Deeplight (Hardinge)
Jun. 30th, 2020 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn5/5. Follows a small-time-con-artist street kid living in a harbor town bordering a sea where gods used to live but have all died off and have left only scattered magical pieces of themselves behind to be found as flotsam and sold.
Whoa. This book knocked my socks off, and I wasn't expecting that -- my previous experience with Hardinge (only two books, I think?) had been that her books were quite well written but unsettling and maybe not quite for me?
This book is also unsettling and maybe not quite for me -- there were large swathes that I kind of skimmed because they were too intense -- but I was super impressed by it anyway. The worldbuilding is quite excellent, as you can maybe see even from the one-line synopsis; I'd never seen anything exactly like it before. And the unsettling quality of her writing really works with the world quite well, in a way I never quite got it to gel when reading her previous books. And the characters really worked for me too. Quest, especially, actually reminds me a lot of someone I know, a woman in her 80's who has that same quality of clear-eyed-ness. And the plot! There was a major reveal that I didn't see coming at all, and partially it's because I think Hardinge is playing a lot with the way we usually think about these kinds of fantasy worlds and our expectations for them.
I did find it a bit oddly paced occasionally (including the end); I'm not sure if that was on purpose or not. But even with all these caveats, I'm gonna have to vote this to win the Lodestar, unless the Kingfisher ends up being even better. Heck, I would vote for it to win the Hugos over everything but Memory if it had been nominated for Best Novel.
SPOILERS fair game in comments!
Whoa. This book knocked my socks off, and I wasn't expecting that -- my previous experience with Hardinge (only two books, I think?) had been that her books were quite well written but unsettling and maybe not quite for me?
This book is also unsettling and maybe not quite for me -- there were large swathes that I kind of skimmed because they were too intense -- but I was super impressed by it anyway. The worldbuilding is quite excellent, as you can maybe see even from the one-line synopsis; I'd never seen anything exactly like it before. And the unsettling quality of her writing really works with the world quite well, in a way I never quite got it to gel when reading her previous books. And the characters really worked for me too. Quest, especially, actually reminds me a lot of someone I know, a woman in her 80's who has that same quality of clear-eyed-ness. And the plot! There was a major reveal that I didn't see coming at all, and partially it's because I think Hardinge is playing a lot with the way we usually think about these kinds of fantasy worlds and our expectations for them.
I did find it a bit oddly paced occasionally (including the end); I'm not sure if that was on purpose or not. But even with all these caveats, I'm gonna have to vote this to win the Lodestar, unless the Kingfisher ends up being even better. Heck, I would vote for it to win the Hugos over everything but Memory if it had been nominated for Best Novel.
SPOILERS fair game in comments!
