Tillerman books, part 3 (Voigt, reread)
Sep. 18th, 2013 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...why yes, I'm still working on posting stuff I started back in August. So. The rest of the Tillerman Cycle (I'm not reading Homecoming), and these form a set for vaguely-spoilery reasons (see Seventeen Against the Dealer).
The Runner (4/5): The book about the "older generation" (mostly the Tillermans' dead uncle, Bullet, as a high school kid). Here we actually get to meet Francis/Frankie Verricker, the Tillermans' father, who's pretty much absent in the rest of the cycle. In terms of the overarching family theme of the cycle, this is the book where we see a family that fails (but because Voigt is so good at drawing characters and families as realistically complicated, this family also succeeds in some small and surprising ways), as opposed to all the other books, where we see families that are struggling to make things work in different kinds of ways, and by-and-large succeeding. It's also clearly the big setup for Come a Stranger, and the big emotional payoff of that one.
Sons From Afar (4/5): I really like this one. James and Sammy decide they need to find out about their dad. And they find — and I love this — that there are no easy answers and no good answers, in the end, there's just you and the people you love and what you choose to make of that. I think I like it because I like James, a lot; I love how he's smart and conflicted and tries to fit in and sacrifices his integrity for that and then finds that there's an integrity of the mind that he can't sacrifice. I love how he's cowardly and courageous at the same time. I'd love to find out what happened to him as a grownup.
I like the idea of Sammy and James both as different sides of Grandfather Tillerman — that between them they have all the sides that caused him to fail, and to fail his family, and to be unhappy, but because their family works, those same traits help them instead of hurting them.
Seventeen Against the Dealer (3+/5): Ummmmm. Yeah. It's a depressing book (though ultimately uplifting) and the one where Dicey loses her way before finding it again. The interesting thing about this one is Cisco Kidd.
I'm afraid I'm a very unironic reader of books that I love (though hand me some obnoxious YA dystopia, and we'll talk), and it was completely lost on me until I was reading a review on the interwebs that Cisco Kidd is totally supposed to be Dicey's and her siblings' father. Francis -> Cisco, duhhhhh.
Whether he actually is their father is, I think, not at all clear (there is never anything that can be taken as proof, and in fact Voigt is very careful never to have the man meet James or Sammy, either of whom would have tried to figure it out), and I think that's part of the point — it doesn't matter, in some sense, whether he is, although the book is more poignant if you assume he is. But whether he is or not, he's a stand-in for this man.
The Runner (4/5): The book about the "older generation" (mostly the Tillermans' dead uncle, Bullet, as a high school kid). Here we actually get to meet Francis/Frankie Verricker, the Tillermans' father, who's pretty much absent in the rest of the cycle. In terms of the overarching family theme of the cycle, this is the book where we see a family that fails (but because Voigt is so good at drawing characters and families as realistically complicated, this family also succeeds in some small and surprising ways), as opposed to all the other books, where we see families that are struggling to make things work in different kinds of ways, and by-and-large succeeding. It's also clearly the big setup for Come a Stranger, and the big emotional payoff of that one.
Sons From Afar (4/5): I really like this one. James and Sammy decide they need to find out about their dad. And they find — and I love this — that there are no easy answers and no good answers, in the end, there's just you and the people you love and what you choose to make of that. I think I like it because I like James, a lot; I love how he's smart and conflicted and tries to fit in and sacrifices his integrity for that and then finds that there's an integrity of the mind that he can't sacrifice. I love how he's cowardly and courageous at the same time. I'd love to find out what happened to him as a grownup.
I like the idea of Sammy and James both as different sides of Grandfather Tillerman — that between them they have all the sides that caused him to fail, and to fail his family, and to be unhappy, but because their family works, those same traits help them instead of hurting them.
Seventeen Against the Dealer (3+/5): Ummmmm. Yeah. It's a depressing book (though ultimately uplifting) and the one where Dicey loses her way before finding it again. The interesting thing about this one is Cisco Kidd.
I'm afraid I'm a very unironic reader of books that I love (though hand me some obnoxious YA dystopia, and we'll talk), and it was completely lost on me until I was reading a review on the interwebs that Cisco Kidd is totally supposed to be Dicey's and her siblings' father. Francis -> Cisco, duhhhhh.
Whether he actually is their father is, I think, not at all clear (there is never anything that can be taken as proof, and in fact Voigt is very careful never to have the man meet James or Sammy, either of whom would have tried to figure it out), and I think that's part of the point — it doesn't matter, in some sense, whether he is, although the book is more poignant if you assume he is. But whether he is or not, he's a stand-in for this man.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-27 11:57 pm (UTC)"Unless that wasn’t his real name.”
“Do you think he would have lied to Momma about his name?” Sammy hadn’t ever thought of that.
“If he had, she never would have caught him. She’d have been easy to lie to."
They are already on to him and his name-changing ways! You're right, James would have figured out Cisco in a heartbeat. Faster than you and I did. ;)
no subject
Date: 2017-08-10 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-10 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-10 04:16 pm (UTC)