christine and Iskander, which I was not a fan of, but at least it was quickly resolved, and as neither are POV characters, we didn't have to slog through the internal mess of it, as we previously had with Whyborne. Honestly, there was not enough Christine being awesome here for my taste, and not enough Iskander either, but the cast is getting big enough, what with the apparently-not-all-bad Endicotts making an appearance, and Miss Parkhurst being a full-fledged secondary character now that she and Persephone are involved, that it's hard to give everyone screentime in these short books, I guess. My biggest complaint is one that I've already voiced previously -- Stanford as the only villain/antagonist we get to have anymore in home books, apparently, which hasn't felt believable/justified/necessary since Bloodline (and I fully expect he is hanging on to existence in the Outside there and will be back some more, ugh).
I did like it that Stanford's involvement brought some Whyborne family issues to the fore not for Whyborne, whose family issues I'm tired of, but for Niles and Heliabel. Honestly, I spent most of the book afraid that Niles was going to finally succeed in convincing Whyborne he does genuinely love and care about him (in his frequently misguided and in the past very damaging way) by sacrificing himself for Whyborne (or possibly Persephone), especially once the thing with the hematophage killing off the heads of houses became a plot point. So I was very relieved that Niles made it through the book alive (though I still think he might sacrifice himself in the end game), and at least got to spend some time with Heliabel again, if not reconcile with her. It was very nice to see Whyborne actually coming to believe in his father's love and respect, and also to admit that Niles has some useful skills, rather than dismissing his ability to command people and make plans as bullying just because he thinks of everything to do with Niles and people like him as bullying. And Niles giving Griffin the replacement swordcane with the Whyborne family crest was a really nice touch, too. (And the replacement car; poor Whyborne just can't escape from progress, can he, what with the telephone in his own house now, too.)
I wasn't expecting Whyborne to learn about Persephone and Miss Parkhurst right away, but in retrospect, I really should have -- it's not like Persephone is subtle, and some things even Whyborne isn't too oblivious to miss XD I liked Whyborne and Maggie's Very Awkward Conversation about Griffin, once Persephone blurts out that secret, too, and Whyborne's continued distress/running joke about needing a new desk was pretty funny. I was also very amused when he immediately briefed Niles on Persephone's preferences, too, and the way he did it (tentacle-haired grandchildren, LOL).
31. Vic James, The Gilded Cage -- I think I first heard about it from thistle_chaser and was immediately intrigued. This was a very interesting premise, and I'm waiting to read more when the next book comes out. I don't think I've seen many full-on urban fantasy dystopias, if any -- I mean, you have a lot of post-apocalyptic urban fantasy worlds of the "technology crashes, magic comes back" type (the Hollows, the Kate Daniels books), and many of them are not very nice places to live, but I think this is the first institutionally oppressive one I've read, and it's pretty cool. The idea is that for centuries England has been ruled by the Equals, a small but powerful minority with magic powers (something like what you'd have gotten if Slytherin had gotten his way, I gather). (Other countries have estabilished their own regimes, some with the Skilled in charge, like Japan, the Philippines, and the American South, others with the Skilled banned, like the American Union, but we only hear about that, as all action so far has taken place in England.) Mostly it's life as usual for the "commoners" who don't have magic powers, with one really important exception: part of the social contract in being ruled by Equals is that every commoner signs away 10 years of their life (their choice, between the ages of 10 and 65) to "slavedays" -- which is what it sounds like, living in designated slavetowns,
working manual labor jobs, with zero autonomy. (It is a super inefficient system by modern standards, but I could handwave it for myself by saying that it originated long enough ago where it would've made more sense, and the Equals would've simply not cared enough to change it, because it was working well enough for their purposes.) Spoilers from here!
Anyway, the worldbuilding is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it, and the fallout of the plots in motion. I'm much less invested in the characters, who were really only there to be vehicles for the worldbuilding and plot, as far as I'm concerned. Weirdly, I found myself most emotionally invested probably in the least likeable POV character of the lot, Gavar Jardine, the boorish heir of the most powerful Equals family. Who is... well, my mental image if him is a bit like Gaston with magic, honestly. His approach to everything is brute force, he throws his fiance into a wall (although Equals' magical healing ability means injuries aren't a big deal to them), he's well on his way to alcoholism if not already there, and he's sullenly resentful of everyone -- except his baby daughter, by a commoner girl he shot when she tried to escape with the baby. Sooo, not exactly a good guy, but I find him interesting in a way I don't the others -- regular-teenager-turned-revolutionary!Luke, clever Abi with her crush on the squib middle son of the Jardine family, or Bouda, ambitious Equal politician and Gavar's fiance. I do find Silyen, the Young Master -- the youngest and most magical of the Jardine family -- interesting, but he is fey enough that I don't have a good feel for him as a person. He seems to be setting about to bring back a magical monarchy, but whether he is doing it out of person ambition, sheer love of magic, or for some deeper/more layered reasons, I haven't been able to figure out.
One thing I appreciate about the book is the rather grey-and-grey morality, and the way it's not a straightforward commoners-vs-Equals setup. Although we haven't heard very much about their motives and plans, there seems to be a group of commoners who are actively interested in upholding the Equals' power, rather than just going with the flow like the silent majority. There are Equals who are working to end the common regime -- but they seem to range from true idealists like Dina and Jackson (I totally guessed that the Angel was Dina, but Jackson being an Equal got me as a twist, though it was very well foreshadowed -- nicely done!) to people like Lord Rix (whom I also suspected of being a reformer pretty much from his first appearance), who are happy to very callously use commoners as tools for their sense of the greater good. Conversely, I thought it was a very nice touch that the dog-man turns out to be not a blameless victim suffering for revolutionary zeal or something (like I'd expected) but someone who tortured children to death for crimes their father committed, and the resulting "I don't hate them enough to murder children"/"Then you don't hate them enough" conversation between him and Luke. I also liked that, upon learning that Jackson and the Angel are Equals, Luke's reaction is not one of "so some Equals are good/on our side after all", but one of profound betrayal and distrust -- and anger, that while he was risking everything, they weren't, by the virtue of both their Skill and their position. Basically, there was more nuance than I was expecting from a dystopian setup, and it makes me curious to see where we go from here. (Also more gore/violence than I'd been expecting from the teenage protagonists, although the prologue should've probably adjusted my expectations on that one...)
32. Rachel Aaron, Nice Dragons Finish Last -- I saw this as a freebie when I switched to Amazon Prime for a trial and borrowed it, having considered it earlier when it was a 99c promo or something. And it's cute. I'm a sucker for dragons, especially dragons who can assume human form, which this book/series has plenty of, as you may imagine. The plot was appropriately thriller-y for a vacation read. I enjoyed the characters, especially Justin the big young dragon who thinks he can fight his way out of anything (I do hope he's OK after his chastisement by Chelsie) and Bob the seer, who may be genuinely mad a bit or may just enjoy screwing around with his siblings by pretending to be, but is entertaining in either case. I don't have an overwhelming need to know what happens next, but will keep the series in mind for when I need something cute and fluffy with shapeshifting dragons, I guess.
33. Cassandra Clare, Forbidden Parabatai Het #2 (actually called Lord of Shadows) -- ~85% of this book is a boring, cliche, overwrought, underedited mess, that I never would've been able to get through without ikel89's trailblazing snark and iMessage confetti to cheer on my progress. The other 15% is no great shakes either, but it has some promise. Spoilers from here, if you care
Here's what falls under the 85%: the entirety of the worldbuilding, especially everything to do with Shadowhunter culture; Emma/Julian and their tedious forbidden parabatai het; the entirety of the plot, such as it is, which makes no fucking sense; the antagonists, who have all the subtlety of a particularly bland Saturday morning cartoon villain (I mean, the Cohort are pretty much literal nazis? and Zara is also Gilderoy Lockhart, basically); convenient and very belabored ret-cons for nominal good guys who have done bad things (Jaime had not betrayed Cristina at all, he's actually on a secret mission! that Diego has zero reason to hide from Cristina, but maybe we're not meant to remember that conversation anymore; Kieran did not actually betray Mark, he thought he was saving his life!); the way characters from the previous trilogies are lionized and/or Flanderized (I can't with the slavering over Jace, and Alec being relegated to a nagging housewife role, and by now even my enjoyment of Magnus is wearing thin); and the frankly awful writing, which is brimming with pointless and seemingly random metaphors/similes (I swear, she just leaves herself notes that say "simile goes here" and then goes through later and fills them in, MadLibs fashion...), sentences that really another pass from an editor, and random knowledge and feelings being assigned to characters apparently at random and for no good reason (why does borderline-urchin Kit know who Aletheia is, especially when Ty and Livvy are right there and they grew up with a Classics geek? Why does Kit/his father randomly quote Emerson? Why are Shadowhunters able to use Wikipedia to look up ley lines but have not managed to google Ty's symptoms to figure out that autism is a thing?).
The bits that are surprisingly not bad were Kit (I'm agog at actually liking a Herondale, after however many fucking books it's been); Kit, Ty, and Livvy's relationship; Diana's secret and the way it is revealed; and seeing Jessamine (from Infernal Devices) as a ghost. I'm kind of on the fence about the Cristina-Mark-Kieran developments, because on the one hand I do like them, but on the other hand, it suffers from the same randomness and pointless cliche as the rest of the 85% (though, OK, the faeries apparently mining kink meme prompts was kind of amusing -- I mean, sex-polleny drink? (subverted) - check; handcuffed together? - check; forced bed-sharing? - check.)
Unfortunately, just about every thing I liked ended up being undermined in some way. I really enjoy Kit's relationship with both Livvy and Ty -- and if Kitty is what it takes to finally write a non-het ship as the main one of a trilogy, that will be nice to see. But killing off Livvy really pissed me off, especially the way it happened. See, I had called Livvy dying back in book 1, because I thought she was the one Blackthorn kid (other than Tavvy, who is there to be the baby) who "doesn't have a designated PSA role, which makes me wonder if she's going to die at some point". Well! And then I was even more convinced she was going to die when the new trilogy was announced to center on Kit, Ty, and Dru. And then there was the (also pretty pointless) interlude with the Shadow Market riot, showing Ty freaking out over Livvy getting hurt, which further upped the death flags. The thing is, she actually got some personality in this book, and some interesting connections to other characters, and I was really liking her growing friendship with Kit. And her death is SO COMPLETELY POINTLESS -- it accomplishes basically nothing -- she managed to hand a sword to Julian, wow -- and so feels like a transparent and cynical fridging for the sake of Ty and Julian angst.
And the Diana reveal -- I thought the way she comes out to Gwyn about being trans was actually really well done, and I liked both his reaction and the fact that she gets a romance of her own (without stupid angst). But the whole reason she has to keep her identity a secret is so tied up in the idiocy that is Shadowhunters rejecting mundane medicine, which makes SO LITTLE SENSE -- I mean, OK, if they truly had magical substitutes for things, but apparently they don't, not really, and it makes the whole culture feel incredibly stupid that the rest of the world has moved on to the 21st century but they're still stuck in the Victorian era. Except when it comes to smartphone usage, I guess, because that's OK? It's just really inconsistent. So there was that, and on a lesser note, it taxed my disbelief that lineage-obsessed Shadowhunters apparently did not realize that the Wrayburn daughter was named Aria and not Diana -- in the chaos of the Dark War, sure, but in the five years after, surely someone would have noticed? And I do get the Doylist motivation there: it is much more of a positve message to have Diana living under a name she chose for herself rather than her dead sister's name, which I appreciate. But it doesn't make sense in universe with the constraints the author has chosen to put in place.
It probably goes without saying that the things that annoyed me in book 1 continued to annoy me here. I've already ranted at lengths about the Shadowhunters' totally idiotic rules, which this volume doubles down on. Tavvy being written as a much younger kid than he's supposed to be continued to annoy me here, too. (I could maybe sort of handwave it as arrested development because of traumatic experiences during the war, but I feel like he was actually too young and too sheltered to really be taken that way? And Julian has been such a stellar parent to him since.)
Why am I still reading these books? Honestly, mostly because
name dragged me down into the darkness with her and misery loves company. I am somewhat intrigued by a Kit and Ty centric series (could not care less about Dru), but I'm also convinced that, given her previous track record, this will end up spoiling all the things I actually enjoy about these characters in favor of forced love triangles, stupid angst, and way too many forced metaphors.
Meanwhile, preserving for posterity the best of ikel89's and mine snarking (not shown: actual discussion of The Raven Stratagem, "vintage Lotor buttsex" (with passdown to/from alenky_cveto4ek), discussion of childbirth, biological children imperative, and Yoshkar-Ola "fake Europe" pictures... [under a spoiler-cut to spare your sensibilities]
K: *posts Wiki link to Scholomance article* Ninja nazi hogwarts
me: That's got a nice jingle to it
K: Julian confirmed tediously monosexual
K: PLOT TWIST
K: clary said no to jace
me: Are we still doing clary and jace
K: WE SO ARE
me: After uh 15 ooks or something
K: did u miss the memo
K: Julians emo het radar senses are tingling
K: They whisper to him that perfect diego is also in manpain
K: Crackship no 15 y/y
K: Omg he really is in manpain
K: HE MISPLACED HIS PIN!!!
me: "Pacific Park, the run-down amusement park at the very end of the pier, overlooking the Pacific Ocean."
me: You know in case we were confused which ocean LA is on and the park name wasn't enough of a clue.
K: I did, however, establish angel genetics
K: Since everyone in a family has fixed remixed traits, I assume Angel genetics is based on this:
1. luminiosity y/n
2. art y/n
3. incest y/n
4. het y/y
5. jace herondale
6. sick, masochistic lion
K: Voila. Mix and match indefinitely
K: Emma is 1, 4, 5
K: Julian is 2, 4, 6
me: Jace: 1,3,4,5,6
K: Clary completes him
K: They know what a selfie is and take them
K: Yet no one can google autism
me: "Shadowhunters saw the beauty in the things mundanes created -- the lights of the Ferris wheel -- but they saw the darkness, too, the danger and the rot."
me: Possibly vaccines and google are of the danger and rot
K: Lbr they are amish ninjas
me: Mark literally gets a replacement goldfish
me: Or am I giving cc too much credit again?
me: Gets a replacement goldfish and then accidentally kills it. Intentionally or not I am amused.
K: That's it that's the book
K: U amuse urself
K: While book amuses CC
me: We really needed that paragraph on centurions cpoied straight from Wikipedia, thanks Arthur
K: I was surprised there were no hyperlinks
me: Julian is painting shirtlessly
K: that bit got me ??? so much
K: Coz like
K: U paint apronfully
K: If u can help it
K: This het is so aggressively stupid
me: Is that Emma and Julian or some other stupid het?
K: FPH ofc
K: The hettest and forbiddenest of them all
K: *sends link about "last Shadowhunters trilogy"*
me: Is she gona actually write something else? Retire on her laurels?
K: There will always be like, Retrospective shadowhunters. Just you wait.
K: Stuff like
K: Origins of shadowhunters
K: Too shadow too hunter
K: Shadowhunter: tokyo drift
K: Everything she writes seems indistinguishable
K: POVs, conflicts
K: Say with simon and jace, u could in fct remember Jace being sheltered from technology but big on idk, homer quotes
K: And s was there for nerd culture
K: And they had personalities that differed enough to make povs recgnizable
K: Here it's a mess
K: Кто цитирует овидия, кто бибера, кто не умеет гуглить но делает селфи и вообще на костер за медицину
me: "small bones raining down from her gown like misshapen snow"
me: Does anyone actually edit this shit? Or at least read it?
K: And your answer, in 720 pages, is NO
K: unbetaed, don't like don' read!!!
me: А мы тогда зачем
me: How is Miach pronouncd, with a final X? Because all I'm hearing in my head is [soccer ball emoji]
me: Anyway, the thing about Julian in that scene [forced bed sharing] is that it really drove home for me how unusual it is for cc to acknowledge anything so 'basely physical' as a hard-on
me: It's all unspecified abstract adjectival p8ining and tortured metaphors
K: Hard ons are too hard to put on page
me: Insufficiently luminous, are hard-ons
me: all the titles are interchangeable
K: it's also such a lame trend. Look:
K: Mortal instruments
Infernal devices
Dark orifices [<-- courtesy of alenky_cveto4ek]
And for kitty it's just
Wicked powers
K: She ran out of three syllabled words
me: I'd been almost enjoying reading and then Emma and Julian showed up again
me: Alec: so what did you think of the unrequired forbidden love of my boyhood, whom you uncannily resemble? Just making smalltalk, lol
me: God I'm so bored by this
me: It is a struggle to force mgh this against the excitement and variety of playing solitaire
me: I have a feeling that the characters he unseelie court are meant to be, like Amr-like, and how boring they are just pisses me off
K: oh yes. Eric was "see i'm so AMBERLIKE"
K: I have a beard and I hate my siblings
K: The reflection that has joysless pg13 au for everyone
me: Nono it's erec with an Elly original
me: "fill a glass from the decanter of wine that rested dustily on a table by the window"
me: WTF how does something rest dustily
me: The tractor was plowing redly along
me: Let's all do it, it's fun!
K: Did she forget how to adverb
me: The prose adverbed shittily onward
K: The prose adverbly shittied onwards
K: Excuse u :<
me: "Emma raised Cortana the morning sun sliding down the blad like melted butter."
me: Why. Why is this necessary?
me: That's not what metaphors are FOR
34 is my Iorich reread, but that'll need to go on the next post, as I haven't written it up yet and this post is long enough already, so it probably wouldn't even fit.
35. T.Kingfisher (ursulav), Jackalope Wives and Other Stories -- I've been a fan of Ursula Vernon's writing since the kiddie Dragonbreath books both I and the rodents immensely enjoyed, and actually even earlier, since her LJ. I enjoyed Summer in Orcus, but I think she's even better in short form, as here. I enjoyed reading all of the stories, and really liked a pretty high percentage. I do think there's a diminishing returns thing that happens to me with Vernon's writing, which kicks in both in a collection of stories and in the longer stories themselves, but individually these were good on average and some of them are going to stick with me for a long time. It proved a powerful antidote to the cliche and high drama of FPH, too, and I needed that.
One thing I really liked here were the rather Pratchetty witches -- no-nonsense women with serious boots and dirt on their hands, who do the necessary because someone has to and have the gift of common sense; actually, it's downright reassuring to know that someone is still writing witches like this out there. The fairy tale riffs (which most of these are, one way or another) have interesting and non-repetitive twists or original bits, and are grounded in reality and a deep sense of place, with lovely, crunchy, down-to-earth prose. My favorites (in no particular order) were "Godmother", The Dryad's Shoe (a Cinderella retelling), and Jackalope Wives), and Pocosin. Also, I should probably put "Razorback" on the list, because while I didn't necessarily love it as a story, I did really really like a lot of quotes from it. But all of the others also had moments or characters or bits of worldbuilding or quotes that I liked. The collection also has a handful of poems, which were more of a mixed bag for me. I'd read two of them before, and the only one I really liked was one of those two ( "This Vote is Legally Binding"). But, well, that's still a very good track record for the collection overall.
Individual pieces, with spoilers:
"Godmother" -- a spare little meta ficlet with a lot of powerful lines and images: "She could never have woven the rope from nettles, or built her own dog out of bones. So I helped her and not you." "Truth is, there are too many broken people in the world. We bet on the ones we think will make it, like birds who feed the strongest chick."
"Jackalope Wives" -- justifiably award winning (including an 'Alfie' as a substitute Hugo that year the Puppies took over the Hugos). It's an 'animal bride' story that acknowledges and preserves both the cruelty of the fairy tale trope (the rape metaphor is both very clearly and non-anvilicious, which I was impressed by -- "I grabbed the skin -- I mean -- it was right there -- she was watching -- I thought she wanted me to have it--") and the happy ending (and introduces Grandma Harken, whom I like a lot, and the desert setting which shows up in at least one other story).
Quotes:
"A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention."
"There's always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him. Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt's so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction."
"Be cruel or be kind, but don't be both, because now you've made a mess you can't clean up in a hurry. [...] He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn't do that, he should have finished what he started."
"He'll kill you. Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don't have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it's over, you'll be all the way something, even if it's just all the way dead."
"I burned it [the jackalope skin]. It was easier that way. You get over what you can't have faster than you get over what you could."
"Wooden Feathers" -- a Pinochhio story, sad and a bit creepy but with a hopeful ending. Quotes: "He did not look like a man who was proud. He looked like a soldier admitting that he had been to war." "'She never knew.' There was a note in his voice that at first she thought was bitterness, and then recognized. Pride."
"Bird Bones" -- an original fairy tale, I think, although following the rules where kindness to beasts begets help. I imagine I would've gotten more out of this one if I were a bird person, but I liked retired math teacher Louise. Quotes: "Really, crime was wasted on criminals. She would have been so much better at it than Sonny."
"The Time with Bob and the Unicorn" -- now this one's just plain fun, with re-virginized Bob and the narwhal he ends up summoning, but especially with the folksy narration. Quotes: "But being retired, I do spend a lot of time down at the coffee shop, partly so that I don't get weird from being home alone all the time and partly because my niece Donna got me a fancy coffee maker and I've read the manual twice and I still don't know how to use it." "Mom made a difference herself for a lot of individuals, many of whom would have maybe preferred to be left undifferentiated, hands-on learning being another one of those things that Mom practiced frequently and to the detriment of others."
"Razorback" -- a take on "Raw Head and Bloody Bones" fairy tale (so, pretty dark, as you can guess, and the ending here is at most bittersweet). I probably like it less for that -- it's a darker story than my other favorites, but probably the most powerful writing in the collection, cumulatively speaking, like these quotes:
"Well, things that thalk are people, however they look, and you don't throw people out of the garden without offering them some hospitality."
"I've also heard that he was one of those folk who come up and try to give you charity you don't want. There was a lot of that going on up there, and nobody gets mad like a do-gooder if you won't hold still and let 'em do good on you."
"The core of being a witch is that you don't fall down while there's work to be done. Sometimes that means you invent work to keep yourself standing upright."
"Sal's nearest neighbor was a woman named Madeline, who had a hard life and stayed cheerful for it. People like that are a blessing and occasionally an affliction."
"Elizabeth Gray's face didn't change. Her heart was still like sand and triumph ran through and pity ran thrrough and neither one sank in. But things do grow on sand, complicated things like sundews, and something grew now in the witch's heart that I wouldn't try to put a name to."
"People say it was a hard spell, but I think that's because most people don't understand magic. It was easy the way dying's easy or birthing's easy. It's not hard, it just hurts a whole hell of a lot."
"and inside the clotted heart, the blood broke up like ice on a river and began to flow again."
"They died again, on the porch. Rawhead knew the way."
"The Dryad's Shoe" -- the cheerful, funny Cinderella retelling in which Hannah (the heroine) is not abused so much as left to her own devices, which she is perfectly happy with, having strong opinions of her own about gardening (in favor) and the production of heirs (firmly against). I liked that the stepmother is is not unduly cruel, just dismissive, and one of Hannah's stepsisters ends up being her friend, and the mis-aimed magic brings about a happy ending only in a comedy of errors sort of way, and mostly it's Hannah's quick thinking anyway. Probably my favorite story in the collection. Quotes: "It is not much use being angry when you are eleven years old, because a grown-up will always explain to you why you are wrong to feel that way and very likely you will have to apologize to someone for it." "'No!' said the herald. 'No, you didn't let me finish! It's not like that! Nobody's droiting anybody's seigneur.'"
"Let Pass the Horses Black" -- a Tam Lin retelling, which is a type of story I really like. This one was a bit too much of a subversion to work for me as well as some of the other tales (or some of the other Tam Lin retellings), but the prose is lovely (I especially liked the horses all the colors of wood, including the one Janet's friend rides, "a hrosethe slick red of madrone bark", because I love madrone bark), and the twist is well set up and yet surprising. Quotes: "and now she was going to her death in a sweatshirt that read: OREGON -- TEN MILLION BANANA SLUGS CAN'T BE WRONG." "She [the faery queen] was beautiful like stars were beautiful or moons or photos of distant galaxies. There was nothing human in her face, nothing that Janet's eyes could catch onto. She had no idea, even after gazing for a long time, what the Queen looked like."
"Telling the Bees" -- this one is as grounded and quietly odd as the other stories, but there wasn't much for me there (it is a very short story). Quote: "Possibly she was not dead long enough. If she had stayed dead for more than a few hours, perhaps she could have found someone with authority."
"The Tomato Thief" -- this year's Hugo-winning novelette and... eh. I liked the beginning (Grandma Harken again! in what is a sequel to "Jackalope Wives") and I liked the end (when the denoument of the fairytale it's remixing -- Russian "The Firebird"/Zhar-ptitsa, although transplanted to the American desert in a lovely way, with a Gila dragon and enchanted roadrunner and mockingbird, and an assist from a coyote -- starts to unfurl), but it dragged for me in the middle. Possibly I just don't get the attraction of magical trains (Raising Steam didn't work for me, either, after all). Anyway, of the witch stories in this book, I enjoyed this one the least, although I did still enjoy it. I do still feel like it was an odd length -- not enough character development for a longer work, not enough concentrated punch or a shorter one... Quote: "The world was hard and fierce, but it also contained tomato sandwiches, and if that didn't make it a world worth living in, your standards were unreasonably high."
"Origin Story" -- creepy, creepy little story (original rather than a retelling?), which isn't my preferred sort of fantasy but is well done nevertheless. Quotes: "She made charnel children that walked on two legs and she pu pig tongues in their mouths to make them speak." "Yes, she did once make a beautiful one. Do you think I don't know how to tell a story? She made one with translucent skin and the eyes of a stillborn calf, and she taught it to sing and to sigh. But this is not that creature's story. [...] And everyone knew, of course, that the owner would side with the fairy... the owner, and his strange mistress with translucent skin and huge calf eyes, who could only sing and sigh." "I will never make anything so great again, she thought. A human might have felt disappointed. The charnel fairy mostly felt relief."
"Pocosin" -- a 'witch faces the devil and god' story, with some very good witchin'. Quotes: "'Shall we do what's needful?' 'Needful,' she said thickly. 'That's being a witch for you.' 'No,' said Death, 'that's being alive. Being a witch just means the things as need doing are bigger.'"
Poems:
"This Vote is Legally Binding" -- the one I like, because it's funny and quirky as well as biting, and is the one that feels most like an Ursula Vernon/T.Kingfisher story. Quote: "You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained."
The others are "Editing" (what it says on the tin), "In Questionable Taste" (love letter to gardening, a bit lost on me since I don't garden), and "It Was a Day," about being a female fan and creator, as Tor.com describes it, which was easily my least favorite piece of writing in the book, counting the foreword and acknowledgements. I don't actively DISlike it, but I found it too on the nose and kind of... generic, empty of the things I normally like about Vernon's writing/art; I'd say more like a blog post than a poem, but I tend to enjoy
ursulav's posts more. Anyway, it could well be cathartic and important, but as a piece of art it did not work for me at all, and I was a bit bummed that it is the note on which the collection ends.
The thing where I said I liked the intro and acknowledgements more? It's because they are totally delightful, and I ended up marking down a quote from each, even:
"My cover letters said things like 'Here is a thing and I said I'd write you a thing but you don't have to publish it but it's yours if you want it but if not, I'll write you a different one.' [...] Well. Here is a thing, but you don't have to read it, but it's yours if you want to. And if not, I'll write you some different ones."
On her friend accepting her Alfie for "Jackalope Wives" at GRRM's party: "(except for a vague, persistent fear that "The Rains of Castamere" would start playing and everyone in the hall would be horribly slaughtered, because it was George R.R. Martin's party.)"
36. Dorothy Dunnett, A Game of Kings (Lymond Chronicles #1) -- so, this is a book I've been meaning to read for aaaages, because a lot of authors I like are apparently big fans and heavily influenced by these books. But it seemed a daunting proposition to go alone, so it never happened, until Awesome Friend Ali (for newer readers, a classmate of L's who has book taste very compatible with mine, it would seem) found her copy and lent it to me via L. And then I took ages to actually get through it, because while I enjoyed reading it very much, it was not an easy book for me to get through. I don't read historical fiction as a rule; I'm OK with historical fantasy, though I prefer secondary world or urban generally, but without the fantastic element, there's just no point (I find historical non-fiction not terribly interesting either). And this book is, like, ridiculously, oppressively erudite -- Lymond keeps quoting things and making allusions, like 90% of which went right over my head (making me deeply resent him). And on a simpler level, I had trouble keeping track of the players, even with the dramatis personae list up front, because of the combination of names/titles/holdings/ranks, and even more trouble keeping track of who was aligned with whom at the moment and who had which agendas. At some point I just kinda... stopped trying to figure out that part and just enjoyed the interactions as they happened in the moment, and the vibrant prose.
One thing that surprised me about this book is how much I disliked Lymond himself. This is a feature, not a bug, I gather, but I wasn't prepared for it because I'd liked or at least come to sympathize with most of his Expys that I was already familiar with -- Diarmuid in Fionavar, even Laurent in Captive Prince (although, to be fair, this is one part Elegy -- also lent to me by Awesome Friend Ali, as a trial balloon, at my guess -- played totally straight, and I disliked its protagonist also). I think part of the problem is that Lymond does not get his own POV, or a particularly sympathetic one from anyone else until pretty late in the book, or very sparsely (the characters who are sympathetic to him do exist and in fact abound, but we see their actions more than their thoughts, so I was not won over along with them). Apparently, according to AFA, hating Lymond is quite common and nothing to be alarmed about / does not interfere with the enjoyment of the chronicles, which is good to know. And I did find that, by the end, I was liking him more, or at least disliking him less, which probably bodes better for the seuqels? And there are a lot of other characters to enjoy instead. I liked Sybilla (Lymond's mother), and Janet (Walter Scott's wife), and Gideon Somerville and his family, who were collectively present over a significant number of pages, and as the book wore on, I found myself really liking Richard (Lymond's older brother), and ultimately either he or minor character Henry Lauder (the prosecutor) might be my favorites. But these are not books I would read for characters at this point, which is tough, because characters is what I mostly read for. Spoilers from here!
There are a lot of clever twists and set pieces, which I was able to appreciate even when I was probably missing their larger significance. Christian Stewart's death was tragic and affecting, and one of my favorite individual scenes (it helped that Lymond was at his least assholish there); I was happy to see that the climax/Lymond's exhoneration ultimately relied on her actions and sacrifice (although the Dramatic Card Playing part of the climax worked less well for me, and by that point I'd completely forgotten about Jonathan Crouch and Will learning to play cards from him). My actual favorite scene, I think, was the cross-examination of Lymond by Lauder, and Lauder's complete delight in him. I kinda ship it, tbh, and Lauder does too ("If I were ten years younger and a lassie, I'd woo him myself"; and then he barges into Lymond's apartments at night -- with Will Scott, but still -- and keeps saying things like "By God, I wish you would take me in hand for six months in that troop of yours" and "I love Mr Crawford like a son [suuure], but I wouldn't have missed that examinatin."). From a more extended perspective, Richard's evolution in his relationship with Lymond, from chasing him blindly (in ineptly), the trial by combat which jeopardizes Scotland's future (which was the low point for Richard for me), to Richard nursing Lymond back to health, first grimly, so as not to be cheated of his retribution, and then the brothers actually coming together and Richard understanding where Lymond is coming from, to Richard wanting to share in Lymond's guilt at the trial and Lymond deflecting his sacrifice, was very well done. And as for Lymond himself, I think it was the point where he is shot by the English trying to silence the messenger who has news of the Queen's ships ("and died stinkingly martyred") that I started warming up to him. Which is >80% into the book, but still.
There are a lot of well-written passages and very clever exchanges. I really enjoyed Lymond discoursing on patriotism/nationalism to Somerville (especially this bit: "It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave.", but the entire passage can be seen here. But my favorite actual line might belong to the Dowager Queen: "The Justicar cannot follow you [in French]. We shall speak in English, in which he cannot follow me. There is no precedent, Mr Crawford, for addressing a man who has been done an injustice by the State. We had, I thought, reached the safe haven of corruption where we never fear to misjudge anybody. I am astounded to find myself wrong."
*
Fannish links:
1) Bujold did an AMA on Reddit recently, from which I gleaned such info as:
"At this stage of my career I am a lot less panicked over cover art, since I have evidence my work will survive the worst anyone can do. Somehow."
"Barrayarans have a sort of stage-Russian accent as delivered by a British actor. Unless they're from one of the other three language groups."
2) From an interview with SKZB:
- Vallista does take place right before Hawk and "and I’ll just say, “It is a truth universally acknowledged.”" Which, what? O.o
- He's now working on Tsalmoth and "starting to think about the end" -- pulling threads together for "The Last Contract" (Vallista is #15, Tsalmoth would be #16, and that just leaves Lyorn and Chreotha and the last book)
- Paarfi 'Monte Cristo' book is not sold yet...
3) And speaking of book news or lack thereof, Winds of Winter may or may not be coming in 2018 (and I may or may not still care when it does finally drop...)
4) And, only half book related: perpetual's Firefly-with-daemons fusion fic, Through the Fog, which is an excellent read (if I still have any Firefly-fic readers left on my flist).
This entry was originally posted at http://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1053302.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
29. Ben Aaronovitch, The Furthest Station (Rivers of London novella, # 5.7 according to Goodreads, which I guess puts it before The Hanging Tree?) -- cute, short and sweet, a sort of side story that reminded me more of the graphic novels than the real books in scope and heft, but I hadn't been expecting a Peter book this year, and won't look a gift horse in the mouth, because it was very nice to get his POV in my preferred medium again, not audio or speech bubbles. Spoilers from here!
I was all excited that Jaget Kumar was going to be one of the characters involved in this, because I love Kumar (he was my favorite thing about WuG) and have missed him, but while it was very nice to learn about his fish and chips at home date night with Mrs Kumar, bad(-according-to-Peter) taste in music, and spoilers from here his official position as "weird bollocks" liason for the BTP, I got less of him as a character than I'd been expecting, which was a little disappointing. But I had been missing Abigail, too, and it was great to see just how amazingly she'd been coming along, and how much Nightingale (and Postmartin, of all people!) respects her skills and efforts. I also wonder a bit if this novella is meant to be a hook/bridge for the YA Abigail spinoff BA had mentioned somewhere (AMA, maybe?) I also found it interesting that in the eyes of random passers by, Peter has graduated from Abigail's scary older brother to a young dad educating her on the history of England. Also interesting to get a bit of a glimpse into her side of the family's background, both how her father came to England and how exactly she and Peter are cousins (which I don't think had been mentioned before?)
Plot-wise, I quite liked this one, and thought it was tighter than the full-blown novels while still giving a feel for the layered and weird life of magical London. Major plot spoilers from here! The ghosts in jars were properly creepy, and I liked the fact that the bad guy was *not* anything supernatural this time, but just a run-of-the-mill stalker-escalating-to-kidnapper, although Peter does entertain the possibility he was pushed over the edge by the proximity of ghosts in jars. I liked the non-resolution sort of resolution -- they rescue the kidnapping victim, but she wasn't in imminent danger; they find the kidnapper, but he commits suicide before backup arrives and there's no clear motive or note or anything. We did get to see Nightingale demolish a wall again, and this time Peter got to watch to his heart's conent, heh, and even poke around to see how magic and friction get along. And I liked the B plot, too, with Chess the foundling godling and his four-year-old's rude questions to Peter, and his overmatched "grandparents" doing their best, and Peter finding them/him a 'support group'.
Random bits -- Nightingale is "aghast" at the restrictions on modern children (which is a rneat and reasonable touch!), and on a separate note shines his shoes while wearing a butler's apron and sleeve garters (somebody draw this, please!); Nightingale at Casterbrook playing pranks on the younger boys -- '"Ballantine junior and I once managed to induce the whole of 3B to wet themselves pretending to be werewolves. [...] I was caned by the headmaster personally." Which apparently was a great honour because the headmaster was known to have progressive views and to be against caning in principle.' Peter arguing with Abigail over whether ghosts can be "alive" and wanting to give them the Turing Test, Peter is studying for his National Investogators Exam, and unrelatedly has worked in a coffee kiosk. And also uses the words "harsh [her] squee" XD And routinely plays rock-paper-scissors with Jaget to determine who will have to do what (Jaget always favors paper, so Peter wins whenever he wants to, I guess). And I kind of love that Nightingale apparently has a "I'm about to do magic" tell in adjusting his cuffs:
Colombo: We'll have to get some workmen down here, then.
"That will not be necessary," said Nightingale, adjusting his cuffs. "If you'd like to stand back?"
"And turn off your mobile phones," I added.
I've been paying attention to signares, too, and here we get: "the smell of white willow and mown grass, as the sensation of rough wool and a young voice singing something choral -- high and sweet. And behind it the impression that I stood amidst the precision gears of a vast clockwork orrery -- smoothly and patiently reordering the cosmos to match its creator's design."
Other quotes:
"Don't get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features."
"I'd heard that he [Peter's classmate] had ended up in a young offenders institution or emigrated to Canada, or something equally dire."
"TVP, who are never rd to by their colleagues in the Met as the Chav Valley Police" (and they still give Peter grief about demolishing landmarks -- his fame has traveled far!)
"The woman who answered the door gave a familiar little start when she saw us and hesitated before saying -- 'Ah. Yes." We know that reaction well -- it is the cry of the guilty middle class homeowner. [...] This sort of thing always create a dilemma since the scale of guild you're dealing with ranges from using the hosepape during a ban to having just finished cementing your abusive husband into the patio."
"'Police! Police!' || The crowd parted in front of me in reluctant confusion, with, I estimate, a third wondering who I was chasing, a third wondering why the police were chasing me, and the last third thinking, This I need first thing in the morning."
"the horror that was the 1980s where every public building was deliberated to look as much like a urinal as possible."
"I personally would have liked to believe that a friendly skeleton on a white horse was waiting to carry her [he girl ghost] off." -- and speaking in all caps, right Peter?
"[N]o abandoned bags or signs of trouble. Not even a dropped brooch or packet of lembas." (<3 Peter you dork!)
"as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or later. Although these days there was likely to be some YouTube of them doing it, which at least helped with the post-mortem investigation.
I mean, quite honestly, the degree to which I love this series, I would probably enjoy a book that was just Peter describing the contents of his DVD collection and nothing else, but I do think this was objectively lovely?
30. Jordan L. Hawk, Draakenwood (Whyborne & Griffin #9) -- another loan from aome (thank you! <3), and a fast, fun read. Whyborne was spending less time second-guessing himself and everyone around him, which was pretty refreshing. Spoilers from here! The misunderstandings plot seems to have moved on to Christine and Iskander, which I was not a fan of, but at least it was quickly resolved, and as neither are POV characters, we didn't have to slog through the internal mess of it, as we previously had with Whyborne. Honestly, there was not enough Christine being awesome here for my taste, and not enough Iskander either, but the cast is getting big enough, what with the apparently-not-all-bad Endicotts making an appearance, and Miss Parkhurst being a full-fledged secondary character now that she and Persephone are involved, that it's hard to give everyone screentime in these short books, I guess. My biggest complaint is one that I've already voiced previously -- Stanford as the only villain/antagonist we get to have anymore in home books, apparently, which hasn't felt believable/justified/necessary since Bloodline (and I fully expect he is hanging on to existence in the Outside there and will be back some more, ugh).
I did like it that Stanford's involvement brought some Whyborne family issues to the fore not for Whyborne, whose family issues I'm tired of, but for Niles and Heliabel. Honestly, I spent most of the book afraid that Niles was going to finally succeed in convincing Whyborne he does genuinely love and care about him (in his frequently misguided and in the past very damaging way) by sacrificing himself for Whyborne (or possibly Persephone), especially once the thing with the hematophage killing off the heads of houses became a plot point. So I was very relieved that Niles made it through the book alive (though I still think he might sacrifice himself in the end game), and at least got to spend some time with Heliabel again, if not reconcile with her. It was very nice to see Whyborne actually coming to believe in his father's love and respect, and also to admit that Niles has some useful skills, rather than dismissing his ability to command people and make plans as bullying just because he thinks of everything to do with Niles and people like him as bullying. And Niles giving Griffin the replacement swordcane with the Whyborne family crest was a really nice touch, too. (And the replacement car; poor Whyborne just can't escape from progress, can he, what with the telephone in his own house now, too.)
I wasn't expecting Whyborne to learn about Persephone and Miss Parkhurst right away, but in retrospect, I really should have -- it's not like Persephone is subtle, and some things even Whyborne isn't too oblivious to miss XD I liked Whyborne and Maggie's Very Awkward Conversation about Griffin, once Persephone blurts out that secret, too, and Whyborne's continued distress/running joke about needing a new desk was pretty funny. I was also very amused when he immediately briefed Niles on Persephone's preferences, too, and the way he did it (tentacle-haired grandchildren, LOL).
31. Vic James, The Gilded Cage -- I think I first heard about it from thistle_chaser and was immediately intrigued. This was a very interesting premise, and I'm waiting to read more when the next book comes out. I don't think I've seen many full-on urban fantasy dystopias, if any -- I mean, you have a lot of post-apocalyptic urban fantasy worlds of the "technology crashes, magic comes back" type (the Hollows, the Kate Daniels books), and many of them are not very nice places to live, but I think this is the first institutionally oppressive one I've read, and it's pretty cool. The idea is that for centuries England has been ruled by the Equals, a small but powerful minority with magic powers (something like what you'd have gotten if Slytherin had gotten his way, I gather). (Other countries have estabilished their own regimes, some with the Skilled in charge, like Japan, the Philippines, and the American South, others with the Skilled banned, like the American Union, but we only hear about that, as all action so far has taken place in England.) Mostly it's life as usual for the "commoners" who don't have magic powers, with one really important exception: part of the social contract in being ruled by Equals is that every commoner signs away 10 years of their life (their choice, between the ages of 10 and 65) to "slavedays" -- which is what it sounds like, living in designated slavetowns,
working manual labor jobs, with zero autonomy. (It is a super inefficient system by modern standards, but I could handwave it for myself by saying that it originated long enough ago where it would've made more sense, and the Equals would've simply not cared enough to change it, because it was working well enough for their purposes.) Spoilers from here!
Anyway, the worldbuilding is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it, and the fallout of the plots in motion. I'm much less invested in the characters, who were really only there to be vehicles for the worldbuilding and plot, as far as I'm concerned. Weirdly, I found myself most emotionally invested probably in the least likeable POV character of the lot, Gavar Jardine, the boorish heir of the most powerful Equals family. Who is... well, my mental image if him is a bit like Gaston with magic, honestly. His approach to everything is brute force, he throws his fiance into a wall (although Equals' magical healing ability means injuries aren't a big deal to them), he's well on his way to alcoholism if not already there, and he's sullenly resentful of everyone -- except his baby daughter, by a commoner girl he shot when she tried to escape with the baby. Sooo, not exactly a good guy, but I find him interesting in a way I don't the others -- regular-teenager-turned-revolutionary!Luke, clever Abi with her crush on the squib middle son of the Jardine family, or Bouda, ambitious Equal politician and Gavar's fiance. I do find Silyen, the Young Master -- the youngest and most magical of the Jardine family -- interesting, but he is fey enough that I don't have a good feel for him as a person. He seems to be setting about to bring back a magical monarchy, but whether he is doing it out of person ambition, sheer love of magic, or for some deeper/more layered reasons, I haven't been able to figure out.
One thing I appreciate about the book is the rather grey-and-grey morality, and the way it's not a straightforward commoners-vs-Equals setup. Although we haven't heard very much about their motives and plans, there seems to be a group of commoners who are actively interested in upholding the Equals' power, rather than just going with the flow like the silent majority. There are Equals who are working to end the common regime -- but they seem to range from true idealists like Dina and Jackson (I totally guessed that the Angel was Dina, but Jackson being an Equal got me as a twist, though it was very well foreshadowed -- nicely done!) to people like Lord Rix (whom I also suspected of being a reformer pretty much from his first appearance), who are happy to very callously use commoners as tools for their sense of the greater good. Conversely, I thought it was a very nice touch that the dog-man turns out to be not a blameless victim suffering for revolutionary zeal or something (like I'd expected) but someone who tortured children to death for crimes their father committed, and the resulting "I don't hate them enough to murder children"/"Then you don't hate them enough" conversation between him and Luke. I also liked that, upon learning that Jackson and the Angel are Equals, Luke's reaction is not one of "so some Equals are good/on our side after all", but one of profound betrayal and distrust -- and anger, that while he was risking everything, they weren't, by the virtue of both their Skill and their position. Basically, there was more nuance than I was expecting from a dystopian setup, and it makes me curious to see where we go from here. (Also more gore/violence than I'd been expecting from the teenage protagonists, although the prologue should've probably adjusted my expectations on that one...)
32. Rachel Aaron, Nice Dragons Finish Last -- I saw this as a freebie when I switched to Amazon Prime for a trial and borrowed it, having considered it earlier when it was a 99c promo or something. And it's cute. I'm a sucker for dragons, especially dragons who can assume human form, which this book/series has plenty of, as you may imagine. The plot was appropriately thriller-y for a vacation read. I enjoyed the characters, especially Justin the big young dragon who thinks he can fight his way out of anything (I do hope he's OK after his chastisement by Chelsie) and Bob the seer, who may be genuinely mad a bit or may just enjoy screwing around with his siblings by pretending to be, but is entertaining in either case. I don't have an overwhelming need to know what happens next, but will keep the series in mind for when I need something cute and fluffy with shapeshifting dragons, I guess.
33. Cassandra Clare, Forbidden Parabatai Het #2 (actually called Lord of Shadows) -- ~85% of this book is a boring, cliche, overwrought, underedited mess, that I never would've been able to get through without ikel89's trailblazing snark and iMessage confetti to cheer on my progress. The other 15% is no great shakes either, but it has some promise. Spoilers from here, if you care
Here's what falls under the 85%: the entirety of the worldbuilding, especially everything to do with Shadowhunter culture; Emma/Julian and their tedious forbidden parabatai het; the entirety of the plot, such as it is, which makes no fucking sense; the antagonists, who have all the subtlety of a particularly bland Saturday morning cartoon villain (I mean, the Cohort are pretty much literal nazis? and Zara is also Gilderoy Lockhart, basically); convenient and very belabored ret-cons for nominal good guys who have done bad things (Jaime had not betrayed Cristina at all, he's actually on a secret mission! that Diego has zero reason to hide from Cristina, but maybe we're not meant to remember that conversation anymore; Kieran did not actually betray Mark, he thought he was saving his life!); the way characters from the previous trilogies are lionized and/or Flanderized (I can't with the slavering over Jace, and Alec being relegated to a nagging housewife role, and by now even my enjoyment of Magnus is wearing thin); and the frankly awful writing, which is brimming with pointless and seemingly random metaphors/similes (I swear, she just leaves herself notes that say "simile goes here" and then goes through later and fills them in, MadLibs fashion...), sentences that really another pass from an editor, and random knowledge and feelings being assigned to characters apparently at random and for no good reason (why does borderline-urchin Kit know who Aletheia is, especially when Ty and Livvy are right there and they grew up with a Classics geek? Why does Kit/his father randomly quote Emerson? Why are Shadowhunters able to use Wikipedia to look up ley lines but have not managed to google Ty's symptoms to figure out that autism is a thing?).
The bits that are surprisingly not bad were Kit (I'm agog at actually liking a Herondale, after however many fucking books it's been); Kit, Ty, and Livvy's relationship; Diana's secret and the way it is revealed; and seeing Jessamine (from Infernal Devices) as a ghost. I'm kind of on the fence about the Cristina-Mark-Kieran developments, because on the one hand I do like them, but on the other hand, it suffers from the same randomness and pointless cliche as the rest of the 85% (though, OK, the faeries apparently mining kink meme prompts was kind of amusing -- I mean, sex-polleny drink? (subverted) - check; handcuffed together? - check; forced bed-sharing? - check.)
Unfortunately, just about every thing I liked ended up being undermined in some way. I really enjoy Kit's relationship with both Livvy and Ty -- and if Kitty is what it takes to finally write a non-het ship as the main one of a trilogy, that will be nice to see. But killing off Livvy really pissed me off, especially the way it happened. See, I had called Livvy dying back in book 1, because I thought she was the one Blackthorn kid (other than Tavvy, who is there to be the baby) who "doesn't have a designated PSA role, which makes me wonder if she's going to die at some point". Well! And then I was even more convinced she was going to die when the new trilogy was announced to center on Kit, Ty, and Dru. And then there was the (also pretty pointless) interlude with the Shadow Market riot, showing Ty freaking out over Livvy getting hurt, which further upped the death flags. The thing is, she actually got some personality in this book, and some interesting connections to other characters, and I was really liking her growing friendship with Kit. And her death is SO COMPLETELY POINTLESS -- it accomplishes basically nothing -- she managed to hand a sword to Julian, wow -- and so feels like a transparent and cynical fridging for the sake of Ty and Julian angst.
And the Diana reveal -- I thought the way she comes out to Gwyn about being trans was actually really well done, and I liked both his reaction and the fact that she gets a romance of her own (without stupid angst). But the whole reason she has to keep her identity a secret is so tied up in the idiocy that is Shadowhunters rejecting mundane medicine, which makes SO LITTLE SENSE -- I mean, OK, if they truly had magical substitutes for things, but apparently they don't, not really, and it makes the whole culture feel incredibly stupid that the rest of the world has moved on to the 21st century but they're still stuck in the Victorian era. Except when it comes to smartphone usage, I guess, because that's OK? It's just really inconsistent. So there was that, and on a lesser note, it taxed my disbelief that lineage-obsessed Shadowhunters apparently did not realize that the Wrayburn daughter was named Aria and not Diana -- in the chaos of the Dark War, sure, but in the five years after, surely someone would have noticed? And I do get the Doylist motivation there: it is much more of a positve message to have Diana living under a name she chose for herself rather than her dead sister's name, which I appreciate. But it doesn't make sense in universe with the constraints the author has chosen to put in place.
It probably goes without saying that the things that annoyed me in book 1 continued to annoy me here. I've already ranted at lengths about the Shadowhunters' totally idiotic rules, which this volume doubles down on. Tavvy being written as a much younger kid than he's supposed to be continued to annoy me here, too. (I could maybe sort of handwave it as arrested development because of traumatic experiences during the war, but I feel like he was actually too young and too sheltered to really be taken that way? And Julian has been such a stellar parent to him since.)
Why am I still reading these books? Honestly, mostly because
name dragged me down into the darkness with her and misery loves company. I am somewhat intrigued by a Kit and Ty centric series (could not care less about Dru), but I'm also convinced that, given her previous track record, this will end up spoiling all the things I actually enjoy about these characters in favor of forced love triangles, stupid angst, and way too many forced metaphors.
Meanwhile, preserving for posterity the best of ikel89's and mine snarking (not shown: actual discussion of The Raven Stratagem, "vintage Lotor buttsex" (with passdown to/from alenky_cveto4ek), discussion of childbirth, biological children imperative, and Yoshkar-Ola "fake Europe" pictures... [under a spoiler-cut to spare your sensibilities]
K: *posts Wiki link to Scholomance article* Ninja nazi hogwarts
me: That's got a nice jingle to it
K: Julian confirmed tediously monosexual
K: PLOT TWIST
K: clary said no to jace
me: Are we still doing clary and jace
K: WE SO ARE
me: After uh 15 ooks or something
K: did u miss the memo
K: Julians emo het radar senses are tingling
K: They whisper to him that perfect diego is also in manpain
K: Crackship no 15 y/y
K: Omg he really is in manpain
K: HE MISPLACED HIS PIN!!!
me: "Pacific Park, the run-down amusement park at the very end of the pier, overlooking the Pacific Ocean."
me: You know in case we were confused which ocean LA is on and the park name wasn't enough of a clue.
K: I did, however, establish angel genetics
K: Since everyone in a family has fixed remixed traits, I assume Angel genetics is based on this:
1. luminiosity y/n
2. art y/n
3. incest y/n
4. het y/y
5. jace herondale
6. sick, masochistic lion
K: Voila. Mix and match indefinitely
K: Emma is 1, 4, 5
K: Julian is 2, 4, 6
me: Jace: 1,3,4,5,6
K: Clary completes him
K: They know what a selfie is and take them
K: Yet no one can google autism
me: "Shadowhunters saw the beauty in the things mundanes created -- the lights of the Ferris wheel -- but they saw the darkness, too, the danger and the rot."
me: Possibly vaccines and google are of the danger and rot
K: Lbr they are amish ninjas
me: Mark literally gets a replacement goldfish
me: Or am I giving cc too much credit again?
me: Gets a replacement goldfish and then accidentally kills it. Intentionally or not I am amused.
K: That's it that's the book
K: U amuse urself
K: While book amuses CC
me: We really needed that paragraph on centurions cpoied straight from Wikipedia, thanks Arthur
K: I was surprised there were no hyperlinks
me: Julian is painting shirtlessly
K: that bit got me ??? so much
K: Coz like
K: U paint apronfully
K: If u can help it
K: This het is so aggressively stupid
me: Is that Emma and Julian or some other stupid het?
K: FPH ofc
K: The hettest and forbiddenest of them all
K: *sends link about "last Shadowhunters trilogy"*
me: Is she gona actually write something else? Retire on her laurels?
K: There will always be like, Retrospective shadowhunters. Just you wait.
K: Stuff like
K: Origins of shadowhunters
K: Too shadow too hunter
K: Shadowhunter: tokyo drift
K: Everything she writes seems indistinguishable
K: POVs, conflicts
K: Say with simon and jace, u could in fct remember Jace being sheltered from technology but big on idk, homer quotes
K: And s was there for nerd culture
K: And they had personalities that differed enough to make povs recgnizable
K: Here it's a mess
K: Кто цитирует овидия, кто бибера, кто не умеет гуглить но делает селфи и вообще на костер за медицину
me: "small bones raining down from her gown like misshapen snow"
me: Does anyone actually edit this shit? Or at least read it?
K: And your answer, in 720 pages, is NO
K: unbetaed, don't like don' read!!!
me: А мы тогда зачем
me: How is Miach pronouncd, with a final X? Because all I'm hearing in my head is [soccer ball emoji]
me: Anyway, the thing about Julian in that scene [forced bed sharing] is that it really drove home for me how unusual it is for cc to acknowledge anything so 'basely physical' as a hard-on
me: It's all unspecified abstract adjectival p8ining and tortured metaphors
K: Hard ons are too hard to put on page
me: Insufficiently luminous, are hard-ons
me: all the titles are interchangeable
K: it's also such a lame trend. Look:
K: Mortal instruments
Infernal devices
Dark orifices [<-- courtesy of alenky_cveto4ek]
And for kitty it's just
Wicked powers
K: She ran out of three syllabled words
me: I'd been almost enjoying reading and then Emma and Julian showed up again
me: Alec: so what did you think of the unrequired forbidden love of my boyhood, whom you uncannily resemble? Just making smalltalk, lol
me: God I'm so bored by this
me: It is a struggle to force mgh this against the excitement and variety of playing solitaire
me: I have a feeling that the characters he unseelie court are meant to be, like Amr-like, and how boring they are just pisses me off
K: oh yes. Eric was "see i'm so AMBERLIKE"
K: I have a beard and I hate my siblings
K: The reflection that has joysless pg13 au for everyone
me: Nono it's erec with an Elly original
me: "fill a glass from the decanter of wine that rested dustily on a table by the window"
me: WTF how does something rest dustily
me: The tractor was plowing redly along
me: Let's all do it, it's fun!
K: Did she forget how to adverb
me: The prose adverbed shittily onward
K: The prose adverbly shittied onwards
K: Excuse u :<
me: "Emma raised Cortana the morning sun sliding down the blad like melted butter."
me: Why. Why is this necessary?
me: That's not what metaphors are FOR
34 is my Iorich reread, but that'll need to go on the next post, as I haven't written it up yet and this post is long enough already, so it probably wouldn't even fit.
35. T.Kingfisher (ursulav), Jackalope Wives and Other Stories -- I've been a fan of Ursula Vernon's writing since the kiddie Dragonbreath books both I and the rodents immensely enjoyed, and actually even earlier, since her LJ. I enjoyed Summer in Orcus, but I think she's even better in short form, as here. I enjoyed reading all of the stories, and really liked a pretty high percentage. I do think there's a diminishing returns thing that happens to me with Vernon's writing, which kicks in both in a collection of stories and in the longer stories themselves, but individually these were good on average and some of them are going to stick with me for a long time. It proved a powerful antidote to the cliche and high drama of FPH, too, and I needed that.
One thing I really liked here were the rather Pratchetty witches -- no-nonsense women with serious boots and dirt on their hands, who do the necessary because someone has to and have the gift of common sense; actually, it's downright reassuring to know that someone is still writing witches like this out there. The fairy tale riffs (which most of these are, one way or another) have interesting and non-repetitive twists or original bits, and are grounded in reality and a deep sense of place, with lovely, crunchy, down-to-earth prose. My favorites (in no particular order) were "Godmother", The Dryad's Shoe (a Cinderella retelling), and Jackalope Wives), and Pocosin. Also, I should probably put "Razorback" on the list, because while I didn't necessarily love it as a story, I did really really like a lot of quotes from it. But all of the others also had moments or characters or bits of worldbuilding or quotes that I liked. The collection also has a handful of poems, which were more of a mixed bag for me. I'd read two of them before, and the only one I really liked was one of those two ( "This Vote is Legally Binding"). But, well, that's still a very good track record for the collection overall.
Individual pieces, with spoilers:
"Godmother" -- a spare little meta ficlet with a lot of powerful lines and images: "She could never have woven the rope from nettles, or built her own dog out of bones. So I helped her and not you." "Truth is, there are too many broken people in the world. We bet on the ones we think will make it, like birds who feed the strongest chick."
"Jackalope Wives" -- justifiably award winning (including an 'Alfie' as a substitute Hugo that year the Puppies took over the Hugos). It's an 'animal bride' story that acknowledges and preserves both the cruelty of the fairy tale trope (the rape metaphor is both very clearly and non-anvilicious, which I was impressed by -- "I grabbed the skin -- I mean -- it was right there -- she was watching -- I thought she wanted me to have it--") and the happy ending (and introduces Grandma Harken, whom I like a lot, and the desert setting which shows up in at least one other story).
Quotes:
"A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention."
"There's always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him. Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt's so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction."
"Be cruel or be kind, but don't be both, because now you've made a mess you can't clean up in a hurry. [...] He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn't do that, he should have finished what he started."
"He'll kill you. Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don't have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it's over, you'll be all the way something, even if it's just all the way dead."
"I burned it [the jackalope skin]. It was easier that way. You get over what you can't have faster than you get over what you could."
"Wooden Feathers" -- a Pinochhio story, sad and a bit creepy but with a hopeful ending. Quotes: "He did not look like a man who was proud. He looked like a soldier admitting that he had been to war." "'She never knew.' There was a note in his voice that at first she thought was bitterness, and then recognized. Pride."
"Bird Bones" -- an original fairy tale, I think, although following the rules where kindness to beasts begets help. I imagine I would've gotten more out of this one if I were a bird person, but I liked retired math teacher Louise. Quotes: "Really, crime was wasted on criminals. She would have been so much better at it than Sonny."
"The Time with Bob and the Unicorn" -- now this one's just plain fun, with re-virginized Bob and the narwhal he ends up summoning, but especially with the folksy narration. Quotes: "But being retired, I do spend a lot of time down at the coffee shop, partly so that I don't get weird from being home alone all the time and partly because my niece Donna got me a fancy coffee maker and I've read the manual twice and I still don't know how to use it." "Mom made a difference herself for a lot of individuals, many of whom would have maybe preferred to be left undifferentiated, hands-on learning being another one of those things that Mom practiced frequently and to the detriment of others."
"Razorback" -- a take on "Raw Head and Bloody Bones" fairy tale (so, pretty dark, as you can guess, and the ending here is at most bittersweet). I probably like it less for that -- it's a darker story than my other favorites, but probably the most powerful writing in the collection, cumulatively speaking, like these quotes:
"Well, things that thalk are people, however they look, and you don't throw people out of the garden without offering them some hospitality."
"I've also heard that he was one of those folk who come up and try to give you charity you don't want. There was a lot of that going on up there, and nobody gets mad like a do-gooder if you won't hold still and let 'em do good on you."
"The core of being a witch is that you don't fall down while there's work to be done. Sometimes that means you invent work to keep yourself standing upright."
"Sal's nearest neighbor was a woman named Madeline, who had a hard life and stayed cheerful for it. People like that are a blessing and occasionally an affliction."
"Elizabeth Gray's face didn't change. Her heart was still like sand and triumph ran through and pity ran thrrough and neither one sank in. But things do grow on sand, complicated things like sundews, and something grew now in the witch's heart that I wouldn't try to put a name to."
"People say it was a hard spell, but I think that's because most people don't understand magic. It was easy the way dying's easy or birthing's easy. It's not hard, it just hurts a whole hell of a lot."
"and inside the clotted heart, the blood broke up like ice on a river and began to flow again."
"They died again, on the porch. Rawhead knew the way."
"The Dryad's Shoe" -- the cheerful, funny Cinderella retelling in which Hannah (the heroine) is not abused so much as left to her own devices, which she is perfectly happy with, having strong opinions of her own about gardening (in favor) and the production of heirs (firmly against). I liked that the stepmother is is not unduly cruel, just dismissive, and one of Hannah's stepsisters ends up being her friend, and the mis-aimed magic brings about a happy ending only in a comedy of errors sort of way, and mostly it's Hannah's quick thinking anyway. Probably my favorite story in the collection. Quotes: "It is not much use being angry when you are eleven years old, because a grown-up will always explain to you why you are wrong to feel that way and very likely you will have to apologize to someone for it." "'No!' said the herald. 'No, you didn't let me finish! It's not like that! Nobody's droiting anybody's seigneur.'"
"Let Pass the Horses Black" -- a Tam Lin retelling, which is a type of story I really like. This one was a bit too much of a subversion to work for me as well as some of the other tales (or some of the other Tam Lin retellings), but the prose is lovely (I especially liked the horses all the colors of wood, including the one Janet's friend rides, "a hrosethe slick red of madrone bark", because I love madrone bark), and the twist is well set up and yet surprising. Quotes: "and now she was going to her death in a sweatshirt that read: OREGON -- TEN MILLION BANANA SLUGS CAN'T BE WRONG." "She [the faery queen] was beautiful like stars were beautiful or moons or photos of distant galaxies. There was nothing human in her face, nothing that Janet's eyes could catch onto. She had no idea, even after gazing for a long time, what the Queen looked like."
"Telling the Bees" -- this one is as grounded and quietly odd as the other stories, but there wasn't much for me there (it is a very short story). Quote: "Possibly she was not dead long enough. If she had stayed dead for more than a few hours, perhaps she could have found someone with authority."
"The Tomato Thief" -- this year's Hugo-winning novelette and... eh. I liked the beginning (Grandma Harken again! in what is a sequel to "Jackalope Wives") and I liked the end (when the denoument of the fairytale it's remixing -- Russian "The Firebird"/Zhar-ptitsa, although transplanted to the American desert in a lovely way, with a Gila dragon and enchanted roadrunner and mockingbird, and an assist from a coyote -- starts to unfurl), but it dragged for me in the middle. Possibly I just don't get the attraction of magical trains (Raising Steam didn't work for me, either, after all). Anyway, of the witch stories in this book, I enjoyed this one the least, although I did still enjoy it. I do still feel like it was an odd length -- not enough character development for a longer work, not enough concentrated punch or a shorter one... Quote: "The world was hard and fierce, but it also contained tomato sandwiches, and if that didn't make it a world worth living in, your standards were unreasonably high."
"Origin Story" -- creepy, creepy little story (original rather than a retelling?), which isn't my preferred sort of fantasy but is well done nevertheless. Quotes: "She made charnel children that walked on two legs and she pu pig tongues in their mouths to make them speak." "Yes, she did once make a beautiful one. Do you think I don't know how to tell a story? She made one with translucent skin and the eyes of a stillborn calf, and she taught it to sing and to sigh. But this is not that creature's story. [...] And everyone knew, of course, that the owner would side with the fairy... the owner, and his strange mistress with translucent skin and huge calf eyes, who could only sing and sigh." "I will never make anything so great again, she thought. A human might have felt disappointed. The charnel fairy mostly felt relief."
"Pocosin" -- a 'witch faces the devil and god' story, with some very good witchin'. Quotes: "'Shall we do what's needful?' 'Needful,' she said thickly. 'That's being a witch for you.' 'No,' said Death, 'that's being alive. Being a witch just means the things as need doing are bigger.'"
Poems:
"This Vote is Legally Binding" -- the one I like, because it's funny and quirky as well as biting, and is the one that feels most like an Ursula Vernon/T.Kingfisher story. Quote: "You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained."
The others are "Editing" (what it says on the tin), "In Questionable Taste" (love letter to gardening, a bit lost on me since I don't garden), and "It Was a Day," about being a female fan and creator, as Tor.com describes it, which was easily my least favorite piece of writing in the book, counting the foreword and acknowledgements. I don't actively DISlike it, but I found it too on the nose and kind of... generic, empty of the things I normally like about Vernon's writing/art; I'd say more like a blog post than a poem, but I tend to enjoy
ursulav's posts more. Anyway, it could well be cathartic and important, but as a piece of art it did not work for me at all, and I was a bit bummed that it is the note on which the collection ends.
The thing where I said I liked the intro and acknowledgements more? It's because they are totally delightful, and I ended up marking down a quote from each, even:
"My cover letters said things like 'Here is a thing and I said I'd write you a thing but you don't have to publish it but it's yours if you want it but if not, I'll write you a different one.' [...] Well. Here is a thing, but you don't have to read it, but it's yours if you want to. And if not, I'll write you some different ones."
On her friend accepting her Alfie for "Jackalope Wives" at GRRM's party: "(except for a vague, persistent fear that "The Rains of Castamere" would start playing and everyone in the hall would be horribly slaughtered, because it was George R.R. Martin's party.)"
36. Dorothy Dunnett, A Game of Kings (Lymond Chronicles #1) -- so, this is a book I've been meaning to read for aaaages, because a lot of authors I like are apparently big fans and heavily influenced by these books. But it seemed a daunting proposition to go alone, so it never happened, until Awesome Friend Ali (for newer readers, a classmate of L's who has book taste very compatible with mine, it would seem) found her copy and lent it to me via L. And then I took ages to actually get through it, because while I enjoyed reading it very much, it was not an easy book for me to get through. I don't read historical fiction as a rule; I'm OK with historical fantasy, though I prefer secondary world or urban generally, but without the fantastic element, there's just no point (I find historical non-fiction not terribly interesting either). And this book is, like, ridiculously, oppressively erudite -- Lymond keeps quoting things and making allusions, like 90% of which went right over my head (making me deeply resent him). And on a simpler level, I had trouble keeping track of the players, even with the dramatis personae list up front, because of the combination of names/titles/holdings/ranks, and even more trouble keeping track of who was aligned with whom at the moment and who had which agendas. At some point I just kinda... stopped trying to figure out that part and just enjoyed the interactions as they happened in the moment, and the vibrant prose.
One thing that surprised me about this book is how much I disliked Lymond himself. This is a feature, not a bug, I gather, but I wasn't prepared for it because I'd liked or at least come to sympathize with most of his Expys that I was already familiar with -- Diarmuid in Fionavar, even Laurent in Captive Prince (although, to be fair, this is one part Elegy -- also lent to me by Awesome Friend Ali, as a trial balloon, at my guess -- played totally straight, and I disliked its protagonist also). I think part of the problem is that Lymond does not get his own POV, or a particularly sympathetic one from anyone else until pretty late in the book, or very sparsely (the characters who are sympathetic to him do exist and in fact abound, but we see their actions more than their thoughts, so I was not won over along with them). Apparently, according to AFA, hating Lymond is quite common and nothing to be alarmed about / does not interfere with the enjoyment of the chronicles, which is good to know. And I did find that, by the end, I was liking him more, or at least disliking him less, which probably bodes better for the seuqels? And there are a lot of other characters to enjoy instead. I liked Sybilla (Lymond's mother), and Janet (Walter Scott's wife), and Gideon Somerville and his family, who were collectively present over a significant number of pages, and as the book wore on, I found myself really liking Richard (Lymond's older brother), and ultimately either he or minor character Henry Lauder (the prosecutor) might be my favorites. But these are not books I would read for characters at this point, which is tough, because characters is what I mostly read for. Spoilers from here!
There are a lot of clever twists and set pieces, which I was able to appreciate even when I was probably missing their larger significance. Christian Stewart's death was tragic and affecting, and one of my favorite individual scenes (it helped that Lymond was at his least assholish there); I was happy to see that the climax/Lymond's exhoneration ultimately relied on her actions and sacrifice (although the Dramatic Card Playing part of the climax worked less well for me, and by that point I'd completely forgotten about Jonathan Crouch and Will learning to play cards from him). My actual favorite scene, I think, was the cross-examination of Lymond by Lauder, and Lauder's complete delight in him. I kinda ship it, tbh, and Lauder does too ("If I were ten years younger and a lassie, I'd woo him myself"; and then he barges into Lymond's apartments at night -- with Will Scott, but still -- and keeps saying things like "By God, I wish you would take me in hand for six months in that troop of yours" and "I love Mr Crawford like a son [suuure], but I wouldn't have missed that examinatin."). From a more extended perspective, Richard's evolution in his relationship with Lymond, from chasing him blindly (in ineptly), the trial by combat which jeopardizes Scotland's future (which was the low point for Richard for me), to Richard nursing Lymond back to health, first grimly, so as not to be cheated of his retribution, and then the brothers actually coming together and Richard understanding where Lymond is coming from, to Richard wanting to share in Lymond's guilt at the trial and Lymond deflecting his sacrifice, was very well done. And as for Lymond himself, I think it was the point where he is shot by the English trying to silence the messenger who has news of the Queen's ships ("and died stinkingly martyred") that I started warming up to him. Which is >80% into the book, but still.
There are a lot of well-written passages and very clever exchanges. I really enjoyed Lymond discoursing on patriotism/nationalism to Somerville (especially this bit: "It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave.", but the entire passage can be seen here. But my favorite actual line might belong to the Dowager Queen: "The Justicar cannot follow you [in French]. We shall speak in English, in which he cannot follow me. There is no precedent, Mr Crawford, for addressing a man who has been done an injustice by the State. We had, I thought, reached the safe haven of corruption where we never fear to misjudge anybody. I am astounded to find myself wrong."
*
Fannish links:
1) Bujold did an AMA on Reddit recently, from which I gleaned such info as:
"At this stage of my career I am a lot less panicked over cover art, since I have evidence my work will survive the worst anyone can do. Somehow."
"Barrayarans have a sort of stage-Russian accent as delivered by a British actor. Unless they're from one of the other three language groups."
2) From an interview with SKZB:
- Vallista does take place right before Hawk and "and I’ll just say, “It is a truth universally acknowledged.”" Which, what? O.o
- He's now working on Tsalmoth and "starting to think about the end" -- pulling threads together for "The Last Contract" (Vallista is #15, Tsalmoth would be #16, and that just leaves Lyorn and Chreotha and the last book)
- Paarfi 'Monte Cristo' book is not sold yet...
3) And speaking of book news or lack thereof, Winds of Winter may or may not be coming in 2018 (and I may or may not still care when it does finally drop...)
4) And, only half book related: perpetual's Firefly-with-daemons fusion fic, Through the Fog, which is an excellent read (if I still have any Firefly-fic readers left on my flist).
This entry was originally posted at http://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1053302.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).