Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi

Posted on 11/10/2019 by Roseanna

a1e37vzc5vlIt’s been a while since I made a(nother) fruitless attempt to consume audiobooks, so I was due a new try. And this one I actually finished, so not even fruitless. I don’t think that’s happened since the summer I spent scanning literally every book in Newnham college library, while listening to The Iliad, The Odyssey and anything else I could get hold of for free on my headphones to stop me from being bored out of my skull. Which should have alerted me to the precise set of circumstances I need to power through an audiobook, but I’m not very smart sometimes. After a difficult (and steadily increasing speeded) start, I found I could manage to listen to this without tuning out when, and only when, I was doing data entry. Anything else, especially if it involved any level of concentration, and I zoned out. And if I was just listening to it with nothing else going on, I got impatient and bored, even on 1.75x speed. I’m assuming I’m weird in this, because lots of people listen to audiobooks and they can’t all be doing data entry or library scanning the whole time. Lucky me, I did at least have a big ol’ bunch of data entry I needed to be doing last week and this, so I got through it without losing the plot desperately much, but it still just… wasn’t as enjoyable an experience for me as reading a words-on-a-page book, nor as immersive. I’m much more aware of my surroundings and other stuff going on when I’m listening than when I’m reading – when I’m reading, I can very easily go totally in-the-zone, to the extent that I won’t notice if someone speaks to me or touches me. Notable – and somewhat embarrassing example – I was reading something very good, and the boyfriend came and sat next to me and I think either hugged me or held my hand. About fifteen minutes later, when he was no longer in the room, I asked “hang on, were being affectionate just now?”. It just… took about 15 minutes to sink into my brain that something outside of the story was happening. I don’t get this level of monofocus when I’m doing basically anything else, and definitely not when listening to an audiobook. And I think I associate the act of consuming stories with that level of immersion so it feels incomplete without it. So audiobooks just feel… unsatisfying. I’m missing out.

And then of course there’s the fact that even at 2x speed, I read more quickly than the audiobook goes. And so I get really impatient. I want the story to be going as fast as stories normally go in my head.

Genuinely interested to hear if anyone who does use audiobooks has any suggestions for how to manage better with them. They’d be a really useful way for me to continue consuming books e.g. at work, but I can’t always be doing data entry. I hope. I’m not sure that would be worth the trade-off.

All that aside, I also didn’t particularly like the book.

The narrator was great, she read really pleasantly and did a good set of easily distinguishable voices for the different characters. Also it was really nice to get the accent, and how that varied between the different characters’ social statuses. Bahni Turpin – no complaints.

But the story? Ehhhhh. Some of this is just because it’s YA, and I don’t like YA. The only ones I read as an adult are the ones I have nostalgia for because I read them when I was the right age. The stuff I come to fresh now feels so… samey. There’s a limited selection of narratives, and they tend to be very focussed on a small subset of problems (shockingly, the ones affecting teens), rather than the breadth you get in adult fiction. I mean, don’t get me wrong, some adult fiction is obsessed with love triangles between the people saving the world too… but there’s other options. And since I’m not a fan of teen-hormone-crush-obsession as a major part of my narratives, I like having those other options. It’s just not my thing. And this is very YA. I spent a pretty chonky section of the book getting annoyed that the only way people could see past years of oppression was if the person who represented the other side of the issue was really really hot. Because it really is just “your people have murdered and oppressed mine but you’re really pretty so I’m going to ignore it and work with you” vs. “I’ve been brought up to think your people are dangerous rebels and should be kept downtrodden at all costs but omg you’re so hot so we can totally fix the system I was happily supporting up until literally five seconds ago”. Guys! That’s not… please… really? Ok no apparently that’s how we roll.

Even leaving aside my own reading tastes and desire for a less annoying narrative… give teenagers some credit. None of the people I was friends with aged 16 were like that… they were relatively sensible and level headed and sure, they had crushes, but they weren’t all-consuming things that required them to throw all sense and logic to the wind and change every opinion they had. It just feels like it’s playing into some really crappy stereotypes of “omg so hormonal” about teenagers that aren’t… real? And it’s annoying to read.

The story in and of itself is… fine I guess? In broad strokes, it sounds fairly similar to a lot of other YA fiction (fictional country, oppressed minority, cruel heartless nobility, one girl defies the world order, has special unique property that allows her to do so, attracts attention of sexy boy in heartless nobility, quests to free her people, undergoes vast quantities of angst). The overall premise is similar to, for instance, Red Queen, which I read a while ago. The details are different, the flavour is different… but it’s just a different reflex of a common narrative. It’s not a great example of it though. The pacing is somewhat nonsense, and goes all over the place near the end. It’s the first book in a trilogy, but it doesn’t do enough of a good job of tidying up loose ends even for that – it’s not stuff being left hanging for book two, it’s just stuff that’s been abandoned (or so it feels). Far too much space in the story is given to a central section of doubled up relationship drama, and you end up sort of forgetting how the actual plot is getting on while this is happening.

And then of course the fact that the relationship stuff is so fucking cringe. I don’t know how many times I had to listen to the phrase “the seasalt scent of her soul” but it was too many. Far too many. There’s also a bit about someone’s eyelashes going on forever, which… weird. And people using the word “scent” in a way that feels downright creepy – I don’t think I’ve ever found the idea of someone enjoying a person’s “scent” romantic. It feels far more… predatory.

This also comes through in broader aspects of the novel – there’s a tendency towards overblow descriptions and behaviours that undermine a lot of the themes it’s going for. There’s a definite striving for the oppressive king to be comprehensible while still evil – we get a lot of his motivation – but he’s so caricaturedly evil that this just doesn’t land at all, and feels like a waste of time. We get introduced early to how evil he is, and however many times you talk about his tragic backstory, it doesn’t outweigh the massive evil.

Likewise, the attempts to make the oppression of the maji (magic users) more complex by giving them a dangerous history of their own feels… iffy. There’s a history in SFF of trying to do an in-world history where x oppressed group is oppressed because in the past actually they were the evil overlords and huzzah now it’s complicated and morally deep oh what a clever author I am. And that isn’t… good. It says some really nasty shit about how people think about oppressed groups and whether they “deserve” what they got. And likewise here, there’s an unresolved sense in the second half of the book that the concern about how dangerous the oppressed group is legitimate, and the way it’s handled feels kinda icky to me. I would have liked to see it shut down more firmly, rather than just set aside when other bits of the plot were more exciting. I feel like it didn’t really get refuted (and is probably an issue coming back for more in book two), but that abeyance feels far more like a tacit agreement to it than I’d like.

There’s also a real polarisation in terms of the female characters that I didn’t like… it’s setting a very real dichotomy of the ungirly, fighty one vs. the soft, gentle, pretty and nice one. And even though the “nice” one gets some development throughout the book, it doesn’t really ever stop that characterisation. Likewise, the fighty one gets to be a bit softer… by being in love with a dude. Like, guys, can we not? Can’t women just have some development for their own sake?

On the plus side, the setting was at least enjoyable. There’s a lot of decent evocation of place, and parts where I was given very clear mental images or impressions of environment – Adeyemi definitely likes emphasising smells, for instance, and that worked well for me in creating an atmosphere. But even this is undermined, because she’s fallen into the common trap of “real world stuff but fake name”. Like in The Black Magician Trilogy, where there are animals that are absolutely spiders, mice and rats, but they need fantasy names because this is a fantasy book, all the animals in this have fantasy names. But not only are the “real” animals discernable underneath from the descriptions… the names are often also just the real animal name with “uh” on the end. Maybe in the paper version the spelling makes that less obvious, but over audiobook, it was kind of rubbish, and definitely eyeroll enough to make me fall out of immersion at points. There was also a bit of “this is the city of <one notable feature that permeates everything>”, which… again, just a bit dull. But the descriptions of the journeys and places were quite well done, so for all I was sighing, at least the hackneyed ideas were being worked fairly hard? I sound catty, but for the most part, I did enjoy the descriptive passages, so long as they weren’t applied to people, and some of the buildings, villages and communities had a very real and evocative feel to them.

However, it was a fundamentally unsatisfying book, frankly, that fell into a lot of stuff I don’t particularly like, but also was doing some of the valid and aspiration-worthy stuff it was clearly trying for quite badly. The issues it’s engaging with are, for the most part, issues worth engaging with, but some of them are dropped part way through, left behind or just made a bit dodge, so it’s hard to see it as a good response to those issues. Its joy for me is in the surface level stuff, the stuff that isn’t enough to sustain a novel. I don’t like or really engage with the characters because there’s not really enough to them to do so – they’re often defined by a simple selection of traits, and we spend too much time watching them lust over someone else to get enough actual character development out of them.

Basically, it’s a very YA novel, and it’s the sort of thing that’s exactly why I don’t read YA… and why I think YA on the whole has some kinda bad points to it. It undersells, I think, what teens are capable of and may enjoy, by narrowing the focus to a specific subset of fairly predictable narratives. It’s not wrong to enjoy those narratives, but I think teen-me definitely wanted a broader scope – and aged out of YA fairly quickly because of this – than it was willing to provide her. I have nostalgia for some YA books, but none of it as strongly as for adult books I read around the same time. Not that this one book is a referendum on all YA, but it does exemplify a lot of the stuff that drives me away from it, as a genre.

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Gods of Jade and Shadow – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on 11/10/2019 by Roseanna
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It’s so pretty…

I was at least partly just attracted to how pretty this is. The cover is extremely attractive. But also, it got a lot of good social media publicity, I absolutely accept that marketing works, and the premise is very much up my street. Or… well. The premise (mythology rejigged) used to be unreservedly up my street, and now is a cautious pique of interest, pending examination of how actually interesting a reimagination it is. I’m not saying there are a fair few that are a) boring or b) kinda sufficiently out of the spirit of the original that it doesn’t even make sense why they chose to do it in the first place – just write your own damn story if that’s what you want… except I totally am. And often they’re the ones that get a lot of marketing… for reasons I don’t really understand, but I’m sure are there. Luckily, this wasn’t one of those. This one is just good.

There are several schools of “let’s redo a myth”, and this has chosen the “lean heavily into the spirit of the mythic narrative” style, rather than updating everything or changing tonnes. It’s writing a myth into a novel, which I think can work really well when the author has a solid take on what a myth really is. I have my own thoughts on that, but it doesn’t even have to agree. They just need a clear idea, a strong take, and for that to bleed through sufficiently into the story that it doesn’t feel like just another novel. Because the whole point of myths is being more than just a story, right?

Anyway, Moreno-Garcia does it and does it good. The novel follows a girl who accidentally resurrects the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, and is bound to him and his revenge against his brother, at the risk of her own life. Structurally, it doesn’t deviate much from what I’d consider traditional mythic narrative*, and it becomes closer and closer to that as the story progresses – it has the same logic, the same repetition of key themes, the same ideas of the trial and the sacrifice and the promised reward that crop up again and again. And it does them well, and manages to really capture that feeling of wonder and strangeness that myths have when told well. Even if you don’t know how any of the magic works – and you never really do – it has an intrinsic, intuitive sense to the whole thing that makes questioning it irrelevant. There’s no how, it just… is. There’s also the strange inevitability you get, the feeling of the narrative force being stronger than any of the characters possibly could be, the weight of fate on them all. It’s properly mythy.

But it manages to do all that while still giving good characters. For all that she’s absolutely a mythical maiden, Casiopeia also feels like a person, with her own hopes and wants and internal life. She feels if not totally modern – the book is after all set in the 20s – then sufficiently close to be familiar. Her life is accessible to us, as are her feelings, her problems. We see the other characters through her eyes, and for all it’s very difficult to like any of them, they all make sense as people… except for the gods, who follow their own, baffling rules. But even they fit well into the landscape created, they are unknowable in predictable ways. They are detached and cold and distant and their actions make sense for people outside of normal consequence and time constraint… but we get to see them through Casiopeia, and so the familiarity of story is overlaid with a real and human confusion, so the myth and the realism lie side by side with each other. The skill is present and visible in balancing both so they don’t fight.

The way I describe it, it sounds like a simple book. And in a lot of ways it is – it tells a story, without fuss or nonsense. But it tells that story so well, and gives you the feelings that myths are meant to give you, so you find yourself needing to turn that next page and the next, needing to know how it turns out. It’s deeply compelling, and full of the unexamined magic I want from these stories – the magic of the unexplained world, not unfamiliar, just unknowable, and part of the fundamental existence of life around us. The magic of stories written to explain the world, and so the magic is itself the explanation. Simple things can be wonderful, when they’re done with care, attention and skill. And this has all three.

*I know very very little about Mayan myths, so if I have stabbed wildly into nonsense here, I have only myself to blame. But it felt familiar, in that way all the myths I do know do, so I’m going for it and ah well, someone will correct me if I’m wrong, probably.

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Reread: The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks

Posted on 06/10/2019 by Roseanna

51xa9xou6ml._sx315_bo1204203200_This is a quick one, because my opinion basically hasn’t changed on rereading it, please pardon the… somewhat clunkier prose of the me of three years ago. I reread it for book club, but honestly, it was quite nice to do this shortly after rereading Consider Phlebas, where my opinion has changed a lot, to reflect on the differences and similarities between the two. I think the thing Player of Games manages much better is immersing you in the world, and without a compelling character to glom onto in either of them, you need that immersion to see you through. I gave, and gave again, five stars to Player of Games for making a book where it totally didn’t matter to me how likeable the character was. I loved watching him, I loved watching his progression, his growing understanding, his changing realisations about himself and the world around him, and I loved learning about that world, so much that it just… was fine. He wasn’t the point. Banks has the gift of giving you an abundance of substance – there’s things to glom onto everywhere, throughout his books, in a way that a lot of the books with unsympathetic characters don’t manage. Dune, and the world it inhabits, just isn’t as rich, as layered, as complex and as well thought through as the Culture. There’s just the one, plain, visible layer of the ooh-look-a-mysterious-world, and that’s not enough to captivate. It feels flat and dead, a stage set, when held up against the vivid and realistic backdrop Banks provides. And I suppose Banks is being deeply character focussed – a huge amount of my interest is spent on watching Gurgeh change and grow through the book. He’s just made it interesting outside of me liking him. And that’s really cool.

And of course he writes lovely prose. I didn’t mention that so much in my original post, but it really, really matters to me. He’s clever and funny and witty and wry, and there’s a care and thoughtfulness to each word on the page, without there seeming to be at any point. Banks is just… good at his craft, in all the ways he needs to be, rather than merely sufficient.

So yeah, still great, still love it. Still doing a thing I don’t really find in anyone else’s books. Will still reread and love.

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Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide – Kate Charlesworth

Posted on 06/10/2019 by Roseanna

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I… may not have blogged for ages because I got stymied writing this post. Graphic novels are hard. I have to think of art words to say. But no, I shall persevere, because the book is great and deserves to be praised loudly and frequently.

I bought this based entirely and somewhat impulsively on a review in the Guardian (here). It felt sufficiently different to my current reading, and I wanted something different. And of course the review is pretty glowing. So I figured, I’ve just been paid… why not.

Go go impulse purchase. It worked out pretty well.

Important note for anyone who might have been concerned – it did not read to me as TERFy. I’m obviously not going to be the best person to judge it, but to the best of my knowledge, Charlesworth is being selective about what she includes based on personal experience, but doesn’t shy away from intersectionality when it comes naturally into her story. There are trans narratives mentioned and crossed over, but they’re not the focus of the book. They are treated no less sympathetically than anything else in there, as far as I can tell. Likewise, it’s a story of someone growing up in the north of England in the past, and so it is very very white, for the most part. Not exclusively, and when it’s not, I sensed nothing that made me go “eek”, but again, I won’t be the best judge here.

The Guardian review is a fair assessment of why I liked it – it combines the personal and the historical, it manages a balance in tone between the serious (when recounting some of the absolute shite of this country’s history for LGBTQ+ folks) alongside the silly, the light, the personal and the joyful. A lot of the time, Charlesworth does not take herself seriously, however much she may do so with the rest of her subject matter. Her cartoon forays into her childhood and adolescence are filled with extremely relatable moments of daftness, awkwardness and missed hints. She clearly rolls her eyes at her childhood self at times, but with a constant sense of fondness undercutting it. It captures very clearly and relatably the tone we surely all have, looking back at our younger selves missing things that seem so obvious now, and blundering through life unaware until something smacks us in the face.

But I think what their review misses is just how crammed the historical parts are. It’s full to bursting with snippets and memories and references, with posters and portraits and other bits and pieces visualised alongside the running timeline, often in chaotic double page spreads. It’s great. It’s a chunky book anyway, but putting it all together makes you so aware of the wealth of cultural heritage she’s drawing on, much of which (but not all) is from her own lifetime. It’s dense, and mad and just… full. But it doesn’t feel unreadable – yes, you have to take the time to read through all the little bits on each page, but it always feels worthwhile, always rewarding. Just a reminder of the quantity of it all. Which to some extent remedies my main issue I often have with graphic novels – I get through them way too quickly. But it forces you not to – because the big double page spreads are so crammed, and the text isn’t linear, you have to stop, open it up, turn it around, and really look to make sure you catch everything. And you want to catch everything, because it’s fascinating or funny or clever or sometimes horrifying but always compelling, so to skip it would feel like such a waste of your time. And so while it didn’t take me as long to read as a full text book, it still made me sit, made me do it in several sessions, made me contemplate what I was reading and actually process it properly. Which yeah, I’m terrible at when reading a graphic novel. Thanks, Kate Charlesworth, for anticipating my poor attention span.

Needless to say, the art is also lovely. She uses different styles for narrating her own growing up, her present and the history, and so you get an immediate visual cue as to what sort of bit you’re reading, whenever you turn the page. But all three are lovely, just in different ways. Again, the diversity of style forces you to slow down what you’re doing and enjoy the view, while also showcasing more of Charlesworth’s art (did I mention? lovely).

Probably for someone well-versed in British LGBTQ+ history, it won’t be as fascinating as it was for me – a lot of the joy was in the learning. But even the bits I did know I enjoyed, because it was so well presented, and all woven through with Charlesworth’s very clear voice. Even when fascinating isn’t there, it’s extremely personable, which makes it something I feel like I’ll definitely reread. It makes no claim to being exhaustive, so I think even with knowledge of the subject matter, the choice of what to include and not will be interesting – it’s intended as a biography of her own interaction with the culture she grew up with, and so will of course be selective and personal. It’s a picture of a life lived as well as a history. And I like that as an idea – a life defined by the culture consumed. I think it would be an interesting way to see a lot of people, especially ones that grew up in particular times.

There’s also a lot about her family, and the changing relationship with parents as one grows older, as well as possible insight into the possibly stifled narratives of her mother’s generation. It’s not always a happy relationship, not always plain sailing, but it’s told with frankness and emotionality that you can’t help but glom onto. It’s so easy to care about her, especially about her young self, and see why she makes the choices she makes, why this conversation hurt and that theme hung over the conversation unsaid. It’s also got a definite background awareness of class issues and the north south divide, and while they don’t much come out into the open, they clearly inform so much else of what was going on. And, important to mention – book with clearly depicted northern accents that aren’t cringe to read (possibly because done by someone who was actually a native of the dialect rather than someone doing a bad impression). It’s all so grounded – in its time, its place, its moment in the culture and the life of one person. You feel really situated into the story at all times, and that’s part of what made it such a page turned (even if you did want to contemplate each page itself very carefully).

For me, and for all that it’s often not a narrative about good things, the overall tone was a positive one, about a person growing into themself and their happiness and comfort with who they are. It’s told well, by an easy to like and relate to narrator (for me at least), and with art that is by turns charming, clever and just pretty. And it was really informative. I would definitely seek out more by Charlesworth in future, and I’d definitely say it’s a good read if you want a graphic novel that will last you multiple sittings.

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This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Posted on 20/08/2019 by Roseanna

71u2bv2bfclqlSometimes, I’m willing to admit, I can be wrong. I have seen Max Gladstone’s books around the place, seen the covers and the blurbs, and concluded “that’s not for me”. And so, when I saw this, when I saw people saying it was great, I assumed that since Max Gladstone seemed to be not for me, so too would this be. But I have a few persuasive friends, who have sensible taste barring the odd complete lapse in all sense and reason*, whom I’m willing to trust when they go “no, this one”. And one of them did, so I figured, what the hell.

And he was right. Because this was very much for me indeed.

By which I mean it was so fucking good. I didn’t know a lesbian spy story told in the medium of letters was something I really needed, but El-Mohtar and Gladstone did, so hats off to them for providing such a necessary service.

Just as a heads up, it’s a novella rather than a novel, coming in at a very slim 198 pages, which by necessity means there’s a pared down-ness to the story. You’re not getting a rambling epic in that sort of space, because the only way to do it would be badly. And well, they’re not doing anything badly here. It’s more a series of snapshots into a relationship, in letters and brief snippets of lives. And as such, it’s a very restricted window onto both characters. It’s not trying to give us the panorama of a whole and unfiltered person. It’s just one line… well… two – the way two people present themselves to each other, and how they see their opposite number. The self and the reflection for each of them. And by committing to such a simple and clear line, the authors have given themselves space to completely devote to making it brilliant.

It’s a really beautiful picture of two people sharing themselves through text, and made especially so because each of the authors wrote one of the characters. There’s a specific voice to each of Blue and Red, and an individual way of saying things and doing things, that you come very quickly to recognise in their words. They put themselves quickly and decisively on the page for you, and tell you in their own words who they are, so you know them within moments.

A big part of the beauty for me is how lovely the prose is. The way they speak to each other is both incredibly real, for people writing letters, sharing their emotions about one another, but also so unreal, and clearly bound up in their nature of being not just out of our time, but out of time altogether. Their words are artificial in the way of all letters, in the way that fitting yourself into a formality – one they even joke about – will do to a person, and yet sufficiently true and real that you can see the person spilling out around the edges. Particularly in Blue’s letters, but in both to an extent, there’s also a strong, lyrical quality (Amal El-Mohtar is a poet? No? *shocked face*) that makes it so, so lovely to read. I found myself going back over lines to appreciate them right down to the word by word level, the choice of each single one being so right. And not just aesthetically – they’re often also really… clever.

The best way I can describe it, I think is this: I really, really like Tom Stoppard. Some people think he’s a bit (or a lot) up himself, just showing off that he’s so clever look at me I wrote a play about quantum physics oh la di daaah! And I’m not going to disagree with you on that. He’s leaning hard into being a clever man, who writes clever wordplay between characters who are all just so clever. But it’s self-aware, too. He’s laughing at himself as much as we are laughing at the joy of the quickness of the dialogue, how it springs from person to person, everyone grabbing onto the concept and playing with it, moulding it, shaping the ideas between them, changing it and growing it and all the time letting you in on the cleverness, asking “do you get it?” and assuming the answer will be “yes! let me play too!”. And the letters here have that quality to them – they exult in what they’re doing, make no bones about how much they are enjoying being exactly what they are, but the door is open for you to see inside. The jokes are open for you to get them, to smile and laugh and see the joy they’re having in being this way.

I smiled as I read this, so many times. They’re not jokes, exactly. But they’re being funny by being clever in a way I see and feel a sort of sympathetic joy for being in that sort of conversation. I am happy, because I understand how happy it would be, to be like that with one another. The reader is happy because they’ve opened up their wonder and elation in each other for you to look inside and feel some shadow of it too. And that’s… really special and compelling and, well, joyful.

I’ve been reading a lot of books that make me have emotions, recently, and as you can see this is just another one of those. Only not just. None of them are “just”. These are what books can really be for me when there’s real soul in them, where the words are crafted and the people real, and I cannot decide whether to rush through it from the exhilaration or slow down to savour every perfectly chosen phrase and pause and poetry, am torn because I want to love it all the ways, and can’t do them all at once. These are books that scream to be read over and again, to take the different meanings they have, and simply because the words they’ve written are beautiful little pieces of art, because the lives they’ve breathed into people born of type on paper mean something to me, however briefly or forever. The books that make me feel something for them, because they’re good enough not just to take my mind away to another place, but to take my heart with it.

Those are the books that really hold me, and why I gripe about prose, about characters when they’re not there. Because when they are? It’s kind of magical.

 

*No, Becky Chambers’ series being not that great is a hill I will die on.

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Dawn – Octavia Butler

Posted on 20/08/2019 by Roseanna

5123kwmeaflThis was… a lot shorter than I expected. Are all three of the Lilith’s Brood books put together the length of a full novel? Maybe I should have read them all in one go. Who knows.

Anyway… I was less taken with this than the other Octavia Butler I’ve read. I’m trying to puzzle out exactly why. I think it’s one of those books where knowing that the ick I am being made to feel is a deliberate choice by the author doesn’t outweigh the discomfort at reading the ick? And either I’m failing to see the bigger picture it’s making – which is entirely possible – or some of the ick is quite… unnecessary and uncomfortable for no real reason that I can see. I don’t quite get what some of it is adding to the story, the characters or the way things come across. And I find it quite hard to read this sort of stuff when it feels gratuitous to me.

So, trigger warnings contain spoilers, but necessary for this book: there’s an amount of coercive sex and sex-like behaviour, with the coercion or attempted coercion being both violence, manipulation and pseudo-drugging. It’s… a fairly major part of what the story is doing. Do not read if this is not something you can soldier through, because it’s not just one scene. And I’m gonna discuss it, because it’s a lot of what’s mattering to how I think about the book.

Broad outline: the world has fucked itself up in war, and humanity barely survives. The only reason at all we might manage to do so is that there has been some… outside help. We follow Lilith Iyapo as she wakes up in captivity by persons unknown, and watch her discover who is holding her, how things sit in her world now, and how she can play a part in rebuilding it for her people. Along the way, there’s an exploration of how she comes to know her captors, her rescuers, and the price her people have to pay for what they’ve been given to start over again, and the lack of choice they seem to have about paying it.

Because a lot of what they seem to be paying with is themselves, in different ways. Their lives in the moment, their genetics, their pleasure and their children. And the book is about watching Lilith coming to terms with this cost, and beginning to experience it, and listening to how she feels about it, or the things she doesn’t say.

Some of this is watching her have her intimate moments, with other humans and with her captors, suborned or coerced. And not just her. There’s a moment where someone says “no” to an offer, to an experience that he’s been told he can refuse… and then the experience is foisted upon him despite his refusal, because “his body said yes”. And that’s… no matter the point it’s making, it’s really really uncomfortable to watch happening. And that sort of thing is pretty unrelenting.

It almost feels like there are multiple the things the book could be about – about slavery and womanhood and identity and colonialism – and I can’t tell which it is, or whether it’s all of them or none, and that feeling of being at sea, of uncertainty, is making me struggle with it, I think. I want to understand, but I don’t. I want to know the answer, because I always want to know the answer. And not knowing the answer means I can’t really enjoy it… for somewhat specific values of “knowing the answer”. I’ve no problem with e.g. Yoon Ha Lee’s technology where I haven’t a damn clue how any of it works but it feels right. I don’t need to understand that. But I need to understand what the book is fundamentally trying to tell me. Or the big answer. And I don’t. And I don’t like it.

Maybe I’ll get those answers in the other two parts – the more I think about how the book felt and was structured, the more it felt like the first act of a single book, a single story, not the first story in a collection of three. I could be wrong, and I could read the second one and write a totally different blog. But the fact I didn’t enjoy it but feel really quite obliged to go onto the next one? I’m treating it like one book I need to finish. Knowing it was originally released as a single volume probably isn’t helping.

So an unsatisfactory, uncomfortable, uncomprehended book. I nearly gave it more stars because I worried it was me who wasn’t up to scratch, rather than it. But that’s no way to mark things, really. I have to judge the experiences I have, not the ones I think I ought to have. And the one I had was decidedly three stars. But I’ll read the other two, and hopefully things will change.

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Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay

Posted on 18/08/2019 by Roseanna

tigana-cover-americanThe boyfriend and I read this roughly simultaneously, and we both had the same two responses to it. Firstly, “BIG MOOD”. Secondly “SO SAD”.

You may see from my previous Guy Gavriel Kay related post that I like him because he makes me have the emotions, especially by picking up on themes that poke me in particular areas of my soul. Tigana has done it all over again, only this time without ripping off any specific historical event, merely riffing on broader ideas and themes to create something that feels historical – I did have to look it up to juuuust double check I wasn’t being really daft and missing a bit of history for it to link up to – but to much the same effect. Specifically, its working on a theme of damnatio memoriae and the effect of being erased and forgotten, more literally than a real world history would ever allow, and how this shapes a people and a culture.

It follows the story of a peninsula called The Palm, after the invasion of two outside forces totally changes the balance of power, and shatters the way the people who live there have led their lives with the magic both invaders bring with them. It follows a group of people who fight against the occupying forces 20 years after the invasion, trying to regain their homeland, and the memory of their home province. Brandin of Ygrath, a sorceror king, has wreaked revenge on the province of Tigana for the death of his son in battle, destroying their great cities, their art and their people, and making it impossible for anyone but its inhabitants to hear its name spoken again. While Brandin lives, Tigana remains forgotten, renamed for its hated rival and punished above all the other provinces. It’s a story of the people of Tigana fighting to unify the Palm against their occupiers, and fighting to get the memory of their very culture back from his spell.

And it is unreletingly, unswervingly sad.

Which isn’t a surprise, given the subject matter, but it’s more than what I’m making it sound like, and not… entirely to the good. GGK does a lot of emotions in a lot of his work, but there’s normally variety, there’s sad and glorious and tragic and miraculous, all shoved together and vying for attention. He may rip your heart out, but he’ll make it absolutely worth your while. This one was a bit more… one note. It felt like he hadn’t quite got the measure of how far to push the reader, how much they wanted. Because I really did sometimes want just a brief pause, for something not to be tarnished with the overwhelming sadness of it all, some glimpse of something positive. Because every positive moment in the book does get brought back to that melancholy absence of memory, that loss. And it keeps on hitting you and hitting you and you can’t get away.

That being said, all that makes it is a 4 rather than a 5. He’s still GGK… this is just not quite as good as his other work (and I think you can tell that it’s earlier on than some of what I might think of as his best).

What it does have, to its credit, is some of the best described fictional locations I can currently think of. I didn’t need the maps he gives me – he describes it all so well and it all fits together so neatly, I understand the direction the story takes without needing to be shown. The landscape too is vivid and real, from the sunny lowlands and seas to the forbidding mountains and Castle Borso, it feels both like a single potential country, and a varied landscape of a real place. I could see so much of it so clearly in my mind’s eye, and none of it by having to analogise to a single, real location, as I have felt myself doing with some of his other work. He paints beautiful pictures with his words, and makes the reader inhabit them without even noticing the effort being put in to make them so real.

Likewise, the people are just as wonderful, flawed and valuable as any of his characters. I loved all of the company, different though they were, and I think it would be hard not to be caught up in their mutual love of music. They’re all thoughtful, when you’re inhabiting their minds as they have the page space, but they are all very different. No matter that you see them all musing on events, you get a varied perspective, a new way of looking at things through each of their eyes. I have my favourites, because of course, but they’re all people I found myself caring immensely about. Again, because GGK really does just have a talent for humans and human relationships. And here he’s made how they interrelate so complex, it’s not just a simple matter of x is friends with y and a fancies b. People don’t just partner up. There’s… mess. Real, human mess. Things happen that don’t get closure for everyone. Real life throws off the plans. People react to things, do stupid shit, and live with the consequences. Throw themselves into inadvisable nonsense and get rescued by their friends, and in the process change how they see each other and themselves. The characters truly, really grow, and more than anything, as in all of his books, the characters are why I love GGK.

There’s Devin, the thoughtful, quiet, patient young musician, and the way he slowly pieces together the things he sees until he figures out the pattern behind them. Baerd who seems a gruff, burly fighter, until you see what’s in his past and his mind. Catriana, with a stick up her arse and lot to prove. And more who would totally be spoilers. But are great.

One of the book club questions we use – not that this is a book club book but it’s useful to have them as a tool for thinking about things – is about which parts of a book you think you’ll remember in a year’s time, or whether it will just leave a blurred and vague feeling. I know with GGK’s books that I have still have vivid and clear pictures of scenery in my head long after I’ve put them down, but also that I can strongly feel, still, the extent to which I really loved the characters he gives us. And to give that strong a memory, be it a year, two years or more later, of a person, and the sense of them as a whole being… it’s really something special, and something worth coming back to for more.

By which I mean, apologies, there’s a load more GGK coming up on here in the next few months. I’m not sorry.

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Testosterone Rex – Cordelia Fine

Posted on 17/08/2019 by Roseanna

9781785783180I’ve been meaning to read this one for ages, but because I don’t actually read a lot of non-fiction (I read it a lot more slowly than I read fiction*), it kept getting put off and off. There are problems with gameifying your reading, after all. But I’m currently slightly ahead of my reading goal (if not my blog, shush), so I figured now was the time… and then when it arrived in the post it turned out to be hardly the chonkiest volume, and I felt rather silly.

Doubly so when I really, really enjoyed it.

I have very mixed success reading pop-topic books. It’s worse the more I know about a thing, obviously, but even in pop-science I sometimes struggle with the tone treating me more like an ignorant child than I’d really like to feel. I mean sure, I don’t really know much about quantum physics, but I’m not an idiot… is my usual response. It makes getting through the longer ones a bit tough, especially when combined with being a bit on the drier side, or tooth-achingly cheery. Thankfully, this is neither. What it is instead is gloriously, bitingly sarcastic, almost unrelentingly. Which is absolutely a tone I can get behind, especially in a book that’s fundamentally about debunking the science (and guff) that theorises that there’s such a thing as a man/woman brain, as well as a lot of the societal nonsense that proceeds, directly or indirectly, from that assumption… from the assumption that men and women cannot be equal, due to hormones/brains/the immutable forces of chromosomes.

That being said, and before you go further, I strongly suspect that if you agree with it, this book will come across great, and if you don’t, it’s going to be a bit grating and superior. I would like to hope most of the people likely to read this are inclined towards the agreement end of the spectrum, but you never know. Proceed with caution if you read the thesis and rankle – you will probably be deeply irritated by the author’s tone.

Primarily, the way she goes about debunking those myths is to present the previous science that supported them, including data from various landmark experiments on the topic (some of which I actually recall from GCSE or A level biology), and to go through illustrating, often using the original data, where the weak points in their arguments lie – whether it’s from selective use of data to present a clearer picture than actually exists, or by highlighting flawed methodologies, she’s committed to undermining them by their own work, rather than external logic. She does present more modern studies that disagree too, but a lot of the work goes into disproving what went before, rather than showcasing precisely the finer points of the newer stuff. She does some of that, enough that there’s a definite working theme throughout of what she thinks the data does prove, but it’s more about proving that hormones/brains are not as simple as they’ve been presented than anything else.

But while she’s debunking some of them, she’s absolutely not above making the reader aware of how blatantly ridiculous (or wankery) some of those conclusions sounded, often just by quoting the science in question. And then sassing it massively. Which is what for me makes the book so readable – it feels like a conversation, albeit with someone extremely knowledgeable about the subject being discussed.

It also touches on some areas where this stuff got covered in the news (a few years ago, or slightly further even), and that I remember, with some insight into why things got reported as they did, and what the issues are with that. She focusses particularly on the financial crash, and subsequent media articles that suggested this wouldn’t have happened with more women in finance.

The book is laid out really clearly, going from the past theories (and debunking them) to the present state of things (both science and more generally) to a look ahead, and her own conclusions. The chapters are short and sufficiently meaty, without being overfull of details. It doesn’t treat the reader like an idiot, though it does assume a certain amount of buy in to the fundamental premise of the book, and pitches the tone accordingly. There’s little love lost here for anyone who genuinely believes, for instance, that men are “naturally” aggressive and therefore “naturally” suited to the rigours of senior management. She’s also very willing to spell out why the conclusions drawn by the less good science have real and current impacts in the world, and how they might play into wider ideas – for instance, why gendered toy marketing might actually make a massive difference.

I had been slightly worried before reading that we’d see no mention or thought about any gender identities beyond cismale and cisfemale. Or worse, that we would, and it wouldn’t be pretty. She’s definitely on the sparse side when considering anything outside of experience where one’s gender assigned at birth matches one’s gender identity, but there is a little in there, and nothing that struck me as egregiously awful (though I’m hardly the best judge). She does tend to use “male” and “female” to mean cis in both cases, especially when talking about hormone production, though, so it’s not exactly perfect, however much she starts with an explanation of how she’s using her terms, especially around differentiating biological sex and gender identity. She does also briefly touch on intersex experience and how it relates to all of the above, but extremely briefly, and once done, it barely comes up again throughout the book. It’s clear she’s primarily interested in cis brains, hormones, and the previous work also specifically around those.

Her fundamental conclusion (because I don’t think you can really “spoil” a science book) is a) that brains and hormones are bloody complicated and you can’t pigeonhole them at all, nor does the science support doing so, and b) that being human, with all the socialising, reasoned thought, culture and other icing we pile on top of evolution undermines all the stuff about evolution making us do <whatever>. She backs all of it up with what at least appeared to me to be good, reasoned argument and some linked data, and let me have fun reading as I got through it.

Did I learn anything? Absolutely. Did it change my opinions? Not in the slightest. But it made me feel more secure that my position is a reasoned and defensible one, with good science backing it up, and also more keen to keep reading more because brains are fascinating, and she writes really interestingly about them. So yeah, solid work, absolutely top bracket pop-science, at least for my reading tastes.

*Which mildly baffles me, since I don’t think I had this problem at uni at all. Clearly I had the knack and it’s just… disappeared somehow? I should get it back.

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Under the Pendulum Sun – Jeanette Ng

Posted on 17/08/2019 by Roseanna

51uuj6-vvqlAlas, a book for a book club I missed. The saddest of times (though in fairness I got to be in Portugal for a fantastic wedding, so I don’t really get to complain about any hardships here at all).

That being said… it wasn’t a great book. And in that really frustrating way that a lot of books have, of bringing some decent ideas to the table and then absolutely failing them all by being utterly shitly written. Sometimes the ideas are enough to carry them through and be worthwhile in spite of all that. Sometimes the ideas are full on stunning. But this one isn’t that sometimes. This one fell flat on its face.

The premise behind the novel is a woman following her brother to fairyland, where he’s a CofE missionary in the mid-19th century, trying to convert them to his faith. He’s missing when she arrives, and she’s stuck in a castle/pastiche of a gothic horror novel until Stuff decides to happen to and around her. There are mysteries. There are people saying cryptic, forboding things. There’s a tower and a library full of mysterious books, and a strangely hard to find housekeeper, as well as a mildly comedy-rustic gardener. You know the drill. But it’s in fairyland. I mean, it’s not an idea that’s been done before in that way, at least to my knowledge. Trying to convert fairies to Christianity is a novel theme, and one that, at least on the surface, I’m definitely interested in – it opens up the same queries that space-missionaries would – do aliens have souls, does Jesus’ dying for our humanity’s sins also cover them, are they capable of achieving salvation, that kind of thing. All nicely fascinating queries, some of which do come up in the book… with no satisfying actual discussion or conclusions associated.

Some of the online reviews sell it as being thoughtful and philosophical, suggesting come for the fairies, stay for the theology… but there isn’t really much in the way of theology in sight (from my thoroughly ignorant and untutored perspective). It’s just the pseudo-deep thing that trash books do when they think they’re being clever, of asking the sort of questions which, if posed in front of me in person, would prompt my sarcastic response of “omg man… deeeeeep…”. Because they sort of look clever, if you’re not paying much attention, but actually they’re kinda hackneyed*. They’re drunk guys who’ve had a daft idea questions that don’t reflect well in the cold light of morning. And more importantly, they’re ones she hasn’t been bothered to try to answer, which would have been a lot of the point of doing it anyway.

Because instead of any actual theology, what happens is she gets distracted by the interfamilial drama of her entirely uninspiringly written characters. You have the protag, who is a pretty carbon copy gothic heroine but with all the individuality sanded off, and her brother, who is has one setting and it is BROOD ON MAXIMUM. He’s seen Mr. Rochester and gone “pff, too much nuance there”. Genuinely, this is one of his only two character features (and the other is a spoiler). They’re both distressingly flat and dull, and I give no shits about the fate of either of them. And no one else really gets any page time. There’s the fairies who live in the mysterious castle, one of whom kinda has a personality I guess? And the other of whom barely turns up for most of the book. And then a cast of other fairies showing up later who mainly exist as your traditional fairy background characters, being weird and cryptic about the place**. As is their wont.

But it doesn’t actually give you much more than that of them. I like cryptic fairies. If we’d had more, that might have been a lot more interesting than some of the character relationships we got. If we’d actually dug into the world she’d created (rather than get a lot of stuff as a late-book infodump), if we’d actually explored the fairy stuff… that might have been really cool too. If we’d backed the ideas up with some actual experience of what those ideas meant to the world they were in? I’d have liked that.

It’s a book that, at least for me, focussed on entirely the wrong thing – it could theoretically have been quite interesting, and I liked the idea of it when told. But it just could not support that ambition in its writing, and even had it been able to, it decided to wander off and care more about the least interesting thing around in any case.

In terms of the writing, it’s something I’m critical of a lot, but this goes a touch beyond just “dull, workmanlike” to “actively a bit crap”. And of course, it’s a first book, there’s a bit of pass given for maybe being a bit unpolished… but that only goes so far. If you’re doing a pastiche of a style, and this is 100% leaning into gothic romance, you have to do it right. If you don’t, it makes you look kind of ridiculous. And with gothic romance? There’s so much of it about – there’s a huge amount of source material to ape if you’re so inclined. Which leaves even less excuse for failure, frankly. It commits less hard than Too Like the Lightning but it fails in the same way (it might actually have benefitted from going the whole hog, actually, now I think of it). It just doesn’t feel right for what it’s trying to be, and that’s constantly jarring as you read through. Add to that it has a couple of motifs that crop up too many times to actually be worthwhile and some hopelessly clichéd character writing, and what you have is something of a disaster.

I ended up giving it 3 stars, but that is almost entirely resting on the idea that could have been good. In terms of execution, it fails entirely for me. Also the ending was just unsatisfying. There wasn’t anything about it that really felt… completed to me. Not in a dun dun duuuuh cliffhanger way, just in a half-arsed way. And no one wants a half-arsed book. A shame, but what can you do.

 

*So I’m led to believe that the Jesuits have actually thought about this and a whole lot more in the context of aliens. Because of course they have.
**Mild spoiler time here: the names of some of these characters massively give away the twist at the end. Or so I’m told. I didn’t spot it, but I have zero knowledge of biblical apocrypha – apparently if you have a bit more knowing than that, you can see it an absolute mile off, and then you just get a chunk of book confirming what seemed blatantly obvious, which sounds no fun to me.

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Shadows in Bronze – Lindsey Davis

Posted on 17/08/2019 by Roseanna

81qd5nkkxklAnd a total genre shift – back to Roman Empire murder mysteries! It is absolutely ideal holiday reading, so it went with me on the plane to Portugal. Definitely endorse reading it while sat by the pool, considering sticking your feet in. It’s light, it’s very readable, and it’s not expecting me to make any great leaps of intuition to get the themes and deeper meanings. It’s gonna give me sass, Romans, murders and mysteries, and I can cope with that.

Unfortunately, it’s also giving me noir-esque misogyny, which I’d rather cope without, if possible. I think I discussed in my review of the previous novel, this feels more tied to it being a murder mystery than it being Roman. Not that I’m suggesting the Romans weren’t rampant misogynists, they obviously were, but the tenor of a lot of it feels more around the detective style, the focus on pretty dames with problems and the hardship of being a guy who loves the gorgeous dame who’s above his paygrade, but also has a lady in every port, and a sad story to go with each one. Or an awkward past. And who intends to flirt outrageously with anyone female who crosses his path. There are women in the story who are cast in more traditionally female Roman roles and whose behaviour, opinions and voices fit into that, but a lot of the way it’s trying to be funny – and often succeeding – is by laying over a pastiche of more modern norms on top of the Roman stuff, and giving that humour from the contrast of the two. But this comes with some vaguely icky modern gender stuff. It was written in 1990, so it’s not surprising it isn’t brilliant… though if you’d asked me I’d have likely guessed another decade older than that.

I never entirely get used to it, and I can’t entirely tune it out, but I tried to appreciate the rest of the book without letting it get too much in the way. It’s there, it sucks, be aware if you plan to read it, but I made the choice to disregard it and it worked out roughly ok for me. It’s low-level enough that that’s still possible, at least. And the main female character who turns up is incredibly competent, so it’s mostly confined to the protagonist’s opinions and thoughts, rather than the tone of the book as a whole. It makes Falco less likeable, which for me makes the whole book suffer, but it can be got past with willing.

In terms of the rest? It’s much on a level with the previous book. The murder plot is well thought out, and has the right balance of guessable details and slow reveal, so you’re neither baffled nor shouting at the book how obvious it all is. Which is much as expected. The characters we get to know are pretty fun, and reasonably fleshed out (though Falco does tend towards some stereotypes – however knowingly they’re being played with).

What it does particularly well, though, much as the previous book, is to situate the story in its setting. Where last time it was Rome and Roman Britain, this time it’s Naples. We see the seaside resorts of a Roman summer retreat, and the fertile slopes of Vesuvius with the littered streets of Pompeii. And what Davis is superbly good at is making those places feel incredibly real. She picks up on the right details to have her landscape feel inhabited, used and made, a real and living place rather than a historical relic, while still preserving the Roman-ness of it all. And I’m not gonna lie, a big chunk of what I’m getting out of these books is the historical tourism – I enjoy feeling like I’m being shown the living Roman world, and as long as the plot being laid on top of it is halfway decent, I’ll be willing to look the other way from its flaws to keep enjoying the setting. I imagine that will eventually pale, and I’ll read a later book and start having to decide if the plot such as it is is enough for me, but for now, it’s worth it.

It’s not a perfect recreation, obviously. It never could be. But the anachronism she brings in is clearly signposted and deliberate, and is mostly there, it at least seems to me, for the humour and perhaps an attempt to draw on a thread of “people have always been the same”, and so it doesn’t read like “mistakes” so much as a deliberate choice. Which is a really tricky thing to manage if you’re doing historical-but-not. It’s a massive contrast to a book I’ve not posted the blog for yet (I’ve done some of them out of order, sorry) – Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng – where it’s trying to do a historical setting more seriously, and is somewhat failing at getting it right. That feels like a sincere attempt that hasn’t been managed with enough skill or knowledge. This feels like someone who knows exactly what they’re doing, and is messing with it because it makes it more fun. I’m struggling somewhat to point out exactly what bit of the text shows you this… if you gave me some time, a red pen and an essay question I probably could, but it’s not coming to me without preparation. But there’s that feel you get and that is enough at least for me.

And sure, they’re never going to be stunning literature. I’m never going to be coming to them for a thrilling, artistic masterpiece. But for going on holiday, and being whisked away inside your head to an entirely believable picture of the Roman countryside (with a side order of murder)? They’re absolutely spot on, and I’ll keep loving them for it.

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