stuff i read 20 dec 2020
Dec. 21st, 2020 12:20 amhp | The Age of Lies by TheDivineComedian (24k Marauders + Regulus Black) This fic asks the criminally underrated question “why does Sirius always get to be the smartass of this friendgroup” and proceeds to give Remus zingers for dayssssss. It’s great. It’s an extremely angsty fic, 90% pain-to-humor ratio but the humor is dead on and the character work—especially the Peter POV—I have seldom seen anything to equal it. The millisecond I finished leaving kudos I downloaded a copy because who knows when one’s favorite fics will get taken down by the author. Like, I’m not saying I’m on this “Sirius thinks Remus is a Death Eater” pain train for the wand jokes (that’s what all the Polyjuice-precaution security questions amount to: dick jokes) … but I’m not not saying that either.
hp | sleeper (177k gen) Harry visits an alternate dimension where he is BFFs with Sirius’s son and Draco’s younger sister. Grindelwald is Chancellor, nobody’s ever heard of Dumbledore, and Tom Riddle is the new DADA professor. This story took a sec to get going but it’s reliably funny even before it went anywhere (Regulus is alive, and his terrible twins are named Castor and Pollux) and it does indeed go to some interesting places.
hp | House Proud by astolat (23k Drarry) well i didn’t glean any new insights re: Harry or Draco but I sure learned a lot about astolat. fantastic, of course—top-notch work.
hp | A Keen Observer by DeepDownSlytherin (150k Andromeda/Ted) Andy Black at Hogwarts, Years 1 through 7. I gotta say, Ted Tonks is a wonderful supporting character but the story is really about the three Black sisters, and how they grew apart. Sirius is a really useful foil here since he got himself disowned first, and while Andy ends up in the same place she doesn’t arrive there the same way; she doesn’t flare hot the way Sirius and Bellatrix do.
black sails | you and i survived by youremyqueen (23k Charles/Jack/Anne pre-canon) This right here is everything I love about Black Sails, a show steeped in violence and rough sex—two things I don’t particularly care for—that somehow manages to depict a plethora of healthy, positive, emotionally fulfilling relationships? And that doesn’t equate “relationship” with “romantic liaison”? This fic is so many things. It’s first of all an epic takedown of toxic hyper-masculinity. It’s Jack-pov, and Jack is my forever favorite. But it really prods hard at the bundle of walking contradictions that is Charles, and Jack, and Anne too. Jack to Charles: “If you want me to be stiff and silent, you’ll have to marry me first.” “If unencumbered understanding and acceptance is Jack’s conception of love, then this is Vane’s: a drowning love.” Charles: “But you’re not easy to conquer, that’s the trick. You just pretend.”
mcu | cascades. by orange-crushed (100k Stucky) Steve is teleporting erratically and involuntarily—literally falling apart into atoms—until the Winter Soldier shows up. Bucky is the thread that draws Steve home, always. It’s monumentally good. Featuring: No Avengers but plenty of Howling Commandos. “Steve would recognize that expression through a five-dollar telescope, looking down at earth from the moon.” “He spent so many years dreaming about it that he was afraid to meet it awake.” “I will kill anyone who comes for him. With my own two hands. I swear before God. Tell your friends.” “I pick every damn fight, but you pick ones that matter.”
asoiaf | two halves of a soul by angel-deux (40k Braime soulmark + highschool au) The one where Theon lives in the Starks’ basement. This is the Platonic ideal of a high school AU. It made me smile and snicker in equal measure and it’s just sincere enough without delving too deep into the endless dramallama of high school.
trc | King by the Roadside by nimmieamee (165k Gansey/Adam/Blue/Ronan/Noah OT5) I am deceased, this fic has slain me. It’s a canon-divergence AU where Gansey never died of a bee sting on the ley line, never had any sense knocked into him, attends Aglionby as captain of the crew team, lives his whole life astride the world, has never spoken more than five words to Adam or Ronan. Then it all comes crashing down. In his darkest hour—when Gansey is living in his car yes it’s his beloved Camaro—he is befriended by Adam and Noah. Blue comes later. Ronan doesn’t really figure until the midway point. This fic is SO GOOD. I do not have adequate words to tell you guys how good. This is the ot5 we deserve, and Maggie was a coward for not giving it to us. I do think the fic is strongest on the Gansey-Adam leg of the ot5 (it apparently started out as A Little Princess AU so like, no surprise there). Adam is so underrated and underappreciated—by canon and by fandom both—and I am jubilant to see him get his due here. I also think Gansey is a significantly better person in this fic than he is in canon??? These are Gansey quotes: “You don’t know me at all if you think I would rather chase Glendower than keep all of you safe.” “I have my money back. Fine. But I don’t want to be the person I was before I met you. I don’t want to be without you. Without all of you I would be nothing but a guy with too many things.” I really cannot endorse this fic enough, it’s got Maggie’s narrative voice down pat—it’s even got minor characters like Kavinsky and Piper’s voices—and the humor is on point (Noah: “Like twenty-five percent of my Aglionby friendships killed me”). The plot sort of meanders around for 150k+ words but since when did Maggie care about plot.
Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (2020) (Locked Tomb #2) If Gideon the Ninth made me love Taz Muir, Harrow the Ninth made me awestruck at her writing chops. This book is a tour de force and also, as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cafemassolit pointed out, the very last thing you’d expect after the unserious goth snark of Gideon the Ninth. Impossible to discuss without MAD SPOILERS so: A meditation on grief. Not just Harrow’s grief, but every Lyctor’s grief for every dead cavalier. Everything about Lyctorhood comes back to the necromancer-cavalier bond, which is a setup so fertile for AU fusions I pray to god we see them the way we see, say, Pacific Rim fusions or daemon AUs. It’s so on-brand that Harrow performed experimental brain surgery on herself not because she loved or missed Gideon (which she did) but because nobody tells Harrowhark Nonagesimus what to do, and she flat-out refuses to be beholden to anyone. Since Abigail and Magnus are a functional version of Harrow and Gideon, it makes sense that Abigail is a much bigger presence in this book, the way Magnus loomed bigger in book 1. Of course Palamedes and Camilla are a functional version of Issac and Jeannemary, and it was lovely to be reunited with them (the coffeeshop AU!! the hug—when Palamedes went to hug amnesiac!Harrow I screamed out loud). My private conviction is that the next book, Alecto the Ninth, will be the romance novel that Palamedes has been scribbling on wallpaper. I mean, at the rate Muir is going would anyone be surprised?
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) (Locked Tomb #1) (reread) It’s rare that a reread is better than the first read-through but now that I’m not struggling to identify secondary characters and I know what’s coming this book is twice as rewarding. I love Gideon sfm she’s so decent.
Cat Sebastian, Two Rogues Make a Right (2019) (#2) mlm childhood BFFs to lovers!!!! Cat Sebastian, a woman after my own heart.
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood (2019) “Fay, an you ever loved me…” What an arrow of a novella. Unerringly drove its iron broadhead tip directly into my heart. People talk about how the forest-ness or the fae-bargain-ness was well done, or how gruff Tobias is such an endearing POV, or Henry’s mom is #lifegoals, and it’s all true but that line is the beating heart of this story for me.
Stephen King, “The Road Virus Heads North” (1999) Why I thought it would be a good idea to read a horror story about a cursed painting that’s impossible to destroy (much like the One Ring), that follows its victim from Boston to Maine, while I was driving up to Maine for the weekend, I have no effing clue.
France Hardinge, Deeplight (2020) “We are all squeezed into new shapes by the people around us.” “You like saving terrible people, don’t you?” “That was the problem with working out what made people tick; sometimes you were left understanding them and not wanting them to die.” This is the first male protagonist of Hardinge’s I’ve read, and as I said to hamsterwoman in the sync-read thread, she tends to pit these wily adolescent protagonists against systems that are corrupt or broken in some way, and the protag has more resources than they think they do, and the engine that drives the plot is the mystery of how the system is failing people. Deeplight fits right into that mold. My overall takeaway was I identified hella strongly with our eel of a hero, Hark, and much less strongly with the supporting cast than I have in previous Hardinge books: “Eels always have spines. They just bend a lot.”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020) Frivolous party-girl leaves Mexico City, treks out to isolated country estate to check on her newlywed cousin, whose letters have grown sinister. There is a house and it is goddamn creepy, and once you set foot in it good luck ever getting out. The mystery of the house grabs you from the get-go, and it’s a compelling enough mystery that it made me overlook some of my problems with Moreno-Garcia’s prose (I mostly just felt like the dialogue was in a weird register). There is body horror. So much body horror. This whole house is a cancer. What I like about Noemí as a protagonist is that the very qualities that she’s constantly being dissed for—her frivolity, her lack of tact, her pigheaded stubbornness, her chainsmoking—are what enable her to escape. And she doesn’t just escape, she rescues others as well. I don’t think I was able to breathe until I read the final line.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe (2016) (Arc of a Scythe #1) Well I can’t fault this YA dystopia (utopia?) for clarity—the writing’s astoundingly clear. What it lacks is depth. Two centuries after science has defeated mortality, there is a special class of people, scythes, whose job is to cull humanity of its excess population. God the worldbuilding is so shallow. The story follows two apprentice scythes whose romance is so clumsy; this is definitely a situation where a friendship would have been more emotionally impactful than a romance. The pacing was almost cinematic in its clarity—i could without much trouble plot the ups and downs on an XY axis. I kept waiting to get bored and stop reading and I never did, I just kept turning pages and now I’m halfway through the second book in the series sooooo joke’s on me lol. I could go on about how clumsy and amateur aspects of the book were but here’s the truth: It’s greater than the sum of its parts. Is it a book that does a bunch of things with virtuoso impressivity? Nope. Does it do well the one thing it sets out to do? Absolutely.
Holly Black, Red Glove (2011) (Curseworkers #2) Local squib boy Cassel Sharpe comes into his magical powers and finds himself wedged between a rock (the FBI) and a hard place (the mafia his girlfriend is in line to inherit). This was a super fun read but I don’t think the romance was well integrated into the plot (who killed Cassel’s brother Phillip?) or the theme (at one point Cassel and his muggle friends attend a nonviolent protest for curseworker rights and get arrested lol). Cassel’s entire family, minus his grandpa, continues to be toxic af—I just wanna give this kid a hug. Overall I thought Book 1 was stellar and this was just plain old good.
Jane Barry, A Time in the Sun (1962) I thought it was going to be about a white girl kidnapped by Apaches who goes native. Given the publication date I was prepared for hella racism. The good news is this book is a lot less racist than I expected! The bad news is the main POV character is a veteran of—and remains heavily invested in—the Lost Cause of the Confederacy which is, uh, not examined at all. Why in blazes did you pick up this book, Lya, I can hear you all asking. Well I was browsing a used bookstore and it had a pretty cover. Jane Barry is not a writer I’ve ever heard of, but she is an incredibly assured writer who never puts a foot wrong in her evocation of time and place (mid-19th century Arizona territory). My beef with her is she seems to be interested in the homosocial relationships between men to the exclusion of other kinds of relationships??? Look here lady if I wanted to go on a historical jaunt with a bunch of bros I’d just reread Lord of the Rings. The kidnapped girl who kicks off the whole plot is almost an afterthought. There is an elegiac quality to the narrative that strikes me as quintessentially Western: It’s about a vanishing frontier and a disappearing way of life. Which makes me mad because indigenous people still, you know, exist in this day and age. Otoh the book makes no bones about the reason the frontier is vanishing—it’s because white men stole a bunch of Indians’ land and massacred them. No, #notallwhitemen but the Apache aren’t gonna trust any white men after this. The end of this book features an actual live onscreen massacre accompanied by Major Character Death, so you know, pretty heavy stuff. Masterfully written but fucking brutal book.
hp | sleeper (177k gen) Harry visits an alternate dimension where he is BFFs with Sirius’s son and Draco’s younger sister. Grindelwald is Chancellor, nobody’s ever heard of Dumbledore, and Tom Riddle is the new DADA professor. This story took a sec to get going but it’s reliably funny even before it went anywhere (Regulus is alive, and his terrible twins are named Castor and Pollux) and it does indeed go to some interesting places.
hp | House Proud by astolat (23k Drarry) well i didn’t glean any new insights re: Harry or Draco but I sure learned a lot about astolat. fantastic, of course—top-notch work.
hp | A Keen Observer by DeepDownSlytherin (150k Andromeda/Ted) Andy Black at Hogwarts, Years 1 through 7. I gotta say, Ted Tonks is a wonderful supporting character but the story is really about the three Black sisters, and how they grew apart. Sirius is a really useful foil here since he got himself disowned first, and while Andy ends up in the same place she doesn’t arrive there the same way; she doesn’t flare hot the way Sirius and Bellatrix do.
black sails | you and i survived by youremyqueen (23k Charles/Jack/Anne pre-canon) This right here is everything I love about Black Sails, a show steeped in violence and rough sex—two things I don’t particularly care for—that somehow manages to depict a plethora of healthy, positive, emotionally fulfilling relationships? And that doesn’t equate “relationship” with “romantic liaison”? This fic is so many things. It’s first of all an epic takedown of toxic hyper-masculinity. It’s Jack-pov, and Jack is my forever favorite. But it really prods hard at the bundle of walking contradictions that is Charles, and Jack, and Anne too. Jack to Charles: “If you want me to be stiff and silent, you’ll have to marry me first.” “If unencumbered understanding and acceptance is Jack’s conception of love, then this is Vane’s: a drowning love.” Charles: “But you’re not easy to conquer, that’s the trick. You just pretend.”
mcu | cascades. by orange-crushed (100k Stucky) Steve is teleporting erratically and involuntarily—literally falling apart into atoms—until the Winter Soldier shows up. Bucky is the thread that draws Steve home, always. It’s monumentally good. Featuring: No Avengers but plenty of Howling Commandos. “Steve would recognize that expression through a five-dollar telescope, looking down at earth from the moon.” “He spent so many years dreaming about it that he was afraid to meet it awake.” “I will kill anyone who comes for him. With my own two hands. I swear before God. Tell your friends.” “I pick every damn fight, but you pick ones that matter.”
asoiaf | two halves of a soul by angel-deux (40k Braime soulmark + highschool au) The one where Theon lives in the Starks’ basement. This is the Platonic ideal of a high school AU. It made me smile and snicker in equal measure and it’s just sincere enough without delving too deep into the endless dramallama of high school.
trc | King by the Roadside by nimmieamee (165k Gansey/Adam/Blue/Ronan/Noah OT5) I am deceased, this fic has slain me. It’s a canon-divergence AU where Gansey never died of a bee sting on the ley line, never had any sense knocked into him, attends Aglionby as captain of the crew team, lives his whole life astride the world, has never spoken more than five words to Adam or Ronan. Then it all comes crashing down. In his darkest hour—when Gansey is living in his car yes it’s his beloved Camaro—he is befriended by Adam and Noah. Blue comes later. Ronan doesn’t really figure until the midway point. This fic is SO GOOD. I do not have adequate words to tell you guys how good. This is the ot5 we deserve, and Maggie was a coward for not giving it to us. I do think the fic is strongest on the Gansey-Adam leg of the ot5 (it apparently started out as A Little Princess AU so like, no surprise there). Adam is so underrated and underappreciated—by canon and by fandom both—and I am jubilant to see him get his due here. I also think Gansey is a significantly better person in this fic than he is in canon??? These are Gansey quotes: “You don’t know me at all if you think I would rather chase Glendower than keep all of you safe.” “I have my money back. Fine. But I don’t want to be the person I was before I met you. I don’t want to be without you. Without all of you I would be nothing but a guy with too many things.” I really cannot endorse this fic enough, it’s got Maggie’s narrative voice down pat—it’s even got minor characters like Kavinsky and Piper’s voices—and the humor is on point (Noah: “Like twenty-five percent of my Aglionby friendships killed me”). The plot sort of meanders around for 150k+ words but since when did Maggie care about plot.
Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (2020) (Locked Tomb #2) If Gideon the Ninth made me love Taz Muir, Harrow the Ninth made me awestruck at her writing chops. This book is a tour de force and also, as
cafemassolit pointed out, the very last thing you’d expect after the unserious goth snark of Gideon the Ninth. Impossible to discuss without MAD SPOILERS so: A meditation on grief. Not just Harrow’s grief, but every Lyctor’s grief for every dead cavalier. Everything about Lyctorhood comes back to the necromancer-cavalier bond, which is a setup so fertile for AU fusions I pray to god we see them the way we see, say, Pacific Rim fusions or daemon AUs. It’s so on-brand that Harrow performed experimental brain surgery on herself not because she loved or missed Gideon (which she did) but because nobody tells Harrowhark Nonagesimus what to do, and she flat-out refuses to be beholden to anyone. Since Abigail and Magnus are a functional version of Harrow and Gideon, it makes sense that Abigail is a much bigger presence in this book, the way Magnus loomed bigger in book 1. Of course Palamedes and Camilla are a functional version of Issac and Jeannemary, and it was lovely to be reunited with them (the coffeeshop AU!! the hug—when Palamedes went to hug amnesiac!Harrow I screamed out loud). My private conviction is that the next book, Alecto the Ninth, will be the romance novel that Palamedes has been scribbling on wallpaper. I mean, at the rate Muir is going would anyone be surprised?Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (2019) (Locked Tomb #1) (reread) It’s rare that a reread is better than the first read-through but now that I’m not struggling to identify secondary characters and I know what’s coming this book is twice as rewarding. I love Gideon sfm she’s so decent.
Cat Sebastian, Two Rogues Make a Right (2019) (#2) mlm childhood BFFs to lovers!!!! Cat Sebastian, a woman after my own heart.
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood (2019) “Fay, an you ever loved me…” What an arrow of a novella. Unerringly drove its iron broadhead tip directly into my heart. People talk about how the forest-ness or the fae-bargain-ness was well done, or how gruff Tobias is such an endearing POV, or Henry’s mom is #lifegoals, and it’s all true but that line is the beating heart of this story for me.
Stephen King, “The Road Virus Heads North” (1999) Why I thought it would be a good idea to read a horror story about a cursed painting that’s impossible to destroy (much like the One Ring), that follows its victim from Boston to Maine, while I was driving up to Maine for the weekend, I have no effing clue.
France Hardinge, Deeplight (2020) “We are all squeezed into new shapes by the people around us.” “You like saving terrible people, don’t you?” “That was the problem with working out what made people tick; sometimes you were left understanding them and not wanting them to die.” This is the first male protagonist of Hardinge’s I’ve read, and as I said to hamsterwoman in the sync-read thread, she tends to pit these wily adolescent protagonists against systems that are corrupt or broken in some way, and the protag has more resources than they think they do, and the engine that drives the plot is the mystery of how the system is failing people. Deeplight fits right into that mold. My overall takeaway was I identified hella strongly with our eel of a hero, Hark, and much less strongly with the supporting cast than I have in previous Hardinge books: “Eels always have spines. They just bend a lot.”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020) Frivolous party-girl leaves Mexico City, treks out to isolated country estate to check on her newlywed cousin, whose letters have grown sinister. There is a house and it is goddamn creepy, and once you set foot in it good luck ever getting out. The mystery of the house grabs you from the get-go, and it’s a compelling enough mystery that it made me overlook some of my problems with Moreno-Garcia’s prose (I mostly just felt like the dialogue was in a weird register). There is body horror. So much body horror. This whole house is a cancer. What I like about Noemí as a protagonist is that the very qualities that she’s constantly being dissed for—her frivolity, her lack of tact, her pigheaded stubbornness, her chainsmoking—are what enable her to escape. And she doesn’t just escape, she rescues others as well. I don’t think I was able to breathe until I read the final line.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe (2016) (Arc of a Scythe #1) Well I can’t fault this YA dystopia (utopia?) for clarity—the writing’s astoundingly clear. What it lacks is depth. Two centuries after science has defeated mortality, there is a special class of people, scythes, whose job is to cull humanity of its excess population. God the worldbuilding is so shallow. The story follows two apprentice scythes whose romance is so clumsy; this is definitely a situation where a friendship would have been more emotionally impactful than a romance. The pacing was almost cinematic in its clarity—i could without much trouble plot the ups and downs on an XY axis. I kept waiting to get bored and stop reading and I never did, I just kept turning pages and now I’m halfway through the second book in the series sooooo joke’s on me lol. I could go on about how clumsy and amateur aspects of the book were but here’s the truth: It’s greater than the sum of its parts. Is it a book that does a bunch of things with virtuoso impressivity? Nope. Does it do well the one thing it sets out to do? Absolutely.
Holly Black, Red Glove (2011) (Curseworkers #2) Local squib boy Cassel Sharpe comes into his magical powers and finds himself wedged between a rock (the FBI) and a hard place (the mafia his girlfriend is in line to inherit). This was a super fun read but I don’t think the romance was well integrated into the plot (who killed Cassel’s brother Phillip?) or the theme (at one point Cassel and his muggle friends attend a nonviolent protest for curseworker rights and get arrested lol). Cassel’s entire family, minus his grandpa, continues to be toxic af—I just wanna give this kid a hug. Overall I thought Book 1 was stellar and this was just plain old good.
Jane Barry, A Time in the Sun (1962) I thought it was going to be about a white girl kidnapped by Apaches who goes native. Given the publication date I was prepared for hella racism. The good news is this book is a lot less racist than I expected! The bad news is the main POV character is a veteran of—and remains heavily invested in—the Lost Cause of the Confederacy which is, uh, not examined at all. Why in blazes did you pick up this book, Lya, I can hear you all asking. Well I was browsing a used bookstore and it had a pretty cover. Jane Barry is not a writer I’ve ever heard of, but she is an incredibly assured writer who never puts a foot wrong in her evocation of time and place (mid-19th century Arizona territory). My beef with her is she seems to be interested in the homosocial relationships between men to the exclusion of other kinds of relationships??? Look here lady if I wanted to go on a historical jaunt with a bunch of bros I’d just reread Lord of the Rings. The kidnapped girl who kicks off the whole plot is almost an afterthought. There is an elegiac quality to the narrative that strikes me as quintessentially Western: It’s about a vanishing frontier and a disappearing way of life. Which makes me mad because indigenous people still, you know, exist in this day and age. Otoh the book makes no bones about the reason the frontier is vanishing—it’s because white men stole a bunch of Indians’ land and massacred them. No, #notallwhitemen but the Apache aren’t gonna trust any white men after this. The end of this book features an actual live onscreen massacre accompanied by Major Character Death, so you know, pretty heavy stuff. Masterfully written but fucking brutal book.
