January books
Feb. 6th, 2013 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanI swear I’m going to do better at posting about the books I read this year! I will not always talk this much. Remember: ALL OF THE SPOILERS.
My first book of 2013 was Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Broadly speaking: Polly as a nineteen-year-old realises she has a double set of memories, and we get the story of her double memories from where they begin to where they end: she meets a man called Thomas Lynn when she is nine years old and then he disappears when she is fifteen. Between times they have a great friendship and invent stories together, which very often come true. In the end, Polly saves him from the fairies who have cursed him and want to claim him.
This book makes me feel terribly unsophisticated. I read Reflections by Diana Wynne Jones in December, which is a non-fiction collection of her essays and reviews. In it she talks about Fire and Hemlock and how it’s based on both the ballad of Tam Lin and the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, which obviously I had noticed, but also about all the myths and fairy tales it draws on and the characters coming in threes and the gender stuff and the way it uses the structure of T S Eliot’s Four Quarters and all of that just totally flew over my head.
Like, I read it once when I was... probably twelve or so, I think, as part of my childhood quest to find every Diana Wynne Jones book and make it mine. So I wanted to reread it as an adult who is more capable of seeing these things in a text, and yeah... not so much. Which makes me sad, because I vastly enjoyed digging into Charmed Life and Conrad’s Fate for a university essay on legacy and magic and Englishness.
And there is this enormous age gap between Thomas and Polly, which I found difficult. I remember the first time that I read this I didn’t see the romance coming at all, because it’s written as another one of Diana Wynne Jones’ children’s novels, which pretty much never include romance except as subtext among the adults. (An exception to this is The Merlin Conspiracy, which hadn’t come out yet.) So I wasn’t reading for the cues that would have clued me in, but also, I was a kid - these days I pick up on precisely what Polly’s granny and mother are concerned about when it comes to her friendship with a grown man, and why Polly hates Tom’s girlfriend and tries to prove herself grown-up. But yeah.
I can deal with it, though, by reaching very specifically for my own experience in a way I don’t usually do when reading. The friendship between Tom and Polly is based on letters and books and inventing stories together - in some ways the deep connection between them is quite reminiscent of a fandom friendship. They very occasionally meet physically, but mostly the joy of cooperative creativity and letters and discussing texts they love carries them through.
Anyway. There are also pitch-perfect, fun, real-feeling secondary characters and very chilling villains and minor antagonists and a happy ending. It’s excellent, even if when I got to the essay in Reflections by one of DWJ’s children and he cited Fire and Hemlock as unquestionably her best work I actually said “WHAT NO” out loud.
Then I read a very good YA book with fairly explicit sibling incest. I still don’t click with YA that well, but... yeah. We’ve come a long way since Judy Blume. Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma:
Broadly speaking: Lochan and Maya are siblings with three younger siblings who they are basically parenting; their single mother is an alcoholic and increasingly absentee until she’s living with her boyfriend by halfway through the book. The two struggle with incestuous desire, give in, and are caught. Lochan tries to fake it as rape, so Maya and the younger three can stay together, but when he finds out Maya has signed an incest confession he hangs himself. As the book ends Maya and the other three are grief-stricken but together.
Okay. So this is definitely a book... not arguing for incest, but putting the best possible situation for incest forward and then saying “is it really so bad?” Because the chapters are written alternately from Maya and Lochan’s POV, we see the desire and love on both sides: there’s no room left for interpreting things as non-consensual. The siblings are very close in age and work together. So yeah, while there is still a very slight power dynamic - Lochan occasionally keeps problems from Maya so she won’t worry, and while they’re a pair, Lochan is still the oldest - it’s much less dubious than I’d expect of even “consensual” incest.
And the text, if not always the characters, is open about the fact that their desires are a product of the fucked-up family dynamic and Maya and Lochan having to act as partners and parents. It just thinks that doesn’t mean it can’t be... broadly positive.
Idk. I found it a weird experience tbh, because Maya would be talking in first person about how no one would understand their love and I’d be like FOR MANY GOOD REASONS ACTUALLY. The part where Maya talks to her best friend about whether various forms of “forbidden” love are okay actually annoyed me: my queer relationships do not inherently involve issues of consensuality and abuse or distorted family relationships, thank you, there is actually a difference. So yeah, weird but good.
I also liked that it was a book where financial problems loom large. I’ve noticed that American YA in particular is ENORMOUSLY focussed on middle-class kids - upper-middle class kids, really. Far more so than British YA/kidlit, and that’s not great either. So it was nice to read about a London family where people don’t just always feel secure in their large houses or randomly go to private schools.
I also really liked the Lochan/Kit relationship. Kit is the thirteen-year-old brother going a bit off the rails, and his relationship with Lochan is interesting: there’s a lot of masculinity jostling there. He resents his big brother for taking over the ‘dad’ role and authority far more than he resents Maya, for instance. There’s also some scary violence between them; it’s fairly understandable dysfunction under the circumstances, but it also adds some niggles as far as the Lochan/Maya relationship goes.
And then I read YET MORE YA, of a very different mould - The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong.
Broadly speaking: Chloe Saunders gets her period and starts seeing ghosts on the same day. She gets sent to a group home for disturbed teenagers and slowly discovers the truth about herself, before running away with three other teenagers.
Okay, remember what I said about American YA and its pretty much universally well-off teens? Yeah. I do like this, though; the period/ghosts thing very specifically sets up a puberty metaphor which I rather enjoy. Chloe is one of those slightly frustrating female protagonists where she wants to help but is physically helpless, and she lampshades it and of course as a teenage girl with human strength, what can she do? But I am also thinking, “yes, but you did give your boy supernatural strength and your other boy self-defence skills.” Also I am not a person who especially enjoys werewolves. I did like it though; there are some great horror sequences and I like that Chloe initially accepts her diagnosis. Rae and Liz and Tori, Chloe’s three female peers, are all awesome in different ways. I was very pleased when Tori, the mean-girl type who I rather sympathised with, was very specifically written as sympathetic even while doing a horrific thing to Chloe. And Rae had the reaction I always wish someone would have when they discover their supernatural powers: instead of whining about how she only wanted a normal life, she is poignantly thrilled that maybe she has powers, maybe she is special.
Last of all I read The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong.
Broadly speaking: Captured by the bad guys, Chloe investigates their evil-scientist genetic manipulation of supernaturals. She and most of her friends escape, but her aunt and friend Rae, both of dubious loyalties, don’t make it out. She and the others run and evade and eventually make it to people who might be able to help.
Torn-between-two-brothers is so overdone, but this isn’t a bad example of the type. Tori breaks my heart and I love her; her emotionally abusive witch mother has totally cut her off, and she is alone. And remains bitchy and tough pretty much all the time, even though she does have distressed moments. Also cool horror stuff, again, including a part with necromantically raised bats which... omg trauma.
There’s this whole thing about sorcerers, who are boys, and witches, who are girls, and their magics are very different and witch magic is more suited to healing and never the twain shall meet. Which annoys me. Like, I try to see it as part of the magical-powers-puberty thing, which is really emphasised by the werewolf character, and boys and girls growing into physical differences. (Ignoring both genderqueer people and intersex people, but whatevs.) But it just... no. There’s never any explanation, it is just natural that because ~men and women are inherently different ~their kinds of magic are different and incompatible. And female magic is linked to girly stuff like healing but men’s magic is for blowing shit up. WHATEVER.
Now, to be fair, what we actually see on the page is Simon being sort of pathetic while the genetically enhanced Tori binds people and fights them and generally is a magical badass. So there’s that. But ultimately I just do not like texts that take inherent and enormous differences between men and women as their starting point.
My first book of 2013 was Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Broadly speaking: Polly as a nineteen-year-old realises she has a double set of memories, and we get the story of her double memories from where they begin to where they end: she meets a man called Thomas Lynn when she is nine years old and then he disappears when she is fifteen. Between times they have a great friendship and invent stories together, which very often come true. In the end, Polly saves him from the fairies who have cursed him and want to claim him.
This book makes me feel terribly unsophisticated. I read Reflections by Diana Wynne Jones in December, which is a non-fiction collection of her essays and reviews. In it she talks about Fire and Hemlock and how it’s based on both the ballad of Tam Lin and the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, which obviously I had noticed, but also about all the myths and fairy tales it draws on and the characters coming in threes and the gender stuff and the way it uses the structure of T S Eliot’s Four Quarters and all of that just totally flew over my head.
Like, I read it once when I was... probably twelve or so, I think, as part of my childhood quest to find every Diana Wynne Jones book and make it mine. So I wanted to reread it as an adult who is more capable of seeing these things in a text, and yeah... not so much. Which makes me sad, because I vastly enjoyed digging into Charmed Life and Conrad’s Fate for a university essay on legacy and magic and Englishness.
And there is this enormous age gap between Thomas and Polly, which I found difficult. I remember the first time that I read this I didn’t see the romance coming at all, because it’s written as another one of Diana Wynne Jones’ children’s novels, which pretty much never include romance except as subtext among the adults. (An exception to this is The Merlin Conspiracy, which hadn’t come out yet.) So I wasn’t reading for the cues that would have clued me in, but also, I was a kid - these days I pick up on precisely what Polly’s granny and mother are concerned about when it comes to her friendship with a grown man, and why Polly hates Tom’s girlfriend and tries to prove herself grown-up. But yeah.
I can deal with it, though, by reaching very specifically for my own experience in a way I don’t usually do when reading. The friendship between Tom and Polly is based on letters and books and inventing stories together - in some ways the deep connection between them is quite reminiscent of a fandom friendship. They very occasionally meet physically, but mostly the joy of cooperative creativity and letters and discussing texts they love carries them through.
Anyway. There are also pitch-perfect, fun, real-feeling secondary characters and very chilling villains and minor antagonists and a happy ending. It’s excellent, even if when I got to the essay in Reflections by one of DWJ’s children and he cited Fire and Hemlock as unquestionably her best work I actually said “WHAT NO” out loud.
Then I read a very good YA book with fairly explicit sibling incest. I still don’t click with YA that well, but... yeah. We’ve come a long way since Judy Blume. Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma:
Broadly speaking: Lochan and Maya are siblings with three younger siblings who they are basically parenting; their single mother is an alcoholic and increasingly absentee until she’s living with her boyfriend by halfway through the book. The two struggle with incestuous desire, give in, and are caught. Lochan tries to fake it as rape, so Maya and the younger three can stay together, but when he finds out Maya has signed an incest confession he hangs himself. As the book ends Maya and the other three are grief-stricken but together.
Okay. So this is definitely a book... not arguing for incest, but putting the best possible situation for incest forward and then saying “is it really so bad?” Because the chapters are written alternately from Maya and Lochan’s POV, we see the desire and love on both sides: there’s no room left for interpreting things as non-consensual. The siblings are very close in age and work together. So yeah, while there is still a very slight power dynamic - Lochan occasionally keeps problems from Maya so she won’t worry, and while they’re a pair, Lochan is still the oldest - it’s much less dubious than I’d expect of even “consensual” incest.
And the text, if not always the characters, is open about the fact that their desires are a product of the fucked-up family dynamic and Maya and Lochan having to act as partners and parents. It just thinks that doesn’t mean it can’t be... broadly positive.
Idk. I found it a weird experience tbh, because Maya would be talking in first person about how no one would understand their love and I’d be like FOR MANY GOOD REASONS ACTUALLY. The part where Maya talks to her best friend about whether various forms of “forbidden” love are okay actually annoyed me: my queer relationships do not inherently involve issues of consensuality and abuse or distorted family relationships, thank you, there is actually a difference. So yeah, weird but good.
I also liked that it was a book where financial problems loom large. I’ve noticed that American YA in particular is ENORMOUSLY focussed on middle-class kids - upper-middle class kids, really. Far more so than British YA/kidlit, and that’s not great either. So it was nice to read about a London family where people don’t just always feel secure in their large houses or randomly go to private schools.
I also really liked the Lochan/Kit relationship. Kit is the thirteen-year-old brother going a bit off the rails, and his relationship with Lochan is interesting: there’s a lot of masculinity jostling there. He resents his big brother for taking over the ‘dad’ role and authority far more than he resents Maya, for instance. There’s also some scary violence between them; it’s fairly understandable dysfunction under the circumstances, but it also adds some niggles as far as the Lochan/Maya relationship goes.
And then I read YET MORE YA, of a very different mould - The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong.
Broadly speaking: Chloe Saunders gets her period and starts seeing ghosts on the same day. She gets sent to a group home for disturbed teenagers and slowly discovers the truth about herself, before running away with three other teenagers.
Okay, remember what I said about American YA and its pretty much universally well-off teens? Yeah. I do like this, though; the period/ghosts thing very specifically sets up a puberty metaphor which I rather enjoy. Chloe is one of those slightly frustrating female protagonists where she wants to help but is physically helpless, and she lampshades it and of course as a teenage girl with human strength, what can she do? But I am also thinking, “yes, but you did give your boy supernatural strength and your other boy self-defence skills.” Also I am not a person who especially enjoys werewolves. I did like it though; there are some great horror sequences and I like that Chloe initially accepts her diagnosis. Rae and Liz and Tori, Chloe’s three female peers, are all awesome in different ways. I was very pleased when Tori, the mean-girl type who I rather sympathised with, was very specifically written as sympathetic even while doing a horrific thing to Chloe. And Rae had the reaction I always wish someone would have when they discover their supernatural powers: instead of whining about how she only wanted a normal life, she is poignantly thrilled that maybe she has powers, maybe she is special.
Last of all I read The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong.
Broadly speaking: Captured by the bad guys, Chloe investigates their evil-scientist genetic manipulation of supernaturals. She and most of her friends escape, but her aunt and friend Rae, both of dubious loyalties, don’t make it out. She and the others run and evade and eventually make it to people who might be able to help.
Torn-between-two-brothers is so overdone, but this isn’t a bad example of the type. Tori breaks my heart and I love her; her emotionally abusive witch mother has totally cut her off, and she is alone. And remains bitchy and tough pretty much all the time, even though she does have distressed moments. Also cool horror stuff, again, including a part with necromantically raised bats which... omg trauma.
There’s this whole thing about sorcerers, who are boys, and witches, who are girls, and their magics are very different and witch magic is more suited to healing and never the twain shall meet. Which annoys me. Like, I try to see it as part of the magical-powers-puberty thing, which is really emphasised by the werewolf character, and boys and girls growing into physical differences. (Ignoring both genderqueer people and intersex people, but whatevs.) But it just... no. There’s never any explanation, it is just natural that because ~men and women are inherently different ~their kinds of magic are different and incompatible. And female magic is linked to girly stuff like healing but men’s magic is for blowing shit up. WHATEVER.
Now, to be fair, what we actually see on the page is Simon being sort of pathetic while the genetically enhanced Tori binds people and fights them and generally is a magical badass. So there’s that. But ultimately I just do not like texts that take inherent and enormous differences between men and women as their starting point.