Reading roundup (finally)
3. Zadie Smith, White Teeth -- not a book I would've ever picked up without ikel89's rec, but I really enjoyed reading it -- slowly, a bit at a time, over several months, which I think is actually the best way to read it, as it's the kind of book that looks over the evolution of family and generations, spanning decades and people interconnected in various messy and human ways. It reminded K of Pratchett and me mostly of Joseph Heller (Good as Gold specifically) -- everyone is flawed and full of human frailty, often in absurd (and hilarious) ways, but it's all shown with a good dose of sympathy as well as humour, this mix of cynicism and understanding which is a balance of tone I really like.
It's not the kind of book where you talk about plot (there's plot, towards the end, but it mainly felt like a way to bring everyone back together and wrap things up, and it was fine, but it was pretty clearly just to wrap things up), or even individual characters -- the principal character feels to be humanity itself. But I liked spending time listening to these people and seeing inside their heads. Niece-of-Shame was probably my overall favorite, but I enjoyed Alsana's championship-level spite, Samad's conflicted faith and yearning for grandeur, Irie's discovery of Jamaica, found Hortense's feelings about Jehovah's Witnesses unexpectedly moving, and found Millat's approach to everything about Islam but especially abstinence really hilarious. You will note Archie and the Chalfens are absent from this list; I enjoyed reading those sections as well, but on a shallower level -- they're funny, but without the deeper notes I got from the immigrants/second gen kids, and so were less interesting to me.
The best thing about the book, though, is the writing, so without further ado, have some quotes:
"This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love."
"Clara's inexplicable dedication to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his bad looks, tedious personality and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for whatever Hortense claimed, Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself"
"this adaptation of Swan Lake (more reminiscent of ducks waddling through an oil slick) [...] and the ducks finally succumbed to the environmental disaster"
re: the trouble with the second-generation children: "Mujib (fourteen, criminal record for joyriding), Khandakar (sixteen, white girlfriend, wore mascara in the evenings), Dipesh (fifteen, marijuana), Kurshed (eighteen, marijuana and very baggy trousers), Khaleda (seventeen, sex before marriage with Chinese boy), Bimal (nineteen, doing a diploma in Drama)"
"Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him."
"It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever smaller salads."
""I'm as liberal as the next person," complained Alsana, once they were alone. "But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.""
"Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both"
"It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best less trouble)."
"It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.)"
"Now, it wasn't that Joyce was a homophobe. She liked gay men. [...] So Joyce couldn't be homophobic. But gay women .. . something confused Joyce about gay women. [...] Joyce understood why men would love men; she had devoted her life to loving men, so she knew how it felt."
"But Irie was sixteen and everything feels deliberate at that age."
"No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave."
"Joyce, he hasn't got a disorder, he's just a Muslim. There are one billion of them. They can't all have ADD."
"Worst of all was the anger inside him. Not the righteous anger of a man of God, but the seething, violent anger of a gangster, a juvenile delinquent, determined to prove himself, determined to run the clan, determined to beat the rest. And if the game was God, if the game was a fight against the West, [...] he was determined to win it. [...] It pissed him off that these were not pious thoughts. But they were in the right ball park, weren't they?"
"What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?"
"after years of corporate synaesthesia (salt & vinegar blue cheese & onion green) people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed,"
"Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them."
"Because there aren't any alien objects or events any more, just as there aren't any sacred ones. It's all so familiar. It's all on TV."
4. Ann Leckie, Provenance -- synch read with ikel89 and cyanshadow, with our thoughts recorded in situ here. Having read only the first Ancillary book before this, I was not prepared for the coziness of this one, and I DEFINITELY was not prepared for Radchaai to be comic relief, BUT! that ended up being my favorite part of the book, narrowly edging out my other favorites, Captain Uisine, the spider mechs, and Prolocutor Dicat. Spoilers from here!
I liked Ingray, our POV character, from the start. She is much cuddlier than Breq, and tries really hard, bless her Slytherin-modeling Hufflepuff heart. But it was really only at the end, when she is terrified and far more out of her depth than she is in political jockeying, but keeps going, with bravery and clear-thinking and kindness, that I found myself respecting her as well as liking her -- it's a nicely done character arc. I was impressed by the way she kept reminding herself Dicat was being a jerk probably meant e was in pain (without letting em get away with being mean to Nicale, but trying to actually address the cause), the way she felt guilty over Chenns' death even though he'd been one of her captors (and though she called him on the "I'm not threatening you" thing he did) -- all of it consistent with her character from the start, but brought out by the need to do something real. I also liked the station security is pissed at Ingray for disobeying in a crisis and feel she should be indicted, and that the fact that she isn't is due a little bit to her being the hero of the hour and mostly to political pressure from her friendship with the Geck and Tyr.
On another Ingray note, I was 98% sure things were leading up to Netano offering Ingray her name and was hoping for the other 2%, but I actually ended up liking OK how it's handled: Netano is doing it for political reasons at least as much as for reasons of suddenly realizing Ingray is awesome, and she and Lak are not too surprised when Ingray turns her down. And I suppose the conversation between Danach and Ingray at the end is the best reconciliation one could hope for, given everything. I would have liked it more if Ingray and Danach had to actually work together at the end, and Danach got to show himself to be competent (and not just spiteful and a jerk), but I suppose it's not his story, so I'll deal... And I did really like Tic's and Garal's reactions when Ingray tells them she turned the name/heirship down -- that Tic is all "I wasn't going to say anything, but THANK GOD!" and Garal is fixated on Compassionate Retrieval but then feels bad when e sees/thinks that makes Ingray cry. And I like the resolution where she's working towards reform at the end from a different direction, and considering engaging Garals sister in it, with Danach's reluctant consideration of help.
My favorite character was Captain Uisine, pretty much from the moment he walked onto the page. Being calm, shrewd, categorical but not unkind when faced with Ingray's unconscious passenger/cargo, then proving himself to be an awesome mech pilot and ship thief (THREE SHIPS! :DDD) and occasional spider-mech-assisted hairdresser, and just all-around awesome person. The book sagged for me a little bit whenever he wasn't around, either as himself or through his spiders/impersonating the Geck ambassador. And I liked the complex thing tying him to the Geck ambassador, that she was acting out of love but clearly wrong to take his choice away, and that he doesn't forgive her but also feels conflicted about it once he knows. And the peace offering of sea worms XD If there's a sequel, I hope it's all Tic and Garal traveling in his stolen ship, buying crap souvenirs for Ingray and Taucris, assisted by adorable spider mechs.
I liked Garal, too, the layered identity games and eir outward calm with flashes of trauma peeking through, hoarding food and stealing kitchen knives just in case. I also liked Prolocutor Dicat a lot, that combination of crotchety/downright mean with shrewdness and absolutely ruthless, calm self-sacrifice. You can tell I liked almost everybody in this bar, including appreciating the not-entirely-allies like the Geck ambassador and the hilarious Radchaai abassador, and even the Omkem antagonists -- the Commander trying to salvage something out of a FUBAR situation she'd gotten into on incomprehensible orders while avoiding shooting more people than is absolutely necessary (and competently spotting the hijacked mechs), and Chenns, who doesn't want to be shooting people at all and doesn't quite trust her, caught in the dilemma of being in the middle of something where he's at once an expert on one part of it (Hwae as a people) and totally out of his depth (military operations), and that he was trying to walk this line between giving the Commander enough info that she wouldn't screw up (for Omkem) or kill people out of ignorance, but at the same time not all the information if he was afraid it would lead to more violence. And his compartamentalization obviously only goes so far as far as the hostah are concerned, but it felt believable with his attempt at geniality and 'not resorting to threats', while being obviously complicity in the violence that does happen. I was sad when he died, and, as I said above, appreciated that Ingray, at least, mourned him, even if nobody else among the good guys did.
It's Leckie, so even more than the characters, I found the worldbuilding really interesting. It's nice to see a range of new cultures, each with their idiosyncracies -- the Hwae and their vestiges and landscape scattered with ruinglass (which made me think of Eldren artefacts in Gentlemen Bastards), the Omkem with their family weirdness, and of course the truly alien Geck, speaking in their weird way and perceiving the world in a pretty bizarre but consistent way. The whole vestiges thing wasn't working for me at first, but then cyanshadow pointed out that we were getting it filtered through Ingray's eyes, and Ingray seemed pretty perfunctory about vestiges, and I accepted that explanation. That line started working for me later on, with the nice complexity of the Assembly Bell being either not a cabbage pickling jar (as the legend holds) or not the actual Assembly Bell, the 'declaration of independence' being a real vestige even though it's actually a fake, and Nicale's obvious distress at the way it's treated by the Omkem, even in the middle of a life-and-death situation for herself. And the final bit, with Ingray and the Special Ops guy exchanging autographs/vestiges was just previous! Oh, and one thing I really liked, on the "they are all alien to each other" side is the way Ingray talks about Compassionate Retrieval (of course it's not a prison), and the way that are really important to her (Prolocutors and their children and heirs and political maneuvering on Hwae) are completely opaque to Tic at the start, and vice versa -- they're both "everyone knows" about their little spheres, and their "everyone knows" areas have very little overlap at the start. I liked a lot of little things about the book, the kind of social worldbuilding Leckie is really, really good at -- like translations being imperfect, including Ingray's hilarious translator app ("Fiddlesticks! Fiddlesticks! Confounded Geck ambassador!")
Also, because it's Leckie, there are gender shenanigans, which I found less disorienting than the Radchaai default to "she". The third gender pronoun (which is apparently non-binary, by Word of God) was integrated very smoothly into family roles, addresses, etc. -- although I never did manage to figure out how they actually tell each other's gender (it doesn't seem to be clothes? since Ingray and Garal share... Is it hair?), and the thing where children default to "unknown-they" for pronouns and apparently decide on a gender and an adult name as a coming of age ceremony was really interesting (as well as the implications, from Taucris's reaction to the Geck ambassador having changed her pronouns several times, that once you pick, you apparently don't get to choose again down the road), and the inheritance of names (and the way it does dovetail nicely with the vestige obsession). But the thing that intrigued me even more is something that's not talked about directly throughout: as far as I can tell, there is nothing like marriage on Hwae, people raising children as couples -- families raise children, but everybody seems to have only a single parent. (I did some word searches for fun, and "parent" is always singular, except when referring to groups of parents belonging to different children; "marriage", "wedding", "spouse", "wife" are never mentioned at all, and "husband" shows up only in acknowledgements.) This also seems to make sense with the prevalence of public creches and normalization of having children by fostering. It all hangs together rather neatly in the background.)
skygiants wrote in her review that the book has the pace of a screwball comedy (despite not being a comedy) and " it feels a lot like Ann Leckie channeling Lois McMaster Bujold, with less intense character dynamics" -- and, yeah, I actually got that feeling, too. And, despite the serious subjects it engages with, it is, like the Miles books, really funny! Ingray's quaint translator app, which has the Omkem Commander swearing "Fiddlesticks!! Confounded Geck Ambassador!" and spouting other delightful gibberish. Not Ingray's shoes! And best of all, the Radchaai ambassador who is so sick of everything in her life, sounding like a TV villain, pining away for lack of tea (as ikel89 put it, it's a TEA-ragedy XD), and flailing disgustedly at all these pronouns. (Although on that note, she kept getting confused over him/her, but handle "e" flawlessly. I wonder if that's just 'cos at that point she'd gotten into the groove of things, or if "e" (being neither male nor female) is more intuitive for Radchaai as a default (or what their translator is set to default to).
Oh, right, and there was a murder plot. What I liked about it is how sci-fi it was -- themurder weapon, and Garal's alibi, were all sci-fi, but most interesting was Hevom's defense that he couldn't have been the murderer -- despite having the means and the motive -- because he could not interact with the victim directly due to Omkem family structure weirdness. It felt like something out of The City and the City, where people can share the same space while by convention existing in totally different worlds they cannot bridge.
Quotes:
Ingray, about Compassionate Removal: "No, it's not a prison! We don't have prisons. It's a place. Where they can be away from regular people. They can do whatever they want, go wherever they like, you know, so long as they stay there. And they have to sta there."
About Rejection: "and just by being on display in the System Lareum that copy has become important. It's a real vestige now, even if it's not the one everyone thinks it is. So why should it matter if it's really a forgery?"
Prolocutor Dicat: "Did I know Ethiat Budrakim was a greedy, power hungry traitor, is the question. [...] Well, he's always been greedy and power hungry. That's normal for an ambitious Assembly representative. The traitor is new."
5. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword (Radch, book 2) -- I put off reading this one for ages because everyone seemed to agree that it was less impressive than the first book (which I'd found myself blown away by, despite some flaws), slower and quieter. And it is; definitely still enjoyable, but I found it less... well, mind-blowing. It's not even the smaller-scale plot and more compressed timeframe; it's more that the Big Ideas have all been introduced in the first book, and now they're just sort of playing out. Major spoilers from here!
I enjoyed watching Breq in her new role as Fleet Captain -- command suits her -- bonding a crew to her, coming into a new place (several new places) and not winning people over but impressing them, making changes and ripping open uncomfortable truths. I like the relationship she's building with Mercy of Kalr as a whole, the whole complex but comforting messiness of it, the ship showing her information as if she were part of a larger whole still, and using non-ancillary bodies to talk to her and hold her, the Kalrs taking care of Breq, the Bos coming together under Tisarwat, the whole organism gelling under Breq's conscious, wistful command. I liked Seivarden continuing her journey of occasionally overly-earnest self-discovery, and I enjoyed meeting the new characters -- the roiling mess of ambition, self-loathing, and seventeen-ness which is Tisarwat (who was probably my favorite), the gruff Medic, and (all too briefly present) Translator Dlique, who was absolutely hilarious, and I hope book 3 has more Presger Translators and that they are all as nuts as she was. I was also intrigued to see the characters who are not Our Heroes and very much shades of gray: Captain Hetnys, who seems to be a good soldier... and also a traitor, perfectly willing to shoot first and ask question later or hold a civillian hostage; Raughad and Fosyf, cocooned in the nature/nurture of their clone-shared sociopathy, were fascinating, in a "terrible people laying the groundwork for their own tragedy" way.
(Interestingly, there are characters for whom, no matter how many times I read "she" as the pronoun in the book, I kept doing a double-take, because in my brain they were apparently male. Tisarwat is definitely like that -- dramatic in a way that felt particularly teenage-boy to me, with the purchased lilac eyes and insta-crush with sulky pining and heedless self-sacrifice. Hetnys was another one I kept defaulting to male on; I think it's the particular kind of high-handed obliviousness that makes me feel that. And Raughad was one I kept going back and forth on -- on the one hand, male sociopaths are much more common, but I could see the abusive relationship with Piat being a f/f one as well as m/f one (Piat herself felt solidly female to me); but Fosyf felt female to me, and the Fosyf-Raughad relationship more like a mother-daughter one, and learning they're clones finally decided me in favor of Raughad being female, too. I realize this is all in my head, but that's kind of the point, and that's why I feel this is interesting to think about. And I definitely did a double-take on learning that the Vaskayan worker Raughad had been tormenting (Uran) was a boy, and the older sibling trying to protect him by building a bomb was a girl -- before Breq had gone to talk to the Vaskayans, who actually do have gendered pronouns, I had been defaulting to the reverse assumption. Oh, and on a related note, I was very amused by how proud Breq was that she'd managed to correctly address the Vaskayan elder as "Grandfather" :D)
The most interesting one to me, though, was Sirix Odela: Samirend ex-labor activist re-educated by the government and disowned by her family for her role in the Vaskayan strikes when she was very young. It's super interesting, because while you see plenty of Evil Empires and Brave Champions of Justice in SFF, you don't often see a character like Sirix: someone who believes she holds ideals of justice and equality, and has in fact worked and suffered for them, while also being blind and bigoted in a lot of ways herself, an oppressed minority who looks down on other oppressed minorities for being less civilized, assimilating less well, not making enough of an effort, even when she was working to uplift them. It's doubtless complicated by the re-education she's gone through -- she cannot actually direct her anger at the establishment without discomfort, and she's got so much anger to go around, so it's got to go somewhere, and it finds easier targets. I thought even the Sirix sections were a bit too on the nose -- too, well, realistic, without the speculative twist which made the messages of Ancillary Justice surprising and eye-opening and punchy -- but I found them to be the most interesting and thought-provoking ones in the book.
There's plot, although it's a very transitional sort of plot. I was amused that the provenance of an antique tea set turned out to be a major plot point, as did, ultimately, the question of where the Undergarden people were growing those mushrooms. All the action is oddly back-loaded to the standoff in the garden, and of course it was clear the supports were going to fail from when Breq first wondered about it on her first visit there. That part was almost too movie-like, though it worked better for me than the Anaander-vs-Anaander pratfalls routine in Justice. I especially liked Breq's bleak determination when she thinks Mercy of Kalr has been destroyed, and the subsequent arrival of the cavalry.
Of course, I continued to enjoy all the little social worldbuilding touches -- the way only Breq seems to care that the annexed societies are not monolithic in religion and language, that Breq's accent is super-aristocratic by virtue of being over a thousand years old, all the obsession with tea (especially funny after Provenance and its ambassador's TEA-ragedy, to use ikel89's brilliant coinage), the penis festival and the ridiculous apocryphal stories the Radchaai believe about it.
Oh, and a random note: it was when Breq threatened to shoot Captain Hetnys as a way of ensuring the cooperation of the Sword of Atagaris (after insisting on treating the grieviously injured ancillary so that Sword of Atagaris could continue to have someone near its captain while they were downwell) that it dawned on me how similar the Ship/Captain relationship in these books is to the dragon/Captain relationship in Temeraire-verse -- you have something vast and powerful (and staffed with a crew) which is not human but is motivated to work along with humanity for the sake of its love for a specific person. Now there's a fusion that would be interesting to see -- the Radchaai version of Temeraire :)
6. Frances Hardinge, A Skinful of Shadows -- present from
eglantiere, in a gorgeous hardcover edition with sparkly foil on the jacket and embossed cover underneath (I can't find a photo that does it justice, but it is going to be the one to beat for this year's "book with prettiest cover" question, that's for sure). This was my first Hardinge, though I've been hearing good things about her books for years, and I definitely, definitely want to read more! Although probably parceled out over time, if all of them pack a punch like this, and from what I've heard, they do.
The first thing that struck me was the absolutely beautiful prose. Not in a way that some fantasy prose gets, purple and opulent, with descriptions piled on top of descriptions, but actually just the opposite -- very simple words, sparingly used, but in novel and powerful ways, so they have the impact and poignancy of a poem, almost.
The second thing that really stood out for me was the kind of heroine Makepeace was: she is clever and resourceful and brave, but she also has all kinds of believable blindspots, consistent with a girl of her era and upbringing -- she struggles with reading, she believes that bathing lets in disease through the pores, and all manner of other nonsense (although she starts to question the animal "facts" about bear cubs and badgers by the end, when she sees something with her own eyes that contradicts the "common wisdom"). Spoilers from here She is *aware* of some of the blindspots -- like coming to realize that she sort of absorbs first the Puritan then the Royalist beliefs when steeped in them, and that they can't both be right -- but doesn't even know about others. This is a brave sort of choice, not making her merely modern. And the trauma of losing her mother is believable, too, the way she doesn't deal with it for years -- and the way other people take advantage of her ignorance and wistfulness, and it gets her in trouble -- all that felt very plausible and natural. Even aside from that, I liked Makepeace and how consistent she was in her priorities and beliefs, her love of animals and sticking up for the underdog, while also being a survivor first and foremost. Everything she accomplished I believed completely.
The other characters have to be quite vivid to compete with Makepeace's brightness, but I ended up really liking Dr Quick, morally grey opportunist that he is, and the truce he forms with Makepeace, and even Morgan (the Puritan soldier never did much for me, but I was happy he was on his way to finding peace). I liked Sir Thomas a lot, but was also not surprised he did not survive the infiltration by ghosts -- he was a decent man who acceded to a monstrous system and only rebelled in tiny, ultimately inconsequential ways. James was a neat character, too; I appreciated the decision to make him likeable but useless, someone who needed to be rescued but was worth the rescue. And oh, Symond was great! -- the golden sociopath who is at once victim and monster, who fooled everyone and is, like Makepeace, a revolutionary of a sort, rather than someone who will simply coast along in hopes of a handout (like James and his father), but who did not profit from his boldness because, ultimately, you can't treat people like things. I found Symond chilling and fascinating, especially because you can't tell how much of his monstrousness is nature, how much is growing up inside the monstrous system of the Fellmottes and knowing what it means for him, watching it grind up his father, and how much is ghosts regularly rearranging his brains. Probably a little bit of everything, since his father, having the latter two of the three, remained a decent and decidedly non-sociopathic person, but he seems to have been a bit of an outlier. So, yeah, the characters were great! And I also really liked Margaret, Makepeace's mother, in her brief but memorable appearance.
The book also reminded me, in some way, of the Lynburn Legacy books -- done right. Like, the house had a proper menacing gothic feel, and the secrets were properly creepy and the Fellmottes properly menacing. But for how dark and oppressive the book's atmosphere can feel, there was also a sort of dark humour throughout, which really worked for me. It was an atmospheric read, but not a grim or depressing one -- I really enjoyed it.
I did have a few small quibbles. I found James's survival and everything after that point a bit too easy/convenient, but I did think Makepeace had more than earned a break by that point, so wasn't too upset by this. The only thing that was a total false note for me in this book was the very last bit, from Hannah's POV. I cannot for the life of me figure out what it's there for, because it did nothing for me. And I feel like, if you're going to depart from the sole POV of the whole book at the end, it better be for a very compelling reason. This tacked-on epilogue was not in any way compelling. I could at least understand it if it were a sequel hook, but seeing as how Hardinge mostly seems to write standalones, I'm guessing that's not it, either?
Quotes:
"Before Symond could saddle up, Lord Fellmotte came into the courtyard and ceremonially embraced his son. It was a clasp without warmth, like that between buckle and clasp. Makepeace wondered what it could possibly be like, to be hugged by your father's ghost-infested shell."
"Trust was like mould. It accumulated over time in unattended places.[...] Over the years, Makeapeace had become encrusted with other people's inattentive trust."
"They deserve to die, she thought groggily, but I do not deserve to be a murderer."
"I'd sooner thrust my hand in a bucket of vipers [than work with Symond]
Then why are we here? asked the doctor.
Because I don't have a bucket of vipers that can help me save James, answered Makepeace with a sigh."
"She had loved her with the cruel purity of the mother bird who forces the fledling out of the nest to test its half-formed wings. She had done what she thought was best for her daughter. She had been right, she had been wrong, and she would never have apologized anyway."
7. S.L.Viehl, Stardoc -- I'd been talking to
spiffikins about how much I like sci-fi doctors (in conjunction with the MCA Hogarth Earthrise books, as I recall, although I've also been reminded of this by sysann watching B5, because Franklin was an early favorite example), and she asked if I'd read these books, which I hadn't even heard of till then. Well, the alien doctoring was definitely a prominent and enjoyable feature! Spoilers from here!
Things I liked about the book:
- The medical drama. This has got all the things I like about the genre, from a competent newcomer figuring out their place in a new environment, cool alien diseases and other high-stakes situations with "patients of the week", then the major mystery/arc kicking off -- from trying to solve an original puzzling case, to losing some patients, to heightening personal stakes, to a planet-wide epidemic, and beyond -- at the point of climax, the entire planet, including the protagonist herself, are in deadly peril because if the epidemic isn't halted, the whole colony planet will be sterilyzed from orbit. I did figure out the connection to the trees looooong before Cherijo did, having recalled that the nurse who was immune also worked in the garden, and I'm meh on the disease-as-sentient-organism since I first encountered that in the later Enderverse books and consequently sideeye, but other than that, the medical stuff was nice and satisfying.
- I also liked the FreeClinic doctors (well, the ones you're supposed to like), especially Dr Dloh the giant spider, and the way Cherijo's relationship with Dr Mayer develops from distrust to respect. But I didn't like that the one "bad" doctor was just completely bad all around -- not just out to get Cherijo, but lazy and incompetent and bigoted and ungrateful and disgusting -- just too easy a target, and boring as an antagonist.
- The worldbuilding of the planet and the different alien species -- so much variety, including quite a few non-humanoids, and also something I don't think I've encountered in sci-fi before -- aliens that don't just look/sound different, but also emit unusual smells, both pleasant and unpleasant. And I liked the structure of the colony, too, the frontier-like environment and rules that went along with it.
- Cherijo's cat, and I'm not even a cat person.
I was less enthused by the mystery around Cherijo's identity, her father's experiment, whatever Maggie actually is, and towards the end, the lengths to which the League was willing to go to capture Cherijo really taxed my disbelief (why does Joseph Grey Veil have this much pull with an alien governing body, given how isolationist Earth is?). I was also meh on Cherijo's romance with Kao, as well as its tragic end, and annoyed at what seems to be an arc being set up with Duncan. I actually think Duncan has some potential as a character, a human raised among aliens and therefore not coming across as human, but there's just too much mixed in there, with his telepathy. And while I appreciated that the mutual non-con didn't end up getting swept under the rug -- Duncan tries to apologize but doesn't really manage to, Cherijo isn't too quick to forgive him -- but I don't know that the rape scene really needed to be there to begin with (definitely the most clinical rape scene I've ever read, although it makes a lot of sense for it to be such). Other, minor, things that didn't quite work for me were the slang (I like the idea, but found the execution grating), and Dhreen's mixed idioms were less funny to me than I thought they were meant to be.
Anyway, I enjoyed this book, but I also suspect the sequels are going to be more heavily weighed towards the Mystery of Cherijo's Identity and Cherijo/Duncan relationship, and will be leaving behind several of the characters I liked best, so I'm not in a particular hurry to continue, but I'll keep an eye out for Kindle deals, maybe.
*
Not going to be counting these (I decided I won't count anything shorter than a novella as a "book"), but also wanted to record a couple of shorter works I've read in the past two months:
Ursula Vernon, "The Dark Birds" -- a novelette which went on my Hugo ballot. This was suuuuper creepy but in the way of the best dark fairytale -- and I don't mean purple prose about blood shining like rubies or whatever, but actual dark folktales with cannibalism and incest and parents leading their children into the woods to be eaten by monsters. I'm not surprised Vernon can do this well.
C.S.Pacat, "Pet" -- Captive Prince-verse story, set during the time of the first book, from the POV of Ancel, the red-haired pet from what this fandom apparently euphemistically refers to as "the garden scene". Ancel's POV turned out to be unexpectedly delightful, starting with the memorable first line: "Ancel was a virgin the first twelve times he had sex."
It's pretty interesting to see the perspective on pets not from Damen, who is horrified and disgusted by the degenerate traditions of Vere, but from someone who's chosen this life for himself (not out of any surfeit of good choices, but in very clear-eyed fashion) and is proud of his skills and accomplishments in his chosen career (and disdainful of slackers who don't pet properly and useless Akielon slaves too helpless to live).
I was wondering how the blowjob-by-proxy scene would work for me in Ancel's POV, considering it is pretty clearly rape in Damen's own perception. That ended up being interesting. I could buy Ancel being oblivious to Damen's horror at the proceedings and merely thinking the Akielon slave isn't pulling his weight in what's supposed to be a joint performance. I saw a review suggesting that this short story "fixes" the garden scene from book 1, but... what, by showing via Ancel that Damen was into it as soon as Laurent started taking part? I mean, I suppose it very slightly softens things from outright non-con to dub-con, in the sense that Ancel did not realize Damen had not consented (in some fashion) to being treated as a pet, but, yeah, IDK, I'm not buying the "fixing" where Laurent is involved.
I liked Berenger a lot, and the revelation that there do seem to be some decent nobles in Vere, even with the Regent in charge. His dynamic with Ancel was also pretty great, especially the "Do you even like horses?"/ "I can't read." / "I see." exchange. I have a hard time believing he would buy Ancel's contract after the arena stunt if he intended to treat him honorably -- that doesn't make much sense, and neither does his explanation that he needed a pet for court -- I'm sure there are easier ways to go about it. So all that felt rather like a manufactured misunderstanding, but it was too much fun to read, so I didn't really mind. Plus it's a short story, so it's not like the misunderstanding had room to be overly drawn out.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1075107.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
It's not the kind of book where you talk about plot (there's plot, towards the end, but it mainly felt like a way to bring everyone back together and wrap things up, and it was fine, but it was pretty clearly just to wrap things up), or even individual characters -- the principal character feels to be humanity itself. But I liked spending time listening to these people and seeing inside their heads. Niece-of-Shame was probably my overall favorite, but I enjoyed Alsana's championship-level spite, Samad's conflicted faith and yearning for grandeur, Irie's discovery of Jamaica, found Hortense's feelings about Jehovah's Witnesses unexpectedly moving, and found Millat's approach to everything about Islam but especially abstinence really hilarious. You will note Archie and the Chalfens are absent from this list; I enjoyed reading those sections as well, but on a shallower level -- they're funny, but without the deeper notes I got from the immigrants/second gen kids, and so were less interesting to me.
The best thing about the book, though, is the writing, so without further ado, have some quotes:
"This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love."
"Clara's inexplicable dedication to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his bad looks, tedious personality and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for whatever Hortense claimed, Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself"
"this adaptation of Swan Lake (more reminiscent of ducks waddling through an oil slick) [...] and the ducks finally succumbed to the environmental disaster"
re: the trouble with the second-generation children: "Mujib (fourteen, criminal record for joyriding), Khandakar (sixteen, white girlfriend, wore mascara in the evenings), Dipesh (fifteen, marijuana), Kurshed (eighteen, marijuana and very baggy trousers), Khaleda (seventeen, sex before marriage with Chinese boy), Bimal (nineteen, doing a diploma in Drama)"
"Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him."
"It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever smaller salads."
""I'm as liberal as the next person," complained Alsana, once they were alone. "But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.""
"Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both"
"It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best less trouble)."
"It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.)"
"Now, it wasn't that Joyce was a homophobe. She liked gay men. [...] So Joyce couldn't be homophobic. But gay women .. . something confused Joyce about gay women. [...] Joyce understood why men would love men; she had devoted her life to loving men, so she knew how it felt."
"But Irie was sixteen and everything feels deliberate at that age."
"No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave."
"Joyce, he hasn't got a disorder, he's just a Muslim. There are one billion of them. They can't all have ADD."
"Worst of all was the anger inside him. Not the righteous anger of a man of God, but the seething, violent anger of a gangster, a juvenile delinquent, determined to prove himself, determined to run the clan, determined to beat the rest. And if the game was God, if the game was a fight against the West, [...] he was determined to win it. [...] It pissed him off that these were not pious thoughts. But they were in the right ball park, weren't they?"
"What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?"
"after years of corporate synaesthesia (salt & vinegar blue cheese & onion green) people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed,"
"Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them."
"Because there aren't any alien objects or events any more, just as there aren't any sacred ones. It's all so familiar. It's all on TV."
4. Ann Leckie, Provenance -- synch read with ikel89 and cyanshadow, with our thoughts recorded in situ here. Having read only the first Ancillary book before this, I was not prepared for the coziness of this one, and I DEFINITELY was not prepared for Radchaai to be comic relief, BUT! that ended up being my favorite part of the book, narrowly edging out my other favorites, Captain Uisine, the spider mechs, and Prolocutor Dicat. Spoilers from here!
I liked Ingray, our POV character, from the start. She is much cuddlier than Breq, and tries really hard, bless her Slytherin-modeling Hufflepuff heart. But it was really only at the end, when she is terrified and far more out of her depth than she is in political jockeying, but keeps going, with bravery and clear-thinking and kindness, that I found myself respecting her as well as liking her -- it's a nicely done character arc. I was impressed by the way she kept reminding herself Dicat was being a jerk probably meant e was in pain (without letting em get away with being mean to Nicale, but trying to actually address the cause), the way she felt guilty over Chenns' death even though he'd been one of her captors (and though she called him on the "I'm not threatening you" thing he did) -- all of it consistent with her character from the start, but brought out by the need to do something real. I also liked the station security is pissed at Ingray for disobeying in a crisis and feel she should be indicted, and that the fact that she isn't is due a little bit to her being the hero of the hour and mostly to political pressure from her friendship with the Geck and Tyr.
On another Ingray note, I was 98% sure things were leading up to Netano offering Ingray her name and was hoping for the other 2%, but I actually ended up liking OK how it's handled: Netano is doing it for political reasons at least as much as for reasons of suddenly realizing Ingray is awesome, and she and Lak are not too surprised when Ingray turns her down. And I suppose the conversation between Danach and Ingray at the end is the best reconciliation one could hope for, given everything. I would have liked it more if Ingray and Danach had to actually work together at the end, and Danach got to show himself to be competent (and not just spiteful and a jerk), but I suppose it's not his story, so I'll deal... And I did really like Tic's and Garal's reactions when Ingray tells them she turned the name/heirship down -- that Tic is all "I wasn't going to say anything, but THANK GOD!" and Garal is fixated on Compassionate Retrieval but then feels bad when e sees/thinks that makes Ingray cry. And I like the resolution where she's working towards reform at the end from a different direction, and considering engaging Garals sister in it, with Danach's reluctant consideration of help.
My favorite character was Captain Uisine, pretty much from the moment he walked onto the page. Being calm, shrewd, categorical but not unkind when faced with Ingray's unconscious passenger/cargo, then proving himself to be an awesome mech pilot and ship thief (THREE SHIPS! :DDD) and occasional spider-mech-assisted hairdresser, and just all-around awesome person. The book sagged for me a little bit whenever he wasn't around, either as himself or through his spiders/impersonating the Geck ambassador. And I liked the complex thing tying him to the Geck ambassador, that she was acting out of love but clearly wrong to take his choice away, and that he doesn't forgive her but also feels conflicted about it once he knows. And the peace offering of sea worms XD If there's a sequel, I hope it's all Tic and Garal traveling in his stolen ship, buying crap souvenirs for Ingray and Taucris, assisted by adorable spider mechs.
I liked Garal, too, the layered identity games and eir outward calm with flashes of trauma peeking through, hoarding food and stealing kitchen knives just in case. I also liked Prolocutor Dicat a lot, that combination of crotchety/downright mean with shrewdness and absolutely ruthless, calm self-sacrifice. You can tell I liked almost everybody in this bar, including appreciating the not-entirely-allies like the Geck ambassador and the hilarious Radchaai abassador, and even the Omkem antagonists -- the Commander trying to salvage something out of a FUBAR situation she'd gotten into on incomprehensible orders while avoiding shooting more people than is absolutely necessary (and competently spotting the hijacked mechs), and Chenns, who doesn't want to be shooting people at all and doesn't quite trust her, caught in the dilemma of being in the middle of something where he's at once an expert on one part of it (Hwae as a people) and totally out of his depth (military operations), and that he was trying to walk this line between giving the Commander enough info that she wouldn't screw up (for Omkem) or kill people out of ignorance, but at the same time not all the information if he was afraid it would lead to more violence. And his compartamentalization obviously only goes so far as far as the hostah are concerned, but it felt believable with his attempt at geniality and 'not resorting to threats', while being obviously complicity in the violence that does happen. I was sad when he died, and, as I said above, appreciated that Ingray, at least, mourned him, even if nobody else among the good guys did.
It's Leckie, so even more than the characters, I found the worldbuilding really interesting. It's nice to see a range of new cultures, each with their idiosyncracies -- the Hwae and their vestiges and landscape scattered with ruinglass (which made me think of Eldren artefacts in Gentlemen Bastards), the Omkem with their family weirdness, and of course the truly alien Geck, speaking in their weird way and perceiving the world in a pretty bizarre but consistent way. The whole vestiges thing wasn't working for me at first, but then cyanshadow pointed out that we were getting it filtered through Ingray's eyes, and Ingray seemed pretty perfunctory about vestiges, and I accepted that explanation. That line started working for me later on, with the nice complexity of the Assembly Bell being either not a cabbage pickling jar (as the legend holds) or not the actual Assembly Bell, the 'declaration of independence' being a real vestige even though it's actually a fake, and Nicale's obvious distress at the way it's treated by the Omkem, even in the middle of a life-and-death situation for herself. And the final bit, with Ingray and the Special Ops guy exchanging autographs/vestiges was just previous! Oh, and one thing I really liked, on the "they are all alien to each other" side is the way Ingray talks about Compassionate Retrieval (of course it's not a prison), and the way that are really important to her (Prolocutors and their children and heirs and political maneuvering on Hwae) are completely opaque to Tic at the start, and vice versa -- they're both "everyone knows" about their little spheres, and their "everyone knows" areas have very little overlap at the start. I liked a lot of little things about the book, the kind of social worldbuilding Leckie is really, really good at -- like translations being imperfect, including Ingray's hilarious translator app ("Fiddlesticks! Fiddlesticks! Confounded Geck ambassador!")
Also, because it's Leckie, there are gender shenanigans, which I found less disorienting than the Radchaai default to "she". The third gender pronoun (which is apparently non-binary, by Word of God) was integrated very smoothly into family roles, addresses, etc. -- although I never did manage to figure out how they actually tell each other's gender (it doesn't seem to be clothes? since Ingray and Garal share... Is it hair?), and the thing where children default to "unknown-they" for pronouns and apparently decide on a gender and an adult name as a coming of age ceremony was really interesting (as well as the implications, from Taucris's reaction to the Geck ambassador having changed her pronouns several times, that once you pick, you apparently don't get to choose again down the road), and the inheritance of names (and the way it does dovetail nicely with the vestige obsession). But the thing that intrigued me even more is something that's not talked about directly throughout: as far as I can tell, there is nothing like marriage on Hwae, people raising children as couples -- families raise children, but everybody seems to have only a single parent. (I did some word searches for fun, and "parent" is always singular, except when referring to groups of parents belonging to different children; "marriage", "wedding", "spouse", "wife" are never mentioned at all, and "husband" shows up only in acknowledgements.) This also seems to make sense with the prevalence of public creches and normalization of having children by fostering. It all hangs together rather neatly in the background.)
skygiants wrote in her review that the book has the pace of a screwball comedy (despite not being a comedy) and " it feels a lot like Ann Leckie channeling Lois McMaster Bujold, with less intense character dynamics" -- and, yeah, I actually got that feeling, too. And, despite the serious subjects it engages with, it is, like the Miles books, really funny! Ingray's quaint translator app, which has the Omkem Commander swearing "Fiddlesticks!! Confounded Geck Ambassador!" and spouting other delightful gibberish. Not Ingray's shoes! And best of all, the Radchaai ambassador who is so sick of everything in her life, sounding like a TV villain, pining away for lack of tea (as ikel89 put it, it's a TEA-ragedy XD), and flailing disgustedly at all these pronouns. (Although on that note, she kept getting confused over him/her, but handle "e" flawlessly. I wonder if that's just 'cos at that point she'd gotten into the groove of things, or if "e" (being neither male nor female) is more intuitive for Radchaai as a default (or what their translator is set to default to).
Oh, right, and there was a murder plot. What I liked about it is how sci-fi it was -- themurder weapon, and Garal's alibi, were all sci-fi, but most interesting was Hevom's defense that he couldn't have been the murderer -- despite having the means and the motive -- because he could not interact with the victim directly due to Omkem family structure weirdness. It felt like something out of The City and the City, where people can share the same space while by convention existing in totally different worlds they cannot bridge.
Quotes:
Ingray, about Compassionate Removal: "No, it's not a prison! We don't have prisons. It's a place. Where they can be away from regular people. They can do whatever they want, go wherever they like, you know, so long as they stay there. And they have to sta there."
About Rejection: "and just by being on display in the System Lareum that copy has become important. It's a real vestige now, even if it's not the one everyone thinks it is. So why should it matter if it's really a forgery?"
Prolocutor Dicat: "Did I know Ethiat Budrakim was a greedy, power hungry traitor, is the question. [...] Well, he's always been greedy and power hungry. That's normal for an ambitious Assembly representative. The traitor is new."
5. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword (Radch, book 2) -- I put off reading this one for ages because everyone seemed to agree that it was less impressive than the first book (which I'd found myself blown away by, despite some flaws), slower and quieter. And it is; definitely still enjoyable, but I found it less... well, mind-blowing. It's not even the smaller-scale plot and more compressed timeframe; it's more that the Big Ideas have all been introduced in the first book, and now they're just sort of playing out. Major spoilers from here!
I enjoyed watching Breq in her new role as Fleet Captain -- command suits her -- bonding a crew to her, coming into a new place (several new places) and not winning people over but impressing them, making changes and ripping open uncomfortable truths. I like the relationship she's building with Mercy of Kalr as a whole, the whole complex but comforting messiness of it, the ship showing her information as if she were part of a larger whole still, and using non-ancillary bodies to talk to her and hold her, the Kalrs taking care of Breq, the Bos coming together under Tisarwat, the whole organism gelling under Breq's conscious, wistful command. I liked Seivarden continuing her journey of occasionally overly-earnest self-discovery, and I enjoyed meeting the new characters -- the roiling mess of ambition, self-loathing, and seventeen-ness which is Tisarwat (who was probably my favorite), the gruff Medic, and (all too briefly present) Translator Dlique, who was absolutely hilarious, and I hope book 3 has more Presger Translators and that they are all as nuts as she was. I was also intrigued to see the characters who are not Our Heroes and very much shades of gray: Captain Hetnys, who seems to be a good soldier... and also a traitor, perfectly willing to shoot first and ask question later or hold a civillian hostage; Raughad and Fosyf, cocooned in the nature/nurture of their clone-shared sociopathy, were fascinating, in a "terrible people laying the groundwork for their own tragedy" way.
(Interestingly, there are characters for whom, no matter how many times I read "she" as the pronoun in the book, I kept doing a double-take, because in my brain they were apparently male. Tisarwat is definitely like that -- dramatic in a way that felt particularly teenage-boy to me, with the purchased lilac eyes and insta-crush with sulky pining and heedless self-sacrifice. Hetnys was another one I kept defaulting to male on; I think it's the particular kind of high-handed obliviousness that makes me feel that. And Raughad was one I kept going back and forth on -- on the one hand, male sociopaths are much more common, but I could see the abusive relationship with Piat being a f/f one as well as m/f one (Piat herself felt solidly female to me); but Fosyf felt female to me, and the Fosyf-Raughad relationship more like a mother-daughter one, and learning they're clones finally decided me in favor of Raughad being female, too. I realize this is all in my head, but that's kind of the point, and that's why I feel this is interesting to think about. And I definitely did a double-take on learning that the Vaskayan worker Raughad had been tormenting (Uran) was a boy, and the older sibling trying to protect him by building a bomb was a girl -- before Breq had gone to talk to the Vaskayans, who actually do have gendered pronouns, I had been defaulting to the reverse assumption. Oh, and on a related note, I was very amused by how proud Breq was that she'd managed to correctly address the Vaskayan elder as "Grandfather" :D)
The most interesting one to me, though, was Sirix Odela: Samirend ex-labor activist re-educated by the government and disowned by her family for her role in the Vaskayan strikes when she was very young. It's super interesting, because while you see plenty of Evil Empires and Brave Champions of Justice in SFF, you don't often see a character like Sirix: someone who believes she holds ideals of justice and equality, and has in fact worked and suffered for them, while also being blind and bigoted in a lot of ways herself, an oppressed minority who looks down on other oppressed minorities for being less civilized, assimilating less well, not making enough of an effort, even when she was working to uplift them. It's doubtless complicated by the re-education she's gone through -- she cannot actually direct her anger at the establishment without discomfort, and she's got so much anger to go around, so it's got to go somewhere, and it finds easier targets. I thought even the Sirix sections were a bit too on the nose -- too, well, realistic, without the speculative twist which made the messages of Ancillary Justice surprising and eye-opening and punchy -- but I found them to be the most interesting and thought-provoking ones in the book.
There's plot, although it's a very transitional sort of plot. I was amused that the provenance of an antique tea set turned out to be a major plot point, as did, ultimately, the question of where the Undergarden people were growing those mushrooms. All the action is oddly back-loaded to the standoff in the garden, and of course it was clear the supports were going to fail from when Breq first wondered about it on her first visit there. That part was almost too movie-like, though it worked better for me than the Anaander-vs-Anaander pratfalls routine in Justice. I especially liked Breq's bleak determination when she thinks Mercy of Kalr has been destroyed, and the subsequent arrival of the cavalry.
Of course, I continued to enjoy all the little social worldbuilding touches -- the way only Breq seems to care that the annexed societies are not monolithic in religion and language, that Breq's accent is super-aristocratic by virtue of being over a thousand years old, all the obsession with tea (especially funny after Provenance and its ambassador's TEA-ragedy, to use ikel89's brilliant coinage), the penis festival and the ridiculous apocryphal stories the Radchaai believe about it.
Oh, and a random note: it was when Breq threatened to shoot Captain Hetnys as a way of ensuring the cooperation of the Sword of Atagaris (after insisting on treating the grieviously injured ancillary so that Sword of Atagaris could continue to have someone near its captain while they were downwell) that it dawned on me how similar the Ship/Captain relationship in these books is to the dragon/Captain relationship in Temeraire-verse -- you have something vast and powerful (and staffed with a crew) which is not human but is motivated to work along with humanity for the sake of its love for a specific person. Now there's a fusion that would be interesting to see -- the Radchaai version of Temeraire :)
6. Frances Hardinge, A Skinful of Shadows -- present from
eglantiere, in a gorgeous hardcover edition with sparkly foil on the jacket and embossed cover underneath (I can't find a photo that does it justice, but it is going to be the one to beat for this year's "book with prettiest cover" question, that's for sure). This was my first Hardinge, though I've been hearing good things about her books for years, and I definitely, definitely want to read more! Although probably parceled out over time, if all of them pack a punch like this, and from what I've heard, they do.
The first thing that struck me was the absolutely beautiful prose. Not in a way that some fantasy prose gets, purple and opulent, with descriptions piled on top of descriptions, but actually just the opposite -- very simple words, sparingly used, but in novel and powerful ways, so they have the impact and poignancy of a poem, almost.
The second thing that really stood out for me was the kind of heroine Makepeace was: she is clever and resourceful and brave, but she also has all kinds of believable blindspots, consistent with a girl of her era and upbringing -- she struggles with reading, she believes that bathing lets in disease through the pores, and all manner of other nonsense (although she starts to question the animal "facts" about bear cubs and badgers by the end, when she sees something with her own eyes that contradicts the "common wisdom"). Spoilers from here She is *aware* of some of the blindspots -- like coming to realize that she sort of absorbs first the Puritan then the Royalist beliefs when steeped in them, and that they can't both be right -- but doesn't even know about others. This is a brave sort of choice, not making her merely modern. And the trauma of losing her mother is believable, too, the way she doesn't deal with it for years -- and the way other people take advantage of her ignorance and wistfulness, and it gets her in trouble -- all that felt very plausible and natural. Even aside from that, I liked Makepeace and how consistent she was in her priorities and beliefs, her love of animals and sticking up for the underdog, while also being a survivor first and foremost. Everything she accomplished I believed completely.
The other characters have to be quite vivid to compete with Makepeace's brightness, but I ended up really liking Dr Quick, morally grey opportunist that he is, and the truce he forms with Makepeace, and even Morgan (the Puritan soldier never did much for me, but I was happy he was on his way to finding peace). I liked Sir Thomas a lot, but was also not surprised he did not survive the infiltration by ghosts -- he was a decent man who acceded to a monstrous system and only rebelled in tiny, ultimately inconsequential ways. James was a neat character, too; I appreciated the decision to make him likeable but useless, someone who needed to be rescued but was worth the rescue. And oh, Symond was great! -- the golden sociopath who is at once victim and monster, who fooled everyone and is, like Makepeace, a revolutionary of a sort, rather than someone who will simply coast along in hopes of a handout (like James and his father), but who did not profit from his boldness because, ultimately, you can't treat people like things. I found Symond chilling and fascinating, especially because you can't tell how much of his monstrousness is nature, how much is growing up inside the monstrous system of the Fellmottes and knowing what it means for him, watching it grind up his father, and how much is ghosts regularly rearranging his brains. Probably a little bit of everything, since his father, having the latter two of the three, remained a decent and decidedly non-sociopathic person, but he seems to have been a bit of an outlier. So, yeah, the characters were great! And I also really liked Margaret, Makepeace's mother, in her brief but memorable appearance.
The book also reminded me, in some way, of the Lynburn Legacy books -- done right. Like, the house had a proper menacing gothic feel, and the secrets were properly creepy and the Fellmottes properly menacing. But for how dark and oppressive the book's atmosphere can feel, there was also a sort of dark humour throughout, which really worked for me. It was an atmospheric read, but not a grim or depressing one -- I really enjoyed it.
I did have a few small quibbles. I found James's survival and everything after that point a bit too easy/convenient, but I did think Makepeace had more than earned a break by that point, so wasn't too upset by this. The only thing that was a total false note for me in this book was the very last bit, from Hannah's POV. I cannot for the life of me figure out what it's there for, because it did nothing for me. And I feel like, if you're going to depart from the sole POV of the whole book at the end, it better be for a very compelling reason. This tacked-on epilogue was not in any way compelling. I could at least understand it if it were a sequel hook, but seeing as how Hardinge mostly seems to write standalones, I'm guessing that's not it, either?
Quotes:
"Before Symond could saddle up, Lord Fellmotte came into the courtyard and ceremonially embraced his son. It was a clasp without warmth, like that between buckle and clasp. Makepeace wondered what it could possibly be like, to be hugged by your father's ghost-infested shell."
"Trust was like mould. It accumulated over time in unattended places.[...] Over the years, Makeapeace had become encrusted with other people's inattentive trust."
"They deserve to die, she thought groggily, but I do not deserve to be a murderer."
"I'd sooner thrust my hand in a bucket of vipers [than work with Symond]
Then why are we here? asked the doctor.
Because I don't have a bucket of vipers that can help me save James, answered Makepeace with a sigh."
"She had loved her with the cruel purity of the mother bird who forces the fledling out of the nest to test its half-formed wings. She had done what she thought was best for her daughter. She had been right, she had been wrong, and she would never have apologized anyway."
7. S.L.Viehl, Stardoc -- I'd been talking to
spiffikins about how much I like sci-fi doctors (in conjunction with the MCA Hogarth Earthrise books, as I recall, although I've also been reminded of this by sysann watching B5, because Franklin was an early favorite example), and she asked if I'd read these books, which I hadn't even heard of till then. Well, the alien doctoring was definitely a prominent and enjoyable feature! Spoilers from here!
Things I liked about the book:
- The medical drama. This has got all the things I like about the genre, from a competent newcomer figuring out their place in a new environment, cool alien diseases and other high-stakes situations with "patients of the week", then the major mystery/arc kicking off -- from trying to solve an original puzzling case, to losing some patients, to heightening personal stakes, to a planet-wide epidemic, and beyond -- at the point of climax, the entire planet, including the protagonist herself, are in deadly peril because if the epidemic isn't halted, the whole colony planet will be sterilyzed from orbit. I did figure out the connection to the trees looooong before Cherijo did, having recalled that the nurse who was immune also worked in the garden, and I'm meh on the disease-as-sentient-organism since I first encountered that in the later Enderverse books and consequently sideeye, but other than that, the medical stuff was nice and satisfying.
- I also liked the FreeClinic doctors (well, the ones you're supposed to like), especially Dr Dloh the giant spider, and the way Cherijo's relationship with Dr Mayer develops from distrust to respect. But I didn't like that the one "bad" doctor was just completely bad all around -- not just out to get Cherijo, but lazy and incompetent and bigoted and ungrateful and disgusting -- just too easy a target, and boring as an antagonist.
- The worldbuilding of the planet and the different alien species -- so much variety, including quite a few non-humanoids, and also something I don't think I've encountered in sci-fi before -- aliens that don't just look/sound different, but also emit unusual smells, both pleasant and unpleasant. And I liked the structure of the colony, too, the frontier-like environment and rules that went along with it.
- Cherijo's cat, and I'm not even a cat person.
I was less enthused by the mystery around Cherijo's identity, her father's experiment, whatever Maggie actually is, and towards the end, the lengths to which the League was willing to go to capture Cherijo really taxed my disbelief (why does Joseph Grey Veil have this much pull with an alien governing body, given how isolationist Earth is?). I was also meh on Cherijo's romance with Kao, as well as its tragic end, and annoyed at what seems to be an arc being set up with Duncan. I actually think Duncan has some potential as a character, a human raised among aliens and therefore not coming across as human, but there's just too much mixed in there, with his telepathy. And while I appreciated that the mutual non-con didn't end up getting swept under the rug -- Duncan tries to apologize but doesn't really manage to, Cherijo isn't too quick to forgive him -- but I don't know that the rape scene really needed to be there to begin with (definitely the most clinical rape scene I've ever read, although it makes a lot of sense for it to be such). Other, minor, things that didn't quite work for me were the slang (I like the idea, but found the execution grating), and Dhreen's mixed idioms were less funny to me than I thought they were meant to be.
Anyway, I enjoyed this book, but I also suspect the sequels are going to be more heavily weighed towards the Mystery of Cherijo's Identity and Cherijo/Duncan relationship, and will be leaving behind several of the characters I liked best, so I'm not in a particular hurry to continue, but I'll keep an eye out for Kindle deals, maybe.
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Not going to be counting these (I decided I won't count anything shorter than a novella as a "book"), but also wanted to record a couple of shorter works I've read in the past two months:
Ursula Vernon, "The Dark Birds" -- a novelette which went on my Hugo ballot. This was suuuuper creepy but in the way of the best dark fairytale -- and I don't mean purple prose about blood shining like rubies or whatever, but actual dark folktales with cannibalism and incest and parents leading their children into the woods to be eaten by monsters. I'm not surprised Vernon can do this well.
C.S.Pacat, "Pet" -- Captive Prince-verse story, set during the time of the first book, from the POV of Ancel, the red-haired pet from what this fandom apparently euphemistically refers to as "the garden scene". Ancel's POV turned out to be unexpectedly delightful, starting with the memorable first line: "Ancel was a virgin the first twelve times he had sex."
It's pretty interesting to see the perspective on pets not from Damen, who is horrified and disgusted by the degenerate traditions of Vere, but from someone who's chosen this life for himself (not out of any surfeit of good choices, but in very clear-eyed fashion) and is proud of his skills and accomplishments in his chosen career (and disdainful of slackers who don't pet properly and useless Akielon slaves too helpless to live).
I was wondering how the blowjob-by-proxy scene would work for me in Ancel's POV, considering it is pretty clearly rape in Damen's own perception. That ended up being interesting. I could buy Ancel being oblivious to Damen's horror at the proceedings and merely thinking the Akielon slave isn't pulling his weight in what's supposed to be a joint performance. I saw a review suggesting that this short story "fixes" the garden scene from book 1, but... what, by showing via Ancel that Damen was into it as soon as Laurent started taking part? I mean, I suppose it very slightly softens things from outright non-con to dub-con, in the sense that Ancel did not realize Damen had not consented (in some fashion) to being treated as a pet, but, yeah, IDK, I'm not buying the "fixing" where Laurent is involved.
I liked Berenger a lot, and the revelation that there do seem to be some decent nobles in Vere, even with the Regent in charge. His dynamic with Ancel was also pretty great, especially the "Do you even like horses?"/ "I can't read." / "I see." exchange. I have a hard time believing he would buy Ancel's contract after the arena stunt if he intended to treat him honorably -- that doesn't make much sense, and neither does his explanation that he needed a pet for court -- I'm sure there are easier ways to go about it. So all that felt rather like a manufactured misunderstanding, but it was too much fun to read, so I didn't really mind. Plus it's a short story, so it's not like the misunderstanding had room to be overly drawn out.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1075107.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).