The rest of the Lodestars
Jul. 15th, 2021 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn-Legendborn (Tracy Deonn): So this was a fun romp: Black UNC student, Bree, meets King Arthur-themed Secret Magic Conspiracy to Save the World from Monsters. (Or: American POC future author gets imprinted by Susan Cooper at a young age and grows up to be like, well, why can't I write fantasy about King Arthur?? I... have a lot of empathy for that.) There was a lot to like about it: the writing is quite compelling; I loved the through-line about Bree's family and mother, and the way that magic can be different in this world and the way her heritage connected with that, and the ending was just awesome!
It was... also very YA, complete with ~romance~ that is at least as important to the characters as the part where monsters might take over the world. And the worldbuilding was also, um, well, it benefited from being read after Harrow the Ninth because I had most of my critical worldbuilding circuits turned way down, but even so I was like "how... how does this American King Arthur thing even work?? Because it Makes No Sense." Also, I thought it was hilarious how it's like this Soooooper Sekret Thing That Must Be Kept From Muggles but the characters are constantly texting each other about it; in the world I live in it would be showing up on the news in a couple of weeks.
The afterword made it clear that Deonn was putting in some of her own life experience with regards to Bree's mom (which I'd kind of suspected from the tone of those parts), and I think I kind of wish that it had been a different book in that regard, because it's a little hard to take that pain as seriously as I think it should be taken, in a book that was as extremely and dramatically YA as this one was.
So, like, I wouldn't buy this for myself, but eh, I'll probably rec it to E in a few years (after warning her about the worldbuilding).
-Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas): So, I liked the magic system and it is cool to get a trans gay Latinx protagonist, but gosh Yadriel is such a whiny kid. I mean, I see that he has a lot to whine about, being trans and gay and no one really understanding that, but a) after reading a whole book about him I still can't tell you very much about his personality except that he angsts a lot about being trans and gay and no one really understanding that. (Okay, and that he likes Julian and cares about school.) And b) I have passed the stage in my life where I empathized with that kind of thing and have passed on to another stage where I find it annoying to read about. (sorry teenagers everywhere! sorry teenage!me who was also very whiny!)
Also, the plot was a bit... So halfway through I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if this was just like Legendborn and the murderer was the uncle because it's got to be the least suspicious character?" Welp, there it is. I thought this was kind of dumb because there wasn't any indication beforehand that I remember (maybe I wasn't paying enough attention) that the uncle had a propensity for murder and being Sooper Eeeevil (not only is he a murderer, he is legit Sooper Eeeeevil) and so on (at least in Legendborn we had stereotypes to fall back on, and Bree didn't know the villain very well).
-Elatsoe (Darcie Little Badger): This was a fun one for me; it reminded me a lot of those meandering children's books I used to snarf up regularly as a child. (It does have an overarching plot/mystery, and Elatsoe is 17, although I think it kind of wanted to be a meandering children's book instead (there are lots of meandering parts that don't really seem to have much to do with the main plot, and there was something about the sort of arch and aware-of-itself-as-a-book nature of the dialogue where the book really coded to me as one of those 12-year-old child detective books rather than a YA/teen book.) After reading Cemetery Boys, I really, really liked that Elatsoe is Not Whiny. Sometimes crap things happen to her (she is Native American and sometimes racism is A Thing. and sometimes there are vampires, because it's that kind of book) and she acknowledges it's crap, and gets on with her life (sometimes by damaging the vampires). Not that I'm suggesting that this is the way everyone has to be (it's not like I'm that way), but it was restful to read, at least right now. (Not going to rec to E, at least given her preferences right now, because it's soooo slow to get action started that she'd probably nope right out -- she strongly prefers action that starts earlier in the book.)
-A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher) - Pretty obvious that Kingfisher/Vernon was the other author on the ballot (besides Novik) who, uh, has actually written more than one book. The thing I enjoyed most about this book (as opposed to the three above and Raybearer, all of which were first books) was that there was a sense of a whole community, not just one love interest and a couple of friends sprinkled in for diversity's sake. And I loved the defensive baking!
That being said, I thought this was a reasonably slight book -- dealing with some major issues, of course, but I sort of felt like it wasn't as ambitious as Raybearer (although better written) and somewhat one-note in what it cared about thematically, though that theme was interesting (what makes a hero, what does it mean to be a hero).
Voting:
Honestly I'm going to be seriously annoyed if anything but Deadly Education wins this, but on the other hand, whenever I feel this way, Hugo voters tend to disagree strenuously with me (like the last time Novik had something on the ballot I thought was miles better than any of the other nominees), so maybe I should just get used to being annoyed :P And I liked all of them better than No Award, so go Lodestar nominators :)
IDK, I feel like the four in the middle could be moved around some -- maybe I will -- but right now I am thinking
Deadly Education >> Raybearer > Baking > Legendborn > Elatsoe > Cemetery Boys
It was... also very YA, complete with ~romance~ that is at least as important to the characters as the part where monsters might take over the world. And the worldbuilding was also, um, well, it benefited from being read after Harrow the Ninth because I had most of my critical worldbuilding circuits turned way down, but even so I was like "how... how does this American King Arthur thing even work?? Because it Makes No Sense." Also, I thought it was hilarious how it's like this Soooooper Sekret Thing That Must Be Kept From Muggles but the characters are constantly texting each other about it; in the world I live in it would be showing up on the news in a couple of weeks.
The afterword made it clear that Deonn was putting in some of her own life experience with regards to Bree's mom (which I'd kind of suspected from the tone of those parts), and I think I kind of wish that it had been a different book in that regard, because it's a little hard to take that pain as seriously as I think it should be taken, in a book that was as extremely and dramatically YA as this one was.
So, like, I wouldn't buy this for myself, but eh, I'll probably rec it to E in a few years (after warning her about the worldbuilding).
-Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas): So, I liked the magic system and it is cool to get a trans gay Latinx protagonist, but gosh Yadriel is such a whiny kid. I mean, I see that he has a lot to whine about, being trans and gay and no one really understanding that, but a) after reading a whole book about him I still can't tell you very much about his personality except that he angsts a lot about being trans and gay and no one really understanding that. (Okay, and that he likes Julian and cares about school.) And b) I have passed the stage in my life where I empathized with that kind of thing and have passed on to another stage where I find it annoying to read about. (sorry teenagers everywhere! sorry teenage!me who was also very whiny!)
Also, the plot was a bit... So halfway through I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if this was just like Legendborn and the murderer was the uncle because it's got to be the least suspicious character?" Welp, there it is. I thought this was kind of dumb because there wasn't any indication beforehand that I remember (maybe I wasn't paying enough attention) that the uncle had a propensity for murder and being Sooper Eeeevil (not only is he a murderer, he is legit Sooper Eeeeevil) and so on (at least in Legendborn we had stereotypes to fall back on, and Bree didn't know the villain very well).
-Elatsoe (Darcie Little Badger): This was a fun one for me; it reminded me a lot of those meandering children's books I used to snarf up regularly as a child. (It does have an overarching plot/mystery, and Elatsoe is 17, although I think it kind of wanted to be a meandering children's book instead (there are lots of meandering parts that don't really seem to have much to do with the main plot, and there was something about the sort of arch and aware-of-itself-as-a-book nature of the dialogue where the book really coded to me as one of those 12-year-old child detective books rather than a YA/teen book.) After reading Cemetery Boys, I really, really liked that Elatsoe is Not Whiny. Sometimes crap things happen to her (she is Native American and sometimes racism is A Thing. and sometimes there are vampires, because it's that kind of book) and she acknowledges it's crap, and gets on with her life (sometimes by damaging the vampires). Not that I'm suggesting that this is the way everyone has to be (it's not like I'm that way), but it was restful to read, at least right now. (Not going to rec to E, at least given her preferences right now, because it's soooo slow to get action started that she'd probably nope right out -- she strongly prefers action that starts earlier in the book.)
-A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher) - Pretty obvious that Kingfisher/Vernon was the other author on the ballot (besides Novik) who, uh, has actually written more than one book. The thing I enjoyed most about this book (as opposed to the three above and Raybearer, all of which were first books) was that there was a sense of a whole community, not just one love interest and a couple of friends sprinkled in for diversity's sake. And I loved the defensive baking!
That being said, I thought this was a reasonably slight book -- dealing with some major issues, of course, but I sort of felt like it wasn't as ambitious as Raybearer (although better written) and somewhat one-note in what it cared about thematically, though that theme was interesting (what makes a hero, what does it mean to be a hero).
Voting:
Honestly I'm going to be seriously annoyed if anything but Deadly Education wins this, but on the other hand, whenever I feel this way, Hugo voters tend to disagree strenuously with me (like the last time Novik had something on the ballot I thought was miles better than any of the other nominees), so maybe I should just get used to being annoyed :P And I liked all of them better than No Award, so go Lodestar nominators :)
IDK, I feel like the four in the middle could be moved around some -- maybe I will -- but right now I am thinking
Deadly Education >> Raybearer > Baking > Legendborn > Elatsoe > Cemetery Boys
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Date: 2021-07-16 02:42 pm (UTC)where the book really coded to me as one of those 12-year-old child detective books rather than a YA/teen book.
I also kept getting this feeling that Elatsoe was a mid-grade book rather than a YA book, even though it pretty clearly was aiming for YA (or at least I think it was; otherwise there was no reason for Ellie to be 17 instead of 12).
And the worldbuilding was also, um, well, it benefited from being read after Harrow the Ninth because I had most of my critical worldbuilding circuits turned way down, but even so I was like "how... how does this American King Arthur thing even work?? Because it Makes No Sense."
Ahaha, possibly the two books that slipped in between 'Harrow' and this for me were too much of a break and the circuits reset, because it has been bugging me! I think part of the problem is, we get so much specific detail about the logistics of the King Arthur thing (like the exact ages in which you're a Scion and can be Called), and this whole hierarchy of Capitalized Titles -- that my brain is immediately like, data! let's make sense of it! and it just, uh, doesn't lend itself to that.
Also, I'm about halfway in, and I'm finding the combination of YA fantasy with monsters and teen romance + passages about dealing with grief and history of racism quite jarring -- they seem to exist at very different levels of reality, and don't come together particularly well.
ETA:
(like the last time Novik had something on the ballot I thought was miles better than any of the other nominees)
I liked the book that won best novel that year, but I still feel disappointed that Spinning Silver did not win. It certainly also has its flaws (too many POVs, inexplicable romance choices) but despite all that, it was such a good book!
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Date: 2021-07-16 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-16 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-16 03:58 pm (UTC)Hee, yes exactly! Like, I don't necessarily expect my fantasy to make a lot of sense -- when it's written in a kind of numinous way (e.g., Earthsea). But if you're going to go into specific rules and details and stuff (hi there Brandon Sanderson!), then I expect that you've thought out your system so that it all makes logical sense! (Which -- it's been a while since I've read Sanderson -- but I seem to remember he is actually pretty good at that.) But here, no.
Also, I'm about halfway in, and I'm finding the combination of YA fantasy with monsters and teen romance + passages about dealing with grief and history of racism quite jarring -- they seem to exist at very different levels of reality, and don't come together particularly well.
Yes, that's what I meant by saying that I wish she'd written another book about the grief parts specifically, as I think they're much harder to take seriously when combined with the monsters and teen romance, and I want to take it seriously, I can see there's something real and painful there.
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Date: 2021-07-16 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-16 06:04 pm (UTC)I didn't dislike Defensive Baking, but I saw all the twists coming from miles off and just sort of sat there waiting for the narrative to catch up.
Deadly Education was an amazing book at the scene-to-scene level, but at the book level, its reaction to Harry Potter reminds me a bit of George R. R. Martin's reaction to Tolkien: real history was gritty and violent and unfair and that therefore, the grittiest, most violent and least fair stories are the most realistic. I'm not so far away from my "blissful school days" that I've forgotten how much they sucked, but the Scholomance goes beyond dramatization by metaphor of how bad it was and just... isn't a school story anymore.
Novik rarely works for me anyway. I liked Uprooted. But I had a negative reaction to Spinning Silver for personal reasons (while acknowledging that it's a good book in the abstract)... and Temeraire deconstructs its world-building so effectively that it's almost funny, like watching Wile E. Coyote disassemble the scaffold he's standing on and plummet to the bottom of a canyon. In the first book, you think, "oh, Master and Commander/Hornblower with dragons, neat!" And by the last book, it's absolutely clear that the the armies are wrong, the governments are wrong, even the farms are wrong--- "X with dragons" makes no sense because dragons change literally everything beyond recognition.
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Date: 2021-07-17 04:31 am (UTC)Agreed about Defensive Baking. I love Ursula Vernon, and I enjoyed this, but it definitely felt slight. (And I did expect Bob the sourdough starter to play a bigger role than it did for most of the book, but that's not the book's fault.) A fun romp with a fun question at the heart, but not more than that.
The others are on my list, but I haven't gotten to them yet.
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Date: 2021-07-17 04:34 am (UTC)IDK -- I'm probably also being hard on it because I liked it, and easier on the others because I can see things they're doing that I want to work even if they don't, which is definitely an annoying thing I can do in my head sometimes :)
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Date: 2021-07-17 04:42 am (UTC)Heh, I never got past the... first? second? book of Temeraire, and I am still thinking this has been a good life choice :)
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Date: 2021-07-17 04:49 am (UTC)I liked Bob very much! :)
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Date: 2021-07-17 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-17 11:48 pm (UTC)I felt the same way about A Deadly Education. I actually liked the book, but I love magic school stories, and this just... wasn't that.
(It didn't strike me as commentary on YA dystopias either, although I suppose there's no reason it' *couldn't* be doing that.)
Temeraire deconstructs its world-building so effectively that it's almost funny, like watching Wile E. Coyote disassemble the scaffold he's standing on and plummet to the bottom of a canyon.
Haha, that's a great visual! (I like the series, but definitely the second half of it kind of falls apart for me, too.)
I liked Uprooted. But I had a negative reaction to Spinning Silver for personal reasons (while acknowledging that it's a good book in the abstract)
Do you mind if I nosily ask what your negative reaction to Spinning Silver was to? (From the standpoint of having liked both Uprooted and Spinning Silver a lot, but also seeing a number of flaws in Spinning Silver despite having a strong positive personal reaction to it.)
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Date: 2021-07-17 11:54 pm (UTC)Yeah, the magical worldbuilding system here could've benefited from more sleight of hand rather than exhaustive infodumping.
I've only read Mistborn, of Sanderson's books, and even that's been a while. I think I remember the magical rules certainly being internally consistent, but they still bugged me because they seemed "wrong" from the standpoint of actual, like, physics/chemistry. Which is not a thing that generally bothers me in magical worldbuilding, but his system felt so "scientific" that I seemed to be thinking about it in a different way than "hard" magic systems that aren't so based on science thing. (Who does a great, correct-feeling science-y magic for my money is Rothfuss. It's basically applied thermodynamics at that point, and I love it.)
I wish she'd written another book about the grief parts specifically, as I think they're much harder to take seriously when combined with the monsters and teen romance, and I want to take it seriously,
Nod -- I had a similar reaction to the truer-feeling bits of this book. The modern-Arthurian-YA-fantasy-with-monsters and teen romance parts don't seem to mesh well with some of the other things the author is going for, and it's kind of a pity.
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Date: 2021-07-18 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-18 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-18 05:23 pm (UTC)Yep, sadly, that's exactly the situation -- the first book of the trilogy came out in 2007, the second in 2011, which means book 3 has been in the works for over 10 years and there's still no publication date. Like ASOIAF, it's one of those series where I've accepted that I may never get a conclusion -- even though Rothfuss keeps taking to fans and giving information about a possible future trilogy and stuff like that. Even if book 3 does come out, it seems incredibly unlikely that it will wrap up all the loose ends, because there are A LOT of loose ends.
That said, I have no regrets about reading the first two books, even if I never get any sort of conclusion. Unlike ASOIAF, I love these not for the plot twists or character arcs, which do, I think, require a complete story for payoff (although it's of course possible to enjoy them along the way), the thing I love most about Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles is the worldbuilding, which there's already plenty of in the two books, followed by very fun secondary/tertiary characters, which, ditto.
But of course it's still a frustrating situation to be in as a fan, and I've stopped actively reccing these books since it became clear book 3 wasn't going to come out in any kind of normal timeframe.
Yeah, I don't really care that much if it's scientifically consistent, but it has to be internally consistent if you're going to give me that much detail about it.
I'm not sure why it bothered me in Mistborn, since I'm certainly happy to accept internally consistent magic based on things that make no scientific/real-world sense. Maybe it was some of the terminology used, maybe it was the fact that I'd seen the series hyped up as having very science-y magic, but instead of just going with the rules of worldbuilding, I'd find myself thinking "but what about Newton's Third Law?" and "but why doesn't this seem to obey the inverse square law?" and "but why would an alloy of these two elements have these completely unrelated properties?" when people were pushing off coins to fly or whatever, which was not helpful to the reading experience, LOL. But also in general Sanderson's writing seems to not work well for me, so maybe I was thinking about alloy compositions and equal and opposite reactions because the book wasn't sweeping me along enough not to...
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Date: 2021-07-19 03:24 am (UTC)Not really, I guess. It's a complex issue and I'm the first to admit my reaction was irrational. I'm Jewish, and I read Spinning Silver in the middle of a kind of self-consciously political #ownvoices trend in genre lit. I tend to approach that sort of book as an outsider, which isn't a bad thing. I really do believe that representation is good and there's room in the world for books that aren't for me, especially if they make people who have been Othered or excluded by traditional genre lit feel warm and comfortable.
Spinning Silver felt really disorienting, because I've been trained to read that kind of story as an outsider, except that I'm actually not one. I kept switching back and forth between "I am meant to identify with Miryem" and "it would be presumptuous to identify with Miryem, she's for people who feel self-consciously like members of a minority group."
I think, in a wider sense, that we see a lot of Jew-as-metaphor these days in genre fiction, where Jews "stand in" as virtual representation for some other minority. Magneto, who is literally Jewish, gets coded as LGBT, Afrocentrist, neuro-atypical... readers, even readers who are Jews, are supposed to understand his Judaism as a kind of generic Otherness. And I keep seeing Jews around the edges of stories centering on members of other minority groups (Ring Shout, Future of Another Timeline, Winter Tide, The City We Became), mostly, it seems, as a way of indicating that the book is meant to be welcoming to minorities. I think Spinning Silver pressed that button as well... which is unfair to the book Novik actually wrote. But there you are.
Apologies for the rant.
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Date: 2021-07-20 05:14 am (UTC)But also in general Sanderson's writing seems to not work well for me, so maybe I was thinking about alloy compositions and equal and opposite reactions because the book wasn't sweeping me along enough not to...
Hee. Mistborn was squarely in the "I can't read much epic fantasy anymore" box, which meant that I read it, liked it reasonably well, got about fifty pages into the sequel, and ground to a halt. It wasn't that I disliked it, I just... couldn't handle any more than that. (This also happens whenever I try rereading Robert Jordan.)
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Date: 2021-07-20 05:38 am (UTC)(No worries about ranting here! All I do is rant, really :D )
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Date: 2021-07-20 07:34 am (UTC)I'm Jewish,
I was wondering if that was part of it when I asked, because the more complicated reactions to that book I've seen on my flist have all been from Jewish readers (which makes sense -- presumably we feel more entitled to have opinions on how the book is doing Jewish Representation than other readers).
My own background, for context, is also Jewish; born in Eastern Europe (former USSR), with my childhood in the Old Country and my teenage years in the US. Given that background, I consider myself ethnically Jewish, culturally Jewish (specifically in the Soviet ex-pat culturally Jewish way, which tends to be quite different from, e.g. American-born culturally Jewish folks, in my experience -- although my children *are* American-born Jews who grew up in that community, so I do have some exposure to it), but not religiously Jewish (I'm atheist/agnostic, like a lot of Soviet Jews tend to be).
Anyway, it's interesting what you say, about feeling disoriented/conflicted about identifying with Miryem -- she felt very identifiable (wrong word, but you know what I mean) to me in a way most protagonists don't, and even the points where we have no commonality were weirdly affecting to me. I had to go back and poke at my write-up to refresh my memory, but even without specific details I remembered how unexpectedly poignant I found certain aspects of Miryem's family's Judaism specifically, something to which I feel very little personal connection.
But, interestingly, a flister of mine who is also Jewish-of-Soviet-extraction read it and Miryem's Jewishness didn't feel quite right to them / was not as affecting as I found it. It surprised me more than it should have, because, well, there are so many different ways of being anything, but I feel like there are particularly many different ways of being Jewish, given the length and breadth of the Jewish diaspora. But it made me wonder in restrospect why that aspect of the book had worked so well for me... Maybe I'm in some kind of sweet spot where I'm Old Country enough to feel entitled to identify with Miryem, but American enough not to miss the things my non/less-American Jewish flisters felt were lacking.
readers, even readers who are Jews, are supposed to understand his Judaism as a kind of generic Otherness
I do feel like that's true, but I also feel like it's maybe becoming less true? or I've been luckier than in the past at finding stories where the Jewishness doesn't feel like just code for Otherness. They don't necessarily all work for me, in general or with the Jewishness specifically, but it's neat they exist.
And I keep seeing Jews around the edges of stories centering on members of other minority groups (Ring Shout, Future of Another Timeline, Winter Tide, The City We Became), mostly, it seems, as a way of indicating that the book is meant to be welcoming to minorities.
I did notice that in Ring Shout (though I liked the Jewish communist lady and her philosophical debates with Chef); the rest I haven't read, but am now curious what I'll think of this setup in The City We Became.
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Date: 2021-07-21 12:16 am (UTC)I agree with that! And I did like the communist lady in Ring Shout, I just thought she also fit into a pattern I've noticed. Anyway, thanks for this and I'm curious to see what you think as well.
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Date: 2021-07-22 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-22 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-22 03:15 pm (UTC)That's interesting that you see that things you personally enjoy about a book can also be weaknesses of a book. To me, I think that if something works for a reader, then it's not necessarily a weakness, just a choice that the book is making that doesn't work for everyone/isn't standard.
It's also interesting that you're harder on books that you like than on books that you don't; I'm definitely the other way around!
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Date: 2021-07-24 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 05:30 am (UTC)