I love What Abigail Did That Summer so much! I lowkey think it might be Aaronovitch’s best single work; Abigail has such a phenomenally distinctive voice (totally agree RE: her narration really feels like a very bright, driven teenager who is also coping with a lot) and I thought the narrative was really tight and impactful. (My annotations on my Kindle copy appear to have been extremely sparse, which probably reflects how captivated I was when I devoured it, but the “!!!!!!!” I left on the last few paragraphs of Chapter 38 seems appropriate, haha.) Also I love the funny annotations on the non-Peter-POV stories, Postmartin’s comments on Abigail’s made me laugh.
* Curiously not the case with the other non-Peter novella, I thought! With the The October Man I felt like Aaronovitch struggled a bit with differentiating the narrator’s voice, but with Abigail imo he outdid himself, her narration feels so unique + real.
And I feel the same about Peter/Nightingale! For whatever reason it just doesn’t really ring true to me as a pairing, though I love them both. Agree that Nightingale seems very homosocial; when I inhaled the entire series last winter I kept wondering whether Aaronovitch might be hinting that Nightingale was more than just friends with David Mellenby, that still feels like it would totally scan.
I’ve liked them more and more as the series goes on
Me too, I think! (Though my top favorite is probably Foxglove Summer, which I guess falls somewhere in the middle? The fairy-centric story just appealed so directly to my interests, plus I adored the overall atmosphere of that one.) One of the big things for me was the full 180 Aaronovitch did with regards to how he writes about transness / trans people, I have to say; there was some stuff in the first couple books that made wince pretty hard, but he seriously made such a huge positive change in that area as he went on and that makes me so happy! This one quote from Hanging Tree is still my favorite thing. (Authorial character growth!)
Thank you for all the book writeups, added a few of these to the to-investigate list! And the Kyoto photos are lovely :)
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* Curiously not the case with the other non-Peter novella, I thought! With the The October Man I felt like Aaronovitch struggled a bit with differentiating the narrator’s voice, but with Abigail imo he outdid himself, her narration feels so unique + real.
And I feel the same about Peter/Nightingale! For whatever reason it just doesn’t really ring true to me as a pairing, though I love them both. Agree that Nightingale seems very homosocial; when I inhaled the entire series last winter I kept wondering whether Aaronovitch might be hinting that Nightingale was more than just friends with David Mellenby, that still feels like it would totally scan.
I’ve liked them more and more as the series goes on
Me too, I think! (Though my top favorite is probably Foxglove Summer, which I guess falls somewhere in the middle? The fairy-centric story just appealed so directly to my interests, plus I adored the overall atmosphere of that one.) One of the big things for me was the full 180 Aaronovitch did with regards to how he writes about transness / trans people, I have to say; there was some stuff in the first couple books that made wince pretty hard, but he seriously made such a huge positive change in that area as he went on and that makes me so happy! This one quote from Hanging Tree is still my favorite thing. (Authorial character growth!)
Thank you for all the book writeups, added a few of these to the to-investigate list! And the Kyoto photos are lovely :)