fictionary update #226: adventures in fantasy
I was considering what these book all have in common with each other, aside from my having read them in the last few weeks. They are all fantasy, in their various ways. They don't all have maps or dragons or even orphans, but all of them do involve the loss of a close family member. Again, in their various ways. However, that didn't make a catchy blog post title... and also seemed a bit misleading, too.
*
I read - and reread - the Narnia books when I was a growing up. I read Lewis’s Space trilogy in high school and since then I’ve read some of his essays and at least one book about Lewis himself. I’ve had nebulous intentions of reading more by Lewis for years. I finally read Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold and it surpassed my expectations.
Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, Orual, who sets out to write about her relationship with her sister and her complaints against the gods. It’s a story about love and (in)justice. All I knew beforehand about the Cupid and Psyche myth was that it had similarities to East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Beauty and the Beast. Some of the narrative beats were familiar, but not very many. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods. I have no husband or child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.
Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write.
Till We Have Faces is surprising, powerful and occasionally heartbreaking. Orual is fierce her in love and anger (and in bitterness, too) and her relationships are complex, often more so than is first apparent. She’s not so much an unreliable narrator as a biased one, and I found it really interesting how that plays out in the end. Also interesting is all the ways in which Orual does not conform to conventional ideas of womanhood - not as a woman of Glome nor as the protagonist of novel written in the 1950s.
(Maybe she’s even surprising and unconventional by modern standards? I don’t know, I’d want to read the book again, and carefully, before making that sort of claim.)
I was a little amused to look through reviews and see Till We Have Faces has been praised for not having the overt Christianity that the reviewer objected to in the Narnia books and for its Christian perspective.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Nadia May. It was excellent.
*
The City in the Lake is a coming-of-age story written in a style that reminded me less of Rachel Neumeier’s others novels and much more of Patricia A. McKillip, and maybe Robin McKinley.
In the City, the Prince disappears. Meanwhile, on the other side of the great forest, Timou’s father, the mage Kapoen, leaves for the City and does not return.
This is lovely. There’s a dreamlike quality to parts of it, but at its heart, it is very real and emotionally relatable - this story is about losing (and finding) family members. Her father had not wanted her with him; he had left her behind-no doubt for very good reasons. Although, Timou thought now, a little more fiercely than was really comfortable, he might have explained to her what those were.
In flight from her own thoughts, Timou curled into her blanket, leaned her back against the great bole of a tree, and let her mind slip through its deep quiet existence until she could forget that she was small and human, and dream with the tree its slow circular dreams.
*
Neumeier’s Winter of Ice and Iron is a tense, atmospheric and utterly gripping story of power and sacrifice. I was planning to finish a couple of other books before I read this one, but I looked at the opening chapters - and then I couldn’t put it down.
When the Wolf Duke of Eäneté dies his son, Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì, does not only inherit a title and land. He also inherits a duke’s deep tie to the Immanent Power of Eäneté, a power shaped by the savagery of the land and generations of cruel dukes. Innisth is determined to protect his people and avoid attracting the notice of the King of Pohorir. This becomes particularly challenging when the king’s emissary threatens members of Innisth’s household.
Across the mountains, Kehera irinè Elin Raёhema, daughter and heir of the King of Harivir, has had a very different, kinder, experience of Immanent Powers. But in the midst of war, the Mad King of Emmer delivers an ultimatum to Harivir - and in a bid to buy her people time, Kehera rides north to become his bride.
By the time Kehera and Innisth’s paths cross, I was completely invested - and conflicted, because they each have the ability to help each other but their goals are different.
The most unusual aspect of the world of Winter of Ice and Iron is the influence the Immanent Powers have. They are at the centre of politics, for they dictate rulership and alliances. They can be destroyed, cause destruction and offer protection from dragons. And, on a personal level, they influence the character of those who hold deep ties to them.
But although Immanents and politics contribute to making the plot complex, the characters were the reason I cared. Neumeier writes her characters beautifully. (Neumeier writes beautifully, full stop.) Kehera is kind-hearted and courageous. Innisth is more reserved and complicated, but the people he surrounds himself with reveal much about what his values. The supporting cast, such as Innisth’s senschal Gereth, are memorable. And I like the way Innisth and Kehera develop respect for one another. (... this would be a much easier book to review if I weren’t trying to avoid spoilers.)
The story is almost too dark for me to enjoy it - almost, because there’s thoughtful restraint to how the darkness is handled. Things like the atrocities committed by Innisth’s late father are alluded to obliquely and rarely confirmed. Other moments of abuse occur off stage, or else only take centre stage at the point where they are stopped. And when see characters get killed, gratuitous details of violence are not dwelled on. This approach doesn’t understate of the horror of these acts, nor the threat characters face - and it keeps the focus on the characters who have endured or feared horrors, rather than on exactly what they’ve endured on feared. I really appreciated this.
The ending left me feeling a little bit bereft, because I wanted more, but really, that’s a good thing. This is amongst Neumeier’s strongest books, and one I will want to reread.
I took a long time choosing a quote from this. All the passages - and there were quite a few - that sprang to mind were too long, or too spoilerish, or too dependent on context. And I kept getting distracted rereading it...Set off by that dark frame, the painting stood out as vividly as though it were a window rather than paint and canvas. It showed the city as a bird, winging high above, might see it. The sky had been shown as a broken scape of leaden clouds, with brilliant beams of sunlight lancing through; in the painting, the play of light caught out the duke’s house while leaving the city below in shadow. The arrogant power of the house had been caught exactly. To one side of the painting, slanting in swift flight, went a lark. The little bird had been rendered in beautiful detail, darting across the heavy sky on a course that would, in the next instant, carry it out of view entirely.
“What do you think of it?” Gereth asked at last.
The young woman answered quietly, “I think the artist was more in sympathy with the bird than the walls.... I don’t think he loved this city. Or was it this house he did not love?”
Neumeier has said that this and The White Road of the Moon both originated from the same story. They each took different aspects of worldbuilding, and The White Road of the Moon, with its fifteen year old protagonist, has a more YA - and a less dark - vibe to it. Yet I definitely felt like there were similarities, or hints of similarities, in themes, in the beats of the narrative.
A note about the ebook: I kept referring to the map as I read, but found place names on map (both Overdrive and Kindle editions) were almost illegible - impossible to decipher if I hadn’t yet encountered that name in the story. It wasn’t until after I finished that I thought to check the Amazon preview for the hardcover edition - yep, a beautifully clear map...
*
Jaclyn Moriarty latest book is The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone. When Bronte was a baby, her parents left her with her Aunt Isabelle before gallivanting off on adventures. Ten years later, Bronte receives the news that her parents have been killed by pirates, and their will insists that she set out alone on a journey to visit her all her aunts and deliver each a gift. Moreover, the will is Faery crossed-stitched, so there will be disastrous consequences if Bronte doesn’t follow it.
This is quirky and entertaining, and what begins as a episodic adventure - meeting her cousins, rescuing a baby from a river, rescuing an aunt from wrongful imprisonment, learning to talk to dragons, accidentally causing an avalanche - eventually twists together in Moriarty-fashion.
I suspect I would have stronger feelings about it were I still Bronte’s age or if it hadn’t been so light-hearted. I was not a fan of the illustrations, which are not to my tastes, but fortunately found them easy to ignore - and I can see how they might appeal to the book’s target audience. All the same, I’d happily read more set in this world. “Oh, I love to have a child in my library! I’ve just finished redecorating the children’s section, so this is perfect, dear child! Trust me! You are going to love it!” [...]
“Well,” I said. “Thank you… But may I look something up instead?”
“Research!” the librarian shrieked, and inside the library people cleared their throats. One woman shot a crank Shhh! in our direction.
The librarian looked guilty. “I make too much noise,” she confided. “But I love it when people want to research! Do it! Dear child, you will love it! The catalogue is over there!” Her voice rose to a shout at the end. People muttered disapproval.
(This has a map. I never ended up looking at it… but I approve of books having maps in general.)
*
Kristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited has a certain number of parallels to Jane Eyre: eighteen year old Jane is an orphan with an artistic streak who has been raised by her aunt; she goes to stay in a mansion and discovers its secrets. But it isn’t really a Jane Eyre retelling, for this is where the parallels end.
Jane, devastated when her Aunt Magnolia, an underwater photographer, dies during a trip to Antarctica, fails biology and drops out of college. An old acquaintance, Kiran Thrash, finds Jane miserable and working in the college bookshop, and invites her to Tu Reviens, the Thrash family’s island mansion. Tu Reviens is preparing for the spring gala and Jane quickly has unanswered questions about the goings-on of the family, the other guests, the servants and even the basset hound. There’s missing artwork, a missing child, a missing stepmother… And why did Aunt Magnolia make Jane promise to never turn down an invitation to Tu Reviens?
There’s a point in the story where Jane has to decide which mystery to pursue first. What follows is a series of possible adventures, in which Jane makes a different choice and uncovers different secrets. Each is stranger than the one before, each a different genre.
I loved them all - with the notable exception of the third one, a horror story involving a creepy library, a warped copy of Winnie-the-Pooh and Beatles songs. I suspect I found it all the more disturbing, because it took things I love and twisted them. Or maybe I would have been disturbed by it no matter what it twisted? Horror is NOT my genre. It was the only point where I regretted listening to the audiobook, because I couldn’t just skim-read through it.
Each of these stories is a different genre, but as the novel continues, it becomes possible for the reader to see how, often unbeknownst to Jane, the other stories are going on in the background. Even if sometimes they unfold very differently if Jane doesn't become involved. (Fortunately the horror-element is pretty much limited to the third story.) And as each unfolds, different sides to the characters are revealed - which can be fascinating and surprising.
Although each story is different, Jane continues to be Jane. She wears Doctor Who pyjamas and quotes Winnie-the-Pooh and makes unusual, handmade umbrellas. She immediately connects with Ivy, one of the servants, and Jasper, the basset hound. She grieves for her Aunt Magnolia. Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh set out to sea once in an umbrella, Jane remembers. During a flood, to save Piglet.
Maybe, she thinks to herself, she should take her umbrellas down to the water, turn them upside down like boats, and send them off on the waves, carrying nothing. Maybe if they carried away all the nothing, she’d be left with something.
This is a highly usual story, full of surprises and characters I cared about. It's compelling and I'm really am glad I read it (in spite of the horror).
A note on the audiobook: The only downside is that you don’t get the maps of the house, and this was the sort of story where I really wanted to consult the maps. But I found an online preview of the book which included the maps easily, so that worked out. Floorplans! I love floorplans for fictional buildings!
(Jane, Unlimited isn’t available as an Overdrive ebook in my region, but I can still view the preview on Overdrive.com. I love Overdrive previews, they’re usually longer than Amazon ones.)
A note on the cover: I don’t dislike it - I suspect it is more eye-catching in person - and now I’ve read the book, I can see how it fits the story. But when I first saw it, it didn’t make me curious about the story. It didn’t tell me anything, really, about what the book is about.
I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but I do judge. I’ve read enough books with terrible covers to know that you can’t tell how good a book is by its cover, so my judgements tend to be about tone and genre. I figure this is the cover’s job - or it should be!
(Interestingly, I had similar reactions - or rather, lack of reactions - to two other new releases with similarly vague covers: Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark and Lainie Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer. Maybe it’s just this year’s fashion? Maybe the publisher are relying on the author’s names to sell the books?)
*
Patricia A. McKillip’s The Moon and the Face is set four years after Moon-flash. Both Kyreol and Terje are heading off on missions: Kyreol to visit another planet for the first time, Terje to return to the Riverworld to observe but not interact. Neither of these missions go according to plan. Someone notices Terje. And Kyreol’s ship crashes down on a moon.
This is a quiet, poignant story about leaving home and returning again, and about embracing change. I liked how it followed on from Moon-flash, particularly the idea that the Riverworld has to be protected from outside influence, and the emotional intensity Kyreol and Terje bring to their various challenges.“What could happen to me in the Riverworld?”
“Well, I don’t know, Terje. You could fall out of a tree; you could eat a bad musk-berry; you could shoot yourself by accident-”
“With an arrow?” He was smiling, remembering then the long hours they had spent together before he had gone upriver. The sun caught in her eyes; she laughed, suddenly very close to him, though he couldn’t remember which of them had moved. He touched her cheek, thinking, at its sunlight darkness, of the black, immense slab of rock that had shrugged its way out of the earth to become, eons later, the northern boundary of the Riverworld. The childwoman Kyreol, betrothed and swarming like a beehive with questions, had drawn him past the edge of the ancient Riverworld into the future. But she wasn’t a child now. She was Kyreol of the Dome, slender and tall in a silver flightsuit, with the reflection of the Face in her skin and the shadow of its secrets in her eyes.
Mission to Read All the McKillip status report: 25 novels, 3 anthologies. There’s only two of her early novels, now out of print, which I can’t find.
*
I switched over to my local Amazon so I could get prices in my own currency. That seemed like the more logical thing to do. And it occurred to me that if I’m now going to buy kindle books more often than once in a blue moon, maybe it’s time to create an Amazon wishlist. (I have a Bookdepository one, for physical books. It’s useful. I’m assuming Amazon’s wishlist works similarly.) However, my local Amazon site doesn’t have a wishlist feature, while Amazon.com just gives me a box redirecting me to my local Amazon for Kindle books. Seriously, Amazon. Isn’t this counter-productive? I thought you wanted to encourage people to spend more money?
I have told myself that, for the rest of December, I am only allowed to read books I’ve already requested from the library or already own, and I have to finish the ones I’ve already started. We will see how I go with this.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.
*
I read - and reread - the Narnia books when I was a growing up. I read Lewis’s Space trilogy in high school and since then I’ve read some of his essays and at least one book about Lewis himself. I’ve had nebulous intentions of reading more by Lewis for years. I finally read Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold and it surpassed my expectations.
Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, Orual, who sets out to write about her relationship with her sister and her complaints against the gods. It’s a story about love and (in)justice. All I knew beforehand about the Cupid and Psyche myth was that it had similarities to East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Beauty and the Beast. Some of the narrative beats were familiar, but not very many. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods. I have no husband or child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.
Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write.
Till We Have Faces is surprising, powerful and occasionally heartbreaking. Orual is fierce her in love and anger (and in bitterness, too) and her relationships are complex, often more so than is first apparent. She’s not so much an unreliable narrator as a biased one, and I found it really interesting how that plays out in the end. Also interesting is all the ways in which Orual does not conform to conventional ideas of womanhood - not as a woman of Glome nor as the protagonist of novel written in the 1950s.
(Maybe she’s even surprising and unconventional by modern standards? I don’t know, I’d want to read the book again, and carefully, before making that sort of claim.)
I was a little amused to look through reviews and see Till We Have Faces has been praised for not having the overt Christianity that the reviewer objected to in the Narnia books and for its Christian perspective.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Nadia May. It was excellent.
*
The City in the Lake is a coming-of-age story written in a style that reminded me less of Rachel Neumeier’s others novels and much more of Patricia A. McKillip, and maybe Robin McKinley.
In the City, the Prince disappears. Meanwhile, on the other side of the great forest, Timou’s father, the mage Kapoen, leaves for the City and does not return.
This is lovely. There’s a dreamlike quality to parts of it, but at its heart, it is very real and emotionally relatable - this story is about losing (and finding) family members. Her father had not wanted her with him; he had left her behind-no doubt for very good reasons. Although, Timou thought now, a little more fiercely than was really comfortable, he might have explained to her what those were.
In flight from her own thoughts, Timou curled into her blanket, leaned her back against the great bole of a tree, and let her mind slip through its deep quiet existence until she could forget that she was small and human, and dream with the tree its slow circular dreams.
*
Neumeier’s Winter of Ice and Iron is a tense, atmospheric and utterly gripping story of power and sacrifice. I was planning to finish a couple of other books before I read this one, but I looked at the opening chapters - and then I couldn’t put it down.
When the Wolf Duke of Eäneté dies his son, Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì, does not only inherit a title and land. He also inherits a duke’s deep tie to the Immanent Power of Eäneté, a power shaped by the savagery of the land and generations of cruel dukes. Innisth is determined to protect his people and avoid attracting the notice of the King of Pohorir. This becomes particularly challenging when the king’s emissary threatens members of Innisth’s household.
Across the mountains, Kehera irinè Elin Raёhema, daughter and heir of the King of Harivir, has had a very different, kinder, experience of Immanent Powers. But in the midst of war, the Mad King of Emmer delivers an ultimatum to Harivir - and in a bid to buy her people time, Kehera rides north to become his bride.
By the time Kehera and Innisth’s paths cross, I was completely invested - and conflicted, because they each have the ability to help each other but their goals are different.
The most unusual aspect of the world of Winter of Ice and Iron is the influence the Immanent Powers have. They are at the centre of politics, for they dictate rulership and alliances. They can be destroyed, cause destruction and offer protection from dragons. And, on a personal level, they influence the character of those who hold deep ties to them.
But although Immanents and politics contribute to making the plot complex, the characters were the reason I cared. Neumeier writes her characters beautifully. (Neumeier writes beautifully, full stop.) Kehera is kind-hearted and courageous. Innisth is more reserved and complicated, but the people he surrounds himself with reveal much about what his values. The supporting cast, such as Innisth’s senschal Gereth, are memorable. And I like the way Innisth and Kehera develop respect for one another. (... this would be a much easier book to review if I weren’t trying to avoid spoilers.)
The story is almost too dark for me to enjoy it - almost, because there’s thoughtful restraint to how the darkness is handled. Things like the atrocities committed by Innisth’s late father are alluded to obliquely and rarely confirmed. Other moments of abuse occur off stage, or else only take centre stage at the point where they are stopped. And when see characters get killed, gratuitous details of violence are not dwelled on. This approach doesn’t understate of the horror of these acts, nor the threat characters face - and it keeps the focus on the characters who have endured or feared horrors, rather than on exactly what they’ve endured on feared. I really appreciated this.
The ending left me feeling a little bit bereft, because I wanted more, but really, that’s a good thing. This is amongst Neumeier’s strongest books, and one I will want to reread.
I took a long time choosing a quote from this. All the passages - and there were quite a few - that sprang to mind were too long, or too spoilerish, or too dependent on context. And I kept getting distracted rereading it...Set off by that dark frame, the painting stood out as vividly as though it were a window rather than paint and canvas. It showed the city as a bird, winging high above, might see it. The sky had been shown as a broken scape of leaden clouds, with brilliant beams of sunlight lancing through; in the painting, the play of light caught out the duke’s house while leaving the city below in shadow. The arrogant power of the house had been caught exactly. To one side of the painting, slanting in swift flight, went a lark. The little bird had been rendered in beautiful detail, darting across the heavy sky on a course that would, in the next instant, carry it out of view entirely.
“What do you think of it?” Gereth asked at last.
The young woman answered quietly, “I think the artist was more in sympathy with the bird than the walls.... I don’t think he loved this city. Or was it this house he did not love?”
Neumeier has said that this and The White Road of the Moon both originated from the same story. They each took different aspects of worldbuilding, and The White Road of the Moon, with its fifteen year old protagonist, has a more YA - and a less dark - vibe to it. Yet I definitely felt like there were similarities, or hints of similarities, in themes, in the beats of the narrative.
A note about the ebook: I kept referring to the map as I read, but found place names on map (both Overdrive and Kindle editions) were almost illegible - impossible to decipher if I hadn’t yet encountered that name in the story. It wasn’t until after I finished that I thought to check the Amazon preview for the hardcover edition - yep, a beautifully clear map...
*
Jaclyn Moriarty latest book is The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone. When Bronte was a baby, her parents left her with her Aunt Isabelle before gallivanting off on adventures. Ten years later, Bronte receives the news that her parents have been killed by pirates, and their will insists that she set out alone on a journey to visit her all her aunts and deliver each a gift. Moreover, the will is Faery crossed-stitched, so there will be disastrous consequences if Bronte doesn’t follow it.
This is quirky and entertaining, and what begins as a episodic adventure - meeting her cousins, rescuing a baby from a river, rescuing an aunt from wrongful imprisonment, learning to talk to dragons, accidentally causing an avalanche - eventually twists together in Moriarty-fashion.
I suspect I would have stronger feelings about it were I still Bronte’s age or if it hadn’t been so light-hearted. I was not a fan of the illustrations, which are not to my tastes, but fortunately found them easy to ignore - and I can see how they might appeal to the book’s target audience. All the same, I’d happily read more set in this world. “Oh, I love to have a child in my library! I’ve just finished redecorating the children’s section, so this is perfect, dear child! Trust me! You are going to love it!” [...]
“Well,” I said. “Thank you… But may I look something up instead?”
“Research!” the librarian shrieked, and inside the library people cleared their throats. One woman shot a crank Shhh! in our direction.
The librarian looked guilty. “I make too much noise,” she confided. “But I love it when people want to research! Do it! Dear child, you will love it! The catalogue is over there!” Her voice rose to a shout at the end. People muttered disapproval.
(This has a map. I never ended up looking at it… but I approve of books having maps in general.)
*
Kristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited has a certain number of parallels to Jane Eyre: eighteen year old Jane is an orphan with an artistic streak who has been raised by her aunt; she goes to stay in a mansion and discovers its secrets. But it isn’t really a Jane Eyre retelling, for this is where the parallels end.
Jane, devastated when her Aunt Magnolia, an underwater photographer, dies during a trip to Antarctica, fails biology and drops out of college. An old acquaintance, Kiran Thrash, finds Jane miserable and working in the college bookshop, and invites her to Tu Reviens, the Thrash family’s island mansion. Tu Reviens is preparing for the spring gala and Jane quickly has unanswered questions about the goings-on of the family, the other guests, the servants and even the basset hound. There’s missing artwork, a missing child, a missing stepmother… And why did Aunt Magnolia make Jane promise to never turn down an invitation to Tu Reviens?
There’s a point in the story where Jane has to decide which mystery to pursue first. What follows is a series of possible adventures, in which Jane makes a different choice and uncovers different secrets. Each is stranger than the one before, each a different genre.
I loved them all - with the notable exception of the third one, a horror story involving a creepy library, a warped copy of Winnie-the-Pooh and Beatles songs. I suspect I found it all the more disturbing, because it took things I love and twisted them. Or maybe I would have been disturbed by it no matter what it twisted? Horror is NOT my genre. It was the only point where I regretted listening to the audiobook, because I couldn’t just skim-read through it.
Each of these stories is a different genre, but as the novel continues, it becomes possible for the reader to see how, often unbeknownst to Jane, the other stories are going on in the background. Even if sometimes they unfold very differently if Jane doesn't become involved. (Fortunately the horror-element is pretty much limited to the third story.) And as each unfolds, different sides to the characters are revealed - which can be fascinating and surprising.
Although each story is different, Jane continues to be Jane. She wears Doctor Who pyjamas and quotes Winnie-the-Pooh and makes unusual, handmade umbrellas. She immediately connects with Ivy, one of the servants, and Jasper, the basset hound. She grieves for her Aunt Magnolia. Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh set out to sea once in an umbrella, Jane remembers. During a flood, to save Piglet.
Maybe, she thinks to herself, she should take her umbrellas down to the water, turn them upside down like boats, and send them off on the waves, carrying nothing. Maybe if they carried away all the nothing, she’d be left with something.
This is a highly usual story, full of surprises and characters I cared about. It's compelling and I'm really am glad I read it (in spite of the horror).
A note on the audiobook: The only downside is that you don’t get the maps of the house, and this was the sort of story where I really wanted to consult the maps. But I found an online preview of the book which included the maps easily, so that worked out. Floorplans! I love floorplans for fictional buildings!
(Jane, Unlimited isn’t available as an Overdrive ebook in my region, but I can still view the preview on Overdrive.com. I love Overdrive previews, they’re usually longer than Amazon ones.)
A note on the cover: I don’t dislike it - I suspect it is more eye-catching in person - and now I’ve read the book, I can see how it fits the story. But when I first saw it, it didn’t make me curious about the story. It didn’t tell me anything, really, about what the book is about.
I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but I do judge. I’ve read enough books with terrible covers to know that you can’t tell how good a book is by its cover, so my judgements tend to be about tone and genre. I figure this is the cover’s job - or it should be!
(Interestingly, I had similar reactions - or rather, lack of reactions - to two other new releases with similarly vague covers: Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark and Lainie Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer. Maybe it’s just this year’s fashion? Maybe the publisher are relying on the author’s names to sell the books?)
*
Patricia A. McKillip’s The Moon and the Face is set four years after Moon-flash. Both Kyreol and Terje are heading off on missions: Kyreol to visit another planet for the first time, Terje to return to the Riverworld to observe but not interact. Neither of these missions go according to plan. Someone notices Terje. And Kyreol’s ship crashes down on a moon.
This is a quiet, poignant story about leaving home and returning again, and about embracing change. I liked how it followed on from Moon-flash, particularly the idea that the Riverworld has to be protected from outside influence, and the emotional intensity Kyreol and Terje bring to their various challenges.“What could happen to me in the Riverworld?”
“Well, I don’t know, Terje. You could fall out of a tree; you could eat a bad musk-berry; you could shoot yourself by accident-”
“With an arrow?” He was smiling, remembering then the long hours they had spent together before he had gone upriver. The sun caught in her eyes; she laughed, suddenly very close to him, though he couldn’t remember which of them had moved. He touched her cheek, thinking, at its sunlight darkness, of the black, immense slab of rock that had shrugged its way out of the earth to become, eons later, the northern boundary of the Riverworld. The childwoman Kyreol, betrothed and swarming like a beehive with questions, had drawn him past the edge of the ancient Riverworld into the future. But she wasn’t a child now. She was Kyreol of the Dome, slender and tall in a silver flightsuit, with the reflection of the Face in her skin and the shadow of its secrets in her eyes.
Mission to Read All the McKillip status report: 25 novels, 3 anthologies. There’s only two of her early novels, now out of print, which I can’t find.
*
I switched over to my local Amazon so I could get prices in my own currency. That seemed like the more logical thing to do. And it occurred to me that if I’m now going to buy kindle books more often than once in a blue moon, maybe it’s time to create an Amazon wishlist. (I have a Bookdepository one, for physical books. It’s useful. I’m assuming Amazon’s wishlist works similarly.) However, my local Amazon site doesn’t have a wishlist feature, while Amazon.com just gives me a box redirecting me to my local Amazon for Kindle books. Seriously, Amazon. Isn’t this counter-productive? I thought you wanted to encourage people to spend more money?
I have told myself that, for the rest of December, I am only allowed to read books I’ve already requested from the library or already own, and I have to finish the ones I’ve already started. We will see how I go with this.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.