Yuletidings.
Merry Christmas, y'all. What did you get this year? I FINALLY HAVE A KINDLE, which is going to eat up all my money but which means I can carry around thousands of books in my purse and thus makes me deliriously happy in ways I cannot properly express.
And I have Chaos Walking fic for Yuletide! Chaos Walking is a YA trilogy with some of the most tight and evocative and vivid prose I've seen in any work of fiction, let alone in its genre. The first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, is a desperate roadtrip across an Old-West-esque frontier planet with scattered settlements and broken-down communication and a germ that makes you broadcast your thoughts uncontrollably. The second and third books broaden the focus and look at violence on a societal level, not just a personal one, and though I think the first book is by far the strongest of the trilogy the other two still do interesting things.
I desperately wanted backstoryfic for several of the characters in the series, including the protagonist's two foster dads, and I got it! He Mourns for the Change that has Come Upon him and his Beloved is a beautiful Ben/Cillian story set before the start of the series. I'm incredibly impressed at how spare-but-evocative the author's prose is; that style captures a lot of what I found so compelling in Ness's writing. Gorgeous, plaintive, and highly recommended, though spoilery as heck if you haven't read The Knife of Never Letting Go. (I don't think it spoils anything for The Ask and the Answer or Monsters of Men, though.)
I'm going to try to actually gather up Yuletide recs this year. We'll see how much headway I make on that, but I've already found some good stuff -- and some good stuff that might not end up on All The Rec Lists, to boot.
Have a good time at whatever end-of-year festivities you attend!
.
And I have Chaos Walking fic for Yuletide! Chaos Walking is a YA trilogy with some of the most tight and evocative and vivid prose I've seen in any work of fiction, let alone in its genre. The first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, is a desperate roadtrip across an Old-West-esque frontier planet with scattered settlements and broken-down communication and a germ that makes you broadcast your thoughts uncontrollably. The second and third books broaden the focus and look at violence on a societal level, not just a personal one, and though I think the first book is by far the strongest of the trilogy the other two still do interesting things.
I desperately wanted backstoryfic for several of the characters in the series, including the protagonist's two foster dads, and I got it! He Mourns for the Change that has Come Upon him and his Beloved is a beautiful Ben/Cillian story set before the start of the series. I'm incredibly impressed at how spare-but-evocative the author's prose is; that style captures a lot of what I found so compelling in Ness's writing. Gorgeous, plaintive, and highly recommended, though spoilery as heck if you haven't read The Knife of Never Letting Go. (I don't think it spoils anything for The Ask and the Answer or Monsters of Men, though.)
I'm going to try to actually gather up Yuletide recs this year. We'll see how much headway I make on that, but I've already found some good stuff -- and some good stuff that might not end up on All The Rec Lists, to boot.
Have a good time at whatever end-of-year festivities you attend!
.