bookhobbit (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bookhobbit) wrote2019-09-10 06:26 pm
bookhobbit) wrote2019-09-10 06:26 pm
Entry tags:
mini book reviews!
I've been read a lot of reviewable books but not writing about it lately. I read three recentish historical low fantasy novels in quick succession and thought I was going to love them and actually...all of them disappointed me in various ways (though a couple I still liked some parts of), so I'm just going to complain about them instead of doing proper full-on reviews.
1. The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
I was geared up for this to be among my favorite new reads of the year, but it was actually one of the things I've finished that I liked the least. The thing is, it's a lot of things I love (low fantasy, historical stuff, sense of the numinous, 18th century, lots of women). But it turned out to also contain a lot of things that upset me (financial worries is the biggest one but also a very visceral sense of depression). So in practice I actually spend through about 60% of the book, anxiety-reading, because it stressed me out so much. Because of this, I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it at all.
There was other stuff. It's written in a historical-pastiche style, but the author uses present tense. I don't mind historical pastiche, and I like present tense, but the combination was confusing and undercut both; the pastiche made me keep expecting past tense and being thrown when it was present, and the present made me feel less immersed in the pastiche. The prose was otherwise nice, but I just couldn't get over that combination.
I also thought that the plot was honestly not well-constructed. I recognize that I speedread, but even allowing for that, it felt like it meandered and switched. The title of the book is The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, but Mrs. Hancock doesn't become Mrs. Hancock until some 60% through the book, and a mermaid is present at the very beginning and the very end but not in the middle when their courtship is most concerned. There's a kind of rivalry between the two characters at the very end, but it doesn't last for very long, and the plot at this point is very slow and emotion-heavy, whereas previously it had been event-heavy. The switch between the two felt abrupt and confusing.
Also, it had this kind of sometimes-weirdly-eroticized physical specificity that I don't like -- it's more of a pet peeve but it also made it less enjoyable for me. Very body-focused. I'm going to talk more about that in Deathless so I won't go into it big here because it was as important a factor in my lack of enjoyment here as it was in Deathless, but it was one.
OH, also, the book was clearly trying to do some antiracist work, but the way it shook out was....well, one of the two black POV characters, she's described in incredibly stigmatizing terms throughout the whole book and eventually that's dealt with but like. There's so much more time spent on the racism she experiences than on her own, like, overcoming of it? And I felt like. It just could have been a lot better? Idk.
2. City of Brass S. A. Chakraborty
I liked this one enough that I checked out the second one from the library as well, but it was still not as good as I'd hoped. It suffers from a bad case of what I always think of as YA Voice (although by publication I don't think it's YA). I would describe it as overwritten. I don't know that there's one single instance of the word "said" as a dialogue tag in the entire two books I read. Every single passage was written with great vividity, therefore leaving no room to amp up the intensity when something exciting happened. There was also a lot of romance that felt fairly obligatory in the "man and woman spend time together and therefore must fall in love" way. Like I said, I don't think it's YA, but it's got the same problem sets as a lot of YA has for me.
I really don't have that many other qualms about it, except a burgeoning potential case of Bury Your Gays (I don't know for sure if it will happen, the last book having ended on a cliffhanger). The worldbuilding was really good, really seamless. It deals with some middle eastern and Muslim folklore and mythology and religion all tangled up into a delightful bundle and I can't really tell when one ends and another begins. The main characters are pretty good: the protag especially is a conwoman from Cairo and i LOVE a good conwoman. She's a pragmatist who gets exasperated with all the political machinations around her and I'm into that.
It's got a kind of "there are no easy answers" three-way political conflict plot that I think people who like political fantasy will be really into. It deals a lot with the conflict between security and cruelty -- how something meant to keep your people safe can hurt others. It threw me a little bit because a lot of this type of fantasy has a strict kind of "x is the powerful one and y is the powerless one" dynamic, but this is more complicated than that. All three groups have a very good reason to distrust the other two and a history of violence against the other two. And all the characters are aware of that, and don't know how to navigate it justly, and it ends up in a lot of bloodshed.
I'll be honest, it's a bit depressing, but not necessarily in a bad way? I will say there's an extremely high density of mysteries and I wish the author would have resolved a few more before the end of the second book, but I don't necessarily fault her as I believe that balance is very individual and difficult. It's a pretty good series so far all told, but it really is overwritten imo.
3. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Again, I really wanted to like it! Conceptually it's everything I love! Folktales! A sort of world-within-world of mythical creatures (somewhat ala the kind of youkai second world stuff you get in anime like YuYu Hakusho)! A weird historical-urban-fantasy kind of conceit! A strong sense of place! Magic as the roots of thing, as the confused and seamy underside of the world, like underneath a rock you've pulled up.
And I really like Valente's prose, although I always get the sense she's an author who puts prose before anything else. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though sometimes it's just too much. In the case of Deathless I didn't find it too much; the actual writing was very beautiful and well-done. And the characters were really well-drawn, sharp and interesting. The worldbuilding was suited to appeal to me.
It's just...hm. It had strong elements that often spoil a book for me, for reasons of personal taste. They're sort of intertwined in this book and sometimes in other things, but they can appear independently.
The first one is most straightforwardly, a visceral and tactile sense of sexuality that I tend to find squicky. I don't mind sex in books, but there's a certain writing style that presents it in a very fluid-heavy, smells-and-tastes kind of way that I am generally grossed out by. There's usually a strong focus on women's genitals in a way that can sometimes come off as borderline misogynistic depending on who's doing it. I associate it strongly with Gregory MacGuire but it's by no means just him.
The second is hard to define because it sounds like a good thing, which is......a lot of feminist stories by cis women for cis women are extremely alienating to me. They tend to present the experience of womanhood as universal. They're usually straight and often concern the relationships between men and women. I don't enjoy this because it's completely irrelevant to my life and to my experience of gender, while still being presented as a kind of universal Truth about it. Some of this is because I'm not a woman, some of it is because I'm not straight, and some of it is because I'm autistic, I think (even if I was a woman, womanhood wouldn't really work that way for me). I don't have a problem with reading stories that aren't about me, but I don't like it when things act like they're telling broad cultural truths about social structures and are then totally irrelevant to all my experiences of those social structures.
When you tie the two together you get this weird kind of emergent body-essentialism, this focus on the physical aspects of Womanhood, that I find extremely uncomfortable as a trans afab person. It's not so much about any of the explicit messages as just about what is focused on, and what kind of language is used. It's very uncomfortable and hard to explain or define, idk. This is probably someone else's favorite book, maybe even someone I know, but I just couldn't get past those aspects.
1. The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
I was geared up for this to be among my favorite new reads of the year, but it was actually one of the things I've finished that I liked the least. The thing is, it's a lot of things I love (low fantasy, historical stuff, sense of the numinous, 18th century, lots of women). But it turned out to also contain a lot of things that upset me (financial worries is the biggest one but also a very visceral sense of depression). So in practice I actually spend through about 60% of the book, anxiety-reading, because it stressed me out so much. Because of this, I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it at all.
There was other stuff. It's written in a historical-pastiche style, but the author uses present tense. I don't mind historical pastiche, and I like present tense, but the combination was confusing and undercut both; the pastiche made me keep expecting past tense and being thrown when it was present, and the present made me feel less immersed in the pastiche. The prose was otherwise nice, but I just couldn't get over that combination.
I also thought that the plot was honestly not well-constructed. I recognize that I speedread, but even allowing for that, it felt like it meandered and switched. The title of the book is The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, but Mrs. Hancock doesn't become Mrs. Hancock until some 60% through the book, and a mermaid is present at the very beginning and the very end but not in the middle when their courtship is most concerned. There's a kind of rivalry between the two characters at the very end, but it doesn't last for very long, and the plot at this point is very slow and emotion-heavy, whereas previously it had been event-heavy. The switch between the two felt abrupt and confusing.
Also, it had this kind of sometimes-weirdly-eroticized physical specificity that I don't like -- it's more of a pet peeve but it also made it less enjoyable for me. Very body-focused. I'm going to talk more about that in Deathless so I won't go into it big here because it was as important a factor in my lack of enjoyment here as it was in Deathless, but it was one.
OH, also, the book was clearly trying to do some antiracist work, but the way it shook out was....well, one of the two black POV characters, she's described in incredibly stigmatizing terms throughout the whole book and eventually that's dealt with but like. There's so much more time spent on the racism she experiences than on her own, like, overcoming of it? And I felt like. It just could have been a lot better? Idk.
2. City of Brass S. A. Chakraborty
I liked this one enough that I checked out the second one from the library as well, but it was still not as good as I'd hoped. It suffers from a bad case of what I always think of as YA Voice (although by publication I don't think it's YA). I would describe it as overwritten. I don't know that there's one single instance of the word "said" as a dialogue tag in the entire two books I read. Every single passage was written with great vividity, therefore leaving no room to amp up the intensity when something exciting happened. There was also a lot of romance that felt fairly obligatory in the "man and woman spend time together and therefore must fall in love" way. Like I said, I don't think it's YA, but it's got the same problem sets as a lot of YA has for me.
I really don't have that many other qualms about it, except a burgeoning potential case of Bury Your Gays (I don't know for sure if it will happen, the last book having ended on a cliffhanger). The worldbuilding was really good, really seamless. It deals with some middle eastern and Muslim folklore and mythology and religion all tangled up into a delightful bundle and I can't really tell when one ends and another begins. The main characters are pretty good: the protag especially is a conwoman from Cairo and i LOVE a good conwoman. She's a pragmatist who gets exasperated with all the political machinations around her and I'm into that.
It's got a kind of "there are no easy answers" three-way political conflict plot that I think people who like political fantasy will be really into. It deals a lot with the conflict between security and cruelty -- how something meant to keep your people safe can hurt others. It threw me a little bit because a lot of this type of fantasy has a strict kind of "x is the powerful one and y is the powerless one" dynamic, but this is more complicated than that. All three groups have a very good reason to distrust the other two and a history of violence against the other two. And all the characters are aware of that, and don't know how to navigate it justly, and it ends up in a lot of bloodshed.
I'll be honest, it's a bit depressing, but not necessarily in a bad way? I will say there's an extremely high density of mysteries and I wish the author would have resolved a few more before the end of the second book, but I don't necessarily fault her as I believe that balance is very individual and difficult. It's a pretty good series so far all told, but it really is overwritten imo.
3. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Again, I really wanted to like it! Conceptually it's everything I love! Folktales! A sort of world-within-world of mythical creatures (somewhat ala the kind of youkai second world stuff you get in anime like YuYu Hakusho)! A weird historical-urban-fantasy kind of conceit! A strong sense of place! Magic as the roots of thing, as the confused and seamy underside of the world, like underneath a rock you've pulled up.
And I really like Valente's prose, although I always get the sense she's an author who puts prose before anything else. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though sometimes it's just too much. In the case of Deathless I didn't find it too much; the actual writing was very beautiful and well-done. And the characters were really well-drawn, sharp and interesting. The worldbuilding was suited to appeal to me.
It's just...hm. It had strong elements that often spoil a book for me, for reasons of personal taste. They're sort of intertwined in this book and sometimes in other things, but they can appear independently.
The first one is most straightforwardly, a visceral and tactile sense of sexuality that I tend to find squicky. I don't mind sex in books, but there's a certain writing style that presents it in a very fluid-heavy, smells-and-tastes kind of way that I am generally grossed out by. There's usually a strong focus on women's genitals in a way that can sometimes come off as borderline misogynistic depending on who's doing it. I associate it strongly with Gregory MacGuire but it's by no means just him.
The second is hard to define because it sounds like a good thing, which is......a lot of feminist stories by cis women for cis women are extremely alienating to me. They tend to present the experience of womanhood as universal. They're usually straight and often concern the relationships between men and women. I don't enjoy this because it's completely irrelevant to my life and to my experience of gender, while still being presented as a kind of universal Truth about it. Some of this is because I'm not a woman, some of it is because I'm not straight, and some of it is because I'm autistic, I think (even if I was a woman, womanhood wouldn't really work that way for me). I don't have a problem with reading stories that aren't about me, but I don't like it when things act like they're telling broad cultural truths about social structures and are then totally irrelevant to all my experiences of those social structures.
When you tie the two together you get this weird kind of emergent body-essentialism, this focus on the physical aspects of Womanhood, that I find extremely uncomfortable as a trans afab person. It's not so much about any of the explicit messages as just about what is focused on, and what kind of language is used. It's very uncomfortable and hard to explain or define, idk. This is probably someone else's favorite book, maybe even someone I know, but I just couldn't get past those aspects.