book book
Pico is in a much better mood today! She's now going to transition from third-person to first-person narratioN! OKAY GO
So I finished Green Rider just a couple days ago, and - it's a fun book. It's not a great book (not "great" as in awesome but "great" as in "oh my god, wow"; eg, Left Hand of Darkness is a great book): it's chock-full of tropes, is predictable (baddies die, goodies triumph, baddies who turn good die, LOOK THE TWIST ENDING I CAN SEE IT FROM A MILE AWAY, etc.), and sometimes wanders off into exposition about the world that speaks for the author thinking "wait! wait, guys, look what I thought of! uh - where do I stick this, it's not relevant anywhere but oh I want to show that I've got all these cool details worked out - THERE, it'll go there!".
But! At the same time, it's charming, enjoyable, well-paced, and is a very good introduction to the fantasy genre for readers new to it. Yes, there's times where I rolled my eyes (eg: Every Time Amilton Was On-Page good lord that boy is a walking cliche), but overall it's good fun.
Nothing extraordinary, and you can tell the Generic Fantasy trappings where they come up (elves = Eletians, orcs = groundmites, Shelob = the spider critter, etc). But Britain doesn't overdo it - she doesn't go all-out and have the Generic Fantasy trifecta of elves-dwarves-humans, which I appreciate (because dwarves are never done right: they're always comic relief, despite that in Norse mythos they're really, really not comic relief), and she doesn't try to make her world be GF analogue cultures ("this country is like France! And this one's like Britland! And this one's like all those -stan countries and India and also Africa but I don't care about them so I'm jsut going to call them The Southern Lands!"). And she has got a good idea going in the following of the messenger troops instead of anyone else.
(I must say I get a little annoyed when I read books and the various parts of the in-world military are all "oh, we're cool, but those guys? pff, they never do any work". I mean, I know that happens IRL, but it's kind of annoying to me.)
Next to read: either Speaker for the Dead, (a reread, as I read Ender's Game a couple months ago and remember a lot of cool ideas in SftD), or/and Out of the Silent Planet, because I haven't read it yet and classic SF is generally good. :D
So I finished Green Rider just a couple days ago, and - it's a fun book. It's not a great book (not "great" as in awesome but "great" as in "oh my god, wow"; eg, Left Hand of Darkness is a great book): it's chock-full of tropes, is predictable (baddies die, goodies triumph, baddies who turn good die, LOOK THE TWIST ENDING I CAN SEE IT FROM A MILE AWAY, etc.), and sometimes wanders off into exposition about the world that speaks for the author thinking "wait! wait, guys, look what I thought of! uh - where do I stick this, it's not relevant anywhere but oh I want to show that I've got all these cool details worked out - THERE, it'll go there!".
But! At the same time, it's charming, enjoyable, well-paced, and is a very good introduction to the fantasy genre for readers new to it. Yes, there's times where I rolled my eyes (eg: Every Time Amilton Was On-Page good lord that boy is a walking cliche), but overall it's good fun.
Nothing extraordinary, and you can tell the Generic Fantasy trappings where they come up (elves = Eletians, orcs = groundmites, Shelob = the spider critter, etc). But Britain doesn't overdo it - she doesn't go all-out and have the Generic Fantasy trifecta of elves-dwarves-humans, which I appreciate (because dwarves are never done right: they're always comic relief, despite that in Norse mythos they're really, really not comic relief), and she doesn't try to make her world be GF analogue cultures ("this country is like France! And this one's like Britland! And this one's like all those -stan countries and India and also Africa but I don't care about them so I'm jsut going to call them The Southern Lands!"). And she has got a good idea going in the following of the messenger troops instead of anyone else.
(I must say I get a little annoyed when I read books and the various parts of the in-world military are all "oh, we're cool, but those guys? pff, they never do any work". I mean, I know that happens IRL, but it's kind of annoying to me.)
Next to read: either Speaker for the Dead, (a reread, as I read Ender's Game a couple months ago and remember a lot of cool ideas in SftD), or/and Out of the Silent Planet, because I haven't read it yet and classic SF is generally good. :D