stuff i read 26 aug 2023
Aug. 26th, 2023 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanel Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns (2008)(Kate Daniels #2) In which Kate proves that her skillset consists of more than just swinging a really big sword. Turns out she is also fully capable of lawyering you to death. It’s a Ghastek, I’m talking about Ghastek in the fried chicken scene:
She done nailed him with the fine print!!!! Gooooo Kate gooo! I see that brief run-in with the witches laying the groundwork for Book 5. And yeah, levity aside, I think it’s pretty indisputable the emotional throughline of this book is Kate’s relationship with Bran. What relationship, you ask? There is no relationship. He’s a Men’s Rights Activist who wants to get in her pants, and for most of of the book they are working at cross-purposes, you say. My point precisely. In Kate’s own words:
So I thought the Crest/Myong subplot was extraneous because who cares about Kate and Curran’s exes right? Until we get to this exchange between Kate and Curran, which encapsulates their competing worldviews: Curran admits he’s throwing a wrench in the proceedings because he thinks Crest would be bad for Myong; he’s not jealous of her new flame, he’s looking out for her. That’s what an alpha does. Kate points out, “If you keep delaying the wedding, you’ll just drive her to suicide again.” “You saw the scars?” says Curran. Kate says, “People must make their own choices, no matter how wrong those choices are. Otherwise they can’t be free.” The payoff for this is of course in book 5 when Julie’s on the verge of going loup and Kate will do anything, literally ANYTHING to save her, and she isn’t asking Curran for permission she’s like “yup this is my decision” and he backs her up. Because people must be allowed to make their own choices, however boneheaded.
So we meet Julie. Who is mostly a prop in this book tbh I do not discern a personality. That’s ok, Julie in this instance is another notch on Kate’s “guess I gotta form ATTACHMENTS to other HUMANS grumblegrumble” belt. Oh and this book also marks Andrea’s introduction. Kate is totally losing her internal battle to avoid forming attachments but given where she’s coming from we should cut her some slack:
Now THIS is a goddamn good book, mainly because the tournament gives it a clear arc. Some of the weaker entries in the series tend to meander, but in this case the crackerjack plot is propelled by the endgame we know, right out of the box, we’re working toward: Kate will swing her big bad sword all over the arena. How she’ll get there we have no clue but we’re primed for it.
First an aside: I just think it’s quaint they have hazard pay and dental insurance in the Mercenary Guild. Like, you would think the end of the world would have made actuarial tables obsolete but somehow the engine of capitalism chugs right along. “Different economic possibilities from the present” is clearly not an axis upon which the Andrews’ imagination turns.
SPOILERS SPOILERS
Second, Derek has a character arc! He has a, er, reverse glow-up? “Pretty boy gets beaten within a millimeter of his life and his face is never the same again” is a fair summary. But that’s just the plot synopsis of whathappens to Derek; it doesn’t describe his internal journey. Kate: “If your roles were reversed, she wouldn’t do the same for you. She’s using you.” Derek: “It doesn’t matter what she does. It only matters what I do.” The healing tank is a crucible, and when Derek emerges from it he is a man with a plan. The plan is to be Curran 2.0 which…ok seems like a lot of work but I support your dreams babe.
Third, Saiman, like Ghastek in the previous book, is sort of uneasy ally…before getting sidelined entirely when Our Gang is sequestered in the arena for the tournament in the final 1/4 of the book. I wish we had gotten Saiman’s pov during the second half of the book because can you IMAGINE how outraged he was to find out he was BACKSTABBED by a BUSINESS PARTNER???? Saiman of course sits on the board of powerful people that runs these super-duper-illegal disgustingly-profitable Midnight Games. Like Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games, Ilona Andrews understands that it’s not what happens in the arena that represents the greatest threat to its combatants—it’s the powerful agendas of the those who pull the strings from behind the scenes. Meaning, Roland. Meaning, Hugh.
Enter Hugh d’Ambray and his Sexy Antagonist Swagger (tm). Idk that I would have glommed onto Hugh so hard if I met him here, at the height of his arrogance, but I met him in Iron and Magic when he was at his lowest emotional ebb and he’s my broken bird and I’m keeping him. He’s so damn good at what he does—he probably reports 110% job satisfaction on all the surveys—why Roland would ever dismiss this man from his service I cannot fathom. (There is a hilarious scene in Iron and Magic where Hugh uses some shapeshifters as bait for a vampire ambush and Ascanio afterwards is like “Motherfucker how did you know” and Hugh retorts “Because I’ve been a warlord longer than you’ve been alive. Are you going to keep standing there with your dick out? We’re losing the light” one of my favorite exchanges EVER that i forgot to quote in my review of that book.) The instant Hugh lays eyes on Kate he’s like “spar with me”, and the payoff isn’t until three books from now but let the record reflect that in that moment Kate wanted to. She recognized it was a bad idea but she wanted to. He’s not wrong that when you’re at the top of your game you would give anything to cross blades with someone who challenges you. What I love about Hugh is that he makes decisions unclouded by ego, as a lot of other men in his position (or possessing his stacked bod!) would: As the tournament wears on and Kate’s team demonstrates what they’re capable of, and it dawns on Hugh that the team he’s backing doesn’t have this thing in the bag, he pivots without fuss. New strategy: endow his team with an indestructible magic sword. He’s not going to wave his dick around and spout a bunch of puffery about how his team is clearly going to smoke the competition. Nope, Hugh’s got a job to do and he is not taking any chances. Unfortunately Hugh had no way of knowing that Kate has an ace up her sleeve. Damn, is there anything Kate’s magical blood can’t do??
Fifth, this is the book where Kate officially jettisons her stepdad’s “say no to emotional entanglements” maxim. Quite dramatically—by impaling herself on an indestructible sword in order to save her friends. But I want to draw your attention to this line: “I would rather walk a hundred times into the Pit than see one of them die there. The gong struck.” So this sentence frames the difficult thing as —not sacrificing one’s lifeblood—but just walking into the arena itself. Subjecting yourself to the uncertainty of the outcome of gladiatorial combat. That’s the scary thing. Kate has a lot of practice at this; Kate has been walking into arenas since she was twelve years old. This is the first thing we learn about Voron that made me go whoah hold up a sec. Kate makes him sound like Father of the Year but the whole time he was carting a twelve-year-old around, not to piano recitals or field hockey or whatever, but this? Does he really have her best interests at heart? Defeating Roland is a matter of survival but does he have to be so bloody single-minded about forging Kate into the perfect weapon? One of the things the Kate Daniels books do best is peeling away the layers of Voron’s backstory, because this is the book where the seed of doubt was planted in my head, and in the next book we learn how he died, and then the next book we learn that he’d probably been Imperius’d into raising Kate, and in the next book we learn who killed him. Each successive revelation builds on the previous book’s but is tied to that specific book’s themes. It’s so elegant.
Sixth, Curran and Kate kiss! I understand structurally why the kiss had to be aborted—if they’d consummated with sex then it woulda felt hollow because the emotional connection wasn’t there yet because Kate & Curran still have too much stuff to work out—but the nature of this particular interruption (Derek walks in to say something forgettable) did not feel organic.
Seventh, characters we meet in this book: Rene “chronically undermined by inept underlings” Chief of Arena Security! Dali “i’m a vegetarian tiger and i drive fast cars”! Jim’s paranoia!!! All excellent members of the recurring/supporting cast.
Shoutout to Kate’s Phedre nò Delaunay moment:
Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds(2010)(Kate Daniels #4) SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS This week in “Kate’s dad’s latest genocide strategy,” Kate’s Aunt Erra comes to town and puts all the shapeshifters on notice. She starts spreading extremely potent magical plagues. She’s piloting dead mages the way one pilots vampires. She looks, eerily, just like Kate. This line from their matchup stuck with me, when Kate says: “You learned to fight when magic was a certainty, so you rely on it to help you in a fight. I learned to fight when technology still had the upper hand. I rely on speed and technique. Without magic you can’t beat me.” I never noticed before how well adapted to this new world Kate is. Kate is like one of those armored cars the necromancers drive that runs almost equally well on gasoline and hydraulic magic. Of course a person (or a machine) is always going to have a strong suit, magic or tech, and Kate given who she is is always going to lean magic, but she’s worked her ass off to become as deadly as she is at hand-to-hand combat. Some of the piece of shit cars they make, when the magic hits and the internal combustion engine quits, they might take 20 minutes to chant into gear. Kate is not (metaphorically) one of them, Kate is top-of-the-line.
First, the negatives: I found Kate and Curran’s estrangement (they are estranged for the better part of the book) pretty fucking contrived. It came down to “you stood me up on a date” vs. “no you stood me up” ok can either of you guys pick up the damn phone?
This book asks the question: Who qualifies as human? Shapeshifters are human, duh, but I think it’s so interesting to look at the assumptions underpinning this exchange: ”If someone is nonhuman, they have no rights, Andrea. No protection.” “That’s why you have to stay and fight. If people like you leave, the Order will never change. The change has to come from within to be effective.” Put aside for the moment Kate and Andrea’s clashing strategic visions on how to effect change—Kate says you apply pressure from outside the organization, Andrea says you do it from within, I say porque no los dos (on the left we call this the “inside-outside strategy”). Now, the Order of Merciful Aid abides by an insanely narrow definition of “human” and that’s a problem, but is it really the case that marginalized folks’ greatest bulwark is a framework of individual rights? I am not saying that formal equality before the law isn’t necessary; just that it’s insufficient. The reason Atlanta’s shapeshifters are able to repel the threat of Erra is because they’re organized. Collectively the Pack wields its power to protect their interests. The Pack, when it has to, even allies with its historic enemies eg. necromancers. And the Pack’s vast resources means it can take care of its own. This book ends with Kate getting fired from her job with the Order as a direct consequence of sticking up for the Pack’s interests. (Did she even have W2 status or was she a 1099 freelance contractor? Nm even if she was W2 they wouldn’t have to pay her severance or unemployment since they let her go “for cause.”) Never fret though Curran swoops in to front her the capital to start her own consulting business. Controversial question: Is Kate Daniels, coasting on her dad’s magic and her boyfriend’s money, a nepobaby? I am obviously being deliberately provocative but I think the very fact that this is a question we can ask, that it makes sense to ask this of the text, is a point in its favor. I might not subscribe to the Andrews’ entire suite of political & economic assumptions but I’m glad they have assumptions for me to interrogate, that they’re bringing this stuff to the table not handwaving it away.
Blair Braverman, Small Game (2022) Unscripted “survival” TV show contestants are stranded in the woods when their entire production team evaporates overnight without explanation. The show is called Civilization. This is a very good book. It’s not doing anything unduly complicated plotwise but it’s so good at showcasing the different ways people can have high emotional intelligence, and how the line between the gross kind of manipulation vs. manipulating others for survival is not a bright line. It’s not that there’s the wilderness over here and there’s the human jungle over there—it’s all one big jumbled jungle. “I came here to have choices,” says our protagonist Mara, and choices she shall have, though not the ones she wanted nor expected. Mara was recruited from her day job as an instructor at a survival school, a job where 95% of her expertise lay in massaging clients’ egos so as to validate their worldviews and give them a “transformational” excursion into the wilderness. Mara is packing serious survival skills, but those were always secondary to her people skills.
There are four contestants. They started out with five but one quit 3 days into filming—Mara was unimpressed “not because he went home but because of all the agonizing about it.” They start out as archetypes and they end up brimming with surprises. Of course the producers would have wanted to cast certain types of people and to push certain storylines. And of course people are multifaceted. The way Braverman made me do a 180 on the nineteen-year-old incipient incel whose brusque overconfidence in his Scout training endangers his fellow survivors’ lives? I wept for Kyle by the end. In the opening pages Mara denigrates Kyle’s choice of tool—on day 1 they all got to pick one tool from a precurated selection. By the conclusion of Kyle’s arc though:
”Who are you?” Ghastek said finally. “And what have you done with Kate?”
”I’m the person whose job it is to settle disputes between the Order and the Guild. I have a lot of free time on my hands, and I spend this time reading the Order’s Charter and the Guild’s Manual. Would you prefer if I went back to my normal mode of conversation?”
”I think so.”
“You underestimated the witches, mouthed off, and got punched. Don’t come crying to me.” I picked up a chicken wing. Food. Finally.
She done nailed him with the fine print!!!! Gooooo Kate gooo! I see that brief run-in with the witches laying the groundwork for Book 5. And yeah, levity aside, I think it’s pretty indisputable the emotional throughline of this book is Kate’s relationship with Bran. What relationship, you ask? There is no relationship. He’s a Men’s Rights Activist who wants to get in her pants, and for most of of the book they are working at cross-purposes, you say. My point precisely. In Kate’s own words:
I didn’t love him, I barely knew him, but God, it hurt. Why was it that I killed everyone I touched?Ladies and gentlemen…drumroll please….Kate Daniels, giving a shit about other people against her better judgment. Her big accomplishment in this book is getting Bran to also give a shit about others. I mean that literally, Kate doesn’t slay the monster herself. Her agency as a character lies in her ability to persuade Bran that caring is worth it, and for him to fight on the side of the good guys. Think about the task the witches set her, to convince Bran to volunteer his blood of his own free will—no entrapment or horsetrading or the blood would lose its potency—and how Kate really did it, she talked him around. This is just so infernally clever. The Andrews set Kate up in the first book as The Brawn. Then in book two they show us violence is not even the deadliest tool in her arsenal. God help us all if Kate ever tries to persuade us.
So I thought the Crest/Myong subplot was extraneous because who cares about Kate and Curran’s exes right? Until we get to this exchange between Kate and Curran, which encapsulates their competing worldviews: Curran admits he’s throwing a wrench in the proceedings because he thinks Crest would be bad for Myong; he’s not jealous of her new flame, he’s looking out for her. That’s what an alpha does. Kate points out, “If you keep delaying the wedding, you’ll just drive her to suicide again.” “You saw the scars?” says Curran. Kate says, “People must make their own choices, no matter how wrong those choices are. Otherwise they can’t be free.” The payoff for this is of course in book 5 when Julie’s on the verge of going loup and Kate will do anything, literally ANYTHING to save her, and she isn’t asking Curran for permission she’s like “yup this is my decision” and he backs her up. Because people must be allowed to make their own choices, however boneheaded.
So we meet Julie. Who is mostly a prop in this book tbh I do not discern a personality. That’s ok, Julie in this instance is another notch on Kate’s “guess I gotta form ATTACHMENTS to other HUMANS grumblegrumble” belt. Oh and this book also marks Andrea’s introduction. Kate is totally losing her internal battle to avoid forming attachments but given where she’s coming from we should cut her some slack:
Considering that the two men I had most loved and admired spent my formative years drilling into me the I could rely on myself and myself alone, trusting other people was easier said than done.Ilona Andrews, Magic Strikes(2009)(Kate Daniels #3) Whaddup party people it’s the Hunger Games book!!!! (vuvuzelas blare in the background) They fight to the death in a gladiatorial arena! I love that everybody (Kate, Jim, Derek) valiantly struggles to keep their activities off Curran’s radar and then Julie shows up and narcs on them within 5 minutes. Because she wanted to watch Kate fight. Lol amazing.
Now THIS is a goddamn good book, mainly because the tournament gives it a clear arc. Some of the weaker entries in the series tend to meander, but in this case the crackerjack plot is propelled by the endgame we know, right out of the box, we’re working toward: Kate will swing her big bad sword all over the arena. How she’ll get there we have no clue but we’re primed for it.
First an aside: I just think it’s quaint they have hazard pay and dental insurance in the Mercenary Guild. Like, you would think the end of the world would have made actuarial tables obsolete but somehow the engine of capitalism chugs right along. “Different economic possibilities from the present” is clearly not an axis upon which the Andrews’ imagination turns.
SPOILERS SPOILERS
Second, Derek has a character arc! He has a, er, reverse glow-up? “Pretty boy gets beaten within a millimeter of his life and his face is never the same again” is a fair summary. But that’s just the plot synopsis of whathappens to Derek; it doesn’t describe his internal journey. Kate: “If your roles were reversed, she wouldn’t do the same for you. She’s using you.” Derek: “It doesn’t matter what she does. It only matters what I do.” The healing tank is a crucible, and when Derek emerges from it he is a man with a plan. The plan is to be Curran 2.0 which…ok seems like a lot of work but I support your dreams babe.
Third, Saiman, like Ghastek in the previous book, is sort of uneasy ally…before getting sidelined entirely when Our Gang is sequestered in the arena for the tournament in the final 1/4 of the book. I wish we had gotten Saiman’s pov during the second half of the book because can you IMAGINE how outraged he was to find out he was BACKSTABBED by a BUSINESS PARTNER???? Saiman of course sits on the board of powerful people that runs these super-duper-illegal disgustingly-profitable Midnight Games. Like Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games, Ilona Andrews understands that it’s not what happens in the arena that represents the greatest threat to its combatants—it’s the powerful agendas of the those who pull the strings from behind the scenes. Meaning, Roland. Meaning, Hugh.
Enter Hugh d’Ambray and his Sexy Antagonist Swagger (tm). Idk that I would have glommed onto Hugh so hard if I met him here, at the height of his arrogance, but I met him in Iron and Magic when he was at his lowest emotional ebb and he’s my broken bird and I’m keeping him. He’s so damn good at what he does—he probably reports 110% job satisfaction on all the surveys—why Roland would ever dismiss this man from his service I cannot fathom. (There is a hilarious scene in Iron and Magic where Hugh uses some shapeshifters as bait for a vampire ambush and Ascanio afterwards is like “Motherfucker how did you know” and Hugh retorts “Because I’ve been a warlord longer than you’ve been alive. Are you going to keep standing there with your dick out? We’re losing the light” one of my favorite exchanges EVER that i forgot to quote in my review of that book.) The instant Hugh lays eyes on Kate he’s like “spar with me”, and the payoff isn’t until three books from now but let the record reflect that in that moment Kate wanted to. She recognized it was a bad idea but she wanted to. He’s not wrong that when you’re at the top of your game you would give anything to cross blades with someone who challenges you. What I love about Hugh is that he makes decisions unclouded by ego, as a lot of other men in his position (or possessing his stacked bod!) would: As the tournament wears on and Kate’s team demonstrates what they’re capable of, and it dawns on Hugh that the team he’s backing doesn’t have this thing in the bag, he pivots without fuss. New strategy: endow his team with an indestructible magic sword. He’s not going to wave his dick around and spout a bunch of puffery about how his team is clearly going to smoke the competition. Nope, Hugh’s got a job to do and he is not taking any chances. Unfortunately Hugh had no way of knowing that Kate has an ace up her sleeve. Damn, is there anything Kate’s magical blood can’t do??
Fifth, this is the book where Kate officially jettisons her stepdad’s “say no to emotional entanglements” maxim. Quite dramatically—by impaling herself on an indestructible sword in order to save her friends. But I want to draw your attention to this line: “I would rather walk a hundred times into the Pit than see one of them die there. The gong struck.” So this sentence frames the difficult thing as —not sacrificing one’s lifeblood—but just walking into the arena itself. Subjecting yourself to the uncertainty of the outcome of gladiatorial combat. That’s the scary thing. Kate has a lot of practice at this; Kate has been walking into arenas since she was twelve years old. This is the first thing we learn about Voron that made me go whoah hold up a sec. Kate makes him sound like Father of the Year but the whole time he was carting a twelve-year-old around, not to piano recitals or field hockey or whatever, but this? Does he really have her best interests at heart? Defeating Roland is a matter of survival but does he have to be so bloody single-minded about forging Kate into the perfect weapon? One of the things the Kate Daniels books do best is peeling away the layers of Voron’s backstory, because this is the book where the seed of doubt was planted in my head, and in the next book we learn how he died, and then the next book we learn that he’d probably been Imperius’d into raising Kate, and in the next book we learn who killed him. Each successive revelation builds on the previous book’s but is tied to that specific book’s themes. It’s so elegant.
Sixth, Curran and Kate kiss! I understand structurally why the kiss had to be aborted—if they’d consummated with sex then it woulda felt hollow because the emotional connection wasn’t there yet because Kate & Curran still have too much stuff to work out—but the nature of this particular interruption (Derek walks in to say something forgettable) did not feel organic.
Seventh, characters we meet in this book: Rene “chronically undermined by inept underlings” Chief of Arena Security! Dali “i’m a vegetarian tiger and i drive fast cars”! Jim’s paranoia!!! All excellent members of the recurring/supporting cast.
Shoutout to Kate’s Phedre nò Delaunay moment:
As we marched back to the Arena Saiman said, “I thought you said those weren’t blades in your hair.” “They aren’t. They’re spikes.”
Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds(2010)(Kate Daniels #4) SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS This week in “Kate’s dad’s latest genocide strategy,” Kate’s Aunt Erra comes to town and puts all the shapeshifters on notice. She starts spreading extremely potent magical plagues. She’s piloting dead mages the way one pilots vampires. She looks, eerily, just like Kate. This line from their matchup stuck with me, when Kate says: “You learned to fight when magic was a certainty, so you rely on it to help you in a fight. I learned to fight when technology still had the upper hand. I rely on speed and technique. Without magic you can’t beat me.” I never noticed before how well adapted to this new world Kate is. Kate is like one of those armored cars the necromancers drive that runs almost equally well on gasoline and hydraulic magic. Of course a person (or a machine) is always going to have a strong suit, magic or tech, and Kate given who she is is always going to lean magic, but she’s worked her ass off to become as deadly as she is at hand-to-hand combat. Some of the piece of shit cars they make, when the magic hits and the internal combustion engine quits, they might take 20 minutes to chant into gear. Kate is not (metaphorically) one of them, Kate is top-of-the-line.
First, the negatives: I found Kate and Curran’s estrangement (they are estranged for the better part of the book) pretty fucking contrived. It came down to “you stood me up on a date” vs. “no you stood me up” ok can either of you guys pick up the damn phone?
This book asks the question: Who qualifies as human? Shapeshifters are human, duh, but I think it’s so interesting to look at the assumptions underpinning this exchange: ”If someone is nonhuman, they have no rights, Andrea. No protection.” “That’s why you have to stay and fight. If people like you leave, the Order will never change. The change has to come from within to be effective.” Put aside for the moment Kate and Andrea’s clashing strategic visions on how to effect change—Kate says you apply pressure from outside the organization, Andrea says you do it from within, I say porque no los dos (on the left we call this the “inside-outside strategy”). Now, the Order of Merciful Aid abides by an insanely narrow definition of “human” and that’s a problem, but is it really the case that marginalized folks’ greatest bulwark is a framework of individual rights? I am not saying that formal equality before the law isn’t necessary; just that it’s insufficient. The reason Atlanta’s shapeshifters are able to repel the threat of Erra is because they’re organized. Collectively the Pack wields its power to protect their interests. The Pack, when it has to, even allies with its historic enemies eg. necromancers. And the Pack’s vast resources means it can take care of its own. This book ends with Kate getting fired from her job with the Order as a direct consequence of sticking up for the Pack’s interests. (Did she even have W2 status or was she a 1099 freelance contractor? Nm even if she was W2 they wouldn’t have to pay her severance or unemployment since they let her go “for cause.”) Never fret though Curran swoops in to front her the capital to start her own consulting business. Controversial question: Is Kate Daniels, coasting on her dad’s magic and her boyfriend’s money, a nepobaby? I am obviously being deliberately provocative but I think the very fact that this is a question we can ask, that it makes sense to ask this of the text, is a point in its favor. I might not subscribe to the Andrews’ entire suite of political & economic assumptions but I’m glad they have assumptions for me to interrogate, that they’re bringing this stuff to the table not handwaving it away.
Blair Braverman, Small Game (2022) Unscripted “survival” TV show contestants are stranded in the woods when their entire production team evaporates overnight without explanation. The show is called Civilization. This is a very good book. It’s not doing anything unduly complicated plotwise but it’s so good at showcasing the different ways people can have high emotional intelligence, and how the line between the gross kind of manipulation vs. manipulating others for survival is not a bright line. It’s not that there’s the wilderness over here and there’s the human jungle over there—it’s all one big jumbled jungle. “I came here to have choices,” says our protagonist Mara, and choices she shall have, though not the ones she wanted nor expected. Mara was recruited from her day job as an instructor at a survival school, a job where 95% of her expertise lay in massaging clients’ egos so as to validate their worldviews and give them a “transformational” excursion into the wilderness. Mara is packing serious survival skills, but those were always secondary to her people skills.
There are four contestants. They started out with five but one quit 3 days into filming—Mara was unimpressed “not because he went home but because of all the agonizing about it.” They start out as archetypes and they end up brimming with surprises. Of course the producers would have wanted to cast certain types of people and to push certain storylines. And of course people are multifaceted. The way Braverman made me do a 180 on the nineteen-year-old incipient incel whose brusque overconfidence in his Scout training endangers his fellow survivors’ lives? I wept for Kyle by the end. In the opening pages Mara denigrates Kyle’s choice of tool—on day 1 they all got to pick one tool from a precurated selection. By the conclusion of Kyle’s arc though:
”He just had to pick a bow drill,” said Mara. “He couldn’t resist.”So yes, Kyle was a dumbass for picking the bow drill over a knife or a pot. Yet Kyle’s choice was in the grand reckoning a good choice, only not for the reasons Kyle thought it was (in the same way Kyle himself is a valuable person, only not for the reasons he thinks he is). Probably not a coincidence either that unlike the other firestarting technologies listed above, IT TAKES TWO PEOPLE to properly start a fire with a bow drill!!!! Civilization = cooperation babes!!!
”It never runs out,” said Bullfrog. “With a lighter, matches, when you use ‘em up, you’re screwed. Bow drill lasts forever.”
Mara knelt beside him and took the other end of the bow.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-27 04:17 pm (UTC)Book 3 in contrast I remember VERY WELL, and it was a lot of fun. I can report that I did not glom on to Hugh at this point, though I did notice him and was I think intrigued.
What I love about Hugh is that he makes decisions unclouded by ego
Yes! I also really like/am impressed by this! (Speaking of Hugh -- that didn't start in this book, but I spent the later books in which Hugh shows up shipping Hugh/Kate hardcore -- it's the kind of foeyay I enjoy, and a rare het example of it, at that. I assume the Hugh & Kate relationship probably hits differently when you meet Hugh in the book where he gets a romance/life partner, but.)
One of the things the Kate Daniels books do best is peeling away the layers of Voron’s backstory, because this is the book where the seed of doubt was planted in my head, and in the next book we learn how he died, and then the next book we learn that he’d probably been Imperius’d into raising Kate, and in the next book we learn who killed him. Each successive revelation builds on the previous book’s but is tied to that specific book’s themes. It’s so elegant.
Concur! The Voron reveals and Kate's unreliable narrator lens on the whole thing is the thing that's most impressed me in this series.
Controversial question: Is Kate Daniels, coasting on her dad’s magic and her boyfriend’s money, a nepobaby?
LOL! I do think she is, at least once her connections become widely known. But to her credit, she is really pissed about it :P
Looking forward to your continued Kate thoughts! (Mine are all at this tag,can't remember if I've linked you before or not)
no subject
Date: 2023-08-27 06:58 pm (UTC)