Ash: A Secret History (Mary Gentle)
Jan. 30th, 2019 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn4/5. I finished Ash: A Secret History, and okay, yep, now I can recommend it (always with the caveat of grimdark and if you liked the Kindle sample, and with a couple other caveats that I'll poke at in the next paragraph). The E-book is $4 currently at amazon, and as it clocks in at 1120 pages, I have to say that the hours of entertainment to cost ratio has been higher than anything else I've bought for some time. except possibly for that one Don Carlo recording that I've listened to too many times to count. I wasn't sure at 30% whether the ending would live up to the wild plot-heaviness of the rest of the book, but it does!
This is one of those books where I feel it's better to have zero spoilers going on. That being said, (1) I must warn anyone who knows... anything... about science... that it does that Thing where "science" is basically used as a synonym for "magic" so you may be facepalming a lot at certain spots (... just call it "wakalixes," okay?), and (2) I must warn any medievalists (or even anyone who... just likes history) that there are lots of things here that might bother you, like the manuscript of Fraxinus not reading at all like anything even faintly from that time period, not just in word translation choice; and footnotes reading much less like what an actual academic doing a translation would write and more like what an author who had done a lot of research on the period would write; and emails from an academic that don't sound like anything an academic would think or write. (For example, at one point the academic is all "but the manuscript got X detail wrong, HOW CAN I TRUST IT EVER AGAIN" which... does not compute for anyone who's ever studied any kind of writing, medieval or not??) So. I was able to suspend my disbelief on all these points enough to really enjoy it (although there was a lot of eye-rolling and facepalming at certain points), but I would not blame you one bit if you couldn't.
Because of those things, I honestly do not know how much I'd like Gentle's other work. But all that being said, this book was awfully satisfying on a number of levels.
rachelmanija, WHOSE FAULT THIS ALL IS, has several posts of interest:
-The post that convinced me to pick up the Kindle sample (no spoilers, though general overall discussion)
-I got so WTF OMG about it in the comments to the above post (I did rot-13 spoilers) that rachel made me a readthrough post so I could flail around, MANY SPOILERS HERE
-Spoilers post, for those who have read it all the way through!
This is one of those books where I feel it's better to have zero spoilers going on. That being said, (1) I must warn anyone who knows... anything... about science... that it does that Thing where "science" is basically used as a synonym for "magic" so you may be facepalming a lot at certain spots (... just call it "wakalixes," okay?), and (2) I must warn any medievalists (or even anyone who... just likes history) that there are lots of things here that might bother you, like the manuscript of Fraxinus not reading at all like anything even faintly from that time period, not just in word translation choice; and footnotes reading much less like what an actual academic doing a translation would write and more like what an author who had done a lot of research on the period would write; and emails from an academic that don't sound like anything an academic would think or write. (For example, at one point the academic is all "but the manuscript got X detail wrong, HOW CAN I TRUST IT EVER AGAIN" which... does not compute for anyone who's ever studied any kind of writing, medieval or not??) So. I was able to suspend my disbelief on all these points enough to really enjoy it (although there was a lot of eye-rolling and facepalming at certain points), but I would not blame you one bit if you couldn't.
Because of those things, I honestly do not know how much I'd like Gentle's other work. But all that being said, this book was awfully satisfying on a number of levels.
rachelmanija, WHOSE FAULT THIS ALL IS, has several posts of interest:-The post that convinced me to pick up the Kindle sample (no spoilers, though general overall discussion)
-I got so WTF OMG about it in the comments to the above post (I did rot-13 spoilers) that rachel made me a readthrough post so I could flail around, MANY SPOILERS HERE
-Spoilers post, for those who have read it all the way through!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 05:25 pm (UTC)For you, actually, I'd unpack that "grimdark" thing a bit more -- it's the kind of book where a rape happens on the first page. And there's a bit where Ash reveals a very humiliating incident that happened to her in the past (like, body fluids involved). So, you know. You might want to skip it.
I will say that (a) being written by a woman, rape isn't treated as some sort of weird male power fantasy -- it's more matter-of-fact "okay this is part of this person's life"; (b) while the humiliation part was not pleasant to read, it didn't actually set off my fairly-sensitive humiliation squick because Ash is so clearly way cooler than that and has lots more things going on in her life than this relatively minor bit, and (c) while Ash herself is het and has het relationships, there isn't a focus on het relationships as the end-all and be-all. Almost all the important relationships are not romantic ones, but rather friendships or loyalty or family-ish relationships... wow, when I put it like that it's pretty clear why I adored this book.
ETA: (d) ugh, I can't tell you because spoiler, but there's one character where you would really really like this character's arc and reveals and plot. Wow, that was probably the most unhelpful reason to read a book ever. But I guess if you decide you are not going to read it I'll tell you that bit.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 10:38 pm (UTC)I have NO IDEA who you're talking about. :P
Oh, yeah, and ditto on the humiliation bit: it was my least favorite part, but my humiliation squick considered it just at the threshold of tolerable.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 08:05 am (UTC)