Reading Wednesday 21/08
Aug. 21st, 2019 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read:
The Storm Keeper's island by Catherine Doyle. (c) Catherine Doyle 2018; Pub 2018 Bloomsbury Children's Books; ISBN 978-1-68119-959-7. A delightful and original children's fantasy.
So lucky by Nicola Griffith. (c) Nicola Griffith 2018; Pub 2018 Handheld Press Ltd; ISBN 978-1-912766-01-7. A powerful novella about acquired disability, that ends somewhat abruptly.
I borrowed The Storm Keeper's island from Judith, who was listening to it as a bedtime story a few months back, and I wanted to read the whole thing through rather than just snippets when I happened to be around at bedtime. It was definitely worth reading!
In some ways tSKI is a classic story about a chosen child with a magical destiny. It's interesting though because it's set in a particular Irish island, Arranmore, which is in fact a real place. And it stays away from the obvious clichés of fantasy set in Ireland; Doyle is actually Irish and has personal connections to Arranmore according to her author bio. It's sort of about an eternal battle between Dagda and Morrigan, but it's mainly about a kid learning to love his island heritage.
I really like Fionn as a character. He's very eleven, and there are great descriptions of his sometimes partial impressions of people he meets and his experiences and emotions. There's a lovely portrayal of his difficult relationship with his annoying older sister, and his just beginning to grasp that grown-ups are people too. He's also modern, he's not some anachronistic character copied from Edwardian children's fantasy. I particularly enjoyed the way that he's starting to get his head round irony and sarcasm; the tight third narrative voice is often hilarious. Another thing I liked was that he thinks of himself as not brave, because when I was in the target age of books like that I often felt that I could never be like the protagonist carrying out daring feats to save the world.
I also very much appreciated the original magic system, with the candles that capture moments in history and allow a sort of partial time travel. It's not like anything I've come across before, and the magic is described really atmospherically. I was completely absorbed in all the exciting adventures. The pace is really fast; the book doesn't waste a lot of time on world building, it goes straight in to the adventures, and you find out the background as you go along, as Fionn discovers the history behind what happens to him. The book handles real-world issues like dementia and child carers for a mentally ill parent, but it's not at all a problem novel, it's an exciting magical adventure with these things in the background.
One disappointment was that for a 21st century book it does badly by its female characters. There's a sister who is mostly annoying and needs to be rescued. There's a mother who is not quite fridged but is overwhelmed by the grief of losing her husband, Fionn's heroic father, and spends most of the book undergoing psychiatric care rather than taking part in the story. There's a long dead grandmother mainly reported as having been beautiful. And a living grandmother (of another kid) who is the antagonist and her only real trait is being bitter about the fact that Fionn's grandfather was the chosen one instead of her. And, well, the Morrigan, but having a female personification of the forces of evil and destruction isn't exactly the book's fault.
I really loved Hild, and I'd seen a number of very encouraging reviews of So lucky, particularly this one byrachelmanija, which really captures what's so great about the book.
So lucky is about a woman whose life falls apart when she's diagnosed with MS. It's specifically written to counter bad cripspiration or tragedy porn stories of protagonists who become disabled. Mara doesn't learn to accept her illness or achieve great things in spite of the terrible tragedy (certainly not the even worse clichés of nobly choosing death over inconveniencing people by being disabled, or finding a magical cure). She learns to embrace her anger about ableism, and to fight back against a society that at best abandons and sometimes actively murders people with disabilities.
The characterization is absolutely amazing. Everybody in the book seems absolutely real, even people who only appear for one sentence. I particularly liked that Mara is a lesbian, in a way that seems absolutely believable and not at all pasted on for token diversity, but also isn't what the story is about. There are very vivid descriptions of MS and the way that the illness itself can be miserable; it's not promoting the straw man version of the social model that everything would be hunky-dory if organizations would only build ramps. I liked the choice to make Mara someone who works in the AIDS world, because it allows interesting, nuanced comparisons between social attitudes to gay people and AIDS, and social attitudes to mysterious auto-immune illnesses that mainly affect women.
I found the thriller plot a bit rushed. There is a serial killer targeting disabled people, and it's creepy and scary, but then it all gets resolved almost abruptly at the end. I also didn't so much like the back story about the drug-using and dead before the story begins sister.
Definitely well worth reading, but with the content warning that it contains some descriptions of torture and murder, and also it exaggerates (this is based on Griffith's author notes in the back of my edition, not my judgement) the awfulness of MS which can already be a pretty devastating illness. A surprisingly high proportion of my friends have been diagnosed with MS in the prime of life, like Mara, and I really don't know whether or not I'd recommend So Lucky to that group of people.
Currently reading: Declare by Tim Powers. I'm enjoying this a lot, it's kind of Le Carré with Powers' signature Egyptian flavoured occult worldbuilding. It's also very long and quite complicated, in the way spy novels tend to be.
Up next: Aru Shah and the song of death, by Roshani Chokshi, the sequel to Aru Shah and the end of time which I loved loved loved, is finally out, so I'm quite possibly going to jump on that. But it'll take me a while to get through Declare.
I borrowed The Storm Keeper's island from Judith, who was listening to it as a bedtime story a few months back, and I wanted to read the whole thing through rather than just snippets when I happened to be around at bedtime. It was definitely worth reading!
In some ways tSKI is a classic story about a chosen child with a magical destiny. It's interesting though because it's set in a particular Irish island, Arranmore, which is in fact a real place. And it stays away from the obvious clichés of fantasy set in Ireland; Doyle is actually Irish and has personal connections to Arranmore according to her author bio. It's sort of about an eternal battle between Dagda and Morrigan, but it's mainly about a kid learning to love his island heritage.
I really like Fionn as a character. He's very eleven, and there are great descriptions of his sometimes partial impressions of people he meets and his experiences and emotions. There's a lovely portrayal of his difficult relationship with his annoying older sister, and his just beginning to grasp that grown-ups are people too. He's also modern, he's not some anachronistic character copied from Edwardian children's fantasy. I particularly enjoyed the way that he's starting to get his head round irony and sarcasm; the tight third narrative voice is often hilarious. Another thing I liked was that he thinks of himself as not brave, because when I was in the target age of books like that I often felt that I could never be like the protagonist carrying out daring feats to save the world.
I also very much appreciated the original magic system, with the candles that capture moments in history and allow a sort of partial time travel. It's not like anything I've come across before, and the magic is described really atmospherically. I was completely absorbed in all the exciting adventures. The pace is really fast; the book doesn't waste a lot of time on world building, it goes straight in to the adventures, and you find out the background as you go along, as Fionn discovers the history behind what happens to him. The book handles real-world issues like dementia and child carers for a mentally ill parent, but it's not at all a problem novel, it's an exciting magical adventure with these things in the background.
One disappointment was that for a 21st century book it does badly by its female characters. There's a sister who is mostly annoying and needs to be rescued. There's a mother who is not quite fridged but is overwhelmed by the grief of losing her husband, Fionn's heroic father, and spends most of the book undergoing psychiatric care rather than taking part in the story. There's a long dead grandmother mainly reported as having been beautiful. And a living grandmother (of another kid) who is the antagonist and her only real trait is being bitter about the fact that Fionn's grandfather was the chosen one instead of her. And, well, the Morrigan, but having a female personification of the forces of evil and destruction isn't exactly the book's fault.
I really loved Hild, and I'd seen a number of very encouraging reviews of So lucky, particularly this one by
rachelmanija, which really captures what's so great about the book. So lucky is about a woman whose life falls apart when she's diagnosed with MS. It's specifically written to counter bad cripspiration or tragedy porn stories of protagonists who become disabled. Mara doesn't learn to accept her illness or achieve great things in spite of the terrible tragedy (certainly not the even worse clichés of nobly choosing death over inconveniencing people by being disabled, or finding a magical cure). She learns to embrace her anger about ableism, and to fight back against a society that at best abandons and sometimes actively murders people with disabilities.
The characterization is absolutely amazing. Everybody in the book seems absolutely real, even people who only appear for one sentence. I particularly liked that Mara is a lesbian, in a way that seems absolutely believable and not at all pasted on for token diversity, but also isn't what the story is about. There are very vivid descriptions of MS and the way that the illness itself can be miserable; it's not promoting the straw man version of the social model that everything would be hunky-dory if organizations would only build ramps. I liked the choice to make Mara someone who works in the AIDS world, because it allows interesting, nuanced comparisons between social attitudes to gay people and AIDS, and social attitudes to mysterious auto-immune illnesses that mainly affect women.
I found the thriller plot a bit rushed. There is a serial killer targeting disabled people, and it's creepy and scary, but then it all gets resolved almost abruptly at the end. I also didn't so much like the back story about the drug-using and dead before the story begins sister.
Definitely well worth reading, but with the content warning that it contains some descriptions of torture and murder, and also it exaggerates (this is based on Griffith's author notes in the back of my edition, not my judgement) the awfulness of MS which can already be a pretty devastating illness. A surprisingly high proportion of my friends have been diagnosed with MS in the prime of life, like Mara, and I really don't know whether or not I'd recommend So Lucky to that group of people.
Currently reading: Declare by Tim Powers. I'm enjoying this a lot, it's kind of Le Carré with Powers' signature Egyptian flavoured occult worldbuilding. It's also very long and quite complicated, in the way spy novels tend to be.
Up next: Aru Shah and the song of death, by Roshani Chokshi, the sequel to Aru Shah and the end of time which I loved loved loved, is finally out, so I'm quite possibly going to jump on that. But it'll take me a while to get through Declare.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-08-21 01:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-08-22 09:39 am (UTC)