cahn | (no subject)

I asked everyone for recs of books with dads, and I now want to make the same post for moms! (I was going to wait until I had had a chance to read more of the recs in the dad post -- thank you everyone!! -- but then

forestofglory had an interesting post about where all the SFF moms have gone which made me think I should go ahead and ask :) )

The rules of the game are as before: Please rec me books with moms who are important characters (important secondary character is fine, and "important" can be defined as you like -- important enough to remember a month later? :) ) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (I said teenager in the other post, but really I mean not babies or toddlers). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s). (

forestofglory's post was about SFF books, but you do not have to be limited to SFF here.)

The interesting thing is, at first I wasn't sure I'd be able to come up with any, but looking at our bookshelf there seem to be more moms than dads. I strongly suspect this is a me-filtering thing, in that I tend to remember strong moms, and maybe don't remember the good dads that much? And also books that I've hung on to seem to have tended to have strong moms?

-The Broken Earth (Jemisin), Essun (arguably she falls into "abusive," but I'm gonna leave her here anyway because the books are actually partially about examining that dynamic)
-Tenar in the later Earthsea books
-Cordelia and Ekaterin in the Vorkosigan books
-Tagiri in Pastwatch (Card)
-Actually a lot of Card's stuff during what I call his "good period" -- Novinha in Speaker for the Dead, DeAnne Fletcher in Lost Boys (whom I rather imprinted on in high school, actually), Rasa in the Homecoming series
-The POV character in "Story of Your Life" (Ted Chiang)
-Dione in Throne of Isis (Judith Tarr)
-I never managed to finish the Gap series (Donaldson), but I'm pretty sure I remember Morn Hyland being a mom is a Big Thing
-Abigail Tillerman! I'm gonna go ahead and mention Liza too, because even though her actual screen time is maybe one page, I still consider her a major character in the first two books. (I guess the Professor is also a dad who is a major character in Solitary Blue, which somehow I both totally glossed over in the dad post and had to think about for a minute to come up with here ("There must be a sympathetic dad character in these books!"))
-Little Women and sequels
-Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu from the Rihannsu books (Duane)
-I believe Hild's mom is a reasonably important character but I don't remember super well (Griffith)
-Ingray's mom in Provenance (maybe? She does seem to care about Ingray, even if she has pretty terrible ways of showing it)

Honorable mentions (characters that might not completely fit my criteria but I'm gonna mention them anyway, and hey, if you have an idea that doesn't exactly fit, feel free to mention it):
-Meg Murry O'Keefe (I actually really like that she gives up being a mathematician for a while, because valid choice, but on the other hand she doesn't get a big role in the books once she becomes a mom, which is in retrospect kind of annoying)
-FMA, which has everything else, doesn't have an important living mom of a non-small-child unless you count Mrs. Bradley, which maybe I should because what she lacks in screen time she makes up by being totally awesome, although Selim... probably... counts as a small child
-The Connie Willis story "And Come from Miles Around" has a mom whose kid is a toddler, but I mention it anyway because it is my favorite SF story (possibly the only story) about a stay-at-home-mom saving the day
-Selenay in the Valdemar books, although I can't remember how old Elspeth was at the time of the books... I seem to remember she was older than she was acting, though

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I don't know this book! What is it about?

That's complicated enough it'll have to wait until I'm off the phone and on the computer. Hopefully this weekend.

Okay. You've read Beggars in Spain, right? I remember discussing Roger Camden in the dads post. I will now explain The Signature of All Things by analogy with Beggars in Spain.

Imagine it's the nineteenth century. No Sleepless plotline, obviously. Imagine Leisha is raised by Roger Camden, and also a mother who is almost exactly like Roger Camden. And her disfavored younger sister is extremely beautiful. Leisha becomes a natural historian and specializes in the study of moss.

Then her parents die, and instead of the book becoming an interesting and nuanced exploration of political, philosophical, and ethical issues, it becomes bizarre and pointless, wherein she meets a guy, has an unsuccessful marriage, and embarks on a weird interlude to Tahiti to find the guy her husband might have been having sex with (insert vaguely homophobic undertones), and (rot13 for spoilers) qrpvqrf fur yvxrf uvz naq tvirf uvz n oybj wbo. This whole second half of the novel can safely be skipped. Then at the very end, we go back to her scientific work and it becomes good again, and she qvfpbiref angheny fryrpgvba, snvyf gb choyvfu va gvzr, zrrgf hc jvgu Nyserq Ehffryy Jnyynpr gb flzcnguvmr nobhg orvat cer-rzcgrq ol Qnejva, naq gnyx nobhg ubj terng Qnejva vf. The end.

All in all, the book had a lot of promise in the first part that it didn't live up to. Characters that had potential remained tantalizingly two-dimensional, never quite leaping off the page and coming to life. Everything felt a bit flat. But the first part was a Bildungsroman of two prodigies raising two child prodigies, and I rather enjoyed it, enough to say it's worth reading if you liked that aspect of Beggars in Spain (which I did).

It's funny, because in the 12 years I've known my partner, we've agreed on exactly three works of fiction that we didn't both hate. Two we liked, and the third is The Signature of All Things, which we liked the first half of and thought the second half was bizarre and unnecessary, and the characters just short of being fully realized. Usually we have radically different tastes, and either we both hate a book, or one of us hates it and the other doesn't. We've basically learned not to rec fiction to each other.

So I was surprised when she said one day, "I'm reading a book I think you'd like." When I realized what book it was, said, "Yeah, I've read it. The first half was good, but the second half goes totally off the rails. The ending is good, you'll like that part." Then when she made it further on in the book, she came to me and said, "WTAF was that???" and we proceeded to agree on everything, and then we talked about how weird it was that we were agreeing on a novel. :P

Huhhhhh. That's interesting. I did like that part of Beggars in Spain, so worth checking out!

What were the other two books you both like?

Then I would read the first part, skip to the part where she gets back to her science, and just accept that some weird shit happens in the middle that may be referred to at the end and that you may not get. If you do read it and decide to skip Weird Tahiti Interlude, I can direct you to the place near the end where it gets good again.

Both by Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon and The Rise and Fall of DODO. His other books we either both hate, are meh about, or I like but have advised her to give a miss based on what I know about her tastes.

DODO is *good*, though. I read it a few months ago and I've recommended it to at least 4 people so far. Stephenson has a co-author for this one, which makes a very clear difference to the quality.

D likes Cryptonomicon too, and told me I would probably like it but that -- if I remember correctly? -- it suffers from the usual Stephenson ending problem. I was never sure it would be worth reading to get to a Stephenson ending, but maybe it is. I've never heard of DODO. Does it have a proper ending?

DODO just came out. You won't believe it: it has a proper ending! Better, about 80% of the way through occurs one of my favorite things I've ever read and which I refuse to spoil for anyone. I'll just say that so far, everyone who's read it has immediately recognized it. My wife walked out to the kitchen where I was washing dishes, exclaimed, "The [Noun]s are [Verb]ing [Noun]!" and I was like, "Told you it was good!" She agreed that although she had been kind of indifferent up to that point, the payoff was worth the rather slow buildup.

Yes, Cryptonomicon is *notorious*. One of my friends who otherwise loved the book is still bitter that I didn't warn him about the ending when I recced it. He gave me a hard time about it for like a month. I told him DODO had a proper ending. :P But up until this year, Cryptonomicon was the only book my wife and I had both liked in 11 years of knowing each other. Despite the ending. I told my friend I'd forgotten about the ending, because when I'm rereading, I just skip that part! He still gave me many dirty virtual looks in chat, and I can't blame him.