“if you want adventure, you have to march right up to it and kick it in the shins”
And that’s a wrap on reviewing everything I read this winter, barring anything still unfinished, of course.
I just counted: I have nine library ebooks, four library paperbacks and four Kindle ebooks to read. I’m halfway through one of the library ebooks, I’ve read the start of one of the paperbacks and I’m at least partway through two of the Kindle books. And yes, I was grumbling yesterday about not being able to find things I wanted to read. But sometimes having a lot of choice doesn’t help -- sometimes telling myself that I should read this before I read that (for instance, on the grounds that my loan expires sooner) just leads to me running away and reading something else entirely.
It’s not a very productive arrangement. (Oh for goodness sake, Herenya, it’s a hobby, it doesn’t have to be productive.) (... it’s a pandemic and I’ll whinge if I need to.)
• Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty: This grew on me and by the end, I loved it. For over twenty years, Abigail Sorenson has been sent chapters of a mysterious self-help book. She’s invited to attend a retreat, meet others who also received The Guidebook and then be part of an on-going group learning more about it.
Gravity Is The Thing alternates between this and Abigail’s reflections about significant relationships/things in her life -- particularly her brother, her marriage, and being the single mother of a preschooler. At times I found this quite uncomfortable, but I also felt like it was needed to be, because some of the things Abigail’s dealing with are difficult, like grief, betrayal, and raising a child alone. The way these parts of the story are drawn together -- and watching Abigail make sense of her life -- was unexpectedly satisfying and compelling.
I also liked some of the whimsical parts, and how Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way. (Probably I’d have liked it even more if there had been more about the friends but, anyway.)
I could have included this in yesterday’s post about idiosyncratic reactions, because I had a couple. I enjoyed its Australian setting and the audiobook’s Aussie narrator, for both variety and familiarity. (This made me realise how few books I’ve read set here lately -- and I can’t remember the last time one was an audiobook.) Also, early on, I made a prediction about how something would end up and I was positively gleeful that my intuition was correct.
Because audiobook, I can’t remember all the lines I liked: If the internet is a legal minefield, it’s also an ocean of buried treasure; you just have to dig in the right place.
“I was thinking something,” Nicole said, pressing her forehead to the glass. “Wilbur, when you say flight waves, are you just thinking of thermals?”
“There’s a sale on thermals at Aldi this weekend,” Frangipani said.
• Stars Above by Marissa Meyer: Most of these are prequel stories for The Lunar Chronicles, except for “Something Old, Something”, in which a group of friends gather for a wedding. I thought that was the perfect coda to the series. It’s funny and sweet, and I like that these fairytale retellings do end with a wedding -- but it happens after time has passed and the bridal couple are no longer teenagers. Having this story at the end of Stars Above rather than as an epilogue to Winter also made the passage of time feel real.
As for the other stories, “Glitches” (eleven year old Cinder meeting her new adoptive family) and “Carswell’s Guide to Being Lucky” (Thorne as a young teenager) were great. “The Princess and the Guard” had some wonderful scenes but they felt a bit like a series of short stories, rather than something cohesive.
“The Keeper” (Scarlet and her grandmother), “After Sunshine Passes By” (Cress), and “The Mechanic” (Kai’s perspective of meeting Cinder) didn’t take full advantage of their potential to tell us much new information, but I still enjoyed spending more time with these characters.
I didn’t care for “The Queen’s Army” or “The Little Android”.
So, in other words, more or less about what I expect from a short story collection.
• Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston: A fun, fandom-y and fairly light-hearted contemporary fairytale retelling. Rosie chases a stray dog into what she believes is an empty house -- and discovers she’s trespassing on the current residence of a teenage actor who stars in movies based on some of Rosie’s favourite SF stories.
Which is not the only coincidence, but I thought those and the handling of the characters’ issues was satisfyingly consistent with the optimistic and light-hearted tone of the story. A touch of fantasy rather than reality, if you will.
When I requested this from the library, I didn’t realise that this was part of a series. I’m curious about the other books.“LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT MY HAIR!” he cries, rushing into the library. He pulls at his shoulder-length orange-pop hair. It’s like someone spilled an entire highlighter on his head. [...]
“I’m hideous.”
“You’re not hideous.” Mr Rodriguez tries to reason with him, following him into the library. He gives me a questioning look as if to see if yes, I am the perpetrator of this great and terrible sin. Yes, yes I am.
By absolute accident, mind you.
“No one will ever like me,” Vance goes on, his voice muffled by his hands.
“I like you,” his guardian says patiently.
“What’s the point if I can’t be beautiful?”
I squint at him. “Are you quoting Howl’s Moving Castle?”
• Wolfskin by W.R. Gingell: Rose, headstrong and adventurous, is delighted to be apprenticed to the warden Akiva. Her story is about growing up, learning about the forest and being warden, and about the mysterious disappearance of other wardens. It is also very fairytale-ish. There are a lot of nods to “Little Red Riding Hood”: there’s a wolf, a special hood, a cottage in the woods, a grandmotherly mentor and a woodcutter. Arguably, the fairytale-side of the plot has more in common with “Beauty and the Beast” -- a man under a curse which has given him an animal form -- and I spied elements from other tales too.
I really like this; Gingell has a knack for writing fairytales which are vivid and original. I didn’t connect with Rose quite as intensely as I have with some of Gingell’s other protagonists -- perhaps because I can’t really relate to her wanting-to-be-a-pirate phase? -- but I liked how the story allowed her to change with time and experience. And this was, more or less, the sort of story I was in the mood for.Gwendolen’s storybooks say that to have adventures one must be either the seventh son of a seventh son, or at the very least the youngest, most beautiful daughter of a bevy of seven, but I haven’t ever had any trouble finding adventure. Mother says it’s my unique perspective on life, but I say that if you want adventure, you have to march right up to it and kick it in the shins. It makes life more interesting.
• Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier: Despite my grumbling, it has been a good week -- for books at least. Ryo is left as a “tuyo” -- a sacrifice to be killed by an enemy -- as a sign that his tribe will withdraw from the Ugaro’s war with the Lau. But his captor doesn’t want to kill him, he wants Ryo to help him stop the war.
Neumeier effectively creates tension between people who are polite, honest and honourable. There are times when Ryo has good reasons for feeling mistrust, fear or even hatred towards Lord Aras -- and it’s never because Lord Aras has treated him or anyone else poorly. While the story begins with Lord Aras holding power over Ryo -- literally of life or death -- Lord Aras is incredibly conscious of that and of Ryo’s wellbeing. He’s adamant about Ryo giving allegiance freely. Moreover, there are situations where Lord Aras, despite his power, is utterly dependent on Ryo. An intriguing relationship, defined by mutual respect, fealty and something more familial (Ryo swears to accept Lord Aras’s authority “as though you were my father [...] as though I were your son”).
The Ugaro culture is intriguing, too. Given what we see of it and of Ryo’s family, I thought that his perspective -- his values, choices and concerns -- made a lot of sense.
There’s also some unusual magically-defying-physics-as-we-know-it worldbuilding -- a river on which one side is summer and the other winter, and the people living on side struggle to cope with extreme weather on the other side -- but apparently I was far more interested in the character dynamics.
Anyway, I enjoyed this. Sequel, please? I faced south, so that my death would not ride up behind me on his tall horse and see my back and think that I was afraid to face him. Also, I did not want to look north because I did not want to see that trodden snow and remember my brother leaving me behind. That might have been a different kind of cowardice. But I could only face one direction. So I faced south.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.
I just counted: I have nine library ebooks, four library paperbacks and four Kindle ebooks to read. I’m halfway through one of the library ebooks, I’ve read the start of one of the paperbacks and I’m at least partway through two of the Kindle books. And yes, I was grumbling yesterday about not being able to find things I wanted to read. But sometimes having a lot of choice doesn’t help -- sometimes telling myself that I should read this before I read that (for instance, on the grounds that my loan expires sooner) just leads to me running away and reading something else entirely.
It’s not a very productive arrangement. (Oh for goodness sake, Herenya, it’s a hobby, it doesn’t have to be productive.) (... it’s a pandemic and I’ll whinge if I need to.)
• Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty: This grew on me and by the end, I loved it. For over twenty years, Abigail Sorenson has been sent chapters of a mysterious self-help book. She’s invited to attend a retreat, meet others who also received The Guidebook and then be part of an on-going group learning more about it.
Gravity Is The Thing alternates between this and Abigail’s reflections about significant relationships/things in her life -- particularly her brother, her marriage, and being the single mother of a preschooler. At times I found this quite uncomfortable, but I also felt like it was needed to be, because some of the things Abigail’s dealing with are difficult, like grief, betrayal, and raising a child alone. The way these parts of the story are drawn together -- and watching Abigail make sense of her life -- was unexpectedly satisfying and compelling.
I also liked some of the whimsical parts, and how Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way. (Probably I’d have liked it even more if there had been more about the friends but, anyway.)
I could have included this in yesterday’s post about idiosyncratic reactions, because I had a couple. I enjoyed its Australian setting and the audiobook’s Aussie narrator, for both variety and familiarity. (This made me realise how few books I’ve read set here lately -- and I can’t remember the last time one was an audiobook.) Also, early on, I made a prediction about how something would end up and I was positively gleeful that my intuition was correct.
Because audiobook, I can’t remember all the lines I liked: If the internet is a legal minefield, it’s also an ocean of buried treasure; you just have to dig in the right place.
“I was thinking something,” Nicole said, pressing her forehead to the glass. “Wilbur, when you say flight waves, are you just thinking of thermals?”
“There’s a sale on thermals at Aldi this weekend,” Frangipani said.
• Stars Above by Marissa Meyer: Most of these are prequel stories for The Lunar Chronicles, except for “Something Old, Something”, in which a group of friends gather for a wedding. I thought that was the perfect coda to the series. It’s funny and sweet, and I like that these fairytale retellings do end with a wedding -- but it happens after time has passed and the bridal couple are no longer teenagers. Having this story at the end of Stars Above rather than as an epilogue to Winter also made the passage of time feel real.
As for the other stories, “Glitches” (eleven year old Cinder meeting her new adoptive family) and “Carswell’s Guide to Being Lucky” (Thorne as a young teenager) were great. “The Princess and the Guard” had some wonderful scenes but they felt a bit like a series of short stories, rather than something cohesive.
“The Keeper” (Scarlet and her grandmother), “After Sunshine Passes By” (Cress), and “The Mechanic” (Kai’s perspective of meeting Cinder) didn’t take full advantage of their potential to tell us much new information, but I still enjoyed spending more time with these characters.
I didn’t care for “The Queen’s Army” or “The Little Android”.
So, in other words, more or less about what I expect from a short story collection.
• Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston: A fun, fandom-y and fairly light-hearted contemporary fairytale retelling. Rosie chases a stray dog into what she believes is an empty house -- and discovers she’s trespassing on the current residence of a teenage actor who stars in movies based on some of Rosie’s favourite SF stories.
Which is not the only coincidence, but I thought those and the handling of the characters’ issues was satisfyingly consistent with the optimistic and light-hearted tone of the story. A touch of fantasy rather than reality, if you will.
When I requested this from the library, I didn’t realise that this was part of a series. I’m curious about the other books.“LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT MY HAIR!” he cries, rushing into the library. He pulls at his shoulder-length orange-pop hair. It’s like someone spilled an entire highlighter on his head. [...]
“I’m hideous.”
“You’re not hideous.” Mr Rodriguez tries to reason with him, following him into the library. He gives me a questioning look as if to see if yes, I am the perpetrator of this great and terrible sin. Yes, yes I am.
By absolute accident, mind you.
“No one will ever like me,” Vance goes on, his voice muffled by his hands.
“I like you,” his guardian says patiently.
“What’s the point if I can’t be beautiful?”
I squint at him. “Are you quoting Howl’s Moving Castle?”
• Wolfskin by W.R. Gingell: Rose, headstrong and adventurous, is delighted to be apprenticed to the warden Akiva. Her story is about growing up, learning about the forest and being warden, and about the mysterious disappearance of other wardens. It is also very fairytale-ish. There are a lot of nods to “Little Red Riding Hood”: there’s a wolf, a special hood, a cottage in the woods, a grandmotherly mentor and a woodcutter. Arguably, the fairytale-side of the plot has more in common with “Beauty and the Beast” -- a man under a curse which has given him an animal form -- and I spied elements from other tales too.
I really like this; Gingell has a knack for writing fairytales which are vivid and original. I didn’t connect with Rose quite as intensely as I have with some of Gingell’s other protagonists -- perhaps because I can’t really relate to her wanting-to-be-a-pirate phase? -- but I liked how the story allowed her to change with time and experience. And this was, more or less, the sort of story I was in the mood for.Gwendolen’s storybooks say that to have adventures one must be either the seventh son of a seventh son, or at the very least the youngest, most beautiful daughter of a bevy of seven, but I haven’t ever had any trouble finding adventure. Mother says it’s my unique perspective on life, but I say that if you want adventure, you have to march right up to it and kick it in the shins. It makes life more interesting.
• Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier: Despite my grumbling, it has been a good week -- for books at least. Ryo is left as a “tuyo” -- a sacrifice to be killed by an enemy -- as a sign that his tribe will withdraw from the Ugaro’s war with the Lau. But his captor doesn’t want to kill him, he wants Ryo to help him stop the war.
Neumeier effectively creates tension between people who are polite, honest and honourable. There are times when Ryo has good reasons for feeling mistrust, fear or even hatred towards Lord Aras -- and it’s never because Lord Aras has treated him or anyone else poorly. While the story begins with Lord Aras holding power over Ryo -- literally of life or death -- Lord Aras is incredibly conscious of that and of Ryo’s wellbeing. He’s adamant about Ryo giving allegiance freely. Moreover, there are situations where Lord Aras, despite his power, is utterly dependent on Ryo. An intriguing relationship, defined by mutual respect, fealty and something more familial (Ryo swears to accept Lord Aras’s authority “as though you were my father [...] as though I were your son”).
The Ugaro culture is intriguing, too. Given what we see of it and of Ryo’s family, I thought that his perspective -- his values, choices and concerns -- made a lot of sense.
There’s also some unusual magically-defying-physics-as-we-know-it worldbuilding -- a river on which one side is summer and the other winter, and the people living on side struggle to cope with extreme weather on the other side -- but apparently I was far more interested in the character dynamics.
Anyway, I enjoyed this. Sequel, please? I faced south, so that my death would not ride up behind me on his tall horse and see my back and think that I was afraid to face him. Also, I did not want to look north because I did not want to see that trodden snow and remember my brother leaving me behind. That might have been a different kind of cowardice. But I could only face one direction. So I faced south.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.