Reading roundup, Nebulas, and a few other cool things
You guys, before I dive into my usual reading roundup and stuff, I have to share something incredibly cool! So, "STET" (mind the content warning) is a short story by Sarah Gailey which was nominated for a Hugo a couple of years ago. It has a neat format, being essentially told through writer/editor marginalia, but I strongly disliked the content, which seems to be what happens with me and most of Gailey's work. 
cahn and and
cenozoicsynapsid and I were talking about Gailey's Upright Women Wanted and Gailey's work in general, over the course of which thread I introduced
cenozoicsynapsid to "STET", and
cahn posited a cool variation on the motifs of AI and editor's notes on "STET". So, anyway, that's the background. The thing I want to share is this absolutely brilliant piece of IF
cenozoicsynapsid wrote, which is yet another permutation of those motifs: Rephrase? (gen, CNTW, mind the warnings in the tags). I love it as a story and piece of interactive fiction in its own right, AND it functions wonderfully as fix-it fic for "STET" for me, by filling in the twin abysses of plausibility and nuance that were my chief problems with the Gailey story. But i suspect it also works well as "STET" fanfic if one actually liked "STET", because
cenozoicsynapsid is coming from a place of having liked "STET". Anyway, I'm so impressed and delighted that this story/IF exists and hope as many people as possible discover it.
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Nebulas are done, so have some nattering, since I'm actually paying attention to awards this year again.
Novel: I've only read two of the nominees (so far), and am surprised but not displeased that Network Effect won over Piranesi, as that's the order I'm planning on voting for them at the Hugos. Like, Piranesi was really interesting and unusual, but I LOOOOVED Network Effect. The other two Hugo-nominated Nebula nominees are Black Sun and The City We Became, neither of which I'm terribly excited to read.
Novella: Three of the novellas are also Hugo-nominated and thus I've also read them. Ring Shout won over Finna and Riot Baby, and it would also be at the top of my list over those two, so I'm pleased with the results (and would be reasonably pleased if Ring Shout won the Hugos, even though it's not the one I'm rooting for).
Novelette: I've started working through the novelettes now that the Hugo packet is out, but have only read the Pinsker one so far, as the one I had most looked forward to reading. I liked it, and am also happy to see it win on principle. (This is another 3/6 overlap for the Hugos and the Nebulas; the other Hugo-nominated ones that the Pinsker won over are "Burn, etc." and "The Pill"
Short Story: Haven't read any of these yet, but another 3/6 overlap ("Badass Moms", "A Guide for Working Breeds", and "Open House") and "Open House on Haunted Hill" won.
Andre Norton (Lodestar equivalent): 3 titles overlap with the Hugos (there were only 5 nominees for the Nebula), Raybearer, Elatsoe, and the winner, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I'm actually not sure how my Lodestar award ballot would be ordered today -- I liked all the entries I've read (most of which were not on the Nebula), so I don't have any conclusions about the Nebula win, except that I'm happy for Ursula Vernon.
Drama presentation combines short and long form, so it's a bit hard to compare, but there are 3 individual episodes on the Nebula list, two of which, The Good Place finale (which won) and the Expanse one, overlap with the Hugo short form nominees, and the third being a different Mandalorian episode than the two nominated for a Hugo. Birds of Prey and The Old Guard overlap the Hugo long form ballot, but there's nothing to be surmised from that, since it was an individual episode that won. I guess the chances of The Good Place finale winning the short form category are pretty solid, though -- I haven't decided whether it or the She-Ra finale are going at the top of my list, but it was a pretty good finale, and a The Good Place episode won the last three years running -- over mostly the same competition (The Expanse, Doctor Who, and The Mandalorian in the most recent year, and I doubt a lot of the Hugo voters have watched She-Ra...)
I also watched the Nebula Awards presentation/show, since it was streaming on YouTube. The show part I could've done without, though the idea was cute, but the presentations and acceptance speeches were really cool and well worth the two hours.
I enjoyed both Tobias Buckell's introduction of Nalo Hopkinson for the Grand Master award and her speech, which was very unflinching about the obstacles she has faced (health and otherwise), and also really enjoyed watching Connie Willis accept the service to SFWA award (I've previously seen her in YouTube clips of video from in-person cons, which really were not very good, so it was cool to get a good look at her for once). John Wiswell, the short story winner, gave a really lovely speech that several other winning authors referenced throughout the ceremony, talking about how his winning story was rejected several times as a way of encouraging other writers. I've not read his work before, but he looked super familiar in the video -- I must've seen him on a panel at one of the virtual cons, I guess? -- ah, yes, he was on the Balticon "Advancing the Story Without Trauma" panel. One of the highlights for me was Ursula Vernon's acceptance speech, which included such gems as "I started this novel because I wanted to write off a kitchen-aid mixer as a business expense" and (about having written 'Wizard's Guide' years ago but being unable to publish it until 2020) "Suddenly everyone was into sourdough starters and distrusting the government. This book's time had come.", but especially the rooster crowing throughout her pre-recorded speech and her closing with "I apologize for all the roosters in the background, but there's nothing I can do about that because roosters are like that." Both Sarah Pinsker and Martha Wells seemed adorably flustered by their wins (despite being repeat winners at this point), and Adam Savage (of Earth) as the presenter for Best Novel (which he did VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY) was also really neat. I also enjoyed P.Djeli Clark's speech, and thought the bit of AAVE code switching was very cool, just from a how code-switching works perspective -- I'm not sure I've seen such a clear case of switching between formal speech and dialect in a formal setting before. I was also impressed that The Good Place finale win actually had Michael Schur and a special effects guy (sorta) accepting their Ray Bradbury award, and their bit was actually REALLY funny, I thought. I wonder what they'll pull out for the Hugo win, since I assume that one's nearly a shoe-in... Even the one award that I had absolutely no interest/horse in the race for, the video game one, the acceptance speech ended up being interesting to me because I had not realized that the creator of Hades, Greg Kasavin, was a fellow Soviet ex-pat, and turns out he's also a fellow Berkeley grad, and close enough to me in age that we would've intersected at Cal, so that's kind of neat. (The video game does look gorgeous, too.)
My final comment to Best Chat was "On a scale of GRRM to John Picacio, I give it a solid 8" and I stand by that -- this was a really nice awards show, and only a little bit longer than it needed to be. (Aydrea Walden is clearly multi-talented and also super-pretty, so it's not like I'm complaining about the amount of time she was on screen, but I definitely enjoyed the speeches more than the filler, so I would still have appreciated a tighter show.)
Speaking of getting to experience things online that would not be an option if not for Covid, I had a really great time attending Balticon panels live Memorial Day weekend and catching up on others after the fact (most are up on YouTube), and should really write that up at some point, but that's not going to make it into this post...
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22. Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys -- I was seeing this book pop up on the awards circuit (including as one of the Lodestar Nominees), but was not too enthusiastic about reading it -- it didn't sound like my thing, what with being what sounded like a ghost romance. So I was going to get around to it eventually, maybe, but then
aome read it and liked it a lot, and I moved it up my queue and put a hold on it at the library. When I started it, I thought again that it wasn't going to work for me: I found Yadriel (the POV character) pretty boring, and this is minor but kept tripping me up -- the use of "brujx" as the gender-inclusive alternative to brujo/bruja just kept throwing me out of the story (I've gotten used to "Latinx", though that also took me some time, 'cos it's just not very pronounceable, but that "jx" combo is just not something my brain can deal with, apparently, because this effect persisted until the very end of the novel. Side note: this was an interesting article on the lack of general adoption of Latinx (and related approaches) as a term in the community it is meant to describe). So, anyway, first couple of chapters were not doing much for me, but then Julian showed up and charmed me, and the book went much faster and more enjoyably after that.
Julian, and Maritza, whom I also started liking a lot more once she had someone besides Yadriel to interact with, really jazzed up the book for me, where Yadriel-centric stuff before that just felt issue-y. The book is still very earnest about representation overall: Yadriel's transness, the LGBT+ rep with Julian's friends, of course everything to do with Latinx representation (and I really liked that the group was shown to be non-monolithic even within Yadriel's family/brujx community), and the intersection with things like class, immigration status, etc. -- plus I think there's some non-highlighted neuroatypical rep, too -- Julian definitely read as ADHD to me, and apparently that was intentional. But where Yadriel seems to spend a lot of time brooding -- not just about being trans and his family not really getting what that means (even though they're trying, to various degrees), and his brujx culture no accepting that fully, but just in general -- it's a part of his personality, so he broods and worries a lot, which is understandable -- especially considering that he lost his mother within the year; like, he gets to see her once a year for a couple of days because brujx spirits can come back on El Dia de la Muerte, but it's obviously still a huge loss -- but it just wasn't very engaging -- I much preferred Julian's much more easy-going way of being, and it added up to a pretty nice balance.
Because I found Julian pretty much a delight. He is definitely not perfect, and can certainly be A Lot, but he is very loveable and just, like, nice to hang out with over the course of the book. There are really funny moments, like when they're using Maritza's dogs to try and find Julian's body (he's the ~ghost boy) and the dog finds instead the tacos Julian dropped when he was attacked; and the matter-of-fact way he is both open about who he is and accepts it about others (e.g. when he tells Yadriel he is gay, when Maritza corrects him about Yadriel's gender, or when instead of the peer pressure Yadriel expects when he tells Julian he doesn't drink Julian's reaction is just "oh, my bad" and moving on), which I really liked as a character trait; and the quieter, poignant moments when he talks about his father, and how he doesn't use Spanish because that was their language together and feels too intimate for anything else (which felt very plausible to me as a bilingual) -- and then starting to use it with Yadriel in particularly charged moments (which is never remarked on, but really speaks for itself).
Julian pretty much carried the book for me, but the Julian/Yadriel romance still does not actually work for me. I think I might just be too old for YA romance at this point -- not the YA books themselves, which I still really enjoy, just the romance part. I think it's to do with my children now being at that stage, and I just can't see it from the POV of the teens anymore. Like Yadriel and Julian were on their "last-day-on-earth" date/adventure thing, and all I could think of was, "don't ignore your father's texts, kid!" and "seriously, dude, how are you going to expain the car if you get caught?" But also, like, they've known each other for just a couple of days, albeit a very intense couple of days for both of them, so this suddenly being a relationship that trumps all other connections was annoying for me to see. Not even implausible, because teenagers in love, but just sigh-inducing.
Because I really liked the other connections the boys have: Julian's group of friends, his complicated relationship with his older brother, Yadriel's large family and community connections, which can be welcoming and stifling at once. That part, I thought, was quite well done, the family that tries but doesn't always get it or believe his identity is real, especially some of the scenes with his grandmother, and his father when he slips up and deadnames Yadriel. I thought Julian was a bit hard on Yadriel's family, but could also see Juian being angry on Yadriel's behalf, and Yadriel's own conflicted feelings -- he loves them but resents that he has to keep explaining himself -- worked for me very well.
There was also the SPOILERS ~Ancient Forbidden Magic~ plot, which was not the strongest part of the book, but I guess it needed a plot beyond the ghost romance. I noticed the missing jaguar knives as a Significant Detail from the first time Lita was mentioned looking for them, and figured they were involved in the disappearances, and also figured out that Yadriel's uncle was the one up to the shady dark magic stuff while Yadriel was still assuming his uncle was the only one who understood him and was speaking up for Yadriel to his father. The resolution, where Yadriel is just acting in self-defense and still tries to save his uncle and it's the jaguar spirit Cabriz has summoned that drags him down to hell was appropriately Disney villain death. What I actually had not expected (though in retrospect should absolutely have done) was Julian turning out to be still alive and thus possible to restore to life and a full-fledged version of romance -- I should have expected that, since anything else would've felt like burying your gays, but at the same time, it seems odd to start off with a ghost romance and end up with the two boys just fully alive and none the worse for wear, not a single bittersweet limitations between them. (I'd been expecting something like Santa Muerte granting Julian the ability to come back on the Day of the Dead even though he's not a brujo, so they would have some time together, or some kind of barriers or restrictions. But at the same time I definitely understand why Thomas wanted to give a story with a gay trans Latinx protagonist a happy ending rather than a bittersweet or melancholy one.
Last couple of random notes: One thing I had not expected and found neat was the commentary on class, although I appreciated it more in those scenes where Yadriel was not literally remarking to himself that oops, he was being classist. Like, Yadriel and Julian's different views on the value of a college education, and Julian being allowed to say that, hey, college is not the only path or necessarily the best path, and his brother who became a mechanic via an apprenticeship process is doing just fine. My favorite bit like that, though, was Julian never having been on a plane, and while Yadriel feels weird about his own rare plane trips to Cuba being a sign of privilege, Julian being like, you'd never get me to go on one of those horrible death traps. Another thing I really enjoyed was how non-homogenious the Latinx communities Yadriel and Julian interacted with were -- the different dishes and treats from different branches of the family, the different accents in Spanish -- it made the backdrop so much richer.
The library yanked my e-book back before I had a chance to transcribe the quotes I'd highlighted, so this is a somewhat vaguer write-up than usual, but I enjoyed the book overall, more than I'd expected to. The author's next thing seems to be yet another Peter Pan retelling, which is a subgenre I have no interest in, but I'll be curious to see what Thomas publishes after that.
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 2/6 (though really it's 2.5). There is no huge gulf between A Deadly Education, Cemetery Boys, and the half of Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking that I've read so far -- I liked them all but did not love them. Of the two I've finished, I would rank A Deadly Education above Cemetery Boys, because while I have quibbles with both books, I did like El a lot and find her an interesting character, and there were no sections of that book that dragged for me the way Cemetery Boys sometimes did.
23. Lindsay Ellis, Axiom's End -- I'd been vaguely curious about it, despite somewhat lackluster reviews, since I really like Lindsay's videos. Not sure I would've gotten around to reading it, but she's one of the Astounding(/Campbell) nominees this year, and it seemed like a good reason to take the plunge. Well... like other readers, I'm also underwhelmed, which makes me a bit sad, because I really do enjoy her YouTube stuff -- including videos on things I absolutely do not care about, like Phantom of the Opera or Transformers, and I always feel a little sad when I don't enjoy the fiction of someone whose blog or personality or whatever I've enjoyed. I think there's maybe two things at work here, in my disappointment: Even though the story sounded like something I should enjoy -- First Contact, finding a common language with an alin species, an Enemy Mine sort of setup -- I've loved these elements in many things from "Story of Your Life" to The True Meaning of Smekday -- it looks like the elements of that Ellis is interested in exploring are not the elements that appeal to me. And less subjectively, I think she's trying for some ambitious things here, and does not have the skill to pull it off effectively -- which, I wouldn't expect it of a first novel, but there's probably a reason most first novels don't attempt stuff at this level. The rest is spoilery, so let's dive in:
The not-my-kinkness of the setup took up a lot of the page-time: I was really not interested in the government coverup stuff, and preferred the stretches where Cora and Ampersand were left alone to bond. There's the attempt to show the leaked First Contact having an effect on the economy and creating a sort of alt-history for the 2007 economic crash, but honestly I did not find that the blog post or articles included interstitially to be adding much to the book. There's also a really pronounced gory-ness to the proceedings which I did not think added anything to the book -- Cora undergoes a lot of injuries, which are described in detail, and very unpleasant medical procedures to repair them, and when it comes to stuff like that, I feel that less is more. And then there's the dubcon alien marriage ("fusion bond"), which... I knew about Cora and Ampersand's relationship, in abstraction, doing in, and that doesn't bother me as such. In fact, one of the most effective aspects of the book for me were the times of their physical contact -- rough and coercive/antagonistic when they first meet, then carefully ascertaining consent in both directions, and moving beyond needing to do that by the end -- the awkward cuddling with Cora hugging his synthetic carapace and him mechanically stroking her hair was legit adorable. My problem with the dubcon marriage is not at all that he is a cyborg alien spider thing, it's that he's a cyborg alien spider thing who keeps lying to her by ommission -- that's the part that's totally not my kink.
Now the ambitious-but-not-quite-there part: There's just A Lot going on, and it's for the most part filtered through Cora, who does not understand a lot of it for a long time. There are alien faction politics and personal history that becomes revealed very gradually, but so gradually and at such a remove, that I really could not care about it. A lot of the action is witnessed by Cora as aliens are chirping at each other in a language she can't understand, or translated imperfectly through space Google Translate. Which, language barriers with aliens are cool stuff, and maybe this would've worked better for me if I felt closer to Cora's own POV. But Cora's POV also felt weirdly detached to me -- like, it's a narrator's words we're getting, not her own, is the sense I got, which I find a less immersive way of doing third person, and kind of pointless when the narrator doesn't have anything interesting going on, which this one did not. So I was watching incomprehensible stuff unfold over the shoulder of someone who did not understand it and did not have terribly interesting thoughts of her own, and it all felt kind of pointlessly opaque. And when they do manage to communicate, it actually felt like it was happening too easily after all the barriers that had been established -- like there's no way the translator tablet would work this smoothly at translating alien speech back and forth, I don't care how advanced amygdaline technology is. I mean, I know it's a conceit to make the story happen, but so much time is spent underlining how difficult it is for the two species to communicate that when it turns out to be quite easy, it feels like it's breaking the rules of its own universe.
Besides Cora's POV, which I found lackluster, there are some other writing aspects that I think are probably just a sign that Lindsay Ellis hasn't done THIS kind of writing much: The pacing felt kind of haphazard -- nothing really pulled me along, the jumping around did not feel natural even though there's an in-universe explanation for Cora to be whisked from place to place and to black out and then wake up suddenly elsewhere. I felt like the entire middle section of the novel was just stuff happening one thing after another rather than building meaningfully to something -- other than Cora's relationship with Ampersand, which does develop nicely, and some realizations about what's going on, neither of which have much to do with the various attacks and flitting from place to place, I didn't feel like there was a plot arc. Like, what was the point of the whole thing with the Genome if it/she was just going to die after all that, and die pretty pointlessly? There's also a weird reliance on describing people by referencing actors ("Colonel Keith, an older gentleman who seemed to Cora what Keanu Reeves might look like if he had aged twenty years, gained fifty pounds, and lost all his charisma", "She reminded Cora of Meg Ryan"), which did nothing to make them memorable to me.
There were some things I enjoyed, of course. I mentioned already that I liked the tentative but growing rapproachment between Cora and Ampersand. I do like how alien these aliens are, not human, not cuddly, but still managing to come across as people. I enjoyed Cora's creative translation of Ampersand's word to the authorities ("I am relieved that your government has refrained from slaughtering this group." "He thanks you for your hospitality." or "How do you know human language?" "Experimentation on human subjects." "Research."). But I wish there had been more for me to like.
Quote:
"If these ETIs really do exist, most of us would have to admit that they have terrible timing. Humanity is fractured, bellicose, paranoid. It's the cosmological equivalent of having a guest come to the door when you're in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight with your spouse, there are lines of coke on the coffee table, and your pants are down around your ankles" -- 'quoting' an article by Kaveh Mazandarani (who is apparently a major character in the sequel). I think it's not a coincidence that my favorite writing in this book was the in-universe nonfiction articles.
On a final note: Some time after I'd finished the book, YouTube helpfully reminded me about this Axiom's End Q&A Lindsay had done back in December, and I rewatched it with the knowledge of the book, and, well, it looks like there's a lot of cool stuff intended to be in there that wasn't coming through in the text or that we haven't gotten to yet. It doesn't make me like Axiom's End itself more -- I still think "it was alright" is about where I am, but it does make me more curious to check out the sequel, which Lindsay says was much easier to write for her, and see if maybe that one works better for met.
But really the video just strengthened my conclusion that I would rather watch Lindsay Ellis talk on YouTube for the equivalent amount of time -- even about Transformers or Phantom of the Opera -- than read a book by her.
25. Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds -- I first heard about this author and book via
_profiterole_'s glowing review, and then saw the author's very distinctive name on the Astounding list and was like, oh, hey, a reason to read that book I was curious about, and then saw her on a Balticon panel, and was impressed by how wonderfully she was holding her own on a panel with more experienced authors and generally enjoyed hearing what she had to say, which took me from "eh, I'll wait for the Hugo packet" to putting the book on hold at the library as soon as the panel wrapped up (good thing, too, as there's only an excerpt in the packet). And almost as soon as I started reading it, I found myself surprised that the book isn't on more awards lists, because I think it's good enough to be on a shortlist.
The premise is maybe not wildly original, but what's done with it is, to me, really cool, with a lot of identity shenanigans and divergent multiverses stuff that I like: Blurb-level premise is, travel between multiverses is discovered and commercialized. Objects can be brought over with no problem, but in order for humans to travel from one universe to another, the version of them on the world they're traveling to can't be alive, or the blowback will kill the traveler. (Also, travel is only possible among worlds that are pretty close in how events unfolded, on the macro level, otherwise you can't reach them. Which explains why everyone has counterparts that need to be kept track of, rather than being, like, populated by lizard people or sentient otadstools or something.) This means that "traverser" springs up as a new job -- people who can travel to a lot of worlds because they are dead in most universes except Earth Zero -- mostly people from the rough enclaves, who had a lot of chances to die, or people who've beaten very long odds on diseases that should've killed them, stuff like that. So that's the basic premise: Cara is a traverses who is dead on 372 out of 380 worlds, and her "rarity" makes her valuable for the first time in her life. For a brief time, she is sure, because the company that invented multiverse travel is working on automating data delivery, and that will render traversers obsolete. I was sold on that premise already, because it's a cool setup for multiverse heists, but then stuff gets even more interesting with all kinds of identity stuff. MAJOR SPOILERS from here!
A little further into the book, we learn that Cara is not actually Caramenta of Earth Zero, adopted into the Ruralite religion and morally upright to the point of total repression: she is Caralee from Earth 22, who took Caramenta's place when 0!Cara was sent to Earth 22 and died from the blowback because 22!Cara was not dead. And eventually we learn that this was not a coincidence but something set up by the head of the company, Adam Bosch, who's got identity secrets of his own. Caralee living her dead parallel self's life was both neatly foreshadowed and neatly done, and the way this impacts her relationships on Earth Zero was also full of cool bits -- that she and sister Esther are much closer than Caramenta and Esther had been, that Caramenta's internalized homophobia (as she's trying to out-Ruralite the Ruralites to try to show she belongs there) is the source of the tension (and mutual pining from afar) between Cara and Dell, the way Caralee's history with Nik-Nik on Earth 22 informs her reactions to him on Earth Zero -- it's all really nicely done, I thought. And then there's her traveling to earth 175 and meeting the versions of the people she knows there -- Nik-Nik the Ruralite younger brother instead of ruthless emperor of Ashtown, Esther, herself, and of course Adranik the emperor, who she learns is the same person as the kindly CEO of the multiverse travel company whom she admires, Adam Bosch. It's neat to see glimpses of the people Cara knows on other worlds, too, the Ashtown Dell, the different lives and endings for Cara herself (like the Caralee on Earth 255, who was adopted by a Wiley City couple, because she "was probably just a shit climber", thinks protagonist Cara) and her mother -- I just really like getting glimpses of this stuff.
And on top of all the delicious identity shenanigans, there's also a neat corporate thriller sort of plot (although that part felt a little rushed compared to the time spent on Earth 175 and the setup): Adam Bosch killing off potential competitors across the universe while buying them out and driving them out of the industry on Earth Zero; first Caramenta and then Caralee getting sent to an earth where he version is still alive being part of a plan; Adam's newly announced business venture relying on simply killing off duplicates in other worlds so that rich people can travel there as a tourist stunt (not the most sophisticated evil CEO plan, but also a pretty plausible one; the break-in into Adam's mansion; and I really liked the revenge Cara comes up with, the slow death via Lot's Wife, counting on Adam rerouting his energies toward leaving a legacy (nicely foreshadowed with her collection, too). The happy ending felt REALLY rushed, not in a way that I think is a flaw of the book, necessarily, because the variety of possible endings you glimpse comes through in a fairy-tale-spare sort of way, but too quick for me to feel any emotional payoff from it. Although I'm not sure I would've gotten much of an emotional payoff anyway, because:
The characters are not the kind of characters I fall in love with, but they're solid for the purposes of the book -- they carry their weight in the narrative, is how I'd put it, I think, and I enjoyed spending time with all of them: Cara the consummate survivor, aloof unknowable Dell, Jean the grizzled mentor, flashy dangerous Nik-Nik (and the very unlike 175! version of him), Adam/Adra the evil overlord, overtly terrible in one universe and avuncular and still terrible in the other, and Esther, who I guess is the pure 'outsourced' heart to Cara's survival-first hardship-born morality. They're mostly archetypes, I guess, but the relationships between them feel real -- the love between Cara and Esther, even with them both knowing they're meeting as strangers not sisters who grew up together, the complicated tangles between Cara and Dell, Cara and Nik-Nik, Nik-Nik and Adra/Adam, Jean's mentorship going so far as to save Cara's life by sacrificing his own and her being moved to hands-on revenge rather than simply whistleblowing by his murder -- it all worked for me as it needed to, and I didn't feel like I was missing any depth.
One other thing I liked about this book is, it seems to be from among this newer crop of books which no longer feel like they need to put a flashing marquee around "LOOK HOW DIVERSE MY CHARACTERS ARE". The main characters are POCs, the protagonist is queer and the romance is a f/f one, but the book is not about these things in any simplistic way even though awareness of them pervades it. But it's refreshingly non-monolithic: Caramenta's internalized homophobia is the reason for the book-long misunderstanding between Caralee and Dell, but while Caramenta is presumably acting out of a desire to fit perfectly inside the Ruralite religion, we see that it's not actually mandated by the religion: Esther, raised in it, has no issue with same sex relationships. And while darker skin is assiciated with Ashtown, where people are out unprotected from the sun, and pale skin with Wiley City, the more interesting meditation is on how all that intersects with the way people choose to present themselves and are perceived as they cross those boundaries: Cara dressing for Ashtown as a visitor from Wiley City vs dressing for a heist in the Wiles with the Ashtown runners, the way the same man looks different when he's an emperor of Ashtown vs an upstanding Wiley City CEO, or an emperor vs a Ruralite. Another thing I found interesting is the way it's stressed a couple of times that Wiley City is a socialist paradise -- to its citizens: basic income, guaranteed housing, free sophisticated medical care, job training and counseling, public parks -- while walling itself off from the subsistence existence beyond its walls (except for day tripping and quaint shopping experiences, or euthensasia), and expelling those non-Wiley-ites it doesn't need anymore as soon as it's done with them -- "They save all their apathy for the world right outside their walls". It's just a refreshing amount of nuance vs the kind of thing I've seen too much of in the recent decade, which was along the lines of "plucky band of queer POC heroes with progressive ideals vs evil white cis dude capitalists" -- like, life's generally more complicated than that, and I find that sort of reductiveness deeply boring.
I was also impressed by the writing, which is really lovely and, mmm, feels mature for a debut novel. Quotes:
"She smiles, less like she thinks I'm funny and more like she wants to prove she knows how."
"I'm not sure how many nuclear bombs it would take to change the song of a place until we can't hear it anymore, but we lost 382 over the course of an hour."
"There is something gratifying about going places where I'm dead and touching things I was never even meant to see."
"this too-pretty runner reminds me that I grew up wanting to lick silver teeth."
Esther: "You shouldn't feed my vanity. It's my worst trait."
Cara: "That you think vanity is your worst trait is a sign of your vanity."
"Because that's what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it's in someone else."
"a blood tide was crawling from her mouth across the sand"
About her Wiley City boyfriend: "The way he could count on me to never be afraid was its own aphrodisiac to an only son who'd been raised sheltered and fragile. I liked his fragility, how easily shocked he was, how he never thought to hide it. [...] I do miss Marius, but like I would miss a pet bird -- something fragile that trusted me to hold it in my hand, heartbeat against my palm, ribs vulnerable to the whims of fingertips. Maybe it's just the power I miss."
"Wiley City is bad at age anyway. They see a fourteen-year-old runner outside the wall and say, A suspicious man spotted near the border, but when a thirty-three-year-old Wileyite murders his girlfriend it's Good boy goes bad."
"Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don't know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if our cleverness would outlive your desperation." (I really, really like this quote. The first part is definitely not a novel sentiment, but having both parts of it there, I'm actually not sure I've come across that before, and I like that it shows both sides.)
"'Why, Dell, you sound exactly like an ashtowner.' She takes it as an insult, which I take as an insult."
About early multiverse travel and discovering that you can't send a person into a world where their doppleganger is alive: "The scientists said, We did not test it enough. We should have expected a backlash. And the spiritual said, We did not petition enough. We should have expected a sacrifice."
"When I told [Nik-Nik] the truth, that I was doing it to remind myself who he really was, to keep myself from loving him, he'd looked... touched. Like he didn't think it would be hard for anyone not to love him. It had more to do with me being broken than him being worthy, but he still kissed me before he left me in the mud. He still went home expecting me to follow. And if I hadn't found my own dead body in the sand that day, I would have."
"I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it."
"Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his familyu and force them to agree you did not."
Nik-Nik's mother: "She named her second son happy, hoping it would be true. She knew the cost of an easy life, and the uselessness of a long one."
"As if not dying is a skill Ive honed, not just blind luck."
"'that makes it worse,' [Esther] says. 'Being bought, not forced.' the words of someone who's never been forced."
Jean, when Cara accuses him of killing competitors for Adam: "I've killed more for worse men, with far less reason. [...] By the time the scope of what we would need to do became clear, there was a department devoted to the... unpleasantness of maintaining a technological monopoly."
"I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety."
Exlee: "You will eat because I'm charging you for the food, and you're still too much Ahstown to waste that."
"because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won't let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead."
"[Dell] is staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to makr the constellations. It's not that you can't make out a shape, it's that you can make out so many shapes you'll never know which one is right."
"Tonight is for living like I'm still on Earth 22, for feeling every ounce of pain, and converting it into rage. Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could."
"Earth 255 me had a child and named it after the mother she doesn't remember enough to resent"
Hugo roundup: Astounding -- 4/6. I actually had to think a long time about this one and where Micaiah Johnson vs K.A.Larkwood would rank for me, i.e. who would be first and who would be second. I was really impressed by both as debut novels. I liked the characters and setting of Unspoken Name more, but the plot and writing of The Space Between Worlds more. Characters and setting usually trump prose and plot for me, but while I would say I liked Unspoken Name more than The Space Between Worlds, just in terms of personal preference, I would say I'm more impressed by Johnson as an author vs Larkwood. I feel like it's an even more promising debut? So, Micaiah Johnson, K.A.Larkwood, Emily Tesh (she would've probably gone above Larkwood if I'd only read Silver in the Wood, but the sequel was a disappointment), Lindsay Ellis. I am also 40% into Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds, so I expect I will finish, or at least sample, at least one more nominee. Even at this point I know he is going on my list below Emily Tesh, because I've been close to DNFing several times and am generally finding it a chore. I checked back the stats from 2020, since Emily Tesh and Jenn Lyons are repeat nominees, and Emily came in 4th last year and Jenn Lyons last, so I probably don't need to worry about reading Jenn Lyons (although it is one of the few complete books from the Astounding folks in the voter packet, so I will at least try it), but I do hope Emily fares better this year.
24. Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry -- this is not my usual reading fare, but it was mentioned by someone ina Balticon panel and sounded intriguing, so I put a hold on it at the library, and when that hold came in, I set aside the three other books I was reading at the time and basically read this one straight through, except for a break when I needed to finish up a library ebook before it disappeared off my phone. I enjoyed it a lot, and the last three chapters or so made me cry a bunch, but I also feel like I don't need to read more by this author, at least for a while.
From the point that Elsa's Granny died, the book kept giving persistent The Westing Game impressions, which makes sense, because you've got a young girl protagonist being directed from beyond the grave by an old person in a mystery quest, and there's a building full of quirky and flawed characters that she gets to know as a result, and there turn out to be all these connections between all of them, and mysterious people with multiple identities, and after all that the young girl inherits a thing. Granny is really dead, and Elsa is younger than Turtle (though equally precocious). The funny thing is, when I went online to see if other people also found them to be similar, I found different books of Backman's compared to The Westing Game -- both A Man Called Ove and I think Anxious People? -- anyway, it was two different ones.
The real-life stuff in the book was much more interesting to me than the fairy tale interludes from the Land-of-Almost-Awake; those tended to be the places where I was tempted to skim or put the book down instead of reading straight through. SPOILERS from here They do connect up by the end, and that aspect was interesting -- the bereaved psychotherapist as the sea-angel, Britt-Marie as the princess for whom two princes (Alf and Kent) were competing, Ulrika as the girl with the power of No, Ulrika and the green-eyed policewoman as the brave knights, but honestly I'm not sure even those little pieces falling in to place at the end really justified the fairy tale stuff retroactively for me -- they just didn't add enough, besides the overall concept of "Granny's stories were about the people in the house".
I'm not really sure how to talk about this book. The action part of the plot felt really jarring compared to the quest-to-get-to-know-the-neighbors part; I supposed it's meant to, but everything to do with Sam just felt less real and interesting to me. Really the only thing I at all like about that part of the plot is that it sets up Britt-Marie for what to my mind is the biggest Crowning Moment of Awesome in the book, the phrase "We don't beat people to death in htis leaseholders' association" -- which was such an unexpected CMOA, from such an unexpected source, I feel like it almost justifies the Sam stuff. Other than that, really, it's just all characters, and I enjoyed the way Backman writes about them all. Granny in particular was both a hilarious character to follow around/hear about and also plausibly (well, in a larger-than-life way) someone people would both admire/follow around for life AND someone people would be justifiably frustrated by. I particularly liked Elsa's mother, who is kind of a force of nature herself, though in a very different way from Granny (I liked Elsa thinking of them as different kinds of superheroes, like Cyclops and Wolverine, though Ulrika is way cooler than Cyclops), and found the others to be generally poignant and/or entertaining as they were meant to be, through Elsa's eyes if not on their own. Elsa's relationship with Granny is of course central; I especially liked the way they bickered as equals. I also liked Elsa's poignant relationship with her mother, and the rapport she builds with Alf, and the way by the end she's getting to know George and Lissette, the step-parental figures, as people, as opposed to just her parents' new partners -- understanding that George is good at running because he was also different as a kid, discovering a shared love of Star Wars with Lissette. Kent is wonderfully heateable throughout the book, but even he gets a reconciliation at the end, with Alf, and Britt-Marie writing to both of them, which honestly was probably more than he deserved, but it fits the themes of the book, so I didn't mind it.
For the most part I was able to roll with all the crazy shenanigans unfolding, just because Granny was such an over-the-top person, but a couple of real-world considerations did bother me slightly throughout, though that didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book. I had a hard time accepting that Elsa would be so alone and with so little protection at school in a book that was clearly set in the modern world of Wikipedia and all eight Harry Potter movies. Maybe things are different in Sweden? or maybe we've just been lucky, but I felt like the trials she undergoes at school were a couple of decades out of date. The other thing was Elsa feeding chocolate to the wurse, who I therefore really hope is a magical creature and not a huge black dog, given that one of the things I've had drilled into me despite not being a dog owner is that chocolate is very bad for dogs. Which, apparently, is something Backman has addressed on Facebook, LOL.
Elsa is a geeky kid, and that was a fun part of the book. I was pleased to see that OotP was her least favorite Harry Potter book (that's why she's only read it twelve times), but hse lost me when it was revealed she likes the book better than the movie (it is my least favorite HP book, but probably my favorite HP movie).
Quotes:
"the Land-of-Almost-Awake [is] not only real but actually far more real than the world we're in now, where 'everyone is an economist and drinks lactose-free milk and makes a right fuss.'"
Granny playing Monopoly: "Granny steals money from the bank and, when Elsa catches her out, also steals the car so she can skip town."
"The Monster looks a great deal as one does when wishing that people would just go home and filthify their own halls."
"Mum [who is pregnant] insists on packing boxes every night despite being told by both the doctor and George that she should be taking it easy. Mum isn't very good at either -- taking it easy or being told."
"Some [people cross the street and] by demonstratively pretending to be having loud telephone conversations with someone who suddenly gives them different directions and tells them to go the opposite way. That is also what Elsa's dad does sometimes when he's gone the wrong way and he doesn't want strangers to realize he's one of those types who go the wrong way. Elsa's mum never has that problem, because if she goes the wrong way she just keeps going until whoever she was supposed to be meeting has to follow her. Granny used to solve the problem by shouting at the road signs. It varies, how people deal with it."
"You can tell [the footsteps are] Kent's because someone is screaming German into a telephone, the way Nazis speak in American films."
"Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups are generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy -- space exploration, the UN, vaccines, and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and alomost no one is entirely not a shit."
"Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them."
Apparently there's a sort of loose sequel centered on Britt-Marie (Britt-Marie Was Here), with an English translation even, but it appears to have garnered mixed reviews. The other thing I've gleaned from Wikipedia is that Backman is only 40 years old, and I'm honestly surprised -- not only does that seem young for a novelist with a bunch of bestsellers out, but I was also expecting someone older from the themes of this book.
(Random note: As I was filling out the tags on this entry, I realized that for the first time in a loooong while none of the author tags were autofilling -- all new authors in this reading roundup, which doesn't happen very often with me.)
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I've also been following Loki along, and enjoying it so far. Tom Hiddleston is ridiculously charming, and the character is fun (once I was able to completely divorce my expectations of him from the mythological character I love, which finally happened in the first Avengers movie). I don't have any deep thoughts on the show so far but this bit was cute:
Loki: I'd never stab anyone in the back -- that's such a boring form of betrayal!
Mobius: You've literally stabbed people in the back like 50 times.
Loki: Well, I'd never do it again, because it got old!
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1151603.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
cahn and and
cenozoicsynapsid and I were talking about Gailey's Upright Women Wanted and Gailey's work in general, over the course of which thread I introduced
cenozoicsynapsid to "STET", and
cahn posited a cool variation on the motifs of AI and editor's notes on "STET". So, anyway, that's the background. The thing I want to share is this absolutely brilliant piece of IF
cenozoicsynapsid wrote, which is yet another permutation of those motifs: Rephrase? (gen, CNTW, mind the warnings in the tags). I love it as a story and piece of interactive fiction in its own right, AND it functions wonderfully as fix-it fic for "STET" for me, by filling in the twin abysses of plausibility and nuance that were my chief problems with the Gailey story. But i suspect it also works well as "STET" fanfic if one actually liked "STET", because
cenozoicsynapsid is coming from a place of having liked "STET". Anyway, I'm so impressed and delighted that this story/IF exists and hope as many people as possible discover it.
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Nebulas are done, so have some nattering, since I'm actually paying attention to awards this year again.
Novel: I've only read two of the nominees (so far), and am surprised but not displeased that Network Effect won over Piranesi, as that's the order I'm planning on voting for them at the Hugos. Like, Piranesi was really interesting and unusual, but I LOOOOVED Network Effect. The other two Hugo-nominated Nebula nominees are Black Sun and The City We Became, neither of which I'm terribly excited to read.
Novella: Three of the novellas are also Hugo-nominated and thus I've also read them. Ring Shout won over Finna and Riot Baby, and it would also be at the top of my list over those two, so I'm pleased with the results (and would be reasonably pleased if Ring Shout won the Hugos, even though it's not the one I'm rooting for).
Novelette: I've started working through the novelettes now that the Hugo packet is out, but have only read the Pinsker one so far, as the one I had most looked forward to reading. I liked it, and am also happy to see it win on principle. (This is another 3/6 overlap for the Hugos and the Nebulas; the other Hugo-nominated ones that the Pinsker won over are "Burn, etc." and "The Pill"
Short Story: Haven't read any of these yet, but another 3/6 overlap ("Badass Moms", "A Guide for Working Breeds", and "Open House") and "Open House on Haunted Hill" won.
Andre Norton (Lodestar equivalent): 3 titles overlap with the Hugos (there were only 5 nominees for the Nebula), Raybearer, Elatsoe, and the winner, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I'm actually not sure how my Lodestar award ballot would be ordered today -- I liked all the entries I've read (most of which were not on the Nebula), so I don't have any conclusions about the Nebula win, except that I'm happy for Ursula Vernon.
Drama presentation combines short and long form, so it's a bit hard to compare, but there are 3 individual episodes on the Nebula list, two of which, The Good Place finale (which won) and the Expanse one, overlap with the Hugo short form nominees, and the third being a different Mandalorian episode than the two nominated for a Hugo. Birds of Prey and The Old Guard overlap the Hugo long form ballot, but there's nothing to be surmised from that, since it was an individual episode that won. I guess the chances of The Good Place finale winning the short form category are pretty solid, though -- I haven't decided whether it or the She-Ra finale are going at the top of my list, but it was a pretty good finale, and a The Good Place episode won the last three years running -- over mostly the same competition (The Expanse, Doctor Who, and The Mandalorian in the most recent year, and I doubt a lot of the Hugo voters have watched She-Ra...)
I also watched the Nebula Awards presentation/show, since it was streaming on YouTube. The show part I could've done without, though the idea was cute, but the presentations and acceptance speeches were really cool and well worth the two hours.
I enjoyed both Tobias Buckell's introduction of Nalo Hopkinson for the Grand Master award and her speech, which was very unflinching about the obstacles she has faced (health and otherwise), and also really enjoyed watching Connie Willis accept the service to SFWA award (I've previously seen her in YouTube clips of video from in-person cons, which really were not very good, so it was cool to get a good look at her for once). John Wiswell, the short story winner, gave a really lovely speech that several other winning authors referenced throughout the ceremony, talking about how his winning story was rejected several times as a way of encouraging other writers. I've not read his work before, but he looked super familiar in the video -- I must've seen him on a panel at one of the virtual cons, I guess? -- ah, yes, he was on the Balticon "Advancing the Story Without Trauma" panel. One of the highlights for me was Ursula Vernon's acceptance speech, which included such gems as "I started this novel because I wanted to write off a kitchen-aid mixer as a business expense" and (about having written 'Wizard's Guide' years ago but being unable to publish it until 2020) "Suddenly everyone was into sourdough starters and distrusting the government. This book's time had come.", but especially the rooster crowing throughout her pre-recorded speech and her closing with "I apologize for all the roosters in the background, but there's nothing I can do about that because roosters are like that." Both Sarah Pinsker and Martha Wells seemed adorably flustered by their wins (despite being repeat winners at this point), and Adam Savage (of Earth) as the presenter for Best Novel (which he did VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY) was also really neat. I also enjoyed P.Djeli Clark's speech, and thought the bit of AAVE code switching was very cool, just from a how code-switching works perspective -- I'm not sure I've seen such a clear case of switching between formal speech and dialect in a formal setting before. I was also impressed that The Good Place finale win actually had Michael Schur and a special effects guy (sorta) accepting their Ray Bradbury award, and their bit was actually REALLY funny, I thought. I wonder what they'll pull out for the Hugo win, since I assume that one's nearly a shoe-in... Even the one award that I had absolutely no interest/horse in the race for, the video game one, the acceptance speech ended up being interesting to me because I had not realized that the creator of Hades, Greg Kasavin, was a fellow Soviet ex-pat, and turns out he's also a fellow Berkeley grad, and close enough to me in age that we would've intersected at Cal, so that's kind of neat. (The video game does look gorgeous, too.)
My final comment to Best Chat was "On a scale of GRRM to John Picacio, I give it a solid 8" and I stand by that -- this was a really nice awards show, and only a little bit longer than it needed to be. (Aydrea Walden is clearly multi-talented and also super-pretty, so it's not like I'm complaining about the amount of time she was on screen, but I definitely enjoyed the speeches more than the filler, so I would still have appreciated a tighter show.)
Speaking of getting to experience things online that would not be an option if not for Covid, I had a really great time attending Balticon panels live Memorial Day weekend and catching up on others after the fact (most are up on YouTube), and should really write that up at some point, but that's not going to make it into this post...
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22. Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys -- I was seeing this book pop up on the awards circuit (including as one of the Lodestar Nominees), but was not too enthusiastic about reading it -- it didn't sound like my thing, what with being what sounded like a ghost romance. So I was going to get around to it eventually, maybe, but then
aome read it and liked it a lot, and I moved it up my queue and put a hold on it at the library. When I started it, I thought again that it wasn't going to work for me: I found Yadriel (the POV character) pretty boring, and this is minor but kept tripping me up -- the use of "brujx" as the gender-inclusive alternative to brujo/bruja just kept throwing me out of the story (I've gotten used to "Latinx", though that also took me some time, 'cos it's just not very pronounceable, but that "jx" combo is just not something my brain can deal with, apparently, because this effect persisted until the very end of the novel. Side note: this was an interesting article on the lack of general adoption of Latinx (and related approaches) as a term in the community it is meant to describe). So, anyway, first couple of chapters were not doing much for me, but then Julian showed up and charmed me, and the book went much faster and more enjoyably after that.
Julian, and Maritza, whom I also started liking a lot more once she had someone besides Yadriel to interact with, really jazzed up the book for me, where Yadriel-centric stuff before that just felt issue-y. The book is still very earnest about representation overall: Yadriel's transness, the LGBT+ rep with Julian's friends, of course everything to do with Latinx representation (and I really liked that the group was shown to be non-monolithic even within Yadriel's family/brujx community), and the intersection with things like class, immigration status, etc. -- plus I think there's some non-highlighted neuroatypical rep, too -- Julian definitely read as ADHD to me, and apparently that was intentional. But where Yadriel seems to spend a lot of time brooding -- not just about being trans and his family not really getting what that means (even though they're trying, to various degrees), and his brujx culture no accepting that fully, but just in general -- it's a part of his personality, so he broods and worries a lot, which is understandable -- especially considering that he lost his mother within the year; like, he gets to see her once a year for a couple of days because brujx spirits can come back on El Dia de la Muerte, but it's obviously still a huge loss -- but it just wasn't very engaging -- I much preferred Julian's much more easy-going way of being, and it added up to a pretty nice balance.
Because I found Julian pretty much a delight. He is definitely not perfect, and can certainly be A Lot, but he is very loveable and just, like, nice to hang out with over the course of the book. There are really funny moments, like when they're using Maritza's dogs to try and find Julian's body (he's the ~ghost boy) and the dog finds instead the tacos Julian dropped when he was attacked; and the matter-of-fact way he is both open about who he is and accepts it about others (e.g. when he tells Yadriel he is gay, when Maritza corrects him about Yadriel's gender, or when instead of the peer pressure Yadriel expects when he tells Julian he doesn't drink Julian's reaction is just "oh, my bad" and moving on), which I really liked as a character trait; and the quieter, poignant moments when he talks about his father, and how he doesn't use Spanish because that was their language together and feels too intimate for anything else (which felt very plausible to me as a bilingual) -- and then starting to use it with Yadriel in particularly charged moments (which is never remarked on, but really speaks for itself).
Julian pretty much carried the book for me, but the Julian/Yadriel romance still does not actually work for me. I think I might just be too old for YA romance at this point -- not the YA books themselves, which I still really enjoy, just the romance part. I think it's to do with my children now being at that stage, and I just can't see it from the POV of the teens anymore. Like Yadriel and Julian were on their "last-day-on-earth" date/adventure thing, and all I could think of was, "don't ignore your father's texts, kid!" and "seriously, dude, how are you going to expain the car if you get caught?" But also, like, they've known each other for just a couple of days, albeit a very intense couple of days for both of them, so this suddenly being a relationship that trumps all other connections was annoying for me to see. Not even implausible, because teenagers in love, but just sigh-inducing.
Because I really liked the other connections the boys have: Julian's group of friends, his complicated relationship with his older brother, Yadriel's large family and community connections, which can be welcoming and stifling at once. That part, I thought, was quite well done, the family that tries but doesn't always get it or believe his identity is real, especially some of the scenes with his grandmother, and his father when he slips up and deadnames Yadriel. I thought Julian was a bit hard on Yadriel's family, but could also see Juian being angry on Yadriel's behalf, and Yadriel's own conflicted feelings -- he loves them but resents that he has to keep explaining himself -- worked for me very well.
There was also the SPOILERS ~Ancient Forbidden Magic~ plot, which was not the strongest part of the book, but I guess it needed a plot beyond the ghost romance. I noticed the missing jaguar knives as a Significant Detail from the first time Lita was mentioned looking for them, and figured they were involved in the disappearances, and also figured out that Yadriel's uncle was the one up to the shady dark magic stuff while Yadriel was still assuming his uncle was the only one who understood him and was speaking up for Yadriel to his father. The resolution, where Yadriel is just acting in self-defense and still tries to save his uncle and it's the jaguar spirit Cabriz has summoned that drags him down to hell was appropriately Disney villain death. What I actually had not expected (though in retrospect should absolutely have done) was Julian turning out to be still alive and thus possible to restore to life and a full-fledged version of romance -- I should have expected that, since anything else would've felt like burying your gays, but at the same time, it seems odd to start off with a ghost romance and end up with the two boys just fully alive and none the worse for wear, not a single bittersweet limitations between them. (I'd been expecting something like Santa Muerte granting Julian the ability to come back on the Day of the Dead even though he's not a brujo, so they would have some time together, or some kind of barriers or restrictions. But at the same time I definitely understand why Thomas wanted to give a story with a gay trans Latinx protagonist a happy ending rather than a bittersweet or melancholy one.
Last couple of random notes: One thing I had not expected and found neat was the commentary on class, although I appreciated it more in those scenes where Yadriel was not literally remarking to himself that oops, he was being classist. Like, Yadriel and Julian's different views on the value of a college education, and Julian being allowed to say that, hey, college is not the only path or necessarily the best path, and his brother who became a mechanic via an apprenticeship process is doing just fine. My favorite bit like that, though, was Julian never having been on a plane, and while Yadriel feels weird about his own rare plane trips to Cuba being a sign of privilege, Julian being like, you'd never get me to go on one of those horrible death traps. Another thing I really enjoyed was how non-homogenious the Latinx communities Yadriel and Julian interacted with were -- the different dishes and treats from different branches of the family, the different accents in Spanish -- it made the backdrop so much richer.
The library yanked my e-book back before I had a chance to transcribe the quotes I'd highlighted, so this is a somewhat vaguer write-up than usual, but I enjoyed the book overall, more than I'd expected to. The author's next thing seems to be yet another Peter Pan retelling, which is a subgenre I have no interest in, but I'll be curious to see what Thomas publishes after that.
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 2/6 (though really it's 2.5). There is no huge gulf between A Deadly Education, Cemetery Boys, and the half of Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking that I've read so far -- I liked them all but did not love them. Of the two I've finished, I would rank A Deadly Education above Cemetery Boys, because while I have quibbles with both books, I did like El a lot and find her an interesting character, and there were no sections of that book that dragged for me the way Cemetery Boys sometimes did.
23. Lindsay Ellis, Axiom's End -- I'd been vaguely curious about it, despite somewhat lackluster reviews, since I really like Lindsay's videos. Not sure I would've gotten around to reading it, but she's one of the Astounding(/Campbell) nominees this year, and it seemed like a good reason to take the plunge. Well... like other readers, I'm also underwhelmed, which makes me a bit sad, because I really do enjoy her YouTube stuff -- including videos on things I absolutely do not care about, like Phantom of the Opera or Transformers, and I always feel a little sad when I don't enjoy the fiction of someone whose blog or personality or whatever I've enjoyed. I think there's maybe two things at work here, in my disappointment: Even though the story sounded like something I should enjoy -- First Contact, finding a common language with an alin species, an Enemy Mine sort of setup -- I've loved these elements in many things from "Story of Your Life" to The True Meaning of Smekday -- it looks like the elements of that Ellis is interested in exploring are not the elements that appeal to me. And less subjectively, I think she's trying for some ambitious things here, and does not have the skill to pull it off effectively -- which, I wouldn't expect it of a first novel, but there's probably a reason most first novels don't attempt stuff at this level. The rest is spoilery, so let's dive in:
The not-my-kinkness of the setup took up a lot of the page-time: I was really not interested in the government coverup stuff, and preferred the stretches where Cora and Ampersand were left alone to bond. There's the attempt to show the leaked First Contact having an effect on the economy and creating a sort of alt-history for the 2007 economic crash, but honestly I did not find that the blog post or articles included interstitially to be adding much to the book. There's also a really pronounced gory-ness to the proceedings which I did not think added anything to the book -- Cora undergoes a lot of injuries, which are described in detail, and very unpleasant medical procedures to repair them, and when it comes to stuff like that, I feel that less is more. And then there's the dubcon alien marriage ("fusion bond"), which... I knew about Cora and Ampersand's relationship, in abstraction, doing in, and that doesn't bother me as such. In fact, one of the most effective aspects of the book for me were the times of their physical contact -- rough and coercive/antagonistic when they first meet, then carefully ascertaining consent in both directions, and moving beyond needing to do that by the end -- the awkward cuddling with Cora hugging his synthetic carapace and him mechanically stroking her hair was legit adorable. My problem with the dubcon marriage is not at all that he is a cyborg alien spider thing, it's that he's a cyborg alien spider thing who keeps lying to her by ommission -- that's the part that's totally not my kink.
Now the ambitious-but-not-quite-there part: There's just A Lot going on, and it's for the most part filtered through Cora, who does not understand a lot of it for a long time. There are alien faction politics and personal history that becomes revealed very gradually, but so gradually and at such a remove, that I really could not care about it. A lot of the action is witnessed by Cora as aliens are chirping at each other in a language she can't understand, or translated imperfectly through space Google Translate. Which, language barriers with aliens are cool stuff, and maybe this would've worked better for me if I felt closer to Cora's own POV. But Cora's POV also felt weirdly detached to me -- like, it's a narrator's words we're getting, not her own, is the sense I got, which I find a less immersive way of doing third person, and kind of pointless when the narrator doesn't have anything interesting going on, which this one did not. So I was watching incomprehensible stuff unfold over the shoulder of someone who did not understand it and did not have terribly interesting thoughts of her own, and it all felt kind of pointlessly opaque. And when they do manage to communicate, it actually felt like it was happening too easily after all the barriers that had been established -- like there's no way the translator tablet would work this smoothly at translating alien speech back and forth, I don't care how advanced amygdaline technology is. I mean, I know it's a conceit to make the story happen, but so much time is spent underlining how difficult it is for the two species to communicate that when it turns out to be quite easy, it feels like it's breaking the rules of its own universe.
Besides Cora's POV, which I found lackluster, there are some other writing aspects that I think are probably just a sign that Lindsay Ellis hasn't done THIS kind of writing much: The pacing felt kind of haphazard -- nothing really pulled me along, the jumping around did not feel natural even though there's an in-universe explanation for Cora to be whisked from place to place and to black out and then wake up suddenly elsewhere. I felt like the entire middle section of the novel was just stuff happening one thing after another rather than building meaningfully to something -- other than Cora's relationship with Ampersand, which does develop nicely, and some realizations about what's going on, neither of which have much to do with the various attacks and flitting from place to place, I didn't feel like there was a plot arc. Like, what was the point of the whole thing with the Genome if it/she was just going to die after all that, and die pretty pointlessly? There's also a weird reliance on describing people by referencing actors ("Colonel Keith, an older gentleman who seemed to Cora what Keanu Reeves might look like if he had aged twenty years, gained fifty pounds, and lost all his charisma", "She reminded Cora of Meg Ryan"), which did nothing to make them memorable to me.
There were some things I enjoyed, of course. I mentioned already that I liked the tentative but growing rapproachment between Cora and Ampersand. I do like how alien these aliens are, not human, not cuddly, but still managing to come across as people. I enjoyed Cora's creative translation of Ampersand's word to the authorities ("I am relieved that your government has refrained from slaughtering this group." "He thanks you for your hospitality." or "How do you know human language?" "Experimentation on human subjects." "Research."). But I wish there had been more for me to like.
Quote:
"If these ETIs really do exist, most of us would have to admit that they have terrible timing. Humanity is fractured, bellicose, paranoid. It's the cosmological equivalent of having a guest come to the door when you're in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight with your spouse, there are lines of coke on the coffee table, and your pants are down around your ankles" -- 'quoting' an article by Kaveh Mazandarani (who is apparently a major character in the sequel). I think it's not a coincidence that my favorite writing in this book was the in-universe nonfiction articles.
On a final note: Some time after I'd finished the book, YouTube helpfully reminded me about this Axiom's End Q&A Lindsay had done back in December, and I rewatched it with the knowledge of the book, and, well, it looks like there's a lot of cool stuff intended to be in there that wasn't coming through in the text or that we haven't gotten to yet. It doesn't make me like Axiom's End itself more -- I still think "it was alright" is about where I am, but it does make me more curious to check out the sequel, which Lindsay says was much easier to write for her, and see if maybe that one works better for met.
But really the video just strengthened my conclusion that I would rather watch Lindsay Ellis talk on YouTube for the equivalent amount of time -- even about Transformers or Phantom of the Opera -- than read a book by her.
25. Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds -- I first heard about this author and book via
_profiterole_'s glowing review, and then saw the author's very distinctive name on the Astounding list and was like, oh, hey, a reason to read that book I was curious about, and then saw her on a Balticon panel, and was impressed by how wonderfully she was holding her own on a panel with more experienced authors and generally enjoyed hearing what she had to say, which took me from "eh, I'll wait for the Hugo packet" to putting the book on hold at the library as soon as the panel wrapped up (good thing, too, as there's only an excerpt in the packet). And almost as soon as I started reading it, I found myself surprised that the book isn't on more awards lists, because I think it's good enough to be on a shortlist.
The premise is maybe not wildly original, but what's done with it is, to me, really cool, with a lot of identity shenanigans and divergent multiverses stuff that I like: Blurb-level premise is, travel between multiverses is discovered and commercialized. Objects can be brought over with no problem, but in order for humans to travel from one universe to another, the version of them on the world they're traveling to can't be alive, or the blowback will kill the traveler. (Also, travel is only possible among worlds that are pretty close in how events unfolded, on the macro level, otherwise you can't reach them. Which explains why everyone has counterparts that need to be kept track of, rather than being, like, populated by lizard people or sentient otadstools or something.) This means that "traverser" springs up as a new job -- people who can travel to a lot of worlds because they are dead in most universes except Earth Zero -- mostly people from the rough enclaves, who had a lot of chances to die, or people who've beaten very long odds on diseases that should've killed them, stuff like that. So that's the basic premise: Cara is a traverses who is dead on 372 out of 380 worlds, and her "rarity" makes her valuable for the first time in her life. For a brief time, she is sure, because the company that invented multiverse travel is working on automating data delivery, and that will render traversers obsolete. I was sold on that premise already, because it's a cool setup for multiverse heists, but then stuff gets even more interesting with all kinds of identity stuff. MAJOR SPOILERS from here!
A little further into the book, we learn that Cara is not actually Caramenta of Earth Zero, adopted into the Ruralite religion and morally upright to the point of total repression: she is Caralee from Earth 22, who took Caramenta's place when 0!Cara was sent to Earth 22 and died from the blowback because 22!Cara was not dead. And eventually we learn that this was not a coincidence but something set up by the head of the company, Adam Bosch, who's got identity secrets of his own. Caralee living her dead parallel self's life was both neatly foreshadowed and neatly done, and the way this impacts her relationships on Earth Zero was also full of cool bits -- that she and sister Esther are much closer than Caramenta and Esther had been, that Caramenta's internalized homophobia (as she's trying to out-Ruralite the Ruralites to try to show she belongs there) is the source of the tension (and mutual pining from afar) between Cara and Dell, the way Caralee's history with Nik-Nik on Earth 22 informs her reactions to him on Earth Zero -- it's all really nicely done, I thought. And then there's her traveling to earth 175 and meeting the versions of the people she knows there -- Nik-Nik the Ruralite younger brother instead of ruthless emperor of Ashtown, Esther, herself, and of course Adranik the emperor, who she learns is the same person as the kindly CEO of the multiverse travel company whom she admires, Adam Bosch. It's neat to see glimpses of the people Cara knows on other worlds, too, the Ashtown Dell, the different lives and endings for Cara herself (like the Caralee on Earth 255, who was adopted by a Wiley City couple, because she "was probably just a shit climber", thinks protagonist Cara) and her mother -- I just really like getting glimpses of this stuff.
And on top of all the delicious identity shenanigans, there's also a neat corporate thriller sort of plot (although that part felt a little rushed compared to the time spent on Earth 175 and the setup): Adam Bosch killing off potential competitors across the universe while buying them out and driving them out of the industry on Earth Zero; first Caramenta and then Caralee getting sent to an earth where he version is still alive being part of a plan; Adam's newly announced business venture relying on simply killing off duplicates in other worlds so that rich people can travel there as a tourist stunt (not the most sophisticated evil CEO plan, but also a pretty plausible one; the break-in into Adam's mansion; and I really liked the revenge Cara comes up with, the slow death via Lot's Wife, counting on Adam rerouting his energies toward leaving a legacy (nicely foreshadowed with her collection, too). The happy ending felt REALLY rushed, not in a way that I think is a flaw of the book, necessarily, because the variety of possible endings you glimpse comes through in a fairy-tale-spare sort of way, but too quick for me to feel any emotional payoff from it. Although I'm not sure I would've gotten much of an emotional payoff anyway, because:
The characters are not the kind of characters I fall in love with, but they're solid for the purposes of the book -- they carry their weight in the narrative, is how I'd put it, I think, and I enjoyed spending time with all of them: Cara the consummate survivor, aloof unknowable Dell, Jean the grizzled mentor, flashy dangerous Nik-Nik (and the very unlike 175! version of him), Adam/Adra the evil overlord, overtly terrible in one universe and avuncular and still terrible in the other, and Esther, who I guess is the pure 'outsourced' heart to Cara's survival-first hardship-born morality. They're mostly archetypes, I guess, but the relationships between them feel real -- the love between Cara and Esther, even with them both knowing they're meeting as strangers not sisters who grew up together, the complicated tangles between Cara and Dell, Cara and Nik-Nik, Nik-Nik and Adra/Adam, Jean's mentorship going so far as to save Cara's life by sacrificing his own and her being moved to hands-on revenge rather than simply whistleblowing by his murder -- it all worked for me as it needed to, and I didn't feel like I was missing any depth.
One other thing I liked about this book is, it seems to be from among this newer crop of books which no longer feel like they need to put a flashing marquee around "LOOK HOW DIVERSE MY CHARACTERS ARE". The main characters are POCs, the protagonist is queer and the romance is a f/f one, but the book is not about these things in any simplistic way even though awareness of them pervades it. But it's refreshingly non-monolithic: Caramenta's internalized homophobia is the reason for the book-long misunderstanding between Caralee and Dell, but while Caramenta is presumably acting out of a desire to fit perfectly inside the Ruralite religion, we see that it's not actually mandated by the religion: Esther, raised in it, has no issue with same sex relationships. And while darker skin is assiciated with Ashtown, where people are out unprotected from the sun, and pale skin with Wiley City, the more interesting meditation is on how all that intersects with the way people choose to present themselves and are perceived as they cross those boundaries: Cara dressing for Ashtown as a visitor from Wiley City vs dressing for a heist in the Wiles with the Ashtown runners, the way the same man looks different when he's an emperor of Ashtown vs an upstanding Wiley City CEO, or an emperor vs a Ruralite. Another thing I found interesting is the way it's stressed a couple of times that Wiley City is a socialist paradise -- to its citizens: basic income, guaranteed housing, free sophisticated medical care, job training and counseling, public parks -- while walling itself off from the subsistence existence beyond its walls (except for day tripping and quaint shopping experiences, or euthensasia), and expelling those non-Wiley-ites it doesn't need anymore as soon as it's done with them -- "They save all their apathy for the world right outside their walls". It's just a refreshing amount of nuance vs the kind of thing I've seen too much of in the recent decade, which was along the lines of "plucky band of queer POC heroes with progressive ideals vs evil white cis dude capitalists" -- like, life's generally more complicated than that, and I find that sort of reductiveness deeply boring.
I was also impressed by the writing, which is really lovely and, mmm, feels mature for a debut novel. Quotes:
"She smiles, less like she thinks I'm funny and more like she wants to prove she knows how."
"I'm not sure how many nuclear bombs it would take to change the song of a place until we can't hear it anymore, but we lost 382 over the course of an hour."
"There is something gratifying about going places where I'm dead and touching things I was never even meant to see."
"this too-pretty runner reminds me that I grew up wanting to lick silver teeth."
Esther: "You shouldn't feed my vanity. It's my worst trait."
Cara: "That you think vanity is your worst trait is a sign of your vanity."
"Because that's what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it's in someone else."
"a blood tide was crawling from her mouth across the sand"
About her Wiley City boyfriend: "The way he could count on me to never be afraid was its own aphrodisiac to an only son who'd been raised sheltered and fragile. I liked his fragility, how easily shocked he was, how he never thought to hide it. [...] I do miss Marius, but like I would miss a pet bird -- something fragile that trusted me to hold it in my hand, heartbeat against my palm, ribs vulnerable to the whims of fingertips. Maybe it's just the power I miss."
"Wiley City is bad at age anyway. They see a fourteen-year-old runner outside the wall and say, A suspicious man spotted near the border, but when a thirty-three-year-old Wileyite murders his girlfriend it's Good boy goes bad."
"Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don't know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if our cleverness would outlive your desperation." (I really, really like this quote. The first part is definitely not a novel sentiment, but having both parts of it there, I'm actually not sure I've come across that before, and I like that it shows both sides.)
"'Why, Dell, you sound exactly like an ashtowner.' She takes it as an insult, which I take as an insult."
About early multiverse travel and discovering that you can't send a person into a world where their doppleganger is alive: "The scientists said, We did not test it enough. We should have expected a backlash. And the spiritual said, We did not petition enough. We should have expected a sacrifice."
"When I told [Nik-Nik] the truth, that I was doing it to remind myself who he really was, to keep myself from loving him, he'd looked... touched. Like he didn't think it would be hard for anyone not to love him. It had more to do with me being broken than him being worthy, but he still kissed me before he left me in the mud. He still went home expecting me to follow. And if I hadn't found my own dead body in the sand that day, I would have."
"I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it."
"Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his familyu and force them to agree you did not."
Nik-Nik's mother: "She named her second son happy, hoping it would be true. She knew the cost of an easy life, and the uselessness of a long one."
"As if not dying is a skill Ive honed, not just blind luck."
"'that makes it worse,' [Esther] says. 'Being bought, not forced.' the words of someone who's never been forced."
Jean, when Cara accuses him of killing competitors for Adam: "I've killed more for worse men, with far less reason. [...] By the time the scope of what we would need to do became clear, there was a department devoted to the... unpleasantness of maintaining a technological monopoly."
"I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety."
Exlee: "You will eat because I'm charging you for the food, and you're still too much Ahstown to waste that."
"because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won't let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead."
"[Dell] is staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to makr the constellations. It's not that you can't make out a shape, it's that you can make out so many shapes you'll never know which one is right."
"Tonight is for living like I'm still on Earth 22, for feeling every ounce of pain, and converting it into rage. Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could."
"Earth 255 me had a child and named it after the mother she doesn't remember enough to resent"
Hugo roundup: Astounding -- 4/6. I actually had to think a long time about this one and where Micaiah Johnson vs K.A.Larkwood would rank for me, i.e. who would be first and who would be second. I was really impressed by both as debut novels. I liked the characters and setting of Unspoken Name more, but the plot and writing of The Space Between Worlds more. Characters and setting usually trump prose and plot for me, but while I would say I liked Unspoken Name more than The Space Between Worlds, just in terms of personal preference, I would say I'm more impressed by Johnson as an author vs Larkwood. I feel like it's an even more promising debut? So, Micaiah Johnson, K.A.Larkwood, Emily Tesh (she would've probably gone above Larkwood if I'd only read Silver in the Wood, but the sequel was a disappointment), Lindsay Ellis. I am also 40% into Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds, so I expect I will finish, or at least sample, at least one more nominee. Even at this point I know he is going on my list below Emily Tesh, because I've been close to DNFing several times and am generally finding it a chore. I checked back the stats from 2020, since Emily Tesh and Jenn Lyons are repeat nominees, and Emily came in 4th last year and Jenn Lyons last, so I probably don't need to worry about reading Jenn Lyons (although it is one of the few complete books from the Astounding folks in the voter packet, so I will at least try it), but I do hope Emily fares better this year.
24. Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry -- this is not my usual reading fare, but it was mentioned by someone ina Balticon panel and sounded intriguing, so I put a hold on it at the library, and when that hold came in, I set aside the three other books I was reading at the time and basically read this one straight through, except for a break when I needed to finish up a library ebook before it disappeared off my phone. I enjoyed it a lot, and the last three chapters or so made me cry a bunch, but I also feel like I don't need to read more by this author, at least for a while.
From the point that Elsa's Granny died, the book kept giving persistent The Westing Game impressions, which makes sense, because you've got a young girl protagonist being directed from beyond the grave by an old person in a mystery quest, and there's a building full of quirky and flawed characters that she gets to know as a result, and there turn out to be all these connections between all of them, and mysterious people with multiple identities, and after all that the young girl inherits a thing. Granny is really dead, and Elsa is younger than Turtle (though equally precocious). The funny thing is, when I went online to see if other people also found them to be similar, I found different books of Backman's compared to The Westing Game -- both A Man Called Ove and I think Anxious People? -- anyway, it was two different ones.
The real-life stuff in the book was much more interesting to me than the fairy tale interludes from the Land-of-Almost-Awake; those tended to be the places where I was tempted to skim or put the book down instead of reading straight through. SPOILERS from here They do connect up by the end, and that aspect was interesting -- the bereaved psychotherapist as the sea-angel, Britt-Marie as the princess for whom two princes (Alf and Kent) were competing, Ulrika as the girl with the power of No, Ulrika and the green-eyed policewoman as the brave knights, but honestly I'm not sure even those little pieces falling in to place at the end really justified the fairy tale stuff retroactively for me -- they just didn't add enough, besides the overall concept of "Granny's stories were about the people in the house".
I'm not really sure how to talk about this book. The action part of the plot felt really jarring compared to the quest-to-get-to-know-the-neighbors part; I supposed it's meant to, but everything to do with Sam just felt less real and interesting to me. Really the only thing I at all like about that part of the plot is that it sets up Britt-Marie for what to my mind is the biggest Crowning Moment of Awesome in the book, the phrase "We don't beat people to death in htis leaseholders' association" -- which was such an unexpected CMOA, from such an unexpected source, I feel like it almost justifies the Sam stuff. Other than that, really, it's just all characters, and I enjoyed the way Backman writes about them all. Granny in particular was both a hilarious character to follow around/hear about and also plausibly (well, in a larger-than-life way) someone people would both admire/follow around for life AND someone people would be justifiably frustrated by. I particularly liked Elsa's mother, who is kind of a force of nature herself, though in a very different way from Granny (I liked Elsa thinking of them as different kinds of superheroes, like Cyclops and Wolverine, though Ulrika is way cooler than Cyclops), and found the others to be generally poignant and/or entertaining as they were meant to be, through Elsa's eyes if not on their own. Elsa's relationship with Granny is of course central; I especially liked the way they bickered as equals. I also liked Elsa's poignant relationship with her mother, and the rapport she builds with Alf, and the way by the end she's getting to know George and Lissette, the step-parental figures, as people, as opposed to just her parents' new partners -- understanding that George is good at running because he was also different as a kid, discovering a shared love of Star Wars with Lissette. Kent is wonderfully heateable throughout the book, but even he gets a reconciliation at the end, with Alf, and Britt-Marie writing to both of them, which honestly was probably more than he deserved, but it fits the themes of the book, so I didn't mind it.
For the most part I was able to roll with all the crazy shenanigans unfolding, just because Granny was such an over-the-top person, but a couple of real-world considerations did bother me slightly throughout, though that didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book. I had a hard time accepting that Elsa would be so alone and with so little protection at school in a book that was clearly set in the modern world of Wikipedia and all eight Harry Potter movies. Maybe things are different in Sweden? or maybe we've just been lucky, but I felt like the trials she undergoes at school were a couple of decades out of date. The other thing was Elsa feeding chocolate to the wurse, who I therefore really hope is a magical creature and not a huge black dog, given that one of the things I've had drilled into me despite not being a dog owner is that chocolate is very bad for dogs. Which, apparently, is something Backman has addressed on Facebook, LOL.
Elsa is a geeky kid, and that was a fun part of the book. I was pleased to see that OotP was her least favorite Harry Potter book (that's why she's only read it twelve times), but hse lost me when it was revealed she likes the book better than the movie (it is my least favorite HP book, but probably my favorite HP movie).
Quotes:
"the Land-of-Almost-Awake [is] not only real but actually far more real than the world we're in now, where 'everyone is an economist and drinks lactose-free milk and makes a right fuss.'"
Granny playing Monopoly: "Granny steals money from the bank and, when Elsa catches her out, also steals the car so she can skip town."
"The Monster looks a great deal as one does when wishing that people would just go home and filthify their own halls."
"Mum [who is pregnant] insists on packing boxes every night despite being told by both the doctor and George that she should be taking it easy. Mum isn't very good at either -- taking it easy or being told."
"Some [people cross the street and] by demonstratively pretending to be having loud telephone conversations with someone who suddenly gives them different directions and tells them to go the opposite way. That is also what Elsa's dad does sometimes when he's gone the wrong way and he doesn't want strangers to realize he's one of those types who go the wrong way. Elsa's mum never has that problem, because if she goes the wrong way she just keeps going until whoever she was supposed to be meeting has to follow her. Granny used to solve the problem by shouting at the road signs. It varies, how people deal with it."
"You can tell [the footsteps are] Kent's because someone is screaming German into a telephone, the way Nazis speak in American films."
"Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups are generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy -- space exploration, the UN, vaccines, and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and alomost no one is entirely not a shit."
"Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them."
Apparently there's a sort of loose sequel centered on Britt-Marie (Britt-Marie Was Here), with an English translation even, but it appears to have garnered mixed reviews. The other thing I've gleaned from Wikipedia is that Backman is only 40 years old, and I'm honestly surprised -- not only does that seem young for a novelist with a bunch of bestsellers out, but I was also expecting someone older from the themes of this book.
(Random note: As I was filling out the tags on this entry, I realized that for the first time in a loooong while none of the author tags were autofilling -- all new authors in this reading roundup, which doesn't happen very often with me.)
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I've also been following Loki along, and enjoying it so far. Tom Hiddleston is ridiculously charming, and the character is fun (once I was able to completely divorce my expectations of him from the mythological character I love, which finally happened in the first Avengers movie). I don't have any deep thoughts on the show so far but this bit was cute:
Loki: I'd never stab anyone in the back -- that's such a boring form of betrayal!
Mobius: You've literally stabbed people in the back like 50 times.
Loki: Well, I'd never do it again, because it got old!
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1151603.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).