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Gen's Shelves
Occasional rambles about books I felt strongly enough to review, when I had free time enough to do it.
Currently reading
The Isle of Glass
The Broken Crown
Deep Atlantic: Life, Death and Exploration in the Abyss
L'élégance du hérisson
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid
Tiger, Tiger
Survival
Tomorrow's Magic
Warrior
The Steerswoman's Road
I'd been hearing for years about The Steerswoman as a thoughtful fantasy book deeply beloved by a lot of people whose taste I respect. I finally got around to reading it, and I wasn't disappointed in the least. Rowan and Bel are fascinating, three-dimensional characters, and so is everyone else, even the minor characters. More than that, I deeply respect Rosemary Kirstein's worldbuilding here. There's genuine culture clash, and genuine culture variation -- not only do different individuals view things differently, but no culture is a monolith. Every adult character actually acts like an adult, pausing to think things through and weighing duty versus emotion versus morality in responsible ways. It makes me sad in a way that that's so rare in fiction, but it was so refreshing here. And, of course, Rosemary Kirstein is excellent at giving you sudden gutpunches of plot reveals that are, in hindsight, very much built upon groundwork she laid when you weren't looking.This is actually a compilation of the first two books of this series: The Steerswoman, and The Outskirter's Secret. I'm glad of that, because I devoured both, and was delighted to get to do so sequentially! Now, of course, I need to get my hands on the next two.
SPOILER ALERT!
Akata Witch
A marvelous heroine and a delightful book! I would gladly recommend it to anyone who wants a quick and engaging read.My only complaint was that there's an aspect of the ending that feels rushed, as if it's given short shrift and then hastily moved on from. There's plenty of room for a sequel, and it may be that Okorafor intends to flesh that out in a later book, but as it stands it was definitely a "...That's it?" moment to me.
Still, any book you only have one complaint with is a successful book by any measure!
American Gods
A reread of a book I hadn't read in about ten years. I loved it then, and I loved it now too; definitely my favorite just-prose Neil Gaiman that I've read. It's not without its flaws -- and it's tackling a complex issue laden with lots of historical and cultural baggage, and doing so imperfectly -- but still, there are passages that are purely numinous, and that make me want to write like that someday. And I enjoy Shadow a lot.
The Hunger Games
A quick read, with clear sparse prose that suits the POV character very well. I loved Katniss -- if you don't, you might not like this book, since it's all in her head, but I loved her enormously. A lot of interesting society-building, cool secondary characters, and a really interesting exploration of what it means to be on display at all times and to actively use that fact. (I loved that Katniss actively used it, and that so did plenty of others; a lot of times, you see protagonists who deal with being on display with angsting and self-destructive tantrums, instead of treating it like a tool that saturates the world and will be used by you or by others against you.)Not sure if I'll like the second and third books as well, since I've heard some spoilers about things that tend to annoy me, but I plan to read them and see.
Coronets and Steel
It took me a while to fully like Kim, the heroine; she reads to me as a little younger than she is, with her impulsive snap judgments, and the fact that the cover painting makes her look older than her textual age didn't help. For the first half or so of the novel, she spends a lot of time going "Well, someone I don't like who knows this situation has told me not to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway -- how bad can it be?" But things picked up, and it helped that I really liked nearly every character -- Kim too, once she grew up a little. Lots of fun, in the end, and I'm glad I kept reading! Definitely going to read the sequel.
Ysabel
I did a lot of skimming in this book. There were aspects I really enjoyed, especially seeing some Fionavar characters again. There was also a lot of the EPIC DOOMED LOVE TRIANGLE THROUGH THE AGES stuff that isn't much to my tastes, although it's clearly to Kay's. Ultimately: kinda fun, but not wholly my kind of thing.
SPOILER ALERT!
The Darkest Road
The third and, in my opinion, the strongest of the Fionavar series, for the simple reason that GGK can write a climax of multiple plot threads like nobody's business. This isn't to say that this book is flawless, of course. As in the rest of the series, GGK occasionally waxes pretentious on his characters' behalf (which they can do just fine without his help), forgets that the seventh time a supposedly stoic character weeps in as many days it takes away some of the emotional power of the scene (weeping is fine; asking us to find it just as overwhelmingly heartbreaking every time isn't), and is way too emotionally invested in epic love triangles, and in having everyone find them the SADDEST THING EVER, including characters who have experienced much more awful things in their lives. To counterbalance that, though, he writes some genuinely beautiful moments and some genuinely original twists on the standard tropes of epic Eurofantasy. This series has one of my favorite twists on the "Elves sailing to the West" trope (redeeming, for me, the otherwise pointless lios alfar), and some fun uses of the aforementioned epic love triangle (Arthurian, no less). GGK writes engaging characters, when he's not masking that with pompousness about their pain, and for all my mostly affectionate mocking of this series, the last half of this book is when everything starts coming together in a tumbling rush of resolving plot, and I remember how worth it the payoff is. This is no Lord of the Rings, and very deliberately not, but it's a lot of fun as a quick-reading fantasy trilogy.
(Warnings for triggers about rape and rape survival, but that's mostly in the first and second books, so it seems a bit silly to mention it here. I don't plan to go back and review all three, though, so I'll do it anyway.)
Ôoku: The Inner Chambers 1
Fascinating premise, well executed! Trigger warning for just about everything, though -- this is NOT a series that shies away from having terrible things happen to its characters onscreen. A very interesting read, but only if you're up for that.Unfortunately, the translation is very clunky, full of thees and thous written by someone with a tin ear for archaic English, and no difference whatsoever between the speech of Edo samurai and Kyoto nobles, even when the text tells us they're speaking very differently. The fact that I enjoyed it as much as I did despite the translation is a testament to the quality of the original, but it's a pity it didn't get a defter translation into English.
Cold Magic
A very different world than the usual, layered and compelling, with a fun central character and a lot of likewise complicated and enjoyable secondary characters. Definitely recommended!
Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief
A fun Mrs Pollifax romp, as always, and an excellent bit of fluff reading. Not one of the standouts of the series, though.
The King of Elfland's Daughter
There are truly lovely moments in this; there are also moments that drag, although the loveliness gains momentum after the beginning. This is a story of fairy tales, more than of world-building, and the characters' logic reflects that. Still, one of the most fascinating and fun things about is that since it predates much of the standard fantasy canon we know today, it's genuinely not in dialogue with Tolkien or any of the later tropes, and as such it's a very different reading experience from most. Definitely worth a read for that alone.
