Little successes
Weird day. We got record-breaking rains last night from whatever of Ida hit New Jersey, and lots of flooding led to closed roads and accidents. Nobody made it to work on time, my boss eventually gave up on trying altogether, turned around and went home.
The Lessons by Cadwell Turnbull
Grabbed after hearing the author on Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans. It's a Childhood's End type story about an alien invasion by incomprehensible, super-powered aliens and the interactions they have with humans who have to struggle to survive. The distinctive elements are that it's set in the US Virgin Islands, and that while the aliens' motivations are mostly incomprehensible, the author has at least figured them out and slowly reveals some of them to the readers.
The combination makes the book a really fascinating exploration of colonialism and its long term impacts. One of the most striking early passages of the book is a brief history of the Virgin Islands and the way in which they keep getting invaded, until invasion just becomes part of the fabric of life. When the aliens land it changes everything, but it also provokes a sort of fatalistic communal shrug.
I liked the view of the Virgin Islands and I really liked the premise, but it was one of those books where I kept liking it intellectually more than I liked it emotionally. I just didn't connect enough with the characters, and Turnbull kept bringing in new perspectives in a way that made it hard to sustain a feeling. The story ends with the perspective of one of the survivors, a character we'd barely seen since the first chapter, and I feel like that's an interesting structural idea but it didn't really work emotionally to sum up the trauma of the past chapters. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/384123.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
The Lessons by Cadwell Turnbull
Grabbed after hearing the author on Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans. It's a Childhood's End type story about an alien invasion by incomprehensible, super-powered aliens and the interactions they have with humans who have to struggle to survive. The distinctive elements are that it's set in the US Virgin Islands, and that while the aliens' motivations are mostly incomprehensible, the author has at least figured them out and slowly reveals some of them to the readers.
The combination makes the book a really fascinating exploration of colonialism and its long term impacts. One of the most striking early passages of the book is a brief history of the Virgin Islands and the way in which they keep getting invaded, until invasion just becomes part of the fabric of life. When the aliens land it changes everything, but it also provokes a sort of fatalistic communal shrug.
I liked the view of the Virgin Islands and I really liked the premise, but it was one of those books where I kept liking it intellectually more than I liked it emotionally. I just didn't connect enough with the characters, and Turnbull kept bringing in new perspectives in a way that made it hard to sustain a feeling. The story ends with the perspective of one of the survivors, a character we'd barely seen since the first chapter, and I feel like that's an interesting structural idea but it didn't really work emotionally to sum up the trauma of the past chapters. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/384123.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.