Yuletide and book reviews
Dec. 29th, 2024 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomi[Unrelated to the general topic of this post, I was clumsy when trying to fix the printer (it didn’t work) and got ink all over myself, so now my hands are blue for the duration. A minor nuisance, but at least it was cyan and not magenta, so I don’t have to look as if I’ve just come from murdering someone…]
I’ve always had very good Yuletide fortune and this year was no exception, with an elegant, perfectly characterized post-canon fic for The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water; I’m delighted with it. Still working my way very slowly through the collection as a whole.
Books recently ordered and read (may contain spoilers), in general a very satisfying batch.
Ben Aaronovitch, Winter’s Gifts: This is a short novel/novella narrated by Peter Grant’s American oppo Kim Reynolds, a red-headed FBI agent from Oklahoma who is called up to Wisconsin in the middle of winter to investigate some weird stuff. I didn’t find Kim’s voice anything like as distinctively “woman raised in a south-Midwest American Christian household and then FBI-indoctrinated” as Peter’s voice is distinctive for his own particular background, but I think it was probably a wise choice on the author’s part—I’d rather Kim sound like a comparatively generic Aaronovitch character than that he go all in on giving her a linguistic characterization that he’s not comfortable with, and get it badly wrong, which has been known to happen. That said, her first-person POV does feel compatible with what we’ve seen of her through Peter so far—intense, dryly humorous, relatively unflappable, professional. I enjoyed being in her head a lot and I hope we get more of her (also I’m glad she gets a love interest!). Note to self: reread this in summer, when the descriptions of freezing cold weather will be pleasant and appealing, not in chilly December.
Chaz Brenchley, The Crater School series: The three Crater School books are so much fun. I’m fond of boarding-school stories anyway and I LOVE the Martian twist on everything, with its careful worldbuilding (I don’t know the early SF settlers-on-Mars genre which is the other thing Brenchley is paying homage to, so I can’t speak to that). They’re very Chalet School-esque in many ways, but warmer, without the underlying moralizing—just about all the characters are likeable in their different ways, without feeling bland or boring—and with a great deal of added intellectual and linguistic delight. I hope the author writes more of them because I’ll eat them up with a spoon.
THAT SAID. Here they are on Mars and everyone at school is still white, Christian, and (to the extent there’s any romance/sex at all) straight? When even the girl called Rachel Abramoff has a prayer book and goes to chapel--! The thing is that I accept as inevitable that Elinor M. Brent-Dyer wrote everyone that way (Lilamani and, subtextually, Tom aside). I don’t accept the same thing as inevitable from someone writing in the 2020s—if it’s possible to move your boarding school to Mars wholesale without disrupting the ethos of your source texts, it should be possible to mess with that aspect likewise. Also I think it’s a terrible missed opportunity for all kinds of fun worldbuilding and characterization as well (just to start with, think of the homage that could be paid to one of the original Chalet School’s more bonkers pedagogic practices—“Lower Fourth! Did I hear someone speaking Urdu? I’ll thank you to remember that Urdu day isn’t until Thursday, today is Cantonese day and tomorrow is English, if you please.”)
More Forest in the mix would be great too, in terms of deeper characterizations as well as non-Christian and (again, subtextually) non-straight characters (I did laugh at Rowany “making a mull of her Oxford entrance and coming back for another year,” which has to be a bit of a reference to Miranda’s half-serious wish for Jan Scott).
Zen Cho, The Friend Zone Experiment: As usual, Zen Cho is very good at getting you invested from the start, and I zipped through this because I couldn’t relax until I was sure everything would eventually be okay for Renee and Ket Siong. I enjoyed both of them (especially Ket Siong being a pianist, and Renee’s professional ultra-competence), including their relationships with other people as well as each other—one thing that gave extra depth to the book was the way that, although Renee’s brother Su Khoon is mostly a schmuck and she knows it, there’s more (mostly through her efforts) to their relationship than just straightforward hostility. And I absolutely fell for Ket Hau, the long-suffering older brother whose patient reserve explodes gloriously when it turns out his personal tragedy wasn’t exactly what he thought it was. (The one thing that disappointed me was that there was so little Malaysian-English dialogue, one of this author’s greatest talents and among the things I look forward to most in her work. I can see in context why not, but still.)
Alice Degan, Neither Have I Wings: I’m sorry to say this was a disappointment after her earlier book, which I really loved. Mostly the problem (as I see it) is with the characters; the two main and two supporting characters of From All False Doctrine are interesting and original (obviously inspired in some ways by people from other books, but still standing up on their own as real people) and fun to spend time with; the same unfortunately does not go for the four main characters of this one. The Charlie/Hal storyline feels like AU fanfic—like the author took these two characters from an entirely different context and of course they had to fall in love with each other because that’s what they do, and also we already know what they’re like and how beautiful they are to look at, so she just needs to sketch in the outlines of who they are in this AU with some infodumping. Except it’s not AU fanfic (as far as I know), it’s original writing, and the result is two very bland and uninspiring main characters. Evvie and Fee|Sara are more fun, except they’re both so good that there just isn’t enough there there.
Also, there is a converse effect in the settings which worked badly for me; the first book is set in 1920s Toronto, which the author is apparently very familiar with and I’m definitely not, so my only reaction was “this sounds pretty authentic to me.” The second book is set in late-wartime England, which the author is somewhat less familiar with and, though I’m no expert either, I have read a hell of a lot about. Some of the language struck me as wrong in context (I don’t expect either “gay” or “dick” in this setting, frankly, furthering the AU-fic effect), and the setting just didn’t feel especially convincing.
All that said, I didn’t hate it! I will probably reread it! But man, the author should be able to do much better work than this.
Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con: This was a lot of fun, with a delightful, almost Damon Runyon-ish narrative voice, Ruthi is so great, and a plot that clicks together perfectly. Once again I was fascinated by the sibling relationships as much as the romantic ones—the not-exactly-reveal that Jules isn’t just the vulnerable younger sis Ruthi sees her as makes a lot of difference (also I loved the Yiddish that they use together and the way it changes the things they say to each other, it’s not just replaced English). and I wanted to know more about Sol’s other family, and I liked the way Sol and poor hapless Esteban still care about each other in their own ways. (One very small thing that caught my eye: I can’t turn the proofreader part of my brain off, and there’s one character whose name keeps flipping back and forth between Albert and Alfred. On the other hand, it would be totally in character for him to have a secret twin.)
Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon: A lot of this is just what I like—low-key accounts of ordinary people doing their thing, in a speculative setting with careful, distinct worldbuilding, one you could live in. Not surprisingly, I loved Emenev the administrator-hero (and his niece frustrated over her literature exam), and I was gripped by the changes the starship Aizuret goes through over her story. In general I am a sloppy reader, I just let the storyline carry me along, and I felt as if I needed to take really careful notes on what was happening geographically and technologically in each story in order so as to understand the thrust of the whole book, what was happening over the long sweep of history. I’d love a novel in this setting.
Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: I got hold of this because its translator, and the author’s husband, is my 偶像 the linguist (and everything else) Chao Yuen Ren; it turns out that his wife was just as amazing. Other than the obvious political reasons, I don’t know why nobody’s made a cdrama out of it, because you wouldn’t have to change a single thing. I’d like to get hold of an edition in the original Chinese to find out if the author’s voice is as distinctive and entertaining that way. She spent much of her childhood being raised like a boy (DMBJ fans will understand why it tickled me that she was known as “Little Master Three”), and in her own words “had four parents. I broke my engagement at a time when engagements were never broken. I was principal of a school before I went to college. I joined revolutions and took refuge from wars. I healed grownups and brought a few hundred children into the world. When I was married, I was married without a wedding.”
(From the foreword: “But my husband has not always been a well-behaved translator. …Now, I want to make it clear once for all that, in the Chinese language, there is no such thing as a relative clause, the use of which I have never quite mastered. [Me, reading: omigod, 赵老师，哈哈哈哈] And he likes to indulge in verbal paradoxes. I think life is complicated enough without relative clauses and strange enough without playing on words. I have tried to catch him doing these things and registered my protests in the form of footnotes, but I won’t guarantee that I have not let some slip by.” “[By CYR] …she writes only as she talks in real life. She aims at no particular style, except in so far as the style is the woman.”)
良いお年を！ Be safe and well.
I’ve always had very good Yuletide fortune and this year was no exception, with an elegant, perfectly characterized post-canon fic for The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water; I’m delighted with it. Still working my way very slowly through the collection as a whole.
Books recently ordered and read (may contain spoilers), in general a very satisfying batch.
Ben Aaronovitch, Winter’s Gifts: This is a short novel/novella narrated by Peter Grant’s American oppo Kim Reynolds, a red-headed FBI agent from Oklahoma who is called up to Wisconsin in the middle of winter to investigate some weird stuff. I didn’t find Kim’s voice anything like as distinctively “woman raised in a south-Midwest American Christian household and then FBI-indoctrinated” as Peter’s voice is distinctive for his own particular background, but I think it was probably a wise choice on the author’s part—I’d rather Kim sound like a comparatively generic Aaronovitch character than that he go all in on giving her a linguistic characterization that he’s not comfortable with, and get it badly wrong, which has been known to happen. That said, her first-person POV does feel compatible with what we’ve seen of her through Peter so far—intense, dryly humorous, relatively unflappable, professional. I enjoyed being in her head a lot and I hope we get more of her (also I’m glad she gets a love interest!). Note to self: reread this in summer, when the descriptions of freezing cold weather will be pleasant and appealing, not in chilly December.
Chaz Brenchley, The Crater School series: The three Crater School books are so much fun. I’m fond of boarding-school stories anyway and I LOVE the Martian twist on everything, with its careful worldbuilding (I don’t know the early SF settlers-on-Mars genre which is the other thing Brenchley is paying homage to, so I can’t speak to that). They’re very Chalet School-esque in many ways, but warmer, without the underlying moralizing—just about all the characters are likeable in their different ways, without feeling bland or boring—and with a great deal of added intellectual and linguistic delight. I hope the author writes more of them because I’ll eat them up with a spoon.
THAT SAID. Here they are on Mars and everyone at school is still white, Christian, and (to the extent there’s any romance/sex at all) straight? When even the girl called Rachel Abramoff has a prayer book and goes to chapel--! The thing is that I accept as inevitable that Elinor M. Brent-Dyer wrote everyone that way (Lilamani and, subtextually, Tom aside). I don’t accept the same thing as inevitable from someone writing in the 2020s—if it’s possible to move your boarding school to Mars wholesale without disrupting the ethos of your source texts, it should be possible to mess with that aspect likewise. Also I think it’s a terrible missed opportunity for all kinds of fun worldbuilding and characterization as well (just to start with, think of the homage that could be paid to one of the original Chalet School’s more bonkers pedagogic practices—“Lower Fourth! Did I hear someone speaking Urdu? I’ll thank you to remember that Urdu day isn’t until Thursday, today is Cantonese day and tomorrow is English, if you please.”)
More Forest in the mix would be great too, in terms of deeper characterizations as well as non-Christian and (again, subtextually) non-straight characters (I did laugh at Rowany “making a mull of her Oxford entrance and coming back for another year,” which has to be a bit of a reference to Miranda’s half-serious wish for Jan Scott).
Zen Cho, The Friend Zone Experiment: As usual, Zen Cho is very good at getting you invested from the start, and I zipped through this because I couldn’t relax until I was sure everything would eventually be okay for Renee and Ket Siong. I enjoyed both of them (especially Ket Siong being a pianist, and Renee’s professional ultra-competence), including their relationships with other people as well as each other—one thing that gave extra depth to the book was the way that, although Renee’s brother Su Khoon is mostly a schmuck and she knows it, there’s more (mostly through her efforts) to their relationship than just straightforward hostility. And I absolutely fell for Ket Hau, the long-suffering older brother whose patient reserve explodes gloriously when it turns out his personal tragedy wasn’t exactly what he thought it was. (The one thing that disappointed me was that there was so little Malaysian-English dialogue, one of this author’s greatest talents and among the things I look forward to most in her work. I can see in context why not, but still.)
Alice Degan, Neither Have I Wings: I’m sorry to say this was a disappointment after her earlier book, which I really loved. Mostly the problem (as I see it) is with the characters; the two main and two supporting characters of From All False Doctrine are interesting and original (obviously inspired in some ways by people from other books, but still standing up on their own as real people) and fun to spend time with; the same unfortunately does not go for the four main characters of this one. The Charlie/Hal storyline feels like AU fanfic—like the author took these two characters from an entirely different context and of course they had to fall in love with each other because that’s what they do, and also we already know what they’re like and how beautiful they are to look at, so she just needs to sketch in the outlines of who they are in this AU with some infodumping. Except it’s not AU fanfic (as far as I know), it’s original writing, and the result is two very bland and uninspiring main characters. Evvie and Fee|Sara are more fun, except they’re both so good that there just isn’t enough there there.
Also, there is a converse effect in the settings which worked badly for me; the first book is set in 1920s Toronto, which the author is apparently very familiar with and I’m definitely not, so my only reaction was “this sounds pretty authentic to me.” The second book is set in late-wartime England, which the author is somewhat less familiar with and, though I’m no expert either, I have read a hell of a lot about. Some of the language struck me as wrong in context (I don’t expect either “gay” or “dick” in this setting, frankly, furthering the AU-fic effect), and the setting just didn’t feel especially convincing.
All that said, I didn’t hate it! I will probably reread it! But man, the author should be able to do much better work than this.
Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con: This was a lot of fun, with a delightful, almost Damon Runyon-ish narrative voice, Ruthi is so great, and a plot that clicks together perfectly. Once again I was fascinated by the sibling relationships as much as the romantic ones—the not-exactly-reveal that Jules isn’t just the vulnerable younger sis Ruthi sees her as makes a lot of difference (also I loved the Yiddish that they use together and the way it changes the things they say to each other, it’s not just replaced English). and I wanted to know more about Sol’s other family, and I liked the way Sol and poor hapless Esteban still care about each other in their own ways. (One very small thing that caught my eye: I can’t turn the proofreader part of my brain off, and there’s one character whose name keeps flipping back and forth between Albert and Alfred. On the other hand, it would be totally in character for him to have a secret twin.)
Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon: A lot of this is just what I like—low-key accounts of ordinary people doing their thing, in a speculative setting with careful, distinct worldbuilding, one you could live in. Not surprisingly, I loved Emenev the administrator-hero (and his niece frustrated over her literature exam), and I was gripped by the changes the starship Aizuret goes through over her story. In general I am a sloppy reader, I just let the storyline carry me along, and I felt as if I needed to take really careful notes on what was happening geographically and technologically in each story in order so as to understand the thrust of the whole book, what was happening over the long sweep of history. I’d love a novel in this setting.
Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: I got hold of this because its translator, and the author’s husband, is my 偶像 the linguist (and everything else) Chao Yuen Ren; it turns out that his wife was just as amazing. Other than the obvious political reasons, I don’t know why nobody’s made a cdrama out of it, because you wouldn’t have to change a single thing. I’d like to get hold of an edition in the original Chinese to find out if the author’s voice is as distinctive and entertaining that way. She spent much of her childhood being raised like a boy (DMBJ fans will understand why it tickled me that she was known as “Little Master Three”), and in her own words “had four parents. I broke my engagement at a time when engagements were never broken. I was principal of a school before I went to college. I joined revolutions and took refuge from wars. I healed grownups and brought a few hundred children into the world. When I was married, I was married without a wedding.”
(From the foreword: “But my husband has not always been a well-behaved translator. …Now, I want to make it clear once for all that, in the Chinese language, there is no such thing as a relative clause, the use of which I have never quite mastered. [Me, reading: omigod, 赵老师，哈哈哈哈] And he likes to indulge in verbal paradoxes. I think life is complicated enough without relative clauses and strange enough without playing on words. I have tried to catch him doing these things and registered my protests in the form of footnotes, but I won’t guarantee that I have not let some slip by.” “[By CYR] …she writes only as she talks in real life. She aims at no particular style, except in so far as the style is the woman.”)
良いお年を！ Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 09:25 pm (UTC)I am a bit ambivalent about Rowany as I like my super competent characters with at least one flaw (cf Rowan’s talent for being blunt to the point of cruelty) but at least she’s not Mary-Lou…
no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 12:27 pm (UTC)I see your point about Rowany, although I was somewhat won over by the fact that she has to come back to school and (if not necessarily truly) admit to everyone that she's failed her entrance exams, and I quite like her perspective. I think the characterization in general tends toward EBD rather than Forest, so not expecting TOO much.