cahn

4/5. So, um. I would not recommend this course of action to anyone else in the world, necessarily, but apparently being in the hospital with nothing to do -- except wait and think about chromosomes -- is the signal for my brain to crave dark fiction about twisted people manipulating one another and everyone else's chromosomes. (This is not to say I didn't appreciate the comfort-recs, which are much more relevant right now.) So, yeah. I ate up this book that I'd been trying for years to read with no success. And loved it, because it is brilliant.

It is totally brilliant. I kept wanting to make comparisons to Dune in my head, in terms of scope and sweep of future history-epic, the careful working-out of the history, the careful working-out of the SFian details (in Dune the ecology, in Cyteen the genetics), the tackling of Big Questions (in Dune the limits of prescience, in Cyteen what makes a person). Only Cyteen's Smart People are a a great deal less laughable than Dune's Smart People, and related to this, Ari Emory is about twenty million times a better and more effective villain than any of the Dune villains, even in the first third of Cyteen. Really, Cherryh just does people in general a lot better than Herbert.

It was like Cherryh took all the tropes of genetic-SF what-makes-a-person stories that I'd ever seen and then ran with it. Ran a marathon with it, that is. All four of the main characters — Ari, Justin, Grant, and Florian/Catlin (who count as one character) — explore a different facet of how our genetics and our environment interact, how our interior programming corresponds to who we are.

And (unlike Dune, which never does this) sometimes it gut-punches you. Sometimes it's clearly telegraphed, and sometimes it comes without warning, and sometimes you come up for air to realize that a punch has been sneaking up on you for hundreds of pages. For those of you who have read it, let me just say: Gehenna. My absolute favorite gut-punch is relatively early on, when we learn what happened to Florian/Catlin I. Pow. And then we switch POV to Ari II, and we learn why, and that's its own punch that comes out of nowhere. OW. (And this, of course, foreshadows the last half of the book. Brilliant.)

It is also Cherryh, which meant that I had much the same problems with it that I've had with all the other Cherryh novels I've ever (tried to) read. Sometimes there is a textbook history lesson. I have trouble with those. (In retrospect at least half my problems with my previous attempts at this book were because I got stalled in the prologue textbook lesson. Next time I read a Cherryh I'm totally skipping it.) Or POVs that are needed for a plot point but otherwise are really kind of not useful. (This time, I just skipped those. I should have figured out to do that years ago.) And Cherryh, unlike Bujold, doesn't do climaxes, or really endings in general. It eventually… ends, because she's done telling the story, but there's no single spear-point cathartic moment like there is in, oh, Curse of Chalion.

This is just one of those books where I want to buttonhole strangers in the streets and tell them about it. I don't necessarily want to tell them to read it; it's a pretty dense 700 pages with no clear ending, which is clearly not going to appeal to everyone. I just want to talk about it.

3+/5 for the series. skygiants totally hooked me on these utterly charming books, beginning with A Bad Spell in Yurt, about Daimbert, a wizard who was not at the top of his class. Not even slightly. He gets a job as the royal wizard of a tiny kingdom, Yurt, and then proceeds to get embroiled in various plots.

These books are basically the antithesis of grimdark. I can think of maybe one human-ish character in all six books who isn't just plugging along trying to do his/her best (if sometimes misguidedly, and occasionally completely misguidedly), and that character isn't completely human. What often saves the day is Daimbert's tendency to bounce around making friends with everybody he meets, as well as a huge dollop of sacrifice and redemption running through the books and popping up at various points. …It will surprise no one that these books hit me straight in the id, and I found myself racing through all six of them at top speed.

They were all (with the exception of the last book) written in the 90's, so, you know, The Fabled East is a Thing starting in book 3, and the books tend to follow a slightly formulaic bent (although the plots themselves are always charming and amusing, with the exception of book 5, whose plot fell apart a little to me). But they're all so good-natured I can't really bring myself to care. I just wanted more Daimbert!

One of the really interesting bits about it is that Brittain just lifts the Catholic Church wholesale into the world, complete with theology, some hierarchy structure (there doesn't appear to be structure past the Bishop level), saints, and so on. I was a little freaked out by this at first, but on second thought I guess it's really not that different from transplanting, say, medieval-era blacksmithing, or animal husbandry, which people do all the time. Why not?

And then there is Daimbert's friendship with Joachim, the palace chaplain in Spell. Wizards and priests, in this world, are traditionally enemies, or at least rather wary of each other. In another book, this would have been the impetus for much angst and suspicion. In Spell, there's a bit of suspicion in the first book, but mostly it's Daimbert bouncing up and down and not taking "Well, actually I suspect you of dastardly deeds" for an answer when he wants to be friends, and continuing to be Super Awesome Friends throughout all the books. Their friendship is by far my absolute favorite thing about these books.

The first one is available for free here. The first five are available in e-book for $5 each; the sixth is available only in paperback.

So I was commanded to read some sequels, which were surprisingly not bad!

Dark Triumph (LaFevers), 3+/5, is the Assassin!Nuns! sequel to Grave Mercy, and is much much better than Mercy. The pacing is better, the characterization is better, the narrator (Sybella) is better (hilariously, Ismae, the narrator of Mercy, seen through Sybella's eyes, is a very sweet nice kid, even though she wants to act all tough in Mercy), the ubiquitous romance doesn't drag out quite as much. It's still not the Assassin!Nuns! book I wanted, but perhaps that's my fault for wanting something else; this one is a solid Stephenie-Meyer-esque YA that reminds me more of The Host than Twilight, while the first book was the other way around. Unfortunately, you kind of have to read the first book to read the second, and I am not really sure it's good enough that it's worth slogging through the first book. Maybe if you skim it, or read a plot synopsis. It also bothers me unduly because the style and the characters are so twenty-first century, while they're supposed to be fifteenth-century. I'm not asking for perfect congruence or anything, but rubbing my face in twenty-first century mores and style kind of irks me. It didn't bother me as much in the first book because I could pretend they were in generic fantasyland instead of solidly situated in 15th-C Brittany, but in this book there are enough references to England, France, etc. that it was harder to get away with it.

A Million Suns and Shades of Earth (Revis), 3+/5: I have to give these books credit, as soon as I finished Suns I wanted to go on to Shades. It's probably the best YA dystopia I've read for quite a while; on the other hand, as you know, that's not a huge bar. They are very readable books. The worldbuilding is pretty good for YA dystopia but has various gaping holes, and some of the plot (including the big plot twist near the end) is frankly kind of unbelievable, with characters shuffling hither and yon solely in support of the plot and not because they would actually do that. Shades also has this totally awesome line, spoken by the chief scientist on the mission (!):

"I talked to Frank, the geologist. He says there are minerals in the soil he's never seen before. We're talking about whole new elements to the periodic table!"

(And no, highly unstable radioactive soil is not a plot twist. Though that really would have been awesome.) Oh authors, why not get a science beta? Just one person who has actually taken chemistry in her life? Would it be so very hard?

These, with Come a Stranger, make up my favorite Tillerman books:

Dicey's Song (4/5): A young person of my acquaintance pointed out to me a while back that if something won the Newberry medal, it was likely because something horribly tragic happened near the end. So, y'know. This one won the Newberry.

I wasn't expecting to like this one on reread as much as I did, or be as emotionally engaged, but the end breaks me down every time. It isn't the main tragedy (or at least not just that): it's the part where Dicey and Gram go into the wood store afterwards. Because — and I'm quite fortunate, I know, to have only the most shallow of understandings of this -- sometimes it's not the thing that happens that breaks you, it's when someone gives you kindness you weren't expecting, or an acquaintance or stranger you wouldn't give two thoughts to otherwise, or vice versa, gives you a deep understanding you hadn't thought anyone could.

It's about reaching out, and letting go.

(Also, wow, after reading Come a Stranger, yeah, Dicey's interactions with Mina, like the bit where Dicey totally shuts Mina down when she wants to visit, totally could be interpreted by an observer as extremely racist if you weren't privy to Dicey's internal monologue or didn't know about her Issues.)

A Solitary Blue (5/5): I was afraid I wouldn't love this book as much as I did when I first read it, but no worries. I cannot explain why I adore this book so much. I don't see why it speaks to me in a way that none of the other Tillerman books quite do, but it does. I think it's because the way Jeff thinks internally is sort of kind of like the way I think internally, even though his experiences are nothing like mine, and he has some qualities I do not have. (And it's kind of amazing that she wrote almost every book with a different protagonist, and they all have different modes of internal thought.)

Also, man, totally setting up Jeff's particular Issues for Seventeen Against the Dealer.

4/5, with the huge caveat that there is a whole lot of nostalgia working in this book's favor, for me. It was one of the first Trek novels I ever read, and the first Ford I ever read, and the copy I have is the original old library copy I first read (which eventually turned up in the library book sale). Ford is, of course, an acquired taste, and one I can't necessarily recommend unless you're a huge fan of piecing together a complex, often-inadequately-signposted plot, lots of allusions (in this one there are at least three SFF book allusions, not to mention all the Trek allusions. Speaking of which, I assume he's talking about Forever War? Should I read that?), and having to reread to catch all the bits one missed the first time, and his insistence on breaking boundaries (his two Trek novels were a) a worldbuilding Klingon novel where the Enterprise crew show up in the prologue, the epilogue, and a cameo by kid!Spock and McCoy's diapers, and b) a musical). This is all, of course, complete catnip for me!

So, anyway. Here we go. As usual for a Ford book, the entire first two-thirds are character and worldbuilding setup for what happens in the last third; the last third is the plot-heavy bit but is heavily dependent on the character and worldbuilding of the first two thirds. ( Here is where I try to work out what's actually going on; this may be boring if you don't know the story, plus obviously massive spoilers. I think I actually understand most of the plot now, but there are fundamental bits I am still unsure of. )

This post is for ollipop, who asked where to start with reading L'Engle.

...It depends!

For the remainder of this post, I'll use L'Engle's terms of kairos (the Murry/O'Keefe books) and chronos (the Austin books), and connection books (books that aren't focused on the O'Keefes or Austins, okay, I can't remember if this is exactly what she called them, whatever).

( Cut for length. )

Note that L'Engle was a Christian, if a radical one, and all her stories are told from a perspective of faith in a loving God (she doesn't beat you over the head with it, but it's definitely a clear influence of her worldview), and this is particularly true of the nonfiction and the Murry-kairos books. (The protagonist of Small Rain/Severed Wasp is not religious, nor are the O'Keefe family to my knowledge, or at least not exactly, so those would be good places to start if you'd rather not read from that worldview.)

In conclusion: all the nonfiction, Ring of Endless Light (you may want to read Arm of the Starfish and The Moon By Night first, and you definitely want to read House Like a Lotus after), and Small Rain/Severed Wasp.

And read all of Sheila O'Malley's writing on L'Engle. (Scroll down about halfway down the page to get to her book discussions.)

4/5. This book was lovely. This book had some rather odd flaws. I adored this book. I wanted to slam this book against the wall (one advantage of e-books, I guess, is that I can’t ever give in to that temptation). I love this book madly. I don’t know that I recommend it to any of you. Then again, I don’t know that I don’t recommend it.

…Right. So. This book is about Portia, an admissions officer at Princeton, which by itself pretty much guaranteed I would read the whole thing; my entire high school career was basically my parents (successfully) gaming the college admissions system. (That’s right. The craziness these days? You can blame, partially, my parents.) Every so often there are these little lectures about the admissions process, which I could see someone else being a little taken aback by but which I ate up like candy. All the people in the book (except maybe Portia’s friend) are mildly unlikeable, including the main character. Usually this turns me off, but about a third of the way through I had identified so strongly with Portia (character-wise and in our response to college; our upbringing and life events and current status were/are totally different) that instead of thinking “She’s mildly unlikeable,” I was thinking, “Huh. I identify with her so much that I wonder very much now if I’m mildly unlikeable.”

Dante is referenced in the book, which obviously made me fall in love. (Though I found the literary referencing, in general, to be a little off-kilter. Some of it was tossed off lightly and well, and some of it was extremely heavy-handed.) The writing is good; I suppose it’s probably no better than other writing in the mildly-literary-writing-about-the-upper-middle-class category, but after coming off of a spate of YA first-book writing it was very refreshing, let me tell you. Possibly the best thing about the book are the little excerpts from student admission essays gracing the top of each chapter; these are hilarious. They range from the sublime to the terrible and everything in between, with bonus snipes at a couple of common grammar mistakes.

There are some weird oddities in the book. One is the two-chapter (I think?) flashback that happens late in the book, which — I see why she did it, but I’m not sure it completely worked structurally for me. Another completely random thing is that Portia is (at least genetically) Jewish; whenever this came up (which it did, being a minor plot point) I would sort of do a double-take at her name being Portia. Her mother is such that it is totally believable that she gave Portia this name on purpose (neither Portia nor her mother is in the slightest culturally Jewish), but this is never addressed AT ALL, including the part where the meaning of her name is dissected.

So now let me talk about why I wanted to throw the book across the room. First, I need to tell you a story. Let me make clear that E, my lovely three-year-old, is the light of my life and quite obviously the best and cutest and most lovable kid that has ever existed. (Don’t worry, that’s not the story.) She was a very much planned and wanted and wished-for baby. When I was pregnant with her, everyone told me, “It’ll all be worth it when you hold her in your arms!” and “You’ll love her more than anything in the world as soon as you see her!”

She was born. Childbirth sucked. They put her in my arms.

And I didn’t feel like I loved her. I didn’t feel like it was worth it at all. (I did, for the record, feel a deep sense of responsibility for this helpless little thing, which might well have been love. But it didn’t feel like it.)

I felt like a complete failure as a parent, as a mother, as a human being. Because any real human being, any real mother, would be totally in love with her newborn baby, right? That’s what everyone had told me!

I will never forget that my cousin called me up to see how I was doing, and she told me that she’d had the same reaction. I will never forget that. I will also never forget a totally random friend at church, R., that I talked to a month later. Most of my church friends said things to the effect of, “Oh, aren’t you ecstatic to have such a darling little baby?” (She was a darling little baby, for the record. She was. But I wasn’t ecstatic about it.) R. asked me how I was doing, and I said something noncommittal, and R. said wryly, “Yeah, at this point I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep my son either.” That floored me. That it was okay. That it was okay to say, hey, you know what? I didn’t feel like I loved my baby when she was born, and that’s okay. It doesn’t make me a bad mom. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. It doesn’t mean I can’t love her, or that our relationship isn’t going to be strong and awesome.

But it means that whenever I see that expectation that mothers will fall desperately in love with their babies as soon as they see them, I get really, really upset. (Not to say that they won’t! Many do! Oxytocin is a wonderful thing! But it’s not everyone.)

( Spoilers; no more spoilers than in the preview of the movie based on the book, to be honest, but then again the movie previews pretty much spoil the book; on the other hand I read the book knowing the plot and it was fine, it’s not exactly a plot-heavy book )

I… kind of want fic for this book. From Helen’s POV, ideally. She gets so little to do in this book, and we never get more than the one-dimensional portrait from Portia’s standpoint, with only very vague hints from other characters that there’s more than that… But I suppose I’ll never get it.

3+/5. Um. Yeah. My parents brought me a bunch of books from my bookshelf at their house last year, and this was one of them. It’s my favorite of Card’s early work, for what are probably obvious reasons. (Songs! Singing! A boarding school where they teach singing!)

This book made me really sad, but not (just) because of the elegiac nature of the book itself; it reminded me that Card used to be able to write, and write really well. It’s clearly work where he’s still struggling to find his feet as a novelist — this was first a novella that got expanded to novel form, and the seams are pretty clear. For example, there’s a whole huge plot thread that is introduced for shock value (it was the twist ending of the novella) and that then dangles helplessly in the wind, never actually going anywhere or (as far as I can tell) being referred to again. But much of the writing is really excellent, and it made me sad for the writer he used to be but isn’t anymore, a writer who could do subtlety and subtext and characters who weren’t just authorial voices and characters whom you loved even when they did terrible things. Oh Card, I miss you.

Now for the elephant in the room.

This is Card’s only book where the protagonist is queer (it’s not entirely clear whether he’s gay or bisexual, probably the latter), and also the only one where we see a mutually loving and respectful same-sex relationship on-screen. Interestingly, this was one of three authors I read as a kid (the others being L’Engle’s House Like a Lotus — and ollipop, I haven’t forgotten I owe you a post on L’Engle, and I am working on that — and Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows trilogy) that taught me that queer sexualities were perfectly normal and homophobia is wrong, which let me tell you, was not a message I was getting from real life (hello, small city in the South, conservative Korean parents, and church!)

Because of this book in particular, I’ve always given Card a lot of leeway when it comes to people ragging on him because of his stance on gay marriage. (The other reason I give him a lot of leeway is that, well, it’s really hard to explain to people who aren’t inside it what it’s like to be inside of Mormonism. I’m not really inside it in the way that Card is, either; it’s easy for me to be in favor of gay marriage, or whatever, because of that.) Because Card clearly has a lot of empathy and sympathy for Ansset, the protagonist.

However. ( One thing that doesn’t disturb me about Card’s portrayal of alternate sexuality in this book, one thing that very much does, and one thing that makes me think I could be wrong about the thing that disturbs me. Warnings for severe torture and death. Also warnings for both spoilers for Songmaster and vague spoilers for other Card oeuvre. )

tl;dr : I like this book very much, and Also Music Yay, and Big Severe Issues, and Confusing Issues, and I don’t even know what to think about it.

My Aeneid post, finally! Many many apologies for the delay.

( My favorite quote from Book 6. )

( Book 7: Juno ups her game. )

( Book 8. Virgil decides he wants to write a blockbuster. )

( Book 9, the thrilling cliffhanger. Not really. )