cahn

I asked everyone for recs of books with dads, and I now want to make the same post for moms! (I was going to wait until I had had a chance to read more of the recs in the dad post -- thank you everyone!! -- but then forestofglory had an interesting post about where all the SFF moms have gone which made me think I should go ahead and ask :) )

The rules of the game are as before: Please rec me books with moms who are important characters (important secondary character is fine, and "important" can be defined as you like -- important enough to remember a month later? :) ) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (I said teenager in the other post, but really I mean not babies or toddlers). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s). (forestofglory's post was about SFF books, but you do not have to be limited to SFF here.)

The interesting thing is, at first I wasn't sure I'd be able to come up with any, but looking at our bookshelf there seem to be more moms than dads. I strongly suspect this is a me-filtering thing, in that I tend to remember strong moms, and maybe don't remember the good dads that much? And also books that I've hung on to seem to have tended to have strong moms?

-The Broken Earth (Jemisin), Essun (arguably she falls into "abusive," but I'm gonna leave her here anyway because the books are actually partially about examining that dynamic)
-Tenar in the later Earthsea books
-Cordelia and Ekaterin in the Vorkosigan books
-Tagiri in Pastwatch (Card)
-Actually a lot of Card's stuff during what I call his "good period" -- Novinha in Speaker for the Dead, DeAnne Fletcher in Lost Boys (whom I rather imprinted on in high school, actually), Rasa in the Homecoming series
-The POV character in "Story of Your Life" (Ted Chiang)
-Dione in Throne of Isis (Judith Tarr)
-I never managed to finish the Gap series (Donaldson), but I'm pretty sure I remember Morn Hyland being a mom is a Big Thing
-Abigail Tillerman! I'm gonna go ahead and mention Liza too, because even though her actual screen time is maybe one page, I still consider her a major character in the first two books. (I guess the Professor is also a dad who is a major character in Solitary Blue, which somehow I both totally glossed over in the dad post and had to think about for a minute to come up with here ("There must be a sympathetic dad character in these books!"))
-Little Women and sequels
-Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu from the Rihannsu books (Duane)
-I believe Hild's mom is a reasonably important character but I don't remember super well (Griffith)
-Ingray's mom in Provenance (maybe? She does seem to care about Ingray, even if she has pretty terrible ways of showing it)

Honorable mentions (characters that might not completely fit my criteria but I'm gonna mention them anyway, and hey, if you have an idea that doesn't exactly fit, feel free to mention it):
-Meg Murry O'Keefe (I actually really like that she gives up being a mathematician for a while, because valid choice, but on the other hand she doesn't get a big role in the books once she becomes a mom, which is in retrospect kind of annoying)
-FMA, which has everything else, doesn't have an important living mom of a non-small-child unless you count Mrs. Bradley, which maybe I should because what she lacks in screen time she makes up by being totally awesome, although Selim... probably... counts as a small child
-The Connie Willis story "And Come from Miles Around" has a mom whose kid is a toddler, but I mention it anyway because it is my favorite SF story (possibly the only story) about a stay-at-home-mom saving the day
-Selenay in the Valdemar books, although I can't remember how old Elspeth was at the time of the books... I seem to remember she was older than she was acting, though

College books, boarding-school books -- I have a great and abiding love for them. The first one I can remember offhand is The Great Brain at the Academy, and Tom Fitzgerald's hijinks as he struggled to make money and not get kicked out, often at the same time. At the time I was really small, and this idea of going away for school was, well, only something Older And Glamorous people did. Perhaps something of that has stayed with me all this time, because I still love the things. Let's see... there was Tam Lin, which raised my expectations of college to way too high a level (turns out, if you major in physics, you don't get people quoting Greek at you as often), and And Both Were Young, a slight L'Engle and not one of her best works, but lovely all the same, and I'm sure many others I'm forgetting.

One of the things I love most about boarding-school books is that the basic idea is that you get all these unrelated kids together, and they have to gel into some sort of community. (Community and partnership, of course, being one of my button-presses.) The best example I know of this (thanks to sarahtales) is Autumn Term (Antonia Forest), where the main characters form individual friendships, but then the class as a whole comes together for a triumph: a very successful class alternative to having a really inferior booth at the school fundraiser. One of the arcs I really like is that of one of the girls who has a not-ideal personality-- she's spoiled rotten and is very passive -- but it turns out she has some talents, and becomes part of the group in the end; the great thing about this is that it's done not by making her oh-just-kidding-she's-actually-fantastic -- she still has all the traits that caused the girls to dislike her, though admittedly has grown out of them a year's worth -- but simply by her decision to be part of the community project, and do it well.

I like fantastical boarding-school books even better, because the tropes seem to work together really well. The boarding-school trope already incorporates the idea of everything being new and fresh and exciting, which turns out to be a great way to showcase exciting magical things (a la Harry Potter, or even Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen -- I think I liked both these books (which were problematic in a lot of ways) much better than I would have in the absence of the boarding-school motif). Fantasy tends to benefit a lot from being able to do fantastic things within a known structure and known character-community-development arcs; for example, Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin is my all-time favorite DWJ novel because of the friendships and community (and plot!) that naturally grow up within the boarding-school structure.

This is all to say that I really, really, really wanted to like Ally Carter's I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You -- boarding spy school for girls! What's not to love? And for the first several chapters, I did love it. Lots of interesting things about the school... a new teacher... female friendships... a new student who doesn't fit in... exciting classes... all the good, familiar tropes.

But what I wanted was a book that was about school-and-character-development first, some sort of external plot second, and maybe a romance third. Or the external plot could have been ditched, seems a shame in a book about spies, but okay. But what I actually got was a YA romance with the school-and-character-development relegated to second place, or maybe third. No external plot. And the romance was the worst kind: being a spy, she treats the relationship as an espionage mission, and lies to the boy. A lot. We know how this story ends; I didn't have to skim to the end to find out. Grr.

Anyway... any boarding-school books (don't have to be fantastical in any way) that you would recommend? There is, of course, Stevemer's College of Magics, which I've just never got around to reading, but which I'm kind of interested to read. I hear Jo Walton's most recent book is a boarding-school book; is it any good? I'll probably pick up the later books in the Ally Carter series as well to see if it gets better -- seems like there are some external plots in the later ones.

sarahtales has written a really excellent essay, from the point of view of an author, about race-sexual-orientation-disability-what-have-you in fiction. Go read it..

Here's a quote:

So, let us discuss the most common fake fictional world of all. It doesn’t involve vampires or werewolves. It involves – well, rent a majority of mainstream movies and you can see it. It’s a world where everyone is a certain way – white, straight, able-bodied – and the really important stories are always a guy’s.

There mayyy be people who aren’t white, straight and able-bodied around in this world. I believe they live on the Isles of Issuelandia, and they are very seldom allowed onto the mainland where the adventures are at.

This is a fantasy world we’ve all been shown a million times over in our lives, so many times it’s had an effect on all of us, whether we know it or not. But most of us, if we stop and think about it, can put our experience of the real world up against the fake default-this-way world we get shown, and say ‘Whoa, these pictures are kind of different!’

The complete brilliance of Isles of Issuelandia aside, I did have to laugh a little at this, because when I sat down and thought about it, my real life is actually rather like the fantasy one she describes, particularly in terms of race. (It hasn't always been like that; college and grad school, which together made up a big chunk of my life, were rather more diverse.) I realized just now that I am the only non-white person on technical staff in my company (out of 90) and one of only four women on technical staff. (Lots more women on admin, but only one other non-white, and she's not full-time.) And not for lack of trying. My company really tries to recruit women and non-whites, and is really excellently friendly towards women and (I've come to realize and very much appreciate since E. was born) moms. When I joined there were three non-whites, but they've all left now (not because of race; I believe they are all working at other jobs with a similar demographic).

Non-work socialization is mostly through church and moms groups right now, which are not quite as bad race-wise, but it's still sort of a "three token Asians, one token Indian, four token Hispanics out of 150" thing.

And although I know tons of gay people (mostly from grad school), none of them are from my current (real) life. Well, church-wise, for obvious reasons, and for some reason everyone at work seems to be straight, too, at least judging in terms of their het relationships, drama involving girls (since they're all guys), and so on.

So, yeah, if you wrote a book about my current life, it would totally be criticized for not having any non-white-straight characters, except the token main one!

(I think the race thing has a lot to do with a) the peculiar demographics of my heavily tech US-citizen industry, b) the really peculiar demographics of the place I live, which tends to be segregated by race and income a lot. Not geographically, so my Whitey McWhite life will probably change somewhat once E. gets in school. The straight thing? No idea.)

Okay, I finished Mockingjay. And... I liked it more than I thought I would. I actually did think it was good, though I certainly found the second half way way way WAY more compelling than the first (I have a couple more thoughts about this). More than that, it made me want to rant about it, which a) is a good sign, and b) usually means that it is both doing a lot of things right (otherwise I wouldn't care) and is seriously flawed (otherwise I'd just rave and declare undying love, which I'm not doing at all).

( Mockingjay-destroying spoilers! I compare Suzanne Collins unfavorably to Sarah Rees Brennan, Megan Whalen Turner, and Lois McMaster Bujold. I've tried to avoid spoilers for any of their books, but there are probably mild meta-spoilers. )

ETA: GAH, I am sorry for the un-cut spoilers. Defective tag has been fixed.

Not to be confused with things that push my buttons -- these are things that make me bounce up and down and proclaim "This is awesome!" (and more likely to be plot- or meta-based) as opposed to things that make me fall utterly in love (which are more likely to be character-based).

-Stories that are ambitious -- that go off in a number of epic directions. Like, I love how Dune is about the problem of prescience and power struggles and Messiah legends and ecology! John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting is about magic and vampires and religion and an answer to Charles Williams' Byzantium and the problem of Richard III.

-Characters who are plotting-within-plots. What I mean by this is something like Dune, where all the characters say one thing and mean another, and then they have some twisty plot they're trying to advance underneath that. I realize this can rapidly turn into laziness -- I think Dune is probably rather lazy in this regard, what with all the explicit notes on how the Baron really is communicating X when he says Y. But I love it anyway.

-Characters who are smart! Or at least not criminally stupid. If I want to read about really stupid people I'll pick up one of my old journals, thanks. I don't expect my fiction heroes to be perfect -- in fact that's boring -- but stupid is even more boring. (Here I must mention, not in a good way, Harry Potter, and even worse, George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light.)

-Correct discussion of science, particularly physics. Seriously, if I never read another discussion of the EPR paradox that says "This means you could transfer information faster than light!" it will be too soon. (Bill Bryson, I am looking at you! You are single-handedly responsible for several people I know having to be disabused of this notion.)

-A mindset that thinks scientists/the scientific method/analytical thinking are cool. The canonical example for me is Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books -- actually those go a little too far in this direction, as I find her scientist-worshipping society a little too pat and a little too idealistic for my taste. But in general, books where a character has a somewhat analytical, skeptical view (e.g., Cazaril in Curse of Chalion) do well with me.

-Allusions to things I think are cool -- I will like you if you quote John Donne or e.e. cummings, and I will utterly think you are made of awesome if you show me you have read Charles Williams, Cordwainer Smith, or the Mabinogion.

-Meta/criticism of canon, if you're working off of some established canon. My favorite published example of this are John M. Ford's Star Trek novels, in one of which he takes down the entire approach to Klingons (um, be aware this was before Next Gen and all of that), and in the other he turns Star Trek into a musical. A book-length one. Literally.

Okay, I, um. I thought, especially once the last book came out, I was done reading Harry Potter fanfic and we could just ignore that episode in my life entirely, yeah? And then I stumbled across Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, an AU, where -- what would happen if a) Harry were brought up in a loving super-rational super-academic household, and b) everyone and everything in the HP universe was, well... more-or-less reasonable? (Not necessarily sane, mind you -- just not holding the Idiot Ball.)

It's like this fic took all the things that make me go squee! and plugged directly into those areas of my brain. Harry starts out by explaining things like observer bias to various people at Hogwart, and decides to run experiments to figure out how magic works! He explains Punnett squares to Draco in the context of blood purity! The first several chapters are a little one-note like that, but I don't care because I love that note! I would have loved it had it all been riffs on that, but as it progresses it also acquires a really interesting plot, layers on layers of hints to be explained, I think maybe every character in the entire fic is now involved in at least one secret plot, and I find the relationship between Harry and Draco extremely moving (and no, not in that way; it's gen/het).

Remember how in The Magicians I was practically mortally offended that on discovering Wood Between the World no one ever thought of doing any experiments? Yeah. This is the answer to that.

Note: this is a WIP. I don't read WIPs. I definitely don't rec them. This is what this thing has done to my brain!

I was listening to Pandora today and a song from Les Miserables came on. (They must recently have gotten the rights, as Les Mis songs had to my knowledge never shown up before.) It catapulted me back to the first time I ever saw Les Mis -- I was in middle school at the time -- and it blew my mind and knocked me flat, in large part because it was the first real Broadway musical I'd ever seen, partially because it was first adaptation of a book I'd ever seen where they actually got the spirit of the book right. I can't even describe the effect seeing it had on me except by saying that I went out and bought not just the recording but the full symphonic recording -- and when I was that age the $30 that you had to shell out for the full recording was basically a real fortune, something like six months' worth of discretionary spending. (To compare, I don't think I bought any other CD that was more than $5 until I went to college.)

Now that I'm older, I can see the flaws. Many of the tunes are simplistic bordering on inane (no, I never did like "Castle on a Cloud" much). Much of the libretto is quite silly (especially Cosette's lines). I suspect if I saw it now I would think it was okay, but nothing special. I'm really glad I saw it as a kid, when it had the power to do that to me.

The only other things I can think of offhand that had this effect on me were reading The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which I got to at precisely the right time (fourth grade and, um, second grade? respectively) for them to turn my world upside down and explode it into color. (And no, LoTR didn't do that for me -- I grew into that one.) Oh, and Dead Poets Society, which I now recognize as a maudlin sentimental film, but which I saw when I had no idea about poetry (fifth grade, I think), and it had a profound and dizzying effect on me.

I'd love to hear the things that you found extraordinarily powerful at the time and that now you wouldn't quite be so impressed by...

Perhaps y'all have seen these (and here and here, though I think the first is the best) before, but I hadn't. Hysterically funny especially if you, like me, grew up reading bad 80's SF/fantasy novels (Dragonlance! Xanth! Valdemar! ...hey, why are you running away? Wait, did I actually admit to reading those?)

I'll add
Katherine Kerr: People Make the Same Dumb Mistakes When Reincarnated
Patricia McKillip: Riddles in the Welsh Tradition Kinda Suck
Diane Duane: The Door Into Alternative Lifestyles
Rosemary Kirstein: Wouldn't It Be Cool If People Revered Their Scientists?
Susan Cooper: The Search for Plot Coupons (okay, that one was not original)

(and yes, I adore McKillip and Cooper, and have a certain fondness for the others; I mock because I love!)

Any other suggestions? Especially for 80's stuff? (Most of the really bad 80's stuff I read has completely escaped my memory...)

Look, before I start recommending any more books to people, let's talk about my hot buttons so you know when I'm recommending something that might not press your hot buttons.

( Short version: Redemption, hard choices, friendship, growing up, history. Long version, with examples, under the cut. )

I reread Dune recently. It's much, much better than I remember. He's extremely good at taking complicated plot points and following them through in such a way that there is clearly a large quantity of backstory and thought involved (even if you don't read the Appendix). I don't think I picked up on half of those the first time I read it (in my defense, I was, what, 12?)--

I've always thought the end is a little strange. Not the general end, which ends in exactly the right place, but the very last paragraph, and indeed the last line:

"History will call us wives."

Isn't that a strange last line? The status of concubines vs. wives is, while certainly somewhat emotionally important, a very minor plot point in relation to the plethora of other galaxy-shattering subjects...I made the mistake of complaining to D about this. He immediately came up with several alternate last lines:

" 'History will call us Bob.' "

" 'History will call us back.' "

"Jessica goes to Sietch Tabr, and sits down, and says, 'Well, I'm back.' "

"Feyd-Rautha nobly takes the sword in his breast and says, 'It is a far, far better thing...' "

Have added "science-fiction author" to list of Careers We Are All Happy D Did Not Choose.