stuff i read 13 Jan 2024

[tabacoychanel]

 

Ilona Andrews, Magic Triumphs (2016)(Kate Daniels #10) Working mom Kate Lennart gives a TED talk on “How to cultivate grandparent-grandchild relationships when grandpa is literally Voldemort.” Sure I’m being tongue-in-cheek but not one hundred percent tongue-in-cheek. I skipped a few books due to vagaries of library hold availability. So Atlanta belongs to Kate now, in a “the Fisher King = the land” way. The plot is a little slow to kick into gear—I would say it doesn’t really get rolling until Hugh rather dramatically shows up—and Hugh is of course the book’s big highlight even if he doesn’t get a ton of screen time. Hugh is doing the hard work of repairing his relationships with the people he’s hurt. This book is very good on the “repairing relationships” front and less satisfactory on “climactic battle with a literal dragon who drinks bone powder smoothies for breakfast.” We’ve been building up to this for ten books—I don’t mean the dragon, the dragon is new: I mean the part where Kate asks her dad for help and then they fight on the same side.

There’s a lot going on in this book and I’m not sure all of it is pulling in the same direction. Kate’s made friends out of formerly uneasy allies, she’s knit a cohesive community out of Atlanta’s patchwork of warring factions, she’s got unlimited free childcare in the form of grandparents & doting aunties and yet “having it all” is still beyond her. This is all in theory stuff I care about but lemme tell you the pacing was WHACK. For the first half before Hugh’s big entrance nothing happened. I think it was supposed to be an ominous-buildup kind of nothing-happens but it didn’t feel like it was building toward anything. Then after the final battle we should have had at LEAST another Scouring of the Shire worth of scenes for me to feel emotionally satisfied by this, the capstone of a TEN BOOK SERIES. The Andrews have a lot of other irons in the fire, and I am grateful for getting to spend time in Kate’s universe but it’s disappointing to see them wrap up Kate’s main storyline with so little care. Iirc they did have some dispute with their publisher and future novels will be published by a diff publisher so that may have had something to do with it?

Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018) A shockingly compassionate story about facing up to our past fuckups. Napoleonic war veteran John Lacroix washes up, traumatized and half-deaf, from his tour of the Iberian Peninsula. We don’t know what kind of trauma and he’s not exactly forthcoming. Lacroix’s energy is very “will perish if even one (1) person Perceives me" and the novel’s plot revolves around his Eat-Pray-Love journey of self-actualization to a clutch of remote Scottish islands. I’m not playin. In the hands of a lesser storyteller Lacroix’s manpain would be 1) offputting and 2) tedious as hell, but Miller intersperses Lacroix’s chapters with the assassin (!) who’s stalking him, and that’s the motor of the plot (otherwise you’d just have Lacroix moping for 400 pages). Lacroix’s chapters alternate with the antagonist, Calley. Calley is a vicious sonofabitch, a rank-and-file soldier dispatched by the military brass to hunt Lacroix down in secret and slit his throat. Lacroix has become a target because he’s a political liability, and the higherups have tasked Calley with the dirty work so as to keep their own hands clean. It’s pretty clear who is culpable for the atrocities committed in Spain, and it’s not Captain John fucking Lacroix.

Not to say that Lacroix has not committed war crimes. He totally has! But like anybody else who’s made major mistakes, he must learn to live with them, not keep beating himself up with the bludgeon of guilt. Lacroix starts out super decision-averse and drifts along pondering things like "Was love, once given, always possessed? A gift, a quality, you could scatter over your head like sacred ashes when you had need of it?" and “But I am not dying, he thought. I have not earned that yet.” It’s a blessed relief when he meets his love interest, Emily, and she sets him straight. He confesses what he’s done. She says:

“I do not know how to judge any of this. It is not for me to judge it. I suppose you must go on living with it somehow. But I do not feel disgraced by knowing you. Nor do I wish to be free of you. I began to love you as John Lovall. I shall love you still as John Lacroix.”

He finally tells her how he’s committed all these war crimes and she’s like, “thanks for telling me.” I think he was hoping she’d forgive him but she’s very clear it’s not her job to have an opinion; if he wants to forgive himself he can do the work. Like!!! The emotional intelligence of this woman. What she was upset at Lacroix about was not trusting her with the truth. Trust is the bedrock of intimacy. We have nothing if we do not have trust.

This book is fucking phenomenal. Miller parcels out information with an eye to maximum emotional impact. He writes about an era when British imperialism was at its apogee without in any way aggrandizing the British Empire. He depicts class as a hierarchy as inexorable as the laws of physics: Lacroix is self-evidently an officer and a gentleman and people recognize him as such and he’s not trying to pass himself off otherwise. When I say it’s a compassionate story I mean by the end I was weeping for the antagonist, Calley, who has zero redeeming qualities—I’m telling you this character was composed of pure unadulterated malice and yet. And yet:

Lacroix wept. It came on him like a shift in the weather, a vertigo, moved through his chest, his throat, convulsed his face. Who was it for? He hoped it was for the girl on the chair in Morales but feared it was only for himself. As for the man he had just buried, who would shed tears for Corporal Calley? Would anyone miss him? Did he have a family? A sweetheart? A friend? Had he not, at the end, boasted of a friend?

Emily Henry, Book Lovers (2022) The platonic ideal of a romance novel. As far as I am concerned Emily Henry is JUSTLY fêted as the queen of contemporary romance. The way she deploys tropes in this book and is self-aware about them and invites the reader in on the joke is all fairly meta, and probably would not work well for a Romance newbie, but I personally found it rewarding.

 Her dialogue is punchy, her sex scenes will melt your face off, her pacing is dynamite, and somehow in the midst of entertaining us for hundreds of pages without reprieve she managed to sneak in themes?? Check this: “Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.”

John Grisham, The Pelican Brief (1992) When people talk about “thriller pacing” do they just mean you withhold information from the reader for no discernible reason? How is that a flex??? It’s been a hot minute since I read a John Grisham. The man can still spin a crackling yarn, but I found myself growing agitated as I tore through this. I’m still trying to think why it upset me so much. The political flashpoints of 1992 are visibly and risibly not the same as today (lol at a Supreme Court Chief Justice who says “let’s wait till we have a full bench before we decide any important cases”) but the model of politics as horserace and horse trading, that is familiar West Wing territory. I think Grisham has sincere environmental convictions--the titular brief was, to my surprise, about the endangered bird and not code for something else—but he also sees queerness as social contagion, and his female protagonist made me throw up in my mouth a little. Darby Shaw is SO smart and SO attractive that every man who comes within her orbit is reduced to panting after her. Her dead lover’s best friend wants to get in her pants and he’s never even met her, she’s just so hot he can’t help it! I think the difference between Darby’s depiction and your standard Mary Sue self-insert is that it’s clear she’s written by a man, and when a man admires a woman he does not desire to emulate her but to possess her. That was a big element of what upset me. But a bigger problem was it’s not very good storytelling. The tempo doesn’t build to a crescendo so much as zig and zag randomly. The withholding of crucial info from the reader felt like crass manipulation rather than designed for emotional impact. If the goal was to get me to turn pages it worked. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to batter my way through another book that casually trashes “the addicts and transvesites” for such paltry payoff.

Grisham has one superb quality which is instinctual sympathy for the little guy. I have a problem with how he defines “little guy” but he clearly envisionshimself as rooting for David against Goliath. Tbh the most unrealistic part of the book was the depiction of journalism as a prestigious, well paid, or secure profession. The actual funniest scene was when Darby astutely wields her white woman privilege to extricate herself from a public space where she almost falls into the baddies’ clutches. P.S John Grisham psttttt you’re a lawyer and I’m not but do you not realize that suicide invalidates one’s life insurance payout

Martha Wells, Witch King (2022) I enjoyed it but by golly I would not recommend it universally. Martha Wells just picks you up and dunks you headfirst into a river of worldbuilding and it’s sink or swim. I hasten to add it’s not infodumpy it’s just well-lived-in, the way LOTR feels lived-in. I found Kai as a protagonist difficult to get a read on, I think I was looking for similarities between him and Murderbot and I didn’t find them right away. But the BIG SPOILERY PLOT THING that happens at the 17% mark sure made me sit up and pay attention. The thing to understand about Kai is that he has lost his people. Literally lost them, in many instances, but more broadly speaking the world has changed to an unrecognizable degree and he’s not sure he has a place in it anymore. That is the throughline to Murderbot, the question of where do I fit in and where are “my” people who will accept me without trying to change or fix me. It explains Kai’s utterly irrational fear of losing Ziede—Kai has so few of “his” people left. It is for this reason that Kai’s festering suspicion of Dahin’s betrayal did not strike me as believable—not that I didn’t believe Dahin was capable, at that point I barely knew Dahin— but I did not believe Martha Wells would set me up for a betrayal like that. And I was right. The betrayal that Kai actually experiences, towards the end of the book, is much less a knife to the gut than a melancholy grace note. Like Kai spends this whole book trying to process the trauma of a million past betrayals, and begin to trust people again, and it’s like. Ugh why are people like this.

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (2022) A rollicking read that left me satisfied through and through. The ending sorta fizzled but i don’t mind, if i had a choice between rereading this or smth that sticks the landing (eg a brandon sanderson) you bet your bottom dollar i’d choose this every time. Tbc I thought Part IV “Magna Terra” (aka the second timeline) was the strongest section because every reveal was just exquisitely built upon the og timeline (#normalizeAUsinprofic). I love that it was a book not devoid of romantic relationships but just didn’t center that kind of relationship. To call Kyr’s relationship with Cleo frenemies seems overly flippant but at the same time if the shoe fits…and Avi! you could tell Tesh was having so much fun writing Avi! This was not a short book and there wasn’t a two-dimensional character in sight. Also fascist deradicalization and dismantling the gender binary are great, in case anyone needed to hear that.

Sophie Irwin, The Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting (2022) An impeccable historical romance that feels very contemporary in the central tension it sets up between love vs. economic survival. I just don’t understand in what universe the institution of marriage is mostly about the romantic connection between two individuals??? Anyway great story! Protagonist goes on the marriage mart to secure her penniless sisters’ futures; sets out to entrap a nobleman; accidentally entraps nobleman’s way hotter & richer brother instead. If only the supporting cast was stronger this would have been five stars!

Kennedy Ryan, The Kingmaker (2019) The premise: Disowned scion of an oil-and-gas oligarch falls for an indigenous pipeline protestor. It was fine? I guess? The sex was hot. And against my own priors (I don’t generally go for “one partner is lying about an important aspect of his identity from the jump”) I enjoyed it. But so much of the story revolved around this inside-baseball model of political change that was fundamentally uninteresting to me. I’ll be on the lookout for more from this author though!

Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol (Murderbot #3) (2018) OK OK I SEE THE HYPE. So, we meet Miki the pet bot. Miki is absolutely useless but for some reason its humans still keep it around? And treat it like a person??? Meanwhile Murderbot is over here losing its gourd because if Miki exists, and Miki’s relationship with its humans is to all appearances one of genuinely reciprocated affection … well it’s never fun to have one’s core beliefs challenged. This was basically a perfect novella. There are two things going on: Murderbot’s character growth, which is incited by Miki, and the plot, which involves Murderbot underestimating the baddies. Historically, Murderbot’s position on security has been “humans are lousy at it; if you want it done right just hire a SecUnit.” This is true. But Murderbot’s wholly justified professional snobbery actually impedes its judgment bc the human security consultants aren’t merely incompetent: in this case they’ve been actively suborned. Oops. Thus, Murderbot has a major blind spot, and suffers real consequences for it. This installment was for me the point at which the series becomes greater than the sum of its parts, because I can see Murderbot has a lot of internal stuff to work through before it can go back to Dr. Mensah et al, and being Murderbot, instead of therapy we get to go on a mission woohoo.

Sarah A. Mueller, The Bone Orchard (2022) Needs less palace intrigue!! The emperor is dead, and his dying command to his mistress is “find out which of my sons killed me.” There are four princes and they’re all scumbags. The whodunnit is frankly not that interesting. Our protagonist is Charm, the late emperor’s mistress. She has been implanted with a device called a mindlock, meaning she is psychically compelled to obey the emperor’s commands. The mindlock is the book’s central technology in the same way the uterine replicator is the Vorkosiverse’s central tech, or the m-scanner is Kate Daniels’. In due course we learn the mindlock isn’t unique to Charm but is borne by all psychics—without it they “burn out” from using their power. Psychics in this world have a very short life expectancy. Charm herself isn’t a psychic, but the body she inhabits is that of “the Lady,” a highborn prisoner of war from one of the imperial satrapies. Charm has no memories of before the mindlock, before the Emperor, before Orchard House. She does have a bunch of alter-egos—helpfully they have names like “Pain” and “Shame”—whose vat-grown bodies she grew from her own bones.

This book is both really cool and really frustrating. I think, first of all, it needed to decide to be a vibe-first book or a character-first book. I personally would have gone with vibes; the fashion is almost a secondary character (the author is a seamstress, among other things). Otoh where the book is strongest is how people process trauma (i forget if there were content warnings but it def needed them) and also how the performance of gender is real work that requires skill and resources. I think the author’s ambition with this story may have exceeded her ability (it’s her debut and it took her ten years to write). Mostly I think there is too much going on, some of the less important stuff should have been cut, and I should have not had such a tough time parsing what was going on in the opening third. For example I should not have been surprised that some of the bone ghosts dislike/distrust Charm, and that their agendas in many cases diverge from hers!! That should have been seeded from the start.

 

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

Working mom Kate Lennart gives a TED talk on “How to cultivate grandparent-grandchild relationships when grandpa is literally Voldemort.”

I should proably just skip straight to this one, shouldn't I XD between that description and Hugh having a big role. Sad to hear it doesn't feel like the main series gets a proper send-off, though I suppose if they were fighting with the publisher it makes sense as to why. And of course there are five billion side stories happening after, so I guess there's less of a need for a "Scouring of the Shire" kind of glide path.

He finally tells her how he’s committed all these war crimes and she’s like, “thanks for telling me.” I think he was hoping she’d forgive him but she’s very clear it’s not her job to have an opinion; if he wants to forgive himself he can do the work.

oh wow, I like this too! (and the actual quote, too)

I knew you had read SomeDesperate Glory because we talked about the Yuletide fics, but nice to see your thoughts on the book! I also love that the romantic relationship(s) are not the important ones (or at least nor more important; I do think Kyr and Yiso have a romantic thing going, and the two of them are definitely important to each other and themes, plot, etc.) I really liked Cleo and Kyr as frenemies or whatever they are (there's also a Cleo fic in Yuletide that I enjoyed), and of course Avi was very predictably my favorite.

I went O.o atthe revelation that it was Rogue Protocol that made Murderbot take a step function leap forward for you, as that is the book on which I got stuck for like 3 years because I was bored by the plot and annoyed by Miki XD I mean, I do agree with all of your points, about Murderbots blindspots coming to bite it and the thematic importance of Miki, so I understand why this interlude was important in the overall bildungsroman sense, but it's still my least favorite of the first four novellas.