seventhlayer

In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.

rachelmanija

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

skygiants

For many years I have been saying 'I must reread the Narnia books,' a thing I somehow have not done in the seventeen or so years I've been actively keeping track of my reading habits. I said this in the late 2000s when the new movies were coming out, and I said it again a couple years ago when I read Til We Have Faces for the first time, and then I said it several times over the past few months while I was rewatching all the 1980s BBC Narnia adaptations with local friends, and then last week my friend was doing a blitz reread of the whole series for a con panel and I had finally said it enough times that I decided to join her instead of just talking about it.

For background: yes, the Narnia books were some of my favorite books when I was a child; they're the first books I actively remember reading on my own, that made me go 'ah! this thing, reading, is worth doing, and not just a dull task set to me by adults!' (This goes to show how memory is imperfect: my parents say that the first book that they remember me reading, before Narnia, was The Borrowers. But they also say that I then went immediately looking for Borrowers behind light sockets which perhaps is why I do not remember reading it first.)

I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus. This did not really put me off Narnia or Aslan -- I had a lion named Aslan that was my favorite stuffed animal all through my childhood -- but I did have a vague sense As A Jewish Child that it was sort of embarrassing for everyone concerned, including the lion, C.S. Lewis, and me. My favorites were Silver Chair, Horse And His Boy, and Magician's Nephew. I reread The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe often simply because it was the first one; Prince Caspian didn't leave much of an impression on me and I only really liked Dawn Treader for Eustace's dragon sequence; The Last Battle filled me with deep secondhand embarrassment.

Rereading, I discover that I had great taste; Silver Chair simply stays winning! The experience of reading the first three Pevensie books is a constant hunt for little crumbs of individuality and personality in the Pevensie children beyond their Situations and how willing they are to listen to advice from Big Lion; Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me. For all the various -isms of Horse And His Boy, it feels really clear that Lewis leveled up in writing Character somewhere between Dawn Treader and Silver Chair; Shasta and Aravis and the horses and Polly and Diggory all just have a lot more chances to bonk against each other in interesting ways and show off who they are than the Pevensies ever do.

However! I also had bad taste. I did not appreciate Caspian as it ought to have been appreciated. Now, on my reread, it's by far my favorite of the Pevensie-forward texts -- and partly I suppose that, as a child, I could not fully have been expected to appreciate the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all. It's good! The Pevensies also just get to do more on their own and use more of their own actual skills than they do in either The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where they're mostly led around by the nose, or Dawn Treader, where they're mostly just having a nice boat trip. Just a soupcon of Robinsoniad in your Narnia, as a treat.

I also came away with the impression that Dawn Treader -- which really is primarily about Eustace and Reepicheep -- would be a better book if either Edmund or Lucy had gone on that trip but not both of them. The problem with Dawn Treader is that Edmund/Lucy/Caspian all kind of blob together in a cohort of being Just Sort Of Embarrassed By Eustace -- Edmund and Caspian particularly -- and don't get a lot to individuate them or give them Problems. Edmund and Caspian's dialogue is frequently almost interchangeable. But an Edmund who has Lucy's trials at the magician's tower and has to deal more with his existing/leftover issues from the first book is more interesting, and a Lucy who is stuck more in the middle of Caspian and Eustace without Edmund to over-balance the stakes is more interesting. I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....

Other miscellaneous observations:

- obviously I am aware of the Susan Problem but man, reading for Susan and Lucy through the later books it is clear how much the gradual tilting of the scales to Lucy Good/Susan Bad does a disservice to both characters. This is especially noticeable IMO in Horse And His Boy; it makes no sense for Lucy to go to war with a bow while Susan stays behind in context of anything we know about those characters from Lion and Caspian, it is so purely an exercise in Lucy Is The Designated Cool Girl Now. Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves

- it is very very funny that every King or Queen of Narnia talks like Shakespeare except for Caspian, who talks, as noted above, like a British schoolboy. My Watsonian explanation for this is that the Pevensies were like 'well, kings talk like Shakespeare' and consciously developed this as an affectation whereas Caspian, who met the Pevensies as schoolchildren at a formative age, was like 'well, kings talk like British schoolchildren' and consciously developed it as an affectation --

- if you are on Bluesky you may have already seen me make this joke but it is so funny to be rolling along in Narnia pub order and have C.S. Lewis come careening back in for Magician's Nephew like 'WAIT! STOP!! I forgot to mention earlier but Jadis? She is hot. You know Lady Dimitrescu? yeah JUST like that. I just want to make sure we all know'

- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment

rachelmanija

Finally, a book that lives up to its premise!

The Tainted Cup's plot is a murder mystery, complex but playing fair, in the tradition of Agatha Christie. Its main characters are Ana, a spectacularly eccentric reclusive genius, and Din, her young assistant who does the legwork, in the tradition of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin or Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

...and the setting is a world that has been regularly ravaged by leviathans the size of mountains that emerge from the sea every "wet season" and rampage around, not only stomping everything in sight but also creating zones like Annihilation's Area X due to their magical, mutagenic bodies!

This has led to the Roman Empire continuing as it's the only force that can (barely) keep them in check, and also to it evolving a sophisticated scientific/magical biological technology which can perform many forensic, military, and technical functions including augmenting people and animals. So you have legionnaires augmented to be short-lived but massively strong and with extra bones that crunch when they move, called cracklers, using giant sloths called "slothics" to haul around artillery to shoot at kaiju!!!

I fucking love this sort of setting. All I want is to roll around in its weird biological decadence, ideally with guides in the form of interesting and/or likable characters. A good plot is just gravy. But! I love the characters AND the plot is excellent!

The opening scene is a masterclass in how to introduce a very unusual and complex setting by making your viewpoint character someone who 1) must navigate aspects of the setting that are new to them too, 2) has a compelling personal problem that's emotionally engaging, 3) and introduces a mystery to keep us hooked.

Din, the viewpoint character, is the new probationary assistant to the investigator, showing up alone to his very first murder scene. He immediately tangles with the guard on site, who is clearly richer and more experienced and correctly sizes him up as a newbie, and is also suspicious that the investigator herself isn't there. This neatly introduces us to the military and investigatory structure, and makes us wonder about Din's boss. As Din is introduced to a very wealthy household, we get to see the biological magitech of the world while also encountering the bizarre murder he's investigating. And while all this is going on, Din is trying to hide the fact that he's dyslexic, which he thinks could get him fired.

It's an instantly compelling opening.

Ana and Din are great characters, Din immediately likable, Ana immediately intriguing. The supporting cast is neatly sketched in. The plot is a very solid murder mystery, the setting is fantastic, and everything is perfectly integrated. The mystery could only unfold as it does in that setting, and the characters are all shaped by it. As a nice little bonus, there's also good disability rep in the context of a world where many people are augmented to boost them in some ways while also having major side effects. Good queer rep, too. And though a lot of the content was dark/horrifying, the overall reading experience was really fun.

I loved this book and instantly dove into the next one. I hope Bennett writes as many Ana & Din books as Christie wrote Poirots.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

marthawells

If you are planning to watch the Murderbot TV series (starting May 16!) on Apple TV, if you could add it on your watchlist, that would be a big help. It's kind of like pre-ordering a book, it tells the publisher/streaming service that you're there for our show.

There's a link here for US viewers: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/murderbot/umc.cmc.5owrzntj9v1gpg31wshflud03

I'm pretty sure it's different for Apple viewers in other countries.

You can also see the trailer at this link.

skygiants

There is a subgenre that I wouldn't have thought to describe as a whole subgenre until I read Kerstin Hall's Asunder and immediately thought 'like Deeplight!' and also 'like those Max Gladstone books!' and also come to think of it 'like The Archive Undying' -- second-world fantasy set in a society that's been shaped around gods, and now those gods are [quite recently] dead or gone or murdered, and everyone is trying to reckon with the shape of the world that they left behind. I like this sort of subgenre quite a bit because it lends itself to interesting complexity; people can have all kinds of different messy feelings about the divine, and about their destruction, and about whatever new powers have come in to fill the void they left, and it's rarely as straightforward as 'it was better before' or 'it's better now.'

Asunder is kind of a weird book and it passes through a lot as it goes; I'm not sure it structurally holds together, and the ending feels in some sense incomplete, but it leaves its world messy in ways I really enjoyed. Our Heroine Karys' country used to be under the charge of a set of variously powerful, variously petty localized divinities, who created much of the important infrastructure, and who all died about twenty years ago, resulting in a major conquest. People Feel Various Ways About This. Now Karys has contracted herself to a different kind of powerful and terrible [divinity?/cosmic horror?] in exchange for the ability to talk to the dead, which serves as her main source of income. The job on which we meet her, however, is immediately in the process of going horribly wrong, as the shipwreck she was investigating turns out to have been caused by a weird monster that traps her in a cavern, where she finds a gravely injured survivor, a young diplomat from a foreign empire. Then in the process of trying to help him escape with her she accidentally traps this whole diplomat inside her subconscious, and the rest of the book is a long strange road trip for the purpose of Getting Him Out Of There, complicated by:

- the various debts of obligation and favor that Karys is obliged to incur to sneak through and past various borders
- the scholar who decides to come along for the ride because she thinks Karys is not only cute but also the most interesting potential research subject she's ever met
- the small unhappy town that Karys ran away from as a child, and her childhood friend/ex-girlfriend?? who has some kind of connection to Karys' childhood god/ex-god??
- Karys' powerful and terrible patron, who has informed her that she is destined to be summoned to him soon for a Great Honor, which does not seem like a good thing at all at all
- the fact that everyone keeps telling Karys and her new passenger Ferain that if they don't Fix This Immediately one of them is inevitably going to have to kill the other for survival, which does not help with building the trust and cooperation that they need to develop in order to keep escaping from
- the weird monsters that are still persistently trying to chase them down

And meanwhile we, the readers, are picking up slowly on all the complicated past between these countries and these gods as we pass through it, and also on what's going on with Karys herself. ( spoilers )

rachelmanija

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

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seventhlayer

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Reading

Face the Dragon, by Joyce Sweeney

Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun, by Kaz Rowe

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The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Murderbot on TV

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The Last Bookstore on Earth, by Lily Braun-Arnold

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December 2019

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