cahn

Being just months behind on life in general (recent visit with parents involved them scolding me for not doing one thing I should have been doing, and then when I did that (the deal being that parents would look after kids in the meantime) they were like, why didn't you do this other thing??) I have not said anything about the couple of historical-ish books I read over... uh, Christmas.

1. The King's Touch (Jude Morgan): historical fiction told from the point of view of Charles II's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth. (He's often called "Jemmy" in the book to distinguish himself from Charles' brother James (later James II), and so I will call him here.) I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the Stuarts in this time period. It's both extremely readable and seems quite well researched (by which I mean that selenak has very few nitpicks about it). Morgan makes the people of this era come alive, so that they're real people to me, entangled in a web of relationships, rather than (as they'd been previously) a list of characters and titles tenuously related by anecdotes told to me in salon -- Minette (Charles's sister) and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and their disastrous marriage, and Minette and Charles's relationship; James (II) and the ways in which he was awful and was clearly on a path to disaster once he became king; William of Orange and Mary (James (II)'s daughter) and their arranged-to-love marriage and how they related to Charles and James and Jemmy; Jemmy himself, obviously, and the way he related to all of these people, and overall to Charles II himself, and a lot more as well. This can be read with no knowledge of the era or the people; I'd had the salon synopsis (see the first few comments), but could be read without that.

I feel that Morgan tries to make the presentation as balanced as possible given that Jemmy is the narrator (probably to the extent of making Jemmy more understanding than he might have been in real life), but Jemmy does have strong feelings about things. (For example, I came away with very strong negative feelings about Philippe, who doesn't seem to have been a super nice person anyway but who was at least incrementally nicer to his second wife, which one wouldn't have known from reading this book, since Jemmy wasn't related to the second wife.)

2. Game of Queens (Gristwood) - Nonfiction book about the 16th century, focusing on the queens: beginning with Isabella the Catholic and going down to Queen Elizabeth of England. It was highly recommended by selenak here. Now, I will say that I think I don't know enough (basically zero) about this era for this kind of survey book to be ideally suited to my learning about it -- all the early queens in the book (Anne de Beaujeu, Louise of Savoy -- Margaret of Austria being something of an exception because she's so very cool) are honestly kind of blending together for me aside from a few disjointed facts, a couple of months after reading it. However, I'm still glad I read it, because the next time I encounter these women I'll have more context for them (and it's already happened a couple of times in salon that they've been referenced and I was like "oh right!"). Once the book got to Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, I was on much more familiar ground (even when I didn't know details, I at least had a fair bit more knowledge about the contextual history of Henry VIII and so on), and so I found those parts much easier going.

Anyway, I still recommend this! Just, it's easier to read if one is even vaguely familiar with the period, and I found the Morgan novel a better way to quickly ingest a large quantity of information about a period I knew very little about.

So, A. likes for me to read things that he reads, and E. doesn't like me to read things that she reads, but this year she has had this school challenge to read books in a bunch of different categories (this is genius by her teacher, because it's definitely gotten her to read books she wouldn't have read otherwise), and so I've had to read some books to see whether they were books she would enjoy reading. :) (And sometimes I got her books that were books I thought I might like to read :) )

And a question for the DW hive mind! One of E's categories she needs to read a book for is "political thriller," and it is stumping us because most political thrillers are, well, for grownups. I am not too worried about strict categories -- her teacher is flexible, anything that could even very slightly be described as such would probably work. The catch is that it has to be middle-school/at-most-YA, otherwise it will be too much for E. (Which rules out a lot of political SF, which otherwise I could use to fulfill the category. Hm... maybe Foundation would be at her level, although I worry it might be too dry for her. I am absolutely happy to count Foundation as "political thriller" for this purpose :P )

-Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney) - I've now read a bunch of these; they're a series but don't really need to be read in order (though there's some continuity; e.g. you'd have to read The Long Haul to figure out how they got a pig as a pet). A. absolutely loves these. I have mixed feelings about them. I can see why he loves them and they're certainly awfully addictive -- even as an adult in my 40's I got sucked into them just about as hard as A. did. They have a sense of humor that is funny both to kids and adults, and the drawings are hilarious. On the other hand, Greg (the narrator) is also just kind of mean and not very nice, and is often just awful to the people he calls his friends. And then again, his meanness isn't at all condoned by the narrative, and he usually gets some sort of comeuppance for it at the end. A. and I have had some talks about when Greg does things that aren't very nice, and A. doesn't seem like any of the meanness is rubbing off on him, so I guess it's okay? Anyway, my favorite is The Long Haul, because there aren't any shenanigans with him being mean to his "friends," and the Terrible No-Good Vacation is one that any parent can empathize with :P and also the subplot with the pig I actually quite liked :PP

-Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger (Sachar) - My beloved third-grade teacher introduced us to Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which I adored, but I didn't know there were sequels until E. came along, and then apparently I didn't read them (E. did) until A. came along and wanted me to read it. These books are hilarious and very, very weird. Props to Sachar for really tapping into the third-grade geek mindset here -- they honestly do read as rather alien to my adult brain, and yet I remember the book making total sense to my third-grade self.

-The Outsiders (Hinton) - I'd never read this before, despite seeing it at the library countless times and knowing it was Great Lit :) This was for the category of "under-18" (one of the stupidest categories in my opinion) because apparently Hinton wrote it before she was 18, and it was the only book I could find that I didn't oppose her reading (well, I suppose there's Diary of Anne Frank, but she would have bounced right off of that one). Buuuuut I guess I'm glad for that stupid category, because this book is really good, there's a reason I'd heard of it so many times :P Of course there's no lack of grimdark YA today, but I can see how this was groundbreaking as the first, and it talks about class in a way that I think is still quite relevant today, and it's deftly written, it's written by someone who knew what they were doing, and it's really surprising that it was written by someone that young. E. liked it as well.

-They Called Us Enemy (Takei) - DNF, but not because it wasn't excellent -- what I read of it was excellent and I highly recommend it. What with... 2021... and everything... I couldn't take reading about the Japanese-American internment camps and anti-Asian sentiment. It was just too much. E. read it and liked it. (I forget whether she counted it as one of the history categories or the Asian-American category.)

-I'd Tell You I'd Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You (Carter) - Best title ever! This one's been on my radar for a long time, since Sarah Rees Brennan mentioned it off-handedly on her blog many years ago. Spy boarding school, what's not to love! This was for the "thriller" category. I think I would have liked this a lot had I read it as a middle schooler, but as an adult I ended up skimming about half of it. Partially it's that I'm just too old for it now; partially it's that the spy girl ends up lying and lying to the love interest character, and I don't like that as a plot device. (I'm glad to report though that it's not sanctioned by the narrative.)

The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Fleming) - I knew basically nothing about the Romanovs or about the Russian Revolution before reading this book, which manages to make one both sympathetic towards the Tsar and his family, and also massively facepalming at them. (One of the quotes on amazon characterizes them as "doomed and clueless," which... yeah.) And the book brings in a lot of sources (quotes from primary, when possible) about what it was like for the peasants and workers at this time, which I really appreciated and which provides a lot of good context for what was going on. And the middle-to-high-school reading level really worked for me as a primer for stuff I didn't know anything about to start with. I really liked this, and will progress on to Massie once I've finished his other books (I'm reading Peter the Great right now) :D E. was frustrated by it and did not get very far; it is clearly a little beyond her reading level.

5/5. So I know the Scholomance books about grimdark-monsters-will-eat-you-magical-boarding-school aren't everyone's cup of tea, and if you didn't like A Deadly Education I dare say you won't like this one either, but wow it is like The Last Graduate was made to laser-focus target my id, in fact way more deeply than Education, which was already pretty good at targeting my id.

Oh, well, to start with, there are certainly a number of things about Graduate that are basically also what I liked about Education, especially at the beginning:

-Grimdark. I actually do enjoy grimdark as a thing, okay, but what I don't enjoy about it is the nihilism, and both A Deadly Education and Graduate reject that utterly -- but more later on that. (Until then, I will say that while Education was reasonably centered in grimdark, Graduate is all about bringing light into the grimdark, which YEAH.)

-Boarding-school -- as others have remarked, to be honest the Scholomance books have quite a bit less boarding-school vibe than one might expect from a one-line description, because the grimdark sort of takes over, but it turns out that a lot of what I like about boarding-school books is:

-Competency kink. It's baked into the premise of these books -- you have to be super competent or else mals are going to eat you. But I really enjoy reading about characters who are really really good at making their magical lutes or casting spells of destruction or whatever, and the details of their doing it.

-Fandomesque Harry Potter critique. Actually that was much more muted in this book than the last one (and there was very little YA-critique in the way I felt like Education was really having a go at YA tropes/cliches, especially grimdark YA) because Novik had her fun in the last book and was interested in bigger things, but still, there's a way in which this particular book is very much an answer to the Harry Potter House System and how the division between them became more and more problematic as the books went on.

-A focus on El learning how to deal with having friends and deepening her friendships and alliances, and I am always there for that kind of thing

So that's how the book starts. And I was unsure how Novik was going to sustain this for an entire book. Like, I'm not opposed to reading about grimdark competency-kink friendship-building Harry-Potter-critiquing for an entire book, but that seemed like -- I don't know -- not quite ambitious enough for what the first book promised?

...And then we got the rest of the book. I guess the least spoilerific way I can talk about it is -- we already knew the theme of Novik's recent books is working with rather than against, and this one doesn't break that streak. And raised to the emotional pitch of eucatastrophe; I had extremely wet eyes through that entire last chapter.

( Spoilers. Tried to keep them as implicit as possible, but still spoilers. )

A couple of other assorted things, including slight nitpicks:

-ase pointed out that the numbers really don't work out in Deadly Education -- I feel rather silly for not noticing it myself: if substantially more than half your kids are being killed off, then unless everyone was having a bunch of kids (and this doesn't seem to be a thing everyone is doing) you wouldn't have any wizards left by this time. Unfortunately there are additional concrete numbers in this book and they keep not making any sense. Oh well.

-First Novik published book (that I know of) where there are actual canon relationships that aren't M/F, whee! (ETA: But because Novik book, relatively minor characters, one of whom was so minor that it actually took me a minute to remember that character's gender.) Though I felt like the stirring speech that went with the second one was a little... too much, a little too "look at me with my awesome vegetables" that I feel like generally speaking Novik is too good a writer to do, instead integrating much more seamlessly: e.g. how she makes the Scholomance as a global entity (unlike the Harry Potter world, I must say), complete with inequities, is integrated into the worldbuilding and in my opinion done really well.

-Also, it does end on a cliffhanger. I knew this going in, and I was worried about what the cliffhanger would be, and in particular I worried it meant the book arc would get aborted. I shouldn't have; the arc works. I mean, it is a giant cliffhanger, but it doesn't mess with the meaning of the book, go Novik.

-Also also, I am sooooo annoyed that I read this days after Yuletide nomination closed. I would SO have nominated Worldbuilding for it. I really REALLY want to know more about the Scholomance now, and also more about what is going on with all those enclave kids. I guess there's always next year. (ETA 10-9: YESSSSSSS)

This may be the best second book of a trilogy I've ever read (except, of course, Purgatorio ;) ). I mean, IDK, it's possible I'm totally forgetting something :) But at least it's the first time in a long time that I didn't think the second book in a trilogy was the weakest link; I think this one is better than Education, not because Education was flawed, but because Graduate built on Education to become something greater than one book could be alone. We'll see in a year, I guess, whether the second book is the strongest because the third book is the weakest link, or whether she'll be able to pull off something to top this. (Honestly the third book seems like it would be incredibly difficult to write, given how she's constrained herself in this book... but then again I wouldn't have thought she could make this one work, and she totally did.)

(ETA: SPOILERS fair game in comments!)

-A Solitary Blue (Voigt) The just amazingly lovely Tillerman fic I got recently inspired me to reread this <3

I continue to identify with Jeff to a degree that's almost painful, even though he's just so diametrically opposed to me (this time around, I thought this especially at the part where he's really good at picking up on people's emotions and what they're thinking, because HAHAHAHAHA um no). I think on this read I identify with him actually partially because he's so different (James is probably the Tillerman character who's most like me, and although I like him and feel for him, I also find him mildly annoying because I dislike the mirror) -- but at the same time, many of his coping mechanisms are really similar to mine, though thankfully I was never nearly as badly off as he was. And also because the way he learns to analyze himself sounds very familiar, too.

Because of the above fic, I was reading it this time looking for Brother Thomas (and, lol, I was amused to find while reading that that fic is now totally my headcanon <3 ) , and now -- I really want a story about his crisis of faith later in the book. He's so unhappy, and I -- just am really moved by his unhappiness, that Voigt thought to include that as something important in his life, even if Jeff himself doesn't really get it in a lot of ways. I was really moved by the bit where he wears his habit around everywhere, even places where he ordinarily wouldn't, even when it's too hot to really, and when called on it he says that he keeps it on because if he took it off he might not put it back on again. Oh, Thomas <3

(Also, I need to reread the other books now to see if Brother Thomas shows up at all -- I was flipping through Come a Stranger and he's name-dropped -- as Brother Thomas and a monk -- at the end of that one, so I think he probably got through the crisis and stayed a monk. But I should go back and look to see if he's mentioned in Seventeen.)

-Miss Pym Disposes (Tey) - DNF. I was rereading the Marlow books (about which more in a bit) because I was wondering whether they would be suitable for E (she would find the school books boring *sigh* but I might be able to get her to read the adventure-focused ones) which led me to the excellent crossover fic Lois Sanger Disposes which led me to reread this book, which I'd read before but forgotten everything about, except a vague feeling that I liked the beginning a lot and disliked the ending.

Ahahaha yeah that seems to sum it up, really. The first 77% of this book is great -- Tey is a great writer -- and ratchets the tension and interpersonal drama up. But once the investigation started going I suddenly remembered why I didn't like it, and I flipped to the end to confirm, and agggggh. It is a great book but it is also a merciless book. ( implicit spoilers ).

-Autumn Term, End of Term, Cricket Term, Attic Term, Run Away Home (Forest) - Books about the large Marlow family, ranging from boarding-school books (all of which I reread) to adventure books (most of which I didn't reread, with the exception of Run Away Home because it was the last) to one RP book (which I also didn't reread). These are so good!

Autumn Term is the best -- there's something about the structure and the compelling centerpiece of the play, and the Lois Sanger / Marie Dobson subplot that is woven into it, that really works for me, and which I feel like wasn't replicated in the other books to the same extent (which I suppose is a known failure mode of sequels). Also, in End of Term I must say that I've been in charge of a few Christmas musical events since I last read it, with the predictable consequence that my sympathies switched totally to be with the teachers who had to deal with all their casting going awry at the last minute, not the kids whose POV we are in. (I'd be horrified if this happened in something I was running!) But I love all these books very very much.

-The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity - rec from lightreads. As lightreads warned, contrary to the title, this is not a self-help book but rather more of a scientist's memoir by Nadine Burke Harris, Surgeon General of California. It's fairly breezily written, easily read, not a whole lot of delving into the nitty gritty of the science (I'm currently reading Robert Sapolsky on that, also on lightreads' rec, which I'm really enjoying) and what I loved about its style was that Harris does, I think, get across the feel of the excitement of doing both science and policy-related-to-science.

And then there's the content: lightreads was like "yeah, yeah, I already knew all that" but I guess I live under a rock because somehow I had never heard of an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, much less knew about the correlation between one's ACE score and adverse medical outcomes, and this... kind of blew my mind. (One of the things I'm thinking about: There are six full cousins in my family on my dad's side (including my sister and me) and three of them have auto-immune problems. Of note is that both the families represented here were pretty high-pressure in general, and also that these three are the youngest in their families and so had a lot of pressure on them to follow the accomplishments of their siblings in a way the older ones didn't. IDK, it's an anecdotal sample size. But still... I wonder.)

-Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Carreyrou) - The rise and fall of Theranos, the company that claimed to do everything, medical-testing-wise, and... really really didn't. ase read this a while back, and it's been on my radar since then -- and I finally got around to it. And WELL that was something.

Let's just say that the book starts with Theranos doing a demonstration in which they purport to show that their blood testing technology works, and it turns out they can't get it to work so at the demo they show a FAKE RESULT. (Also, the CFO is like "...maybe we shouldn't do that?" and then he gets fired.) This is not even the craziest thing that happens in the book. It's basically like a primer on How Not To Do Science Or Technology. Or maybe How To Do Technology Totally Unethically. I actually had trouble reading the first half because the sheer scale of the amorality turned out to ping my embarrassment squick. Like, it's embarrassing to do science ("science") so awfully! When Carreyrou himself showed up in the book and I knew stuff was about to go down, I can't tell you how relieved I was.

gah, I keep meaning to talk about these and don't, so here at least is a record that I actually read these :P

Black Sun (Roanhorse) - 3+/5. I wasn't able to get through Roanhorse's previous book with the kick-butt angsty teen heroine, but I am happy to say that this was a function of not being able to read books like that anymore and not a reflection on Roanhorse, because this one I actually liked! It's a fantasy novel inspired by pre-Columbian cultures, and I found it fairly compelling. It does end on a total cliffhanger, which I wish I'd known before reading it!

Network Effect (Wells) - 3+/5 - Murderbot! :D I love Murderbot and I don't have anything different to say about this one than I did about past Murderbot books, which is wow I relate so much to Murderbot -- except, okay, um, I related even more to 3. Which... this is the kind of thing that makes me think that E's ASD diagnosis is clearly genetic :P
If you've read Murderbot, you know what to expect; if you haven't, don't start here. No, wait, I have more feelings. ( extremely mild spoilers. )

The Relentless Moon (Kowal) - DNF - I understand this one is supposed to be better than Stars, but there is just something about Kowal's writing I can't deal with. I did try and noped out within a chapter.

The City We Became (Jemisin) - DNF - I got further in it than into Moon :) I respect Jemisin's work, and I suspect this book is probably good. but I think maybe this one is better read by someone who, well, likes cities? Or likes NYC in particular? I had much the same problem with Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140.

Novels:
Piranesi > Harrow the Ninth > Network Effect > Black Sun > City > Moon > No Award
(IDK, I may switch Harrow and Network. I think Network is a more solid book, but Harrow blew my mind more. It's really hard for me to compare them.)

-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... ( Spoilers )

-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

finally starting to get caught up on writing up my Hugo reading! I hope!

4/5. Well. That was a WILD ride.

-I had managed to osmose beforehand that Harrow was crazier than Gideon the Ninth, and before reading I was all, "how is that even possible?" Heh, I learned how that was possible!

-I also realized during the course of this book that Muir has apparently tapped into some deep and primal urge I have to be... utterly confused?? I spent almost all of the book being completely confused and loving it! though it was because I did trust Muir to clear everything up by the end. I feel like someone's review said that the whole book was like an extended trust fall (sorry, I forget who said that) and... yeah.

-the worldbuilding continues to be a weird blend of "watch how much I absolutely do not care about worldbuilding" and "watch how much I do care about worldbuilding" but bothered me less this time around because I'd had a whole previous book to turn my brain off in this regard

-I live under a rock so the memes didn't bother me, and I loved all the Biblical references!
( spoilers )

4/5. ...okay, I found this book totally delicious because a) I feel like the whole thing was written affectionately but also totally skewering YA-grim-dystopian-love-triangle-ness (there is fake dating, but no love triangle in this book, just snark about the potential for a fake dating love triangle, which I found hilarious -- but also it's a YA grim dystopia that is actually well-written and works and isn't super anvilicious (1), which is... well, I can say that about other YA grim dystopia I've read, but certainly that is not what first comes to mind when I think about YA grim dystopia I've read in the past, much it for the Hugos), and also b) it could be looked at as a (quite well written) subset of Harry/Draco Grimdark AU only we can't have non-het so Draco is a girl with just a very fandom feel to it in terms of the things it's interested in examining from Harry Potter -- I saw a review that compared it to The Magicians, and the thing is that while Magicians had a similar "let's deconstruct Harry Potter via a dark gritty version" idea, it wasn't engaged in looking at it from a fandom perspective. (2)

I mean, the boy's name is Orion, and the book opens with how he is constantly saving people from gruesome fates, and El is really grumpy about it, and she doesn't think he even knows her name before he went off saving her life. And Orion sticks closely to El for a while because he thinks she's a dark magician... I have read all those fics before, is what I'm saying :D I don't think El ever shows up in leather pants but I was totally waiting for it :D (Though, I mean, Novik changes enough that they're their own characters -- Orion is the one who has the cushy pureblood enclave parents; El is the scrappy kid of a lovely hippy single mom.) Anyway, in general, the extremely-fandomesque-deconstruction of Harry Potter / Hogwarts is hilarious to me -- there are all sorts of bits like El explaining why they're always all studying in the library even though they don't really like it there: it's because it's safer there from the marauding monsters! or why the teaching/pedagogy is so horrible: because there are no teachers, it's all done automagically.

As well, although the tone of the book is not heavy (as opposed to dark; it's very dark, but what I mean is that this book is not making a bid to be Srs Lit), I wonder if the entire book isn't basically a metaphor for high school and college admissions and how college admissions / going from school to the outside world in general are basically like a monster that can eat you alive. The graduation monsters literally do so, in the book; but also it happens figuratively, as people overcome ethical qualms to do things that aren't very nice, and not-very-nice-deals are struck, and alliances are made, and people are taken advantage of, and privilege tramples over the un-privileged.

This is all so smoothly done (and Novik's writing is very smooth and compelling -- she really is getting better and better with every book, and I basically inhaled this over a couple of days) that by itself I would have liked the book very much, but what really made me love it are the relationships El forms slowly and painstakingly with a couple of the other kids (not just Orion, although I got a kick out of that as well). That's the heart of the book, and a book as dark as this needs a heart. And it's a good one.

And the other thing that made this book really good: the last quarter of the book I really loved, which brings together a theme I've noticed in Novik's writing before and Harry Potter fandom-critique :) ( Implicit spoilers for Novik's last three books, nothing explicit )

The only quibble I had was that much is made at the beginning of everyone disliking El on sight -- El says that this isn't because of anything she does, it's because of something about her or her aura. But then during the course of the book she is able to form relationships with others, and except for Orion it's never really explained what happened to overcome her aura or whatever. The best I can come up with is that El isn't a reliable narrator, and though yeah maybe she doesn't present well and people respond negatively to that at first, she responds to people being turned off her at first by being a jerk to everyone (she does know she does this, and there's ample evidence of this in the book) in a self-perpetuating spiral, and it's that spiral that gets checked with those particular people. But it would have been nice to have just a bit more text pointing to that, not just my headcanon.

Content warning: it is grimdark horror! Lots of gruesome bits, lots of people dying in gruesome ways.

This is the one to have to beat for the Lodestar, I'm guessing. I'll be really surprised if anything else on the Lodestar ballot tops this.

(1) I mean, yeah, sure, the premise is anvilicious by design, but I'm so glad not to get lines about How People Are Evil For Doing X, or whatever; that's what I mean.

(2) I feel that the Scholomance world is, while extremely dark, also more coherent than the ersatz Narnia world of the Magicians if only by virtue of not trying to do so much -- Novik isn't trying to merge two things that are diametrically opposed to each other.

5/5. [Adapted from a salon comment.] This may be my favorite biography I've ever read (to be fair, that's not a super long list... but still). It dates from 1966 (English translation 1979) but is still a classic and I can see why. It was SO GOOD and near the end I could feel myself drawing it out a little so I wouldn't have to finish reading it and not have any more left. Orieux really gets that what I want out of history is well-thought-out-and-well-analyzed-and-well-sourced gossipy sensationalism delivered in anecdotal bite-sized chunks, but still with overriding themes. And boy was Voltaire's life basically tailor-made to deliver that -- but Orieux also leaned into it for all it was worth. And he has got this dry sense of humor that is evident on every page and just hilarious.

I really loved how Orieux makes Voltaire come alive as someone who had so SO many faults (SO MANY, lol, Voltaire was a champ at both holding grudges and not letting things go, and there were just innumerable places where Orieux was all "...and here's yet another example where ANY ACTUAL GROWNUP would have LET IT GO, but did Voltaire? I will give you one guess.") but also at the same time so many amazing virtues, many of which were in some sense part and parcel with his flaws: the Voltaire who Could Not Let Things Go is the same Voltaire of the Calas affair.

I highly encourage you to read selenak's description of L'affaire Calas (scroll to near the end) -- and really her whole very excellent review of Orieux, which goes into much more detail that this one and which convinced me to read it -- but briefly, the Calas family was wrongfully accused and convicted of killing their own son/brother, and Jean Calas (the father) was tortured to death. Voltaire decided to investigate, found evidence that the Calas family was innocent, and Would Not Let It Go until the verdict was overturned-- and Orieux points out that this was a huge deal because before this judges had been the last word, and there was no recourse if there was a wrong verdict.

It did kind of make me wish that we got more biographies these days that were written as literature (the writing is excellent, and also kudos to the translator for keeping the excellence of the writing and that dry wit) and where the biographers weren't afraid to have overt opinions. Orieux has Decided Opinions about everything and is not shy about owning it (and usually has evidence, though selenak did find a couple of sloppy bits in her review, but I'm finding that's waaaay better than most biographies), and it is GREAT.

I must also say that it is a pretty long book (even though the English version is abridged -- the French/German version is 1000 pages! The English version is only ~500) and though I was riveted almost the entire time, there were bits where Orieux goes on about various visitors Voltaire had (especially in his later years) where I was, okay, kinda bored :) But generally speaking I adored this book.