Trying that review thing.
Aug. 24th, 2019 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callunavOoookay.
What am I reading currently: Just at this moment, I'm poking experimentally at The Broken Girls, by Simone St. James, which I found on this morning's BookBub. I liked the sample and bought it for $2 from ebooks.com, and am enjoying it so far. It seems to be an interesting blend of suspense/crime fiction and ghost story. The narrative alternates between 2014 and 1950. The 2014 story is a third person narrative from the point of view of Fiona, a journalist, who is involved with James, a police officer. The 1950 story is also in the 3rd person, each chapter from the perspective of one of four roommates at a girls' boarding school, one of whom will be murdered.
The 1950 narratives are really engaging, with the four personalities very distinct and very human in how the girls perceive themselves, the others, and the school. All of the girls are sympathetic in different ways. In 2014, the relationship between Fiona and James is interesting, and so far there's a nice balance of tensions. Fiona frustrates/worries James and others in her life with her obsession with the now-abandoned boarding school, where her older sister was killed in the 1970s (thus, not contemporary with the other narratives). As a result of deciding to write a piece on it, she is on the scene when the older (1950s) remains are discovered and becomes part of that investigation. This makes it seems likely to me that there's going to be a really nice narrative structure of development and revelations occurring in each timeline, feeding into each other. So my current feeling is that the story is interesting, the characters are interesting, and I have a lot of hope that the novel is well-crafted. My main issue at the moment is that more than half the story rests on Fiona and I'm not that interested in her yet. We'll see.
What else am I reading currently: Also open on my desktop for switching back and forth among (that's a terrible syntactical construction, I'm so sorry) are N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (SFF), which I want to like more than I do so far but am not giving up on, and Terry Pratchett's Maskerade which I am rereading for the umpteenth time for unchallenging comfort-reading. I've been on a whole binge of Pratchett re-reading in the past two weeks, and do have critical/review-y thoughts about them, but that's way too much to go into right now.
On paper, I've been reading The Forgetting, by Sharon Cameron, which I picked up at random from the library and am really liking. It's SFF, with some excellent world-building and complex character dynamics. Although the protagonist and the other main characters are young adult, they have well developed social, familial, and personal histories that make them much less simplistic than a lot of YA characters.
On my phone, at bedtime, I've periodically been rereading Diana Wynne Jones's Homeward Bounders, which I first encountered when I was 10 and living in England, had just discovered DWJ. (It was 1981; she hadn't really made it across the Atlantic very well at that point, though that changed quickly.) At the time, I'd already read a few of her other books and loved them, and when I encountered Homeward Bounders, I was quickly caught up in it. In fact, I became so caught up in it that I found myself thinking about it constantly when I was supposed to be doing other things, and eventually got freaked out at how much it had taken over my brain and sent it back to the library unfinished. I went back and read it a couple years later, and loved it. I still think it's one of her best.
I do think some people struggle with it, but I think that's partly a misunderstanding when it comes to age-appropriate recommendations. My experience aside, just because the prose is accessible to intermediate readers doesn't mean the story will be. There's a lot of DWJ that I'd recommend to 10-13 year olds, or kids reading at those levels, but there are also some that I wouldn't, or not indiscriminately, and Homeward Bounders is one of them. (I vividly recall being 11 or 12 and walking into my 2nd home, the children's section of the public library, and being haled from across the room by a reference librarian, who called, "[Calluna]! Someone tells me you understand Diana Wynne Jones!" I was bemused at the time, but I think I get it better now.)
On audio book in the car, I'm currently listening to Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment which is comfort reading of the highest order. I was stressed last week, and now I'm once again caught up in the book. However, when it's done, I'll probably go back to Rachel Aaron's The Spirit Rebellion (SFF, second book in the Eli Monpress series), which I'm listening to/reading/encountering for the first time. I've really enjoyed discovering Rachel Aaron, but I have a couple reservations that stop me from giving the books my heart, so we'll see how that goes, too. I do enjoy and respect the world-building and particular conception of how magic works in this series.
What have I read this week: at a point when I was feeling fragile, a couple days ago, I started reading Gail Carson Levine's Ogre Enchanted, which is new to me. I really, really enjoy her books and her characters' voices, except...they all start to sound the same to me. Good, but the same. The Bamarre books are a partial exception to this. I think I'll finish Ogre Enchanted at some point, because why not? but I wish the author would continue in the direction she seems to be moving in the Bamarre books and work at evolving equally charming protagonists who sound different from each other.
I discovered Kelsey Sutton at the library, and read three books by her. I'm ambivalent. The first one I read was Some Quiet Place, which on my first reading I felt was less an SFF novel than a really engaging, if imperfect, parable of dissociation. It fell into the category of books that I really like but that I'm not sure I'd be willing to try to defend to others. The premise is that the protagonist is able to see emotions as people - Guilt appearing next to someone to put a heavy hand on their shoulder, Excitement bobbing and skipping along next to a vigorous teacher, etc. - but mysteriously is untouchable by any of them. Fear, in particular, is fascinated by her and can't resist trying to figure out why he can't affect her.
Unfortunately, I went back over it, and found the flaws more pronounced, and some frustrating misunderstandings (or what are, in my opinion, misunderstandings) of the differences between denial, dissociation, and the specific form of dissociation that is traumatic forgetting. In particular, toward the end, it is strongly implied that strength of character means no need for trauma responses. Given my personal history and my profession, this pissed me the hell off, so now I'm much more ambivalent about it.
The second Sutton book I read was Gardenia, and I have a much less cohesive sense of it. The premise is that the protagonist sees glowing numbers over everyone's heads - including her own - counting down the time they have left before they die. The plot has more reflective, personal threads, of the character dealing with relationships and her own life choices when these numbers are a constant, overriding intrusion - how close does she get to a guy she likes if she knows she won't have very long with him? How does she respond to someone who's suicidal when she knows for a fact that they're going to live into their nineties? Etc. - intertwined with more active, conventionally plotty threads of her efforts to solve her best friend's murder in the time she has left. I don't have a clear critical opinion of it but I enjoyed reading it.
The third book was the 'companion' book to Some Quiet Place, Where Silence Gathers, and I frankly thought it was terrible. Its pacing was bad enough to be really obtrusive, and the parable in this case was one of revenge vs forgiveness, which left me cold. I tried to find the grieving, bewildered, angry, and depressed narrator sympathetic, but largely failed.
What else? I already talked about Alice Hoffman's The Rules of Magic. I did take a look at Practical Magic, decided it looked very similar, and chose not to continue.
I read a thriller called The Liar's Wife, by Samantha Hayes, which started off strong enough to get me to buy it through BookBub for a couple dollars, but ended up very disappointing. Shoddily constructed, too much tension based on waiting for Big Reveals that are predictable for anyone familiar with the genre, and it seems to go for a kind of not-quite-Gaslight horror for most of it (which requires a more delicate touch than she employed, but which I appreciate anyway), and then descends rather luridly into lots of violence to make its point at the climax. (I have nothing against violence, in its place. What I'm complaining about is the abrupt discarding of one style in favor of another, as though the first - which is a very versatile and effective style when done well - just isn't any good for climactic events.)
...I think that's all for the week. The week before that was mostly binge-Pratchett with a few exceptions. One of the better of those was Zoe Chant's Bodyguard Bear: I realized within 2 pages - okay, starting with the cover-art - that it was of a genre that regrettably doesn't really work for me, but I read the whole thing anyway because it was just that adorable.
Up next: finishing The Broken Girls, continuing with Pratchett rereads, finishing The Forgetting and finding out what else Sharon Cameron has done, and two books from the library by Katie Alender that I didn't know existed: I discovered Bad Girls Don't Die a while ago, and never realized that there were sequels. And since I appear to be on a ghost-story streak, I may proceed to Mary Downing Hahn (thank you,truepenny). Not sure if I'll keep on with The Fifth Season for now. Sooner or later I'll probably read it.
For my own future reference:
This post contains mention of--
- The Broken Girls, Simone St. James
- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin
- The Forgetting, Sharon Cameron
- Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones
- Ogre Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
- The Spirit Rebellion, Rachel Aaron
- Some Quiet Place, Kelsey Sutton
- Gardenia, Kelsey Sutton
- Where Silence Gathers, Kelsey Sutton
- The Liar's Wife, Samantha Hayes
- Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
- Bodyguard Bear, Zoe Chant
-- and a whooooooole lot of Pratchett, but no actual discussion thereof.
Edit: Oh, doh! I forgot the intermediate-level graphic novel Amulet, also from the library. It was cute, but I'm not sure I'll read the rest. It has, however, reminded me to keep an eye out for graphic novels in general.
What am I reading currently: Just at this moment, I'm poking experimentally at The Broken Girls, by Simone St. James, which I found on this morning's BookBub. I liked the sample and bought it for $2 from ebooks.com, and am enjoying it so far. It seems to be an interesting blend of suspense/crime fiction and ghost story. The narrative alternates between 2014 and 1950. The 2014 story is a third person narrative from the point of view of Fiona, a journalist, who is involved with James, a police officer. The 1950 story is also in the 3rd person, each chapter from the perspective of one of four roommates at a girls' boarding school, one of whom will be murdered.
The 1950 narratives are really engaging, with the four personalities very distinct and very human in how the girls perceive themselves, the others, and the school. All of the girls are sympathetic in different ways. In 2014, the relationship between Fiona and James is interesting, and so far there's a nice balance of tensions. Fiona frustrates/worries James and others in her life with her obsession with the now-abandoned boarding school, where her older sister was killed in the 1970s (thus, not contemporary with the other narratives). As a result of deciding to write a piece on it, she is on the scene when the older (1950s) remains are discovered and becomes part of that investigation. This makes it seems likely to me that there's going to be a really nice narrative structure of development and revelations occurring in each timeline, feeding into each other. So my current feeling is that the story is interesting, the characters are interesting, and I have a lot of hope that the novel is well-crafted. My main issue at the moment is that more than half the story rests on Fiona and I'm not that interested in her yet. We'll see.
What else am I reading currently: Also open on my desktop for switching back and forth among (that's a terrible syntactical construction, I'm so sorry) are N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (SFF), which I want to like more than I do so far but am not giving up on, and Terry Pratchett's Maskerade which I am rereading for the umpteenth time for unchallenging comfort-reading. I've been on a whole binge of Pratchett re-reading in the past two weeks, and do have critical/review-y thoughts about them, but that's way too much to go into right now.
On paper, I've been reading The Forgetting, by Sharon Cameron, which I picked up at random from the library and am really liking. It's SFF, with some excellent world-building and complex character dynamics. Although the protagonist and the other main characters are young adult, they have well developed social, familial, and personal histories that make them much less simplistic than a lot of YA characters.
On my phone, at bedtime, I've periodically been rereading Diana Wynne Jones's Homeward Bounders, which I first encountered when I was 10 and living in England, had just discovered DWJ. (It was 1981; she hadn't really made it across the Atlantic very well at that point, though that changed quickly.) At the time, I'd already read a few of her other books and loved them, and when I encountered Homeward Bounders, I was quickly caught up in it. In fact, I became so caught up in it that I found myself thinking about it constantly when I was supposed to be doing other things, and eventually got freaked out at how much it had taken over my brain and sent it back to the library unfinished. I went back and read it a couple years later, and loved it. I still think it's one of her best.
I do think some people struggle with it, but I think that's partly a misunderstanding when it comes to age-appropriate recommendations. My experience aside, just because the prose is accessible to intermediate readers doesn't mean the story will be. There's a lot of DWJ that I'd recommend to 10-13 year olds, or kids reading at those levels, but there are also some that I wouldn't, or not indiscriminately, and Homeward Bounders is one of them. (I vividly recall being 11 or 12 and walking into my 2nd home, the children's section of the public library, and being haled from across the room by a reference librarian, who called, "[Calluna]! Someone tells me you understand Diana Wynne Jones!" I was bemused at the time, but I think I get it better now.)
On audio book in the car, I'm currently listening to Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment which is comfort reading of the highest order. I was stressed last week, and now I'm once again caught up in the book. However, when it's done, I'll probably go back to Rachel Aaron's The Spirit Rebellion (SFF, second book in the Eli Monpress series), which I'm listening to/reading/encountering for the first time. I've really enjoyed discovering Rachel Aaron, but I have a couple reservations that stop me from giving the books my heart, so we'll see how that goes, too. I do enjoy and respect the world-building and particular conception of how magic works in this series.
What have I read this week: at a point when I was feeling fragile, a couple days ago, I started reading Gail Carson Levine's Ogre Enchanted, which is new to me. I really, really enjoy her books and her characters' voices, except...they all start to sound the same to me. Good, but the same. The Bamarre books are a partial exception to this. I think I'll finish Ogre Enchanted at some point, because why not? but I wish the author would continue in the direction she seems to be moving in the Bamarre books and work at evolving equally charming protagonists who sound different from each other.
I discovered Kelsey Sutton at the library, and read three books by her. I'm ambivalent. The first one I read was Some Quiet Place, which on my first reading I felt was less an SFF novel than a really engaging, if imperfect, parable of dissociation. It fell into the category of books that I really like but that I'm not sure I'd be willing to try to defend to others. The premise is that the protagonist is able to see emotions as people - Guilt appearing next to someone to put a heavy hand on their shoulder, Excitement bobbing and skipping along next to a vigorous teacher, etc. - but mysteriously is untouchable by any of them. Fear, in particular, is fascinated by her and can't resist trying to figure out why he can't affect her.
Unfortunately, I went back over it, and found the flaws more pronounced, and some frustrating misunderstandings (or what are, in my opinion, misunderstandings) of the differences between denial, dissociation, and the specific form of dissociation that is traumatic forgetting. In particular, toward the end, it is strongly implied that strength of character means no need for trauma responses. Given my personal history and my profession, this pissed me the hell off, so now I'm much more ambivalent about it.
The second Sutton book I read was Gardenia, and I have a much less cohesive sense of it. The premise is that the protagonist sees glowing numbers over everyone's heads - including her own - counting down the time they have left before they die. The plot has more reflective, personal threads, of the character dealing with relationships and her own life choices when these numbers are a constant, overriding intrusion - how close does she get to a guy she likes if she knows she won't have very long with him? How does she respond to someone who's suicidal when she knows for a fact that they're going to live into their nineties? Etc. - intertwined with more active, conventionally plotty threads of her efforts to solve her best friend's murder in the time she has left. I don't have a clear critical opinion of it but I enjoyed reading it.
The third book was the 'companion' book to Some Quiet Place, Where Silence Gathers, and I frankly thought it was terrible. Its pacing was bad enough to be really obtrusive, and the parable in this case was one of revenge vs forgiveness, which left me cold. I tried to find the grieving, bewildered, angry, and depressed narrator sympathetic, but largely failed.
What else? I already talked about Alice Hoffman's The Rules of Magic. I did take a look at Practical Magic, decided it looked very similar, and chose not to continue.
I read a thriller called The Liar's Wife, by Samantha Hayes, which started off strong enough to get me to buy it through BookBub for a couple dollars, but ended up very disappointing. Shoddily constructed, too much tension based on waiting for Big Reveals that are predictable for anyone familiar with the genre, and it seems to go for a kind of not-quite-Gaslight horror for most of it (which requires a more delicate touch than she employed, but which I appreciate anyway), and then descends rather luridly into lots of violence to make its point at the climax. (I have nothing against violence, in its place. What I'm complaining about is the abrupt discarding of one style in favor of another, as though the first - which is a very versatile and effective style when done well - just isn't any good for climactic events.)
...I think that's all for the week. The week before that was mostly binge-Pratchett with a few exceptions. One of the better of those was Zoe Chant's Bodyguard Bear: I realized within 2 pages - okay, starting with the cover-art - that it was of a genre that regrettably doesn't really work for me, but I read the whole thing anyway because it was just that adorable.
Up next: finishing The Broken Girls, continuing with Pratchett rereads, finishing The Forgetting and finding out what else Sharon Cameron has done, and two books from the library by Katie Alender that I didn't know existed: I discovered Bad Girls Don't Die a while ago, and never realized that there were sequels. And since I appear to be on a ghost-story streak, I may proceed to Mary Downing Hahn (thank you,
truepenny). Not sure if I'll keep on with The Fifth Season for now. Sooner or later I'll probably read it.For my own future reference:
This post contains mention of--
- The Broken Girls, Simone St. James
- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin
- The Forgetting, Sharon Cameron
- Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones
- Ogre Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
- The Spirit Rebellion, Rachel Aaron
- Some Quiet Place, Kelsey Sutton
- Gardenia, Kelsey Sutton
- Where Silence Gathers, Kelsey Sutton
- The Liar's Wife, Samantha Hayes
- Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
- Bodyguard Bear, Zoe Chant
-- and a whooooooole lot of Pratchett, but no actual discussion thereof.
Edit: Oh, doh! I forgot the intermediate-level graphic novel Amulet, also from the library. It was cute, but I'm not sure I'll read the rest. It has, however, reminded me to keep an eye out for graphic novels in general.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 01:11 am (UTC)I guess they couldn't, at that point, have been thinking about _Fire And Hemlock_, the ending of which baffles many people. But otherwise, I don't... really understand what's not to understand.
(I don't know when I read _Homeward Bounders_, but it was appropriate for whatever age I was then.)
"...no need for trauma responses..."
Kill.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 11:31 am (UTC)I think it was either Homeward Bounders or The Spellcoats, but I couldn't swear to it.