cahn

Uhhhh. One day I will start posting about books again (I have been reading at a much slower rate than usual lately) but here is a thing from the annals of my other other fandom:

( Competition fun, also drama )

Happy birthday, salon! (Also happy 50th discussion post, wow!)

(Also, I know we were going to do more classics salon reads and I still want to! I have not forgotten! My hands are acting up a bit and I need to rest them for a while first, though :/ )

OKAY I am trying to make my way through Related Work! I did read this in record time, because I found it extremely interesting!

This is a survey of Neil Gaiman's work, with a marked emphasis on his work in comics and Sandman in particular. I found this fascinating because I read Sandman relatively recently -- 2021, as it turns out, which I guess is not all that recently -- and that's a major subject of this work. I guess I'm glad to have read Sandman, so it was good I read it then because there is no way I would have gotten through it after the whole Gaiman stuff broke. Like, it's possible (though not probable) I might still have tried, but I would have hit the first horror segment and noped right out.

Anyway, it was really interesting to read about from the viewpoint of someone who clearly loves and knows a lot about comics, because I know nothing about comics, so when she explains stuff about what artist did which parts, and what to look for in their work, and how to judge the arc as a combo of text and art, well, I just think that's really cool and I kinda wish I'd had this info when I read it.

Also, occasionally you get a line like "Blake [provided] a set of twelve illustrations for Paradise Lost... filling Hell with demons who ripple with idiosyncratically proportioned but coruscatingly homoerotic musculature," which I enjoy :D

I wondered, when I began it, how the text would deal with the Gaiman stuff that's come out since I read Sandman, and I felt like the book handled it exactly right. It's scrupulously fair (as far as I can tell) about giving fair credit to Gaiman where credit is due, for example putting a trans woman in a comic in 1991. Sandifer talks about various criticisms one may have (spoilers: the trans woman dies, Gaiman says something that sounds like she is only there "for cis people to have emotions about") and then Sandifer points out, "it cannot be forgotten that this was 1991. Gaiman may pat himself on the back for his readers' turnarounds [from being turned off by a trans woman to feeling for her], but the fact of the matter is that putting a trans woman in a comic was going to alienate a portion of the audience, and that getting that same audience to instead be outraged on Wanda's behalf was a significant accomplishment." Which I think is very fair: in the early 90's if you got a sympathetic storyline about a gay person you were doing well! (And in those days they all died, too, in my experience.) Sandifer does not, in the earlier part of the book, accuse him of anything for which there isn't evidence, and she draws a line from the boy who was inside the abusive cult of Scientology to his early work involving POV characters in messy situations...

But Sandifer is not in the slightest a Gaiman apologist; she is a chronicler and an analyst. Which means that when the text then, in a logical and measured presentation (but with definite feeling underneath), lays out what's known about the horrific man that this boy became, and the line from that man to the characters in his later work -- well, it hits rather harder, for me, than if the book had been terribly loud and emotional about it.

The only thing I quibble with is that one of the only other Gaimans I've read is The Graveyard Book, which she doesn't even name by title and is very dismissive about, and I liked it a lot! :P Also Sandifer says that she formatted it for the Hugo packet hurriedly and to expect typos, etc., and there were some, as well as a few times of rough transitions that I would presume that something that had had more editing time would have worked out.

But anyway as soon as I finished it I really wanted to read her work on Watchmen, which is probably the graphic-novel work I have the most strong feelings about but have really no insight into the graphic part of! I am trying to contain myself because I have to read more Hugo stuff! (And then Redwall for A., which may take a while... there are a lot of them...)

I feel as if Best Related Work is an embarrassment of riches this year and I'm glad I made myself go through it. I want to vote Palmer very high but this is also really good and I also want to vote this at the top!

hey so Worldcon schedule is out?!
...I'm going to Worldcon next month for the first time ever! Anyone else going?? (Besides ase and hamsterwoman, yay! :D )

(How does one figure out what to attend? It seems quite overwhelming! Are there things I should definitely try to attend?)

I read this a while ago (and even wrote the vast majority of this up a while ago) but am just getting around to posting it. This book is about a "tradwife" influencer (heh, my fingers automatically type "tradewife," that's interesting, yes I don't know what a tradewife would be but that sounds super cool, I would actually like to read all the books about tradewives please), Natalie Heller Mills, who has a gorgeous, highly curated life on Yesteryear Ranch with her handsome husband Caleb and homeschooled five children. (This is not really a spoiler as we find this out in the first couple of pages, but this highly curated life turns out to be propped up by a LOT of external help, like nannies (yes, plural).) One day, she wakes up in a more gritty, primitive version of her tradwife life, with a man who is vaguely reminiscent of her husband (and who is also named Caleb) and different (though somewhat similar) kids. The book pursues both tracks via flashbacks: in the "flashback" timeline, we see how Natalie came to become a tradwife influencer in the first place, and in the "present" timeline, we see Natalie trying to deal with living in a more primitive time and trying to figure out wtf is going on.

rachelmanija advised me to read this book and I mentioned that I tend to have a hard time with books where the awful protagonist gets her comeuppance. I never finished, say, Yellowface, because of this reason. (I like books where the awful antagonist gets her comeuppance! It's the awful protagonist that bothers me. I think Yellowface made me sympathetic enough to the protagonist that it set off my humiliation squick.) And Natalie is awful! But somehow Burke manages to walk the tightrope, for me:

On one hand, I find her sympathetic enough that I was willing to read a whole book about her. The flashbacks do a lot to explain how she ended up the way she did, and you can see that she has a lot of internal problems. And Natalie herself, while she has awful takes on things, actually does see some things in a way that's maybe not correct but where there is in fact some perceptiveness. There were several times where I chatted Rachel and was like, "so, actually... I know she is awful and she's going too far here but she does kind of have a point about this" and/or "okay, this is funny." Oh, here's one: "The truth is that whoring yourself out can take you pretty far, if you do it with intention. Look at Mary Magdalene. Now there is a woman who understood the assignment." (I thought this was hilarious, okay?)

And on the other hand, Natalie is super awful enough that I was totally okay with her getting her comeuppance. She is occasionally perceptive but she is also sometimes mistaken about some things and even more than that, she lies to everyone around her and, mostly, herself, about everything.

Anyway, that's a really hard balance to keep going through a whole book, but it worked for me. I think it helped that we know at least some of what that comeuppance is from the very first chapter, and we're reading the book to find out how they all got there. I think the other thing that helped is that this is clearly and intentionally coded as a trashy revenge novel, only where the revenge is on the protagonist. (I had a very interesting talk with someone who hated the book because they kept wanting it to be deeper than it was, and while I can see where they're coming from, I had no trouble with that at all because it is so very clearly coded as trashy-revenge to me that I didn't expect it to be particularly deep.)

The climactic confrontation scene is -- I also chatted this to Rachel -- the most satisfying confrontation scene I've read in a long time. Maybe ever. I expect a lot of this has to do with having to have lived in Natalie's head for almost an entire book and feeling sorry for all the people around her -- some of whom are equally as bad, but some of whom, especially her kids, don't deserve any of this -- and feeling like she really did need to be confronted, and the confrontation actually having some compassion mixed in with the smackdown.

I will say, Natalie is in theory a conservative Christian but this is not what I would call an accurate replication of a conservative Christian in the details, and if you're looking for that you will be disappointed. Hilariously, there is a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-coded line in the middle: "Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith," which is a very famous line in my church (Hi there Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf!) and as far as I can tell nowhere else at all. Natalie isn't LDS and neither is Burke, but I know a lot of tradwife influencers are, and it sounds like Burke has been listening to a lot of them... Some people don't like how it was all mixed together. I didn't mind, because it was more about the feel of it to me than the details.

I also read some reviews of how Natalie didn't even believe a lot of what she was saying, or was cynical about it. This for me was a plus rather than a minus because my mom is actually exactly like this; she does all the things that she's supposed to do societally and religiously and all that, but she's pretty hard-edged practical and really to a large degree cynical about it all.

Every few chapters I would chat my plot theories to Rachel. I was... confused.

Spoilers:

Holy crap, I had a lot of theories (mainly time travel) but I did NOT guess AT ALL that they were just hanging out in a more primitive version of their tradwife lives fifteen years later, and that Old Caleb was just... older Caleb. And also I laughed so hard that they weren't even self-sufficient, Caleb was just picking up food from his kids!

I loved loved that Mary and the other kids got to ESCAPE. Natalie says, when they leave Yesteryear, "Mary will never be normal. All our children will suffer, but it is Mary, I think, who will suffer the most." I was so relieved that this was just Natalie lying to herself again -- that the last word came from Mary and she'd managed to be all right in the end, and actually so much all right that she could have a little compassion for her horrible awful mother.

Really quite impressive that this is a first novel -- everything seems to just slot into place so well.

I am honestly a little hesitant to recommend this book because it really does feel very trashy, but at the same time it was also extremely entertaining, at least for me. I think both of these qualities are evident from the summary I wrote above -- and as I said earlier, I think the trashiness is incredibly intended -- it's exactly that vein that Burke is tapping into. So, like. If this review sounds like something you would like, you probably would like it, and if it doesn't, you probably wouldn't. :)

I also tried reading Trad Wife (Schaefer) but I gave up kind of early on. I did skim the last, idk, third, and it seemed like it was doing pretty much what I expected. There I think the husband is too awful... I mostly just wanted her to divorce him.

Zelunjo Onyenezi-Onyedele (Zelu) is a (Nigerian-American, parapalegic) writer who hasn't had much luck with getting her first litfic book published. She throws caution to the wind and writes a post-apocalyptic SF novel about dueling robots, Rusting Robots, that becomes a runaway best-seller, and then starts having to deal with that fame, while she also deals with her loving and sometimes stifling family, as well as the rest of her life. Meanwhile, all of this is happening against the backdrop of a near future where robotic exoskeletons have started to become possible and space travel is opening up...

So yeah, some of these thoughts are in reaction to discussing with ase --

I liked the near-future and (except for one thing in the spoiler section) thought it was quite well done -- a reasonable extrapolation, compelling, and also getting that sort of "hey the future is cool!" feel while still showing some of the underside as well.

I thought the chapters about Zelu were compelling and I enjoyed them, although I will say that I think I am no longer interested in character arcs involving adult children who struggle with their (especially immigrant) families not taking them seriously. Like. If I want that I can just pick up the phone, you know? (The last conversation I had with my mom before writing this paragraph, literally, went like this: "You're going on [trip], right?" "Yes--" "Did you remember to get a hotel??" "...yes." "Did you remember to get a rental car??" "...yes." It's nice that my mom is concerned about me, but I've in fact been traveling without my parents for more than a quarter century now...)

I also felt like Zelu, while a reasonably compelling character that held my interest for a book, is not actually a protagonist that I like all that much (and for this reason I probably wouldn't have finished the book if it hadn't been for Hugo voting). She may have reasons to be whiny but she is whiny; she makes questionable decisions; one of her questionable decisions that she makes multiple times is that she repeatedly does not tell people she loves about decisions she's making that will be things they will want to know. Now, I see why -- I've been known not to tell my parents things because I know they'll flip out (and those things aren't always bad things, even!) and I have my own quirks left over from that -- but Zelu does seem to take this to extremes. I got the sense of her as a somewhat selfish person who has to work pretty hard (and often doesn't) to overcome her selfish tendencies.

The Rusting Robots chapters bothered me; I found them hard to get through (though they got easier as the book went on) and I kept getting thrown out of the book by not being able to imagine at all how Rusting Robots was a best-seller. (I admit that these chapters were sufficiently non-compelling to me that I didn't really think too much about how they might or might not hold together, so I can't speak to that.)

Then the last chapter happened, which retroactively made me like everything better! ( Spoilers. )

Okay, so (especially if you don't read the spoilers, which I would recommend not reading if you're actually going to read the book) this sounds like I'm saying negative things and actually I think I liked it least of the books on the ballot, but at the same time I actually think it's going on the top of my Hugo ballot. It's the one book on the ballot that I feel like really embodies the kinds of things I want to see in a Hugo winner -- complex and interesting near-future-worldbuilding combined with characters who feel like real people, frustrating though real people may be. And the things that didn't gel with me are exactly that -- not things I thought were bad about it, but things that didn't gel with me personally.

This is a very interesting ballot. I think Drop of Corruption is probably the most technically perfect writing, and has a lot of interesting things about it, though in some sense is playing everything rather straight; Incandescent has a flawed ending but I adore it the most of all the nominees and feel like it's doing good and interesting things within the magical-school framework; Everlasting is perhaps the most compelling to read but the weakest as a book; Raven is doing some interesting things (inside of an epic fantasy outline that is even more bog-standard than any other nominee), but is significantly weaker than the other nominees I've read in terms of craft. And then Death of the Author, which has the prose and the big ideas and an interesting ending and a protagonist I don't vibe with... and then there's Shroud by Tchaikovsky, which I haven't read. It is on my shelf looking at me. Maybe I will. It doesn't look THAT long and the print is large.

Anyway, so far I think my ranking is pretty firm at
Author > Incandescent > Drop > Raven > Everlasting.

So, more Hugo reading! So I just finished The Everlasting and I have Feelings and I have to talk about it. In fact, I unexpectedly had so many feelings that I then made the mistake of telling D about it. And you will all just have to suffer with me --

D: Is it about gobstoppers?
Me: No! It is not about gobstoppers!

-- the thing is, I had not been expecting all that much from it, having had previous experience not-intensely-negative-but-not-particularly-positive with Harrow Hugo reading, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the first quarter of the book more compelling than I'd thought it would be. Though I did have this sort of constant low-level irritation during that first quarter because -- well. It takes place as a secondary-world fantasy, taking place in a kingdom called Dominion, that's concerned with two time periods: what I have been calling the "modern era," which is a post-industrial, vaguely early-twentieth-century-feeling sort of place where the best and bravest young men are sent off to fight wars, remembering their semi-mythical founding myth... and the second time period is that distant 1000-year semi-mythical "past era," where there is a semi-mythical queen and her best-beloved knight, Sir Una the Everlasting, whose tragic death is instrumental in constructing the founding myth of the country.

And the thing is, it's probably not 100% obvious from that one-sentence description, but the "modern" era is extremely evocative of WWI-ish Britain what with the young men going off to war and coming back with shell shock and everyone keeping a stiff upper lip about it (except the protesters) and so on, and the "past" era is extremely evocative of Arthurian mythology, what with the once and future queen and the knights she gathers around her and the green hill and the sword in the stone tree that can only be unsheathed by the right person (although it's Una and not the queen who does it), and lots of mentions of a Savior (religion, though, is otherwise completely ignored except when it's useful for resonance), and so on --

D: Are there coconuts?
Me: No! There are no coconuts!

And it just so happens that I have an absolute crapton of feelings about Arthurian mythology (over many decades at this point) and also a whole lot of feelings about WWI Britain (many of which are rather more recent, but even if it weren't for recent media consumption, would have had some feelings about it from general cultural literacy and other media) and it was very clear that Harrow was cheerfully just using all that to make me have feelings about her characters/world, and I was rather annoyed about this because it felt to me like she got to exploit all the resonances without actually having to do any work to, well, actually think hard about the historical/mythical parallels she was exploiting, and also annoyed because, of course, it worked, because I do have quite a few feelings about all these things.

D: Is there a holy grail?
Me: ...yes. Yes, there is a holy grail. There actually is.
D, unfortunately now encouraged: Is there a holy hand grenade?
Me: NO! There is no holy hand grenade!!
D, a little later: Well, is there a Black Knight?
Me: ...kind of.

ANYWAY. The book starts out being narrated by Owen, who is an idealistic, nationalistic, conflicted young man, back from the wars and trying to make his way as a historian. He's also obsessed with Sir Una Everlasting and her story in not all that different a way than the way I was obsessed with all things Arthurian as a kid/adolescent, though rather more shippily. So due to plot reasons, Owen goes back in time to meet Una herself, and is with her on her last quest to find the holy grail (no really) and then goes back with her to what he knows will be her death; his role is to be the one who chronicles her quest and her death.

Me: See, the idea is that he's kind of a Malory figure --
...wait. His last name is literally Mallory. GAH.
D: *laughs at me*

Then I got past the first quarter mark, and it abruptly got both quite a bit more compelling to me -- so I didn't mind the above appropriation nearly as much (plus, by that time it had done its work), and also I started feeling very baffled by exactly how much it was giving off increasing vibes of being a really compelling shipfic. The thing is. I've actually spent quite a bit more time than usual in the last couple of months reading and thinking about fanfic, especially shipfic, for Reasons, and in particular thinking about what I seek out when I seek out fanfic, and what I want to see in a fanfic, and how to create the effects of a shippy fic I would like, and... this book is doing... a LOT of that.

For one thing, it's just piling on tropes on top of tropes (weak geeky man with strong tough woman, mutual pining, competence kink, loyalty kink, fealty kink, road trip, pulling back from betrayal, not pulling back from betrayal, hurt/comfort of course, lack of sleep, protection, nightmare comforting, bathing together, the list goes on, at one point there's even freaking Must Huddle Together For Warmth). And it's deeply satisfying to me because these are all tropes I eat up with a spoon.

And the ship is really very much a fanfic kind of ship, where we sort of assume we're starting out with UST between the two main characters and just building from there. (There are a couple of in-universe reasons for this, starting (but not finishing) with Owen's lifelong obsession with Una, but, like. The vibe!!) And over-the-top UST that goes on for quite a while is something that I am just really really fond of for shippy tropey fics. (Look, my fandom genesis included The X-Files, okay?)

Me: So by the 50 percent mark I was feeling kind of desperate for them to just have sex already.
D: ...uh, okay.

-- and the whole thing was doing this very fic thing of really just being there for the tropes and resonances. Worldbuilding, yeah, fine, great, as long as it reinforces the tropes! And yeah, this was sort of one thing about this book: I was never entirely convinced, I think, that the world existed outside of where the characters happened to be at the time... partially because it had borrowed so much from our world. (There was a bit more unique-worldbuilding near the end, as there sort of had to be.) But it didn't really matter... because you don't really read fic for the worldbuilding, right?

Character development, sure! As long as it reinforces the tropes, which means a lot of dwelling on the three main characters. I do think it's a natural tendency, mind you, especially in a shipfic, to really limit the number of people who have major roles in the fic, because each successive character means more interaction and more inner life that has to be constructed, and anyway you mostly just care about the ship and maybe the antagonist, sure. But I'm kind of amazed that Harrow wrote a whole novel in which there are three actual characters. And there are three more characters who do get screen time and whom I love very very much (Owen's dad -- does he even ever get a name??; Owen's long-suffering thesis advisor; Ancel -- the three of them are probably my favorite characters, in fact) but they do seem to me to have this aura of being taken a little for granted.

It also sort of reminded me of, you know, how you get these >100k fics in a fandom where it's really basically doing the same thing multiple times, or playing with the same fandom dynamic multiple times and stretching it out in ways that it didn't necessarily really have to, and the readers love it, because that's what we're here for. Right up to doing basically the same scene from two different POVs. (Again, there is an in-universe reason, but... very fic vibes, is all I'm saying!)

I believe this explains why I've been seeing such differing opinions of the book on my DW list -- because if you really like the particular tropes Harrow is piling on, you're probably going to be deeply satisfied by it regardless of whether you might have other issues (me, this is me), and if those tropes don't do much for you you're going to be like "what was even the point of that?" and if you like the tropes just fine but aren't particularly into them, the issues might bother you more.

( spoilers! )

Anyway. In conclusion, if you like a particular kind of tropey fic, then I think you will really love this book! (And if you don't, you will probably find it way too long and over-the-top.) Also it has more things to say about nationalism and national myths and fate and heroism and so on than I have really talked about here! I am just here for talking about shipfic, I guess.

D: I still think it should have been about gobstoppers.
Me: NO it should not have been about gobstoppers!!

Hey, I am reading Hugos stuff! I am behind on posting, though. Have the novelettes!
I must confess I was not particularly taken by any of these, but it may also be that I read them mostly while traveling and probably at least slightly grumpy :)

- “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) - this was the one that took me longest to read. I think... this could have been a lot fewer words. Basically, this is satire-esque AU Cold War with kaijus. It was fun, when I finally got through it, if a bit in-your-face.

- “Never Eaten Vegetables”( by tH.H. Pak (Clarkesworld, Issue 220) - Story about a ship carrying embryos that abruptly finds it has to parent a number of them. I think somehow I was the wrong audience for this story and I don't quite feel like I can articulate why? [ETA 6-1: oh wow. See discussion below. This story clearly hit me in a very particular way that I couldn't handle, and I'm retroactively feeling like it's a much stronger story than I could consciously give it credit for when I read it.] I felt like it was very "corporations are bad! They are the bad guys! Have we mentioned this??" and also was trying to get me to feel things via parenting, but I never really did because the parenting didn't feel real to me, and I was not very surprised to find the author is not themself a parent. idk. I think for some reason, that may not really have been the writer's fault, I never quite gelled with the characters enough, even though sentient ships and things like that are usually my jam.

- “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells (Reactor, July 10, 2025) - Martha Wells, like several other authors on this list, is very hit or miss for me, and this one was a miss. I was vaguely aware that this takes place as sort of a Murderbot-adjacent story, but it turns out that Murderbot itself is the draw for me; I couldn't really make myself care that much about the people or the ship, for some reason -- perhaps because I didn't remember enough about Murderbot, I didn't really get why I should care.

- “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For”( by Cameron Reed (Reactor, April 2, 2025) - This story just kind of confused me. It started out life as a Cyteen-esque story about genetics and environment and its intersection with a corporate sort of mentality (which was fine, although I think I'd rather just go read Cyteen again) and then veered somewhat sharply into

I guess this is a spoiler

a desperate flight narrative where they have to run for their lives from a rival corporation who has demolished the one they were working for

. I felt like the sharp change made the story a bit incoherent to me? I guess it's trying to say something about different bodies, but I never quite caught up to the plot shift to get to the point where I was engaging thematically, I guess?

- "The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 67) -- so I feel like Pinsker can be very "is this story meant for you or not" but this story about two girls in a traveling show together, one of whom is a mentalist and the other of whom is an illusionist, was very much meant for me. It's not a story that has well-defined answers, but that's kind of the point (and perhaps now I know to expect that from a Pinsker story so I don't get blindsided by it any more), and I really enjoyed the relationship between the two girls and all the unspoken depths of it (which although complex is not written as explicitly romantic, which I highly approve of and I want more stories with complex friendship that isn't explicitly romantic yes please thanks!).

- “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 65) - I always sort of brace myself when I see Valente's name, but for this piece about a vampire/succubus in rural America (which apparently is a Dolly Parton songfic?), she actually toned down her trademark over-the-top-ness enough that I actually liked it?? I did feel like it didn't quite draw the characters vividly enough that the end scene really felt earned -- and what's wrong with people who make the best of their circumstances anyway?? The way the story kind of denigrated that didn't sit well with me, as someone who tends to want to complain about my circumstances rather than make the best of them (and who very much admires people who do the latter).

Gosh, I don't know how I'd vote on this?? Probably something like this:

Millay > Kaiju > When He Calls > My Mother Is Leaving > Vegetables > Rapport > No Award, I guess?
6-1: I think I'm moving Vegetables up. Millay > Kaiju > Vegetables, I think? I feel like I should move the Millay down but I still like it better than the others...

I have been really bad this year at getting out to see things, but I saw a couple of things! I'll talk about the first one here: hamsterwoman inspired me and I got to see Hadestown on tour! (The same cast she saw, even, although I didn't realize this until afterwards.) It was only here for two weeknights, clearly as a pit stop in between the two major metropolitan areas we live between. The theater was packed. The only empty spots I saw in the entire house were, hilariously, right in front of us (and must have been people who didn't show up for some reason, as the seats were definitely sold). I didn't buy tickets early enough and they were sold out when I first looked, but fortunately some opened up day of -- I wouldn't normally buy orchestra section for a show I didn't already know I'd love, but that's what I get for not planning ahead. But it turns out I did love it enough that I enjoyed the orchestra section tickets immensely, so it all turned out well.

The singers were all just extremely, extremely good, both as singers and as dancers (well, I guess Hades and Persephone didn't really dance a ton, but Eurydice in particular had a lot of parts where she had to combine with the ensemble), and really imprinted on me. To the extent where I went back and listened to the Broadway recording and was like "okay, sure, yeah, these are the same songs, but that's not MY cast." They were just really really almost scarily professional -- I really can't believe the Broadway cast is any better -- it was hard to believe that we were getting this kind of quality of cast. SO good.

Nickolaus Colón as Hades was THE standout performance of the night in a cast full of excellence. Seriously it was worth seeing it for him alone. The Persephone, Namisa Mdlalose Bizana, was also an excellent singer whose strength matched Colón's (a weak dancer, but as I said before she didn't have to do that much of it). I thought it was a great choice to have the really strong singers be the "gods" -- it really added something to it.

Eurydice (...I think we must have seen an understudy? The site says Hawa Kamara but I'm pretty sure that's not who we saw) and Orpheus (Jose Contreras) were also good but their voices were more sort of good in the way I expected them to be good, kind of. Orpheus, unfortunately, had the flaw (at least that night) that sometimes his top notes (he has a lot of falsetto notes, which is a bit weird?) were flat, and those were inevitably the notes where the song was supposed to be borderline-magic, and it unfortunately always threw me out of those bits because I'd be like "...but he's flat, augh!" The Fates (Gia Keddy, Miriam Navarrete, Jayna Wescoatt) were quite excellent -- both as singers and as an ensemble of three (as they basically did all their parts together, as one would expect). The Hermes (Rudy Foster) was also excellent. So were the ensemble. They were just all super super good.

The orchestra accompaniment was seated on-stage (it was a rather crowded stage at times) and I need to mention the pianist and the trombonist who both sometimes seemed to be participating in the action -- especially the trombonist, who occasionally got up from his seat and played his trombone mingling with the other actors, which was amazing. (I told D at intermission, "No one told me that the trombonist was the hero of this show!") I was especially watching him because now I have a kiddo who plays trombone, and he was using at least a couple of different mutes to make his trombone make a variety of sounds (A.'s trombone teacher showed us some of these at one point, for fun), and also sometimes he doubled as the xylophone player, which I thought was interesting!

I tend to operate one of two different ways with musicals. Either I go in knowing nothing or I go in having basically memorized the soundtrack. This was the former: I went in not knowing anything except that it was an AU retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I'd picked up from osmosis there were trains, and I'd listened to a few of the songs beforehand to make sure I liked them well enough. The pros are that I get to be continuously surprised by the real thing, and the cons are that there are lots of spots where I just don't catch the words, because I have fairly poor speech processing. This was one where I think it was a good choice to go in knowing nothing, because there are so many parts where the music and the visuals work together so well that I think the effect would have been blunted if I'd known the music really well going in. (Hamilton is one where I think it was better to know the soundtrack ahead of time, as I don't think I'd have been able to make out the vast majority of the words otherwise.)

( Vague spoilers if you're like me and have never watched it before )

I think this is a show that I admire more than that I'm fannish about. It's kind of interesting -- it's almost like it's so polished that there aren't any weird cracks or rough edges to hang a fannish hat on, so to speak. So I didn't feel the desire to see it again the next day (not that I would have, but I've absolutely been to theater events where I was like "okay, I would be very strongly tempted go to see this again tomorrow if I could spare the time") but if the tour comes back next year I'd almost definitely go if Colón were still in it, and even if not I'd strongly consider going.

Last week:Lament for the destroyed trees and landscape around Jerusalem. A woman eats her own child. More discussion of Titus and whether he wanted to spare the Temple or not. The Carthage and Alexandria precedents for Romans treating defeated opponents. Torching a temple = REALLY BAD LUCK. The timetable of the siege of Jerusalem set by Vespasian's ascent as emperor.

This week: The aftermath of the burning of the temple, and the end of the siege of Jerusalem. Still some pretty awful stuff.

Next week: Okay, going to try to read all of book 7! We'll see how this goes.