![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelhighlights of my sync-read with witcherology:
atia: i am DEVOURING the poppy war
atia: poor rin
atia: sinegard is so vivid!
atia: omg i went outside and there are so many mosquitoes this is why i am an indoors person
me: "this is why i am an indoors person" the title of our joint autobiography
atia: "oh you're the one nezha hates" this ship is sailing
me: will i ever recognize an enemies-to-lovers-ship in the wild? doubtful
atia: how...how do you not
me: have you seen my gideon the ninth writeup? the ship was RIGHT THERE the whole time and i just...didn't
atia: altan should be gay. and in love with his lieutenant i said what i said
me: i think Rachel Kuang successfully got us into the headspace of a sleep-deprived Scholarship Kid vying for a spot at elite boarding school, but now the war’s cut everyone’s education short i don’t find the narrative thread nearly as compelling
atia: you put it in wordsssss
me: tbf i wasn't crazy about deathly hallows either, hogwarts was the emotional core of hp
me: got to admit that Gandalf-saving-everybody’s-asses-from-the-Balrog moment was p spectacular
There's a word in Chinese to refer to the college-application process, they call it a 独木桥 which means one of those sketchy wooden rope bridges suspended over a yawning chasm. You have one shot; one test and it defines the rest of your life. Our penniless orphan protagonist Rin has to score well because she has no fallback: which makes her unlike Quentin Coldwater but like Darrow the Red, both of whom i'm mentioning here because acing The Impossibly Difficult Test to get into the Selective Institution is a big part of The Magicians and Red Rising. Rin's bloody singleminded focus drives the narrative all the way to Sinegard, but it hits a brick wall when the Federation invades and the country shifts to war footing.
I really wanted to like this book, and I came away quite fond of it because I felt like it was written FOR ME. For instance the trick with the scarecrows to scare up arrows from your enemies is straight out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Somebody: I want Seven Treasure Soup! Me: You mean Eight Treasure Congee right?? Wtf is Seven Treasure Soup. Carrying a protesting piglet up a mountain and down again every morning is exactly the kind of repetitive rote exercise you see in these zero-to-hero martial arts training montages (i'm thinking specifically of Guo Jin climbing a sheer cliff face every night in Legends of the Condor Heroes). And I loved Rin: she's in it to win it, she has no margin for error and she'll hold a grudge unto the grave. You know how some people are touch-starved well this girl is praise-starved and it is both painful and mesmerizing to watch.
What let me down was 1) the secondary characters 2) the worldbuilding. About 60% of the way into the book we have: "And she didn't want to admit it, but Nezha was a welcome relief from Altan." Me: SAME BITCH SAME. Because the whole time we've been under siege in this coastal city under Altan's command I have been so bored, and finally Nezha shows up with the relief troops oh thank god. Which doesn't speak well of either Altan's characterization, or the second- and third-tier characters Rin's been bunking down with since she got her official military posting (you notice there's always a nice even number of squads or platoons and then there's the odd one out, the SHADOW division? in this case 12 for the zodiac and the thirteenth, which is the one Rin joined, is the special ops team). Admittedly the final-act reveal of Altan's Tragic Backstory Details brought me around somewhat, just not enough to make up for how utterly uninterested i was in him relative to how big of a role he played. plus i thought the conflict between the physical and spiritual realms was going to have a far bigger payoff than it did. i basically wanted this whole book to be the boarding school story it was for the first 30%
As far as the worldbuilding goes, my main complaint is there was a lot of important historical events (there were after all two Poppy Wars prior to this one, i still don't understand the difference between the Red Emperor and the Dragon Emperor tbh), political ramifications etc. that either confused me because i couldn't parse what was happening, or I just didn't care. like the buildup for the Alcatraz prison-facility left me completely meh. the "lies my teacher told me" coverup of the Speerly genocide was less meh but still kind of meh. i can't even be arsed to go back to dig up more examples. i think introducing all this stuff organically, feeding the infodumps to your readers drop by drop and timing it so the medicine takes effect at exactly the right moment is a skill that Lois McMaster Bujold excels at, I've never found anyone to match her, and I cannot really fault Rachel Kuang who is after all twenty-three years old and publishing a bestselling fantasy trilogy while going to grad school.
In conclusion: I'm glad I read it, I'm on the fence about continuing with the sequels, I'm interested in whatever direction Kuang's career takes off in (she's a delight to follow on social media).
witcherology: atia: i am DEVOURING the poppy war
atia: poor rin
atia: sinegard is so vivid!
atia: omg i went outside and there are so many mosquitoes this is why i am an indoors person
me: "this is why i am an indoors person" the title of our joint autobiography
atia: "oh you're the one nezha hates" this ship is sailing
me: will i ever recognize an enemies-to-lovers-ship in the wild? doubtful
atia: how...how do you not
me: have you seen my gideon the ninth writeup? the ship was RIGHT THERE the whole time and i just...didn't
atia: altan should be gay. and in love with his lieutenant i said what i said
me: i think Rachel Kuang successfully got us into the headspace of a sleep-deprived Scholarship Kid vying for a spot at elite boarding school, but now the war’s cut everyone’s education short i don’t find the narrative thread nearly as compelling
atia: you put it in wordsssss
me: tbf i wasn't crazy about deathly hallows either, hogwarts was the emotional core of hp
me: got to admit that Gandalf-saving-everybody’s-asses-from-the-Balrog moment was p spectacular
There's a word in Chinese to refer to the college-application process, they call it a 独木桥 which means one of those sketchy wooden rope bridges suspended over a yawning chasm. You have one shot; one test and it defines the rest of your life. Our penniless orphan protagonist Rin has to score well because she has no fallback: which makes her unlike Quentin Coldwater but like Darrow the Red, both of whom i'm mentioning here because acing The Impossibly Difficult Test to get into the Selective Institution is a big part of The Magicians and Red Rising. Rin's bloody singleminded focus drives the narrative all the way to Sinegard, but it hits a brick wall when the Federation invades and the country shifts to war footing.
I really wanted to like this book, and I came away quite fond of it because I felt like it was written FOR ME. For instance the trick with the scarecrows to scare up arrows from your enemies is straight out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Somebody: I want Seven Treasure Soup! Me: You mean Eight Treasure Congee right?? Wtf is Seven Treasure Soup. Carrying a protesting piglet up a mountain and down again every morning is exactly the kind of repetitive rote exercise you see in these zero-to-hero martial arts training montages (i'm thinking specifically of Guo Jin climbing a sheer cliff face every night in Legends of the Condor Heroes). And I loved Rin: she's in it to win it, she has no margin for error and she'll hold a grudge unto the grave. You know how some people are touch-starved well this girl is praise-starved and it is both painful and mesmerizing to watch.
What let me down was 1) the secondary characters 2) the worldbuilding. About 60% of the way into the book we have: "And she didn't want to admit it, but Nezha was a welcome relief from Altan." Me: SAME BITCH SAME. Because the whole time we've been under siege in this coastal city under Altan's command I have been so bored, and finally Nezha shows up with the relief troops oh thank god. Which doesn't speak well of either Altan's characterization, or the second- and third-tier characters Rin's been bunking down with since she got her official military posting (you notice there's always a nice even number of squads or platoons and then there's the odd one out, the SHADOW division? in this case 12 for the zodiac and the thirteenth, which is the one Rin joined, is the special ops team). Admittedly the final-act reveal of Altan's Tragic Backstory Details brought me around somewhat, just not enough to make up for how utterly uninterested i was in him relative to how big of a role he played. plus i thought the conflict between the physical and spiritual realms was going to have a far bigger payoff than it did. i basically wanted this whole book to be the boarding school story it was for the first 30%
As far as the worldbuilding goes, my main complaint is there was a lot of important historical events (there were after all two Poppy Wars prior to this one, i still don't understand the difference between the Red Emperor and the Dragon Emperor tbh), political ramifications etc. that either confused me because i couldn't parse what was happening, or I just didn't care. like the buildup for the Alcatraz prison-facility left me completely meh. the "lies my teacher told me" coverup of the Speerly genocide was less meh but still kind of meh. i can't even be arsed to go back to dig up more examples. i think introducing all this stuff organically, feeding the infodumps to your readers drop by drop and timing it so the medicine takes effect at exactly the right moment is a skill that Lois McMaster Bujold excels at, I've never found anyone to match her, and I cannot really fault Rachel Kuang who is after all twenty-three years old and publishing a bestselling fantasy trilogy while going to grad school.
In conclusion: I'm glad I read it, I'm on the fence about continuing with the sequels, I'm interested in whatever direction Kuang's career takes off in (she's a delight to follow on social media).
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 08:13 pm (UTC)Me too! I mean, I love magic boarding schools, so that's no surprise, but for sure that was my favorite part of the book.
I liked the middle (squad of misfits) section a bit better than you did, it seems, but definitely not because of Altan, whom I also found really, really boring.
But, yeah, what I loved about this book -- and I did like it enough, on the whole, to race through it and to put Kuang at the top of my the-award-formerly-known-as-Campbell list -- was Rin, and her single-mindedness, and her sheer GRIT. K and I read it in quick succession, and our Hogwarts sorting discussion verdict was "what a dark Hufflepuff" -- which, you really don't see that much.
I am struggling with the sequel, which doubles down on boring Altan stuff (despite him being dead). Although it sure does cater to the praise-starved aspect of Rin's character, if you wanted to see more of that.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 10:19 am (UTC)And I concur it is absolutely hilarious that your blindness to enemies-to-lovers is so real XDD both on the account of Rin's Terrible Taste In Men (so much more of that in book2 lol) and Gideon, which I am yet to read but i have second hand exposure.
one of those sketchy wooden rope bridges suspended over a yawning chasm
that's freaking amazing and i say it with appropriate levels of existential terror
PS. Altan is the boringest I confirm. He def touched dicks with his magical boyfriend I mean lieutenant.