Remember this project? It might be slow going, but I have not given up on it! Book 2 on the revolution syllabus I have set myself is Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed's half-accurate account of the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd in 1917.

Please note: I have no better idea about any of the actual politics involved than I did before I read this book. This is because there are approximately five million political parties involved, most of them claiming to be Socialist and all of them in a constant process of sitting in on meetings and then storming out on each other in a huff.

(Half the time the storming out in a huff is followed by someone else shouting "YOU ALREADY STORMED OUT LAST NIGHT! WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?")

Anyway, John Reed's version is pretty partisan and only sort of accurate, so everything he says about actual facts has to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt anyway.

What his account does do is give a very good idea of the inevitable confusion that occurs when a country tries to remake all of its social and political structures overnight. Nobody has any idea what's going on in the rest of the country; social structures are in a constant state of flux; half the time half of the national infrastructure is on strike in protest against the other half; people are constantly putting up posters all around the city saying "WORKERS! DON'T LISTEN TO [OTHER POLITICAL PARTY]! WE HATE THEM AND THEIR STUPID FACES." One entire major party decides to boycott all the meetings because they're annoyed that the Bolsheviks have stolen their land reform program and THEY THOUGHT OF IT FIRST, JEEZ. John Reed, the American Socialist journalist who is narrating the whole story, almost gets accidentally executed at least three times by the Bolshevik party, which he supports and has a safe-conduct from; another three times he is blithely able to wander into government areas where he really should not have been without anybody stopping him.

History is chaos, man. Any time, any place -- it's basically amazing that anything ever gets done.

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You know how sometimes you all of a sudden remember the existence of an author from your childhood, and you go, "really? Was the heroine's love interest actually a pig that that turned into a dragon? Did the fairies seriously turn out to be aliens that made them do it? Did the villainness have sex with an evil broom? Did that really happen?"

So when I went home this weekend I did my best to see if I could locate my old copies of Mary Brown's novels. The only one I have so far found is Strange Deliverance, which I remembered as "the fairies are aliens who make them do it," but I FULLY BELIEVE THE OTHERS EXISTED AND I WILL LOCATE THEM. (Though if anyone else has read any of Mary Brown's books, corroborative evidence is also welcomed.)

Anyway, my memory is not quite accurate about Strange Deliverance; the climax turns out to involve fairies vs. aliens who make the local kids do it, or at least turn up with some experimented-upon fetuses in HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES after entrancing the local prom queen and her hapless boyfriend into going up to the fairy circle (where the aliens are currently hanging out) and playing "Sleeping Beauty" every couple of months.

Oh, also, everything takes place in a post-apocalyptic town with a eugenicidal dictator. Aforementioned dictator helpfully reveals his fascist eugenicidal ambitions in the prologue.

Then we have a timeskip; midway through the book, our protagonists are SHOCKED when someone points out that in a town where no disabled infants survive a day past their birth, the only gay couple disappeared in mysterious circumstances a few days after making their sexuality public, and the only people of color who were in the town's original population never married or had children despite marriage and children being compulsory for everyone else, this MIGHT be part of the all-powerful town dictator's sinister design!

(There is black character in the book. She is the Magical Herb-Woman who lives just outside the town and provides helpful, sage, unselfish mystical wisdom to all of the white kids who are our protagonists.

There are also disabled characters in the book. They are mentally disabled twins, innocent and completely indistinguishable souls who are so naively devoted to Prom Queen that they follow her around, carry her stuff, and trot nobly and self-sacrificingly with her into ill-advised fairy circle alien experimentation shenanigans. The narrative is very eager tell you about all the times they comically mess up their words.)

Anyway our actual protagonist doesn't really do much except go to mandatory sexy summer camp with her boyfriend and think half-worried and half-judgmental thoughts about Prom Queen. Eventually she gets a magical unicorn ring, but that's not really . . . important . . .? GIVEN THAT THE MAIN PLOT INVOLVES ALIENS AND POST-APOCALYPTIC DICTATORSHIP. ( Spoilers I guess.Collapse )

MARY BROWN, you guys.

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Graham Robb won me over with his biography of Victor Hugo from the introduction, in which he explains that he's basically writing the biography in order to spend four years reading everything ever written by Victor Hugo. YES GOOD. A+ DECISION. When the book later hits the writing of Les Mis, Robb takes a break to tell everyone that, yes, the biography is fine and all, but really they should just put his book down and go pick up Les Miserables instead, because it's THAT GOOD.

I mean, it helps that Victor Hugo is an unfairly interesting person; also, unfairly hilarious. Not, I hasten to add, someone you would probably want to spend time with on a regular basis, despite the massive cult of contemporary worshippers who disagreed. Young Hugo, after all -- well, it's probably enough to just remind everyone that Marius Pontmercy was a self-insert.

(You know who has passionate nostrils, besides Marius Pontmercy? VICTOR HUGO DOES. You know who freaks out when his girlfriend has to lift her skirts a little in order to get through the mud? YEP, YOU GUESSED IT. Better muddy petticoats than immodest ankles, he advises her!)

And then there's Old Hugo, Chief Priest of the thriving Cult of Hugo, with an ego the size of the continent of Europe, who did his level best to seduce anything that moved and subsumed the lives of his entire family into the upkeep of the aforementioned Cult -- and, perhaps even more annoyingly, was the greatest mansplainer EVER TO LIVE, prone to interrupting people's conversations and announcing things like, "I have read neither Goethe nor Schiller, but I know them better than those who have learnt their works by heart!"

SURE, HUGO.

It's also important to note that over the course of his career, Hugo: passionately supported royalty; passionately supported Napoleon; passionately supported Republicanism; passionately led the Romantics; passionately supported the bourgeoisie; passionately charged against a barricade on the side of a repressive government; then, guilt-stricken, spent the next revolution after that wandering around behind the barricades hoping someone would let him pull an Enjolras and jump around being the leader and waving a flag.

(Sadly, by the time he got to the barricade, it was all over and they were just hauling the corpse of the ACTUAL leader away. OOPS.)

I mean, I actually think all these inherent contradictions are awesome, and so does Robb; without them, Les Miserables, among others, would be a much more didactic and less inherently fascinating book. But one can imagine it made being a Victor Hugo fan sort of confusing at the time.

There are dozens of LolHugo stories worth relating, but I think my favorite is the year that Hugo spent really, really into Spiritualism. During this period of time, Hugo received supernatural visits from such luminaries as Cain, Moses, Jesus, Mozart, Sir Walter Scott, The Spirit of the Ocean, and The Shadow of the Tomb. Mostly they were coming to tell Hugo that they'd read his books and thought they were AWESOME. A standard night in the Hugo household over that year might look something ( like thisCollapse )


OH VICTOR HUGO.

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I like to imagine there is one really dedicated Azelma Thenardier fan out there who spends her time sadly browsing through the Les Mis tag on the AO3 and wondering where all the Azelma-centric fic is. Lone Azelma Thenardier fan: this one's for you.

Title: And Yet Are Orphans
Fandom: Les Miserables
Characters: Azelma, Gavroche, and a couple of Ami cameos
Summary: For lack of anything better to do, Azelma pays a visit to her brother.
Notes: The standard set of Thenardier family warnings apply -- implied child abuse, canon character death, you know the drill. Up at the AO3 over here. Thanks to genarti for the beta!

( “My other sister's prettier,” remarked Gavroche. “This one would be a red-faced bourgeois if she could.”Collapse )

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The Best of All Possible Worlds is not quite the book I wanted it to be.

I mean, I love its themes! It's about a culture of stoic telepathic AU!Vulcans -- they're called Sadiri, but, I mean, they're basically Vulcans -- whose home planet gets destroyed, including most of the lady not!Vulcans; they settle on another planet, one that's historically and infrastructurally sympathetic to refugees, and start figuring out how they're going to maintain their culture and heritage.

Enter Our Heroine, Grace Delarua, a scientist with a hobby for linguistics who is assigned to help the new community settle in. Eventually she and a couple not!Vulcans and some other scientists end up going on a ROAD TRIP to visit a bunch of other communities descended from long-ago not!Vulcans and check out their genetic and cultural similarities. Meanwhile, Grace and her buddies repeatedly have this conversation:

BUDDY: So, you and not!Vulcan team leader are totally going to hook up, right?
GRACE: No, I mean, we're just friends!
BUDDY: You guys are going to make such cute babies.
GRACE: .....

Guess who is right on this! Spoiler: it isn't Grace. I am not actually sure this is an effective technique, either from a Watsonian or a Doylist perspective -- it got my back up a little bit both ways -- but oh well.

Anyway, it's an interesting book, but the structure of it -- essentially a set of vignettes arranged alongside each other, rather than a driving narrative -- means that there ended up being a lot of things that I wanted to see explored in more depth instead of the sort of . . . emotional glide we got. There's some serious stuff that happens -- telepathic abuse! near-death experiences! -- and we were told Grace was having a hard time dealing with it, but I'm not sure we saw that as much? Also, there were a couple things that rubbed me the wrong way about the seeking-marriage-partners aspect and the fake Vulcan gender relations stuff; Delarua gets rescued a little too often for my taste, and ( spoilersCollapse )

On the other hand, despite the things that rubbed me wrong, there were also a series of things that made me really happy. Linguistics! Cultural contrasts and interesting worldbuilding! Genderqueer character! Delarua's mom trying to seduce her friend away from her husband! The chapter where Delarua's scientific ethics conflict with her humanistic ethics! The colony whose backstory basically goes like this:

FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 1: We interpret our cultural mores differently than you and now we can't stop fighting about it!
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 2: How will we ever resolve this conflict?
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 1: . . . fuck it, let's just throw everything out the window and become space elves.
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 2: GREAT. LET'S BE SPACE ELVES.

And then they elect an official Fairy Queen, and she picks a space elf harem, and they spend the next couple centuries hanging around singing and strumming lutes and having fairy revels in the woods because WHY NOT. (Community 2 become DARK space elves, because they were the Goth ones, I guess.) I laughed so hard!


Also, this does not reflect on the book itself, but the cover appears to have a washed-out white palette to deliberately obscure the fact that the heroine is described as a woman of color. THANKS, DEL REY. >.<

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Judith Merkle Riley's The Serpent Garden has about half of a really good book in it!

That half is about Susannah Dallet, daughter of a Tudor-era painter and married to another painter, this one a jerk. Fortunately he dies in like the first chapter, which leaves Susannah free to team up with her old nursemaid and the widow who lives downstairs, secretly paint SEXY ADAM AND EVES, pass it off as as her late husband's pious religious work, and sell it to sketchy dudes to make them all lots of money.

Susannah's first-person voice is GREAT. All the women she interacts with, from Team Old Lady Support System to the fancy French court ladies she later ends up painting, are also great! Whenever we were reading her sections I was like "yep, this is a book I am heartily enjoying! Please tell me more about Tudor painting techniques!"

Alas, Susannah's first-person sections are interspersed with a bunch of third-person sections, because there is a B plot, and it's about some evil nobleman who summoned up a demon with the help of Susannah's late husband and thinks she's hiding his secrets, and it's super boring. I spent every one of these sections impatiently skimming so we could get back to one of Susannah's.

Susannah also has a love interest with his own fairly boring third-person POV, who ( spoilers for the romance plot if you care.Collapse )

Also there is a wacky C-plot about the angel of creativity and some cherubim? Sure, I guess.

Anyway, it's kind of worth it for Susanna? And for TUDOR LADY PAINTERS and, as always, for the relationships between historical women, which is Riley's strongest point. But I did also kind of spend most of the book wishing I was just rereading Riley's The Oracle Glass instead, which remains one of my favorite works of hilarious idfic.

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I've read and enjoyed most of Alaya Dawn Johnson's other books, but oh man, The Summer Prince! Not only is it the best thing she has written by far, it is one of the best things I've read so far this year.

The Summer Prince is set in the future Brazilian city of Palmares Tres, several centuries after some sort of apocalypse. Palmares Tres is mostly matriarchal, and is ruled by a Queen. Every five years, men campaign to serve as Summer King; one is elected. He becomes a political and media darling for a year, and is then voluntarily sacrificed, and chooses the new ruling Queen in the ultimate act of disinterested non-partisanship as he dies.

(The actual political mechanics of the cycle are more complicated than that. Because everything is more complicated than that.)

Anyway, Our Heroine June is not super involved in politics -- her family is privileged, her mother's wife is politically influential, but June is a TEENAGED REBEL who just wants to make POLITICALLY CONFRONTATIONAL PUBLIC ART. Stealth graffiti! YOUTH POWER! The only valid art is TRANSGRESSIVE! You know, that kind of thing.

Then Enki -- the son of an immigrant who grew up in lowest class of Palmares Tres' citizens -- gets elected, the most popular Summer King in decades. Enki claims himself as an artist, too, and his one-year term is the canvas that he's going to use to make the greatest political statement he possibly can.

June thinks: MY PERFECT ARTISTIC COLLABORATOR!
June's best friend-sometimes-with-benefits Gil thinks: WHAT A HOTTIE.

(Okay, June also thinks 'what a hottie,' but mostly she is very determined to focus on ART.)

Anyway, Gil starts dating Enki and becomes a minor celebrity by association, and June and Enki start collaborating on increasingly more controversial projects, and the political situation in Palmares Tres gets more and more tense, and soon June finds herself having to make much harder choices than she planned on. Choices like, "how do I make a powerful artistic statement about a divisive political issue when my feelings about that issue are 'BUT ACTUALLY IT'S REALLY COMPLICATED?'" and "do I care more about being recognized as a great artist, or actually making the change my art is about?"

Man, it's just a really good, really complicated book that asks smart questions, and I am not capturing the half of it. I haven't even talked about the way various different issues of class and age and power and technology intersect within the city, or June's fraught and fascinating relationship with her mother and stepmother, or HOW MUCH I SHIP JUNE WITH HER BEST LADY RIVAL BEBEL WHO IS TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH HER. Why is no one writing me June/Bebel fanfic RIGHT NOW. Someone had better get on this come Yuletide. Everyone read this book and write me that!

(I am actually not sure how I feel about the ending, for the record. But I like the rest of the book so much I don't care.)

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I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is one of those memoirs that's fascinating to read partly because you have to take it with a grain of salt.

So Robert E. Burns is a WWI veteran from New Jersey -- notable mostly for being exceptionally short -- who, upon returning home with severe PTSD, wanders away from his respectable middle-class family and becomes a drifter. One morning, he sort of accidentally falls in with some petty criminals and ends up helping to rob a grocery store for four dollars. Because it's a stupid, petty robbery, they are almost immediately caught and Burns gets sentenced to six to ten years of hard labor. After a few weeks of extreme misery on a chain gang, Burns pretty promptly decides on ESCAPE OR DIE TRYING; his escape is successful and he makes it to Chicago.

All this is probably true, and if what you're looking for is an an account of life on a chain gang -- which I was -- it's a super useful reference, and worth reading just for that.

Once he's in Chicago, Burns -- by his own account -- eventually gets caught up in this epic romantic drama where his landlady falls madly in love with him and essentially blackmails him into marrying her, and Burns (by his own account) is all, "I will share your bed, I will even marry you, but YOU CANNOT BUY MY HEEEEART and if TRUE LOVE comes along I am dumping you like a hot potato." Eventually Burns becomes a successful newspaper owner, and of course at this point TRUE LOVE comes along in the guise of a hot young music student, and he dumps wife #1 like a hot potato as promised, and wife #1 proceeds to tell the authorities that he's an escaped convict and get him arrested, in what Burns characterizes as an act of pure spite.

All of this -- for obvious reasons -- I take with something of a grain of salt. (ALL I CARE ABOUT IS LOOOOOOOVE! says Burns. Sorry to seem cynical, Burns, but I feel like there may have been SOME LESS THAN PURE MOTIVES in marrying and then dumping your landlady here.)

Anyway, by this point, Burns is a Notable and Respected Citizen and back in touch with his respectable family and his case is lobbied hither and yon, including extensive bribery of various officials, but to no avail; back to the chain gang to finish out his stint he goes. I sort of have conflicted feelings about this, because, on the one hand, yeah, clearly, NOBODY deserves to be on a chain gang and it's horrible and unfair, but on the other hand . . . sorry all your wealth and social status couldn't buy your way out of the justice system, dude?

Once it becomes clear that nobody is going to reverse his case, Burns manages to escape AGAIN, and lies low in New Jersey for a while, and then decides "eh, screw it" and starts publishing his anti-chain-gang manifesto, which is this book! Which basically ends with "HERE I AM, HANGING OUT IN NEW JERSEY. COME AT ME BRO"

And then -- this is the part I found out from the internet after finishing -- it gets made into an award-winning movie starring Paul Muni, and the governor of New Jersey is all "well, I'm not extraditing this celebrity author," and Burns gets the credit for helping expose the terrible conditions on chain gangs, which leads to the eventual abolition of the chain gang system. Happy ending!

(And for the curious, TRUE LOOOOVE drops out of contact once he escapes prison and is never heard from again.)

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When I started reading the Seven Kingdoms Trilogy with Graceling, I was pretty much expecting that Bitterblue was going to be my favorite.

Now I've read Fire and Bitterblue, and my preferences did not totally shake out as I expected. I liked both of them! But I think if I had to pick one of the books in a cage match, it would be Fire.

Fire is about a woman named Fire who is a monster, which means she has the magic powers of being almost irresistible and a certain level of mind control over others. This is deconstructed as much as it ought to be. The plot isn't really a plot, per se, in that dramatic things happen; there's a war inching closer in the background, but most of the book is about Fire balancing her abilities with her responsibilities as a moral and ethical person, which she is. It's the quietness of Fire I like, as much as anything. I like seeing the dynamics shake out between the characters, who feel like real people with real concerns. I like seeing Fire figure out a place for herself on her own terms. It all feels very solid to me.

Bitterblue, meanwhile, is about learning how to rule and recovering from trauma -- on a personal and a nation-wide scale -- and both of these are things I really like, so theoretically it should be the book I like the most. And I do definitely admire a lot of what it's doing, but somehow the internal logic of it never felt one hundred percent solid to me. There's something almost dreamlike about the experience of reading it -- I mean, part of this is because everyone is super traumatized and so they keep spitting out trauma-related non sequiturs, and partly this is because all the architecture in the book was designed by a psychopath, including lots of weird sculptures and secret passageways, and partly this is because the government policies are designed by a lot of traumatized people and explicitly make no sense. But it means you get a lot of conversations like this:

BITTERBLUE: I would like to discuss our problematic governing policies with you.
ADVISOR: Just please don't bring up bones in the course of this conversation.
BITTERBLUE: What?
ADVISOR: Also, I don't know what you're talking about, Your Majesty, everything in the city is perfectly fine.
BITTERBLUE: What?
ADVISOR: Have you ever wondered what would happen if you jumped out a window? I wonder that. ALL THE TIME.
BITTERBLUE: What?
ADVISOR: May I be excused?

And then Bitterblue will wander off down a secret passageway and stare at some surrealistic architecture and think about how none of her advisors make any sense, which they don't. So, I mean, I liked it, and I'm very glad she wrote it, but I had a little bit of a harder time investing in it . . .

(Also, and unrelatedly, I was incredibly bored and annoyed by the love interest, although I liked the way it was evently resolved.)

(Also also, even more unrelatedly, but can we have a moratorium on characters-named-Death-pronounced-differently? I actually liked this particular character, but I kept getting distracted!)

This is just me, though! I know a bunch of people who say Bitterblue is their favorite of the trilogy, and there are definitely good reasons for that. So because I'm curious, a poll:



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This is a tribute post for posthumous characters.

By posthumous characters, I mean characters who were dead before the story began -- and whose death is probably somehow pivotal to the story as it stands -- and who then get enough attention in flashbacks/ghostly appearances/reminiscences from contemporary characters that they become your actual favorite character, which is REALLY UNFAIR because THEY WERE DEAD TO BEGIN WITH.

Some posthumous characters I personally would like to honor today:


1. Donkey from 20th Century Boys

This is really the character who inspired this post. Donkey's mysterious "suicide" is one of the events that kicks off the mystery of this manga, and I remember getting really angry when he showed up in flashbacks and turned out to be my favorite of the kids. HE DIDN'T BELIEVE IN GHOSTS! HE LOVED SCIENCE! HE GREW UP TO BE A TEACHER WHO WANTED TO HELP KIDS! Five million characters in this manga, and my favorite was dead by like page two. ;___;


2. Lilly Kane from Veronica Mars

She walks the dreams of the people she left behind until her murder is solved . . . and as a side project, she also dispenses fashion advice! Lilly was fabulous, and she knew it, and we all knew it, and I'm still kind of sad that Veronica Mars dd not end up as a show about a teenaged PI and her ghost buddy who fought crime with her.


3. Teresa from Claymore

I just had a conversation with a friend who had seen the anime of Claymore - which is shonen about angsty half-demon ladies who fight demons - but not read the manga. "You should read it!" I said. "IS THERE MORE TERESA?" he said. ". . . no," I said, "uh, Teresa is a flashback character? She's dead . . .? Her death is the heroine's character-forming moment and motivation, remember . . .?" "Yeah," he said, sadly, "but I keep hoping, because she was THE MOST AWESOME CHARACTER."


Honorable mention: Arang from Arang and the Magistrate

I'm not really sure this actually counts, because a.) I haven't yet finished the kdrama Arang and the Magistrate and b.) it's true that Arang is a posthumous character but she is also . . . the main character . . . which does not quite create the same dynamic of bitter frustration that I feel about, say, Donkey. But she's such an AMAZING ghost that I have to include her anyway.


And now I throw this open to the floor! Which posthumous characters would you like to honor today?

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You know that writing advice about figuring out the worst thing that can happen to your characters, and then making it worse?

I feel like a lot of contemporary YA dystopia very, very earnestly takes this advice a liiittle too much to heart, but Steven Dos Santos' The Culling is a particularly hilariously dramatic example.

Now, there are definitely things to like about The Culling. For one thing: gay protagonist! And, more importantly, for all the ANGST AND STURM AND DRAM racked up throughout the dystopia, the fact that Lucky is gay is never actually a source of angst, which is a nicely refreshing change.

But, I mean, Lucky has plenty of other things to angst about, include:
- the fact that he lives in a super dystopian regime called THE ESTABLISHMENT, so terrible and grimdark and hopeless and improverished that children's games include Dodge Piss and Shit Dash. Also, there are government-created plagues. Also, there is slave labor. Also, books are banned. Also, everyone gets drafted into the workforce as a teenager
- except for the SPECIAL teenagers who are chosen each year to COMPETE in LIFE-THREATENING TRIALS
- and every time they come in last in a trial, they will be forced to choose to kill one of their Incentives -- the TWO PEOPLE they LOVE THE MOST!

Obviously Lucky gets sent into the trials, with his BELOVED BABY BROTHER and his SICKLY SURROGATE MOTHER as his Incentives. There he bonds with all his fellow trainees, including SUPER HOT BLONDE REVOLUTIONARY Digory.

But then, midway through, when the trials begin, the dramatic twist: ( spoilers!Collapse )

The rest of the book is an exercise in ever-increasing angst porn in ever-more-dramatic locations, as various sympathetic teenagers are forced to make choices like "which one of your long-lost twin babies would you RATHER KILL?" or "will you shoot your father yourself . . . or allow him to be eaten alive by GIANT MUTANT RATS?!?!"

My favorite is probably the trial when half of the protagonists and all of their loved ones have been infected with a fatal virus, and have to dig for limited number of antidote vials . . . buried in a floor MADE OF ANGRY ATTACK ZOMBIES. Yes. That happens.

I will say this, though -- my biggest complaint with The Hunger Games (first book) was I felt it dodged out of forcing Katniss to confront the hardest decisions. She's never responsible for the death of a sympathetic character, she only kills in self-defense. And for all the HILARIOUSLY EPIC ANGST-O-RAMA, that's not a mistake this book makes. Lucky does become complicit in the deaths of various other innocent people in order to save the innocent people he likes best, and he knows it. And if you're going to write a GRIMDARK GRIM DARK DYSTOPIA, you have to acknowledge that.

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I said to myself, "all right, all right, I'm back in the same fandom that I was when I was SEVENTEEN, but at least I'm not writing overwrought fanfic for it!" Cue hollow laughter.

Title: on your way up to the light
Fandom: Les Miserables
Characters: Jean Valjean, Eponine, Cosette, Marius, Gavroche
Summary: Brick AU of the 'small canon divergence leads to slightly larger changes' variety, and also of the 'I have a lot of feelings about parallels between Eponine and Valjean' variety. Eponine throws a note at Valjean; she doesn't anticipate the consequences.
Notes: Warnings for suicidal ideation. Title comes from the Mountain Goats song Amy aka Spent Gladiator. Also up at the AO3, over here. Thanks to genarti for the beta!

( He took it, unfolded it, and read on it, in large letters written with a pencil: MOVE OUT.Collapse )

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The Dragon Waiting is one of those everything-and-the-kitchen-sink alternate histories -- the Byzantine Empire is evil and taking over France and Italy! and also there are WIZARDS! and also there are VAMPIRES! and also Owen Glendower was ACTUALLY FOR-REAL MAGIC! and also John M. Ford would like to argue pointedly with Shakespeare's interpretation of Richard III, thank you very much!

(No actual dragons, though. Or dinosaur lawyers, which is a shame; I cannot think of an alternate history that would not be improved by dinosaur lawyers.)

It's also a book that for me did not actually come together in a structural way I could understand until about 3/4 of the way through. The book reads a bit like this:

HYWEL PEREDUR: I am a child with unexpected wizard powers! And now we're going to learn about how I suffered terrible tragedy and lost everything I loved.
DIMITRIOS DUCAS: I am a child growing up happily as a Roman in occupied Gaul! And now we're going to learn about how I suffered terrible tragedy and lost everything I loved.
CYNTHIA RICCI: I am a young doctor in the court of Lorenzo de Medici! And now we're going to learn about how I suffered terrible tragedy and lost everything I loved.
GREGORY VON BAYERN: I am a scholarly guilt-ridden vampire, but John Ford is tired of writing backstories, so let's just assume that I suffered terrible tragedy and lost everything I loved and get on to AN INORDINATELY COMPLEX LOCKED-ROOM MURDER MYSTERY.

AN INORDINATELY COMPLEX LOCKED-ROOM MURDER MYSTERY: *occurs*

EVERYONE: *becomes extremely emotionally attached to each other*

HYWEL: Conveniently, you are all part of my master complex plot against the evil empire which I am not going to explicate! Now we're going to go on a vaguely related inordinately complex political mission involving Margaret of Anjou.

A VAGUELY RELATED INORDINATELY COMPLEX POLITICAL MISSION INVOLVING MARGARET OF ANJOU: *occurs*

HYWEL: My master complex plot which I am not going to explicate now involves us all splitting up to have character development. At least, some of this is part of my plot. Maybe. Eh, who knows.

EVERYONE: *splits up for character development*

SOME RANDOMLY CHOSEN SCENES: *advance character development, but not all the character development, just whatever character development John M. Ford feels like writing about that day*

EDWARD IV: *dies*

RICHARD III FIX-IT FANFIC: *commences*

BECCA: Oh oh wait, okay, now I see what you are doing, and why you needed to set up these characters and why you needed magic and vampires and why you wanted to write those particular scenes! Some of those particular scenes, anyway. OKAY. I'M STARTING TO GET IT.

Like, it really does sort of feel like John M. Ford wrote the last third of the book last, and then worked out what he needed in order to get there, and then wrote about half of what he felt like he needed, and threw in another few scenes that he didn't need but he just wanted to write about, and trusted the reader to figure out the rest.

And by the end I think this probably works! It helps that John M. Ford is very clever, and the alternate history interestingly constructed; if you are the sort of person who likes puzzle-box plots that engage your brain, your brain will very certainly be engaged. And occasionally he throws in terrible in-jokes like the time that a stage manager in the Medici court proposes the great work Stella Martiis, and if you are the kind of person who enjoys these kind of terrible in-jokes you're having enough fun ferreting them out that you don't really mind.

But on the other hand I feel like nobody can be blamed for not wanting to wait 3/4 of the way into the book to understand why we are following these particular people and why vampires and Welsh wizards are thematically important to this Richard III fanfic anyway.

Also, for those who have read the book, ( spoilersCollapse )

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Somehow in my whole life, despite growing up on Pippi Longstocking, I had never actually read Ronia, the Robber's Daughter.

Fortunately, shoroko recognized this as the travesty it was and turned up one day with her copy for our household - in a very timely fashion, too, because children's adventure books make for AMAZING thesis-stress-reading.

Ronia, The Robber's Daughter is the most adorable book about a blood feud between two gangs of thieves EVER. Head Thief Matt is SUPER EXCITED to have a daughter to someday pass the leadership of his gang down to, which makes sense, because she's awesome.

He is way less excited to find out that his rival, Borka, a.) has a son and b.) is moving into the fortress next door. (Stupid Borka isn't even supposed to know how to MAKE kids!)

Meanwhile, the kids, Ronia and Birk, save each other's lives a few times, and then become friends, and then swear to be together forever, and then decide that their parents are making stupid and unethical life choices and they refuse to be a part of them.

HIJINKS ENSUE. And difficult family stuff, but -- spoiler! -- it all works out okay in the end. Honestly there is really nothing about the book that I can think of that is not delightful. Plucky badass kids! Adventure! Loyalty! Awesome moms! Daring escapes! Emotional depth! Etc., etc.

(Has anyone seen the movie? I feel like I was having a conversation about this with somebody recently, but that was before I read the book, so I actually had no idea what I was talking about.)

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Yesterday over breakfast we were discussing the prevalence of Shakespeare and other early modern plays set in the contemporary era, which of course begs the question: why don't we ever set contemporary plays in Elizabethan times? Our Hamlet, anyone? Cat on a Straw Thatched Roof? Glengarry Glen Ross, Now In The Actual Highlands?

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Season of Migration to the North was a birthday gift from shoroko, and I went into it knowing almost nothing about it -- for once, I managed to actually do the sensible thing and skip over the introduction, even though this is always a painful thing to do. (Yes, introductions spoil everything, but . . . THEY'RE IN THE FRONT! THAT MEANS THEY COME FIRST! I have a really hard time not reading books straight through.)

Anyway, is about a young man comes home to his Sudanese village after studying in England and finds a stranger named Mustafa Sa'eed living there, who claims not to know English despite obvious evidence to the contrary. The narrator becomes obsessed with learning Mustafa's story; as is often the case, knowledge is a mixed blessing at best.

Mustafa Sa'eed, it turns out, was once a student at Oxford; a genius; possibly a sociopath; a representation of "exotic Africa" in the British imagination; responsible for the deaths of at least four women; the perpetrator of a crime of passion; the victim of a crime of passion; not Othello; a lie.

Now he's home, and determined to live a simple life. Except then he's suddenly gone, leaving the narrator a legacy wrapped up in corruption and colonialism and violence against women that the narrator is REALLY NOT SURE THAT HE WANTS. (Mustafa's wife also gets some of this legacy. It's worse for her.)

It's a short book, but as you can imagine, it packs a hell of a punch.

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I always forget just how much I love Archer's Goon until I reread it.

This is one of the set I mentally classify as DWJ's Really Weird Books (which are of course all the ones I love best.) In it, thirteen-year-old Howard Sykes finds that a group of seven ambiguously super-powered wizard siblings are planning to take over the world as soon as they get rid of whatever block is stopping them from leaving Howard's town.

The block, it seems, has to do with some rubbish short stories that Howard's famous-author father has been writing once every three months, and all of the wizard siblings are now determined to get their hands on them -- and they are not averse to using their powers to do things like shut off all the power, dig up the street in front of Howard's house, send marching bands and disco dancers to harass them at all hours, and stop the family's bank accounts. Every member of the household has a different reaction to all these goings-on:

QUENTIN, HOWARD'S FATHER: storms around shouting dramatically about MEGALOMANIAC WIZARDS and how AS A TAXPAYER and CITIZEN OF THE WORLD it is his bound duty to not write any magical words for anyone! He must TAKE A STAND!
CATRIONA, HOWARD'S MOTHER: is very, very unimpressed with all these wizard shenanigans, until it turns out that super-powered wizards could potentially cause her to lose her job, at which point she becomes very unimpressed with Quentin
AWFUL, HOWARD'S BRATTY LITTLE SISTER: seems to have discovered a new joy in life, which is to be as bratty and terrible as possible to every single super-powered wizard that she meets
FIFI, AWFUL'S FRAZZLED BABYSITTER: is not very comfortable with all these goings-on, until she meets Archer, the sexy oldest wizard brother, and suddenly becomes a little too comfortable with these goings-on
THE GOON: is a tower of strength in their time of crisis! For the record, the Goon does not properly belong to the household; he's a giant gorilla of a person who shows up as Phase 1 of the Campaign to Acquire Quentin's Words and sort of amiably refuses to leave until Quentin produces some words for Archer. Eventually, since there seems no getting rid of him, they make him up a bed on the sofa and set him to running errands and barbecuing in the backyard

You may have noticed something especially unusual about this description now: Howard's parents ALSO have to cope with 'surprise, there's magic!' This is something I feel I always want to see in kids' novels and never do; usually it's the kids' jobs to take care of everything while the parents remain oblivious. Archer's Goon is emphatically NOT THIS. It is, instead, very much a book about families, and how some things about the ways families interact remain the same no matter what the circumstances -- not just with Howard's family, but with super-powered wizard siblings, too, who have a complex family dynamic all their own.

Also, Quentin and Catriona are also probably my favorite set of parents in a DWJ book. They're completely human and super flawed, and prone to tremendous arguments, and not always particularly great people, but the fact that they really love their kids is never in doubt.

Ahhh, Archer's Goon! I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I mean, it's not perfect, and the ending is horrendously unfair to ( spoilersCollapse ) -- but, I mean, no one is saying that anyone involved in making these decisions are actually good people, and I love all the characters too much anyway to care. (Also, where is all the fic about [SPOILER] coming and inviting Awful to rule the world?)

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I've been instructed that I should read John Ford's The Dragon Waiting, but before I got around to that I found myself in possession of a copy of Ford's The Last Hot Time, courtesy of rachelmanija.

The Last Hot Time is a really fascinating, really cool book in a lot of ways. It's old-school urban fantasy - elves, cold city lights, and a distinctly noir feel - and set in a kind of strange post-fantasy-apocalyptic Chicago, with the Field Museum and old movie theaters and a gangster history that everyone remembers with faint nostalgia and a thriving black market in addictive elf blood. (Addictive elf blood. Yes.) It's also I guess maybe related to something called the Borderlands universe which I know absolutely nothing about, although I'm happy to be enlightened!

Anyway, I have been kind of bored of elves for a long time now, but what I like about this is that while there are elves in it, it's not really about the elves at all; it's more about the mix of (fascinating, diverse, troubled) human characters that move through the city, and have their lives affected by it. The protagonist is a very sweet young paramedic from a a small Iowa town who gets sort of accidentally picked up to do an emergency medical job by the mysterious Mr. Patrise one afternoon, and the more he gets involved the more he comes to learn about himself and the city and the rest of the people in it. The protagonist is low-key and interested and generally willing to go with the flow, and the reader's picking up the rich tidbits of dropped information and putting things together as much as he is, all of which makes it a consistently fascinating read. (If occasionally very much of its time. There are tons of characters of color, but the female characters, while interesting, emphatically do not get as much to do as the male characters, and when they do they usually don't succeed in it; also there is some unfortunate casual yellowface at a Halloween party.)

But. But ( major spoilers aheadCollapse )

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innerbrat gave me the first volume of Princeless specifically so I would write it up, and I read it and thought it was adorable and then totally forgot to do so. BUT I'M DOING IT NOW.

So this is the protagonist of Princeless:



She's Princess Adrienne, and she's going to take her dragon and go on an adventure and rescue all her sister princesses from towers! If she can find some suitable armor, of course.



As you can see, Princeless is not exactly subtle; it is engaging with the fantasy canon in some VERY SPECIFIC ways and it wants to make very sure you understand them! So this is the kind of work where worldbuilding takes a backseat to beating cliches over the head with an angry mallet, and that's okay. Because some cliches need to get beaten.

Secondary characters include Adrienne's adorable poetry-loving twin brother Devin and her new sidekick, half-dwarf teenaged lady blacksmith Bedelia. Also, the dragon. They are all pretty great. But mostly, I'm really interested to see what's going to happen with Adrienne and her sisters and her family -- to my understanding each volume is going to focus on one sister-rescue-mission, and, uh, obviously I love complicated sister dynamics, so I am pretty excited about that!

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When newredshoes was visiting this weekend, we ended up watching most of The Bletchley Circle, and I just sort of feel like talking a little bit more about Susan, the mystery-solving protagonist.

I mean, I've said this before, but the thing that gets me about Susan is that she has all the hallmark traits of a Sherlock Holmes or a, I don't know, Patrick Jane (I've never watched The Mentalist) or any of the other flawed civilian crime-solving geniuses who tend to anchor the kind of shows where geniuses solve crime. She sees the world in ways that other people don't; she sees patterns that most people don't see, and that leads her to have exceptional insights. She's incredibly intelligent, and very bad at explaining herself to people who aren't as intelligent -- she doesn't have the communication skills or the patience for it. And she LOVES her intelligence. She loves being right. She loves being right sometimes to the point where she forgets to have the appropriate reactions of horror at horrible things, and forgets to take other people's horror into account, because those horrible things prove her deductions correct.

But she isn't a Sherlock Holmes, because she isn't an independently wealthy upper-class white man who can afford to be dismissive of the rest of the world. She's a fifties housewife, a woman who has been socialized to be polite and conciliating and to always put other people at first. So she doesn't say, "I'm brilliant, I can see things you can't;" she says, "I'm good with patterns." And the way these impulses are at war in her -- her knowledge of her own intelligence and skills and the fact that she is smarter and better than other people, and the fact that she knows she's not supposed to be, and no one will take her seriously if she is -- is what makes her fascinating, and what anchors the show, for me.

And I don't think I've seen another character like this, and I want to.

(This is of course a request for recs, I am always requesting recs.)

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