Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2023-10-15 05:23 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2023-10-15 05:23 pm
Entry tags:
Books!
- National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Space by Catherine Hughes: I have two standards by which I judge Educational Kids Books About Astronomy, one gigantic and one tiny.
The gigantic one is, of course, how it treats Pluto. Any book that claims there are 9 planets is a NOPE WRONG BAD. Either you do not count Pluto, or you count all the dwarf planets. Those are your options. There is no third one.
This book counts all of the dwarf planets and handles the entire thing very well. (For an older kid book that also does it well, I recommend the Magic School Bus solar system book).
The tiny standard is how it handles the issue that some pictures are Actual Photos Taken By Space Robots and some pictures are Artist's Rendering. This book handles this pretty well, too! If a kids book mixes between them with no differentiation, I won't care as much as the whole Pluto issue, because the Pluto issue is a clear signal of how it handles the concept of Science Is A Moving Target, but I think how it handles the photos vs artwork goes to the quality of accuracy and teaching that it cares about. - Desmond by Ulysses Dietz: This is an m/m erotica book featuring a gay vampire, a gay human, and the gay vampire's straight vampire best friend. The romance is not Happily Ever After.
So.
In the late 90s, I did my best to read every vampire book I could get from the library. I'd find lists on the Internet and everything. Somehow I did not find this one, alas for me, because that would have been the perfect time, and this is definitely a book I was seeking at that time.
This is a book so directly in conversation with Anne Rice that it very nearly says so explicitly in dialogue in the first chapter. This is non-angsty actually-gay French vampires. No angsting about being a vampire! No angsting about being gay! No angsting about being rich! TBF, Desmond could stand to do some angsting about things, he doesn't have much in the way of feelings or depth.
The protagonist is Desmond Beckwith, a rich English-French -- the book is, uh, having it both ways? It calls him English a lot, he's also French, I assume he has to be French to be in conversation with Anne Rice but the author really wanted him to be English, anyway just roll with it -- rich dude/aristocrat -- he may or may not be an aristocrat himself but his parents were both titled, like I said, just roll with this -- who becomes a vampire and then works as a banker until present days (late 1980s).
Along the way, he observes the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (for… reasons?) and rescues a vampire named Roger from the guillotine. Roger is his best friend, business partner, and also very straight. But still his bff! We must be French vampires who are close friends and not angsting at each other, because Anne Rice's French homoerotic vampires have no sense of humor. (I did not find a notable sense of humor in this book, either.)
Tony is the human guy who Desmond picks up at a bar and proceeds to sugar daddy without his permission, even as Desmond scoffs at the idea of sugar daddying. Desmond gets him an apartment without asking him first, he manipulates his connections to get Tony a job and Tony doesn't find out until long afterwards, and is cool with it, because emotions are not even pastede on yay; the author forgot to paste them on.
Tony also is fatally wounded by a serial killer who targets gay men, and dies after rejecting being turned into a vampire. I say this because all the stuff on tumblr does not give the impression that this is yet more Even Gay Erotica Must Kill Its Gays; both of Desmond's boyfriends die in this book. That plot point successfully cured me of my desire to get more of this series through ILL; it was a nice walk through the 1990s Vampire Fiction Feelings, but there's a reason I prefer slash.
The characterization is thin, to put it nicely. The plot is also thin. The relationship is thin. But also canonically gay vampires. Where was this book when I was searching for it? I do not really care for it now, but those vampire book lists is also how I found the Austra Vampires books, which I love dearly, and they're basically in this same vein of Author Really Loves This One Specific Thing And So Makes The Characters Obsessed With it. For the Austra books, it's stained glass windows. For this book, it's historical furniture.
Content note, there's a lot of AIDS in this book, which is natural given the time period (and probably another "fuck you" to Anne Rice). Tony does not have AIDS. Desmond is active in The Gay Community Of New York, including being a buddy to friendless gay men who are dying of AIDS.
An interesting worldbuilding detail is that Desmond ages normally until he turns 65, at which point he magically de-ages back to 21, his age at turning, and repeats the cycle. An odd twist on this is that he treats his visible age as being his actual age, which can sometimes come off strangely. But it avoids every complication of masquerade that other vampire and immortals canons deal with, which is what to do about not visibly aging.
The book also seems in parts to be in dialogue with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain, although I haven't read that much Saint-Germain. - A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro: YA m/f Sherlock Holmes murder mystery at an elite Connecticut boarding school, for some unknown reason.
I read this book entirely because of the title, which is very clever. The title was the best part. I did not like this book.
James "Jamie" Watson is a descendant of Yes That Dr. Watson, who is a historical figure who wrote all those stories, but the book treats the original stories as "they happened but also Watson took some liberties", as a way of explaining how some of the details in the stories are not based in any reality.
Charlotte Holmes is a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and her family thoroughly, ruthlessly trains all their descendants in mystery solving.
They are both British citizens; I think Watson is dual. Through various meddling, they end up at the same Connecticut elite prep school for rich kids. Why Connecticut? Why an American prep school to begin with? This can't be a requirement of YA, can it? British boarding school novels probably invented YA in the first place. Whatever. Let's move on.
Holmes is a rich kid, although she's been financially cut off by her family and exiled to America for the crime of having emotions they don't like -- not, notably, per the text, for drug addiction, but they don't seem to care about deciding to yank away all support from their teenage daughter with a drug problem; this is a book that believes that any Holmes must not have any emotions other than cruelty to those they like.
Watson is not a rich kid. He is there because he has unaddressed anger issues and his estranged father is a manipulative asshole who lives near the school and decided to get Watson to go there so Watson can meet Holmes; Holmes's uncle is paying Watson's tuition. Watson's parents are divorced and Watson's mother not only has sole custody, she has sole custody on the other side of an ocean. Watson's father has a new family and new kids. Watson has never met his father's second wife or children. This feels fully deserved after you meet Watson's dad. Watson's dad is such a jerk, I suspected him of setting up the murders just to manipulate Holmes into agreeing to be friends with Watson.
Holmes was a famous kiddie sleuth who was in the tabloids for solving crimes and Watson was obsessed with her. He's so glad to have a chance to meet her and be her friend. She has no real understandable emotions in this book. She's just mean a lot.
And then the murders begin.
This is... fine? It's not my thing. I found both Watson and Holmes to be deeply unlikable, which is a problem, since Watson is the narrator and he's an unsympathetic one. The setting is also deeply strange for a Sherlock story and it kept drawing attention to how weird it was to have a Sherlock story there. I'd also gotten the mistaken impression this was f/f; is there a different YA Sherlock that's f/f?
This book loses points for making the creative decision to turn Sherlock Holmes into a drug-addicted teenage girl who has been sent away from any family or friends or social support, abandoned on the other side of the ocean, and then, because there's not an ounce of creativity at play here, makes the narrative choice to have her have been raped in the recent past before the book begins. Because you can't have a female Sherlock without that, right? Especially since she's, like, at best, sixteen. (The whole ages thing is so papered over, I initially thought this was meant to be set at Fictional Yale and then discovered otherwise when I checked the inside book cover.) Plus the book has her have tried, at age 14, to seduce her adult tutor (who turned her down), and is now having to deal with all the consequences of that. It's so unimaginative. So uncreative. No points.
And then the book earns negative points when it turns out that the murderer actively assisted in Holmes having been raped in the first place. Why! Why these choices!
You will note I call him Watson, this is because the book decides his name is James and that he prefers James, but everyone calls him Jamie and he doesn't do much to correct them. But he prefers James. And it's told in first-person, so we just get that. And then in the epilogue that Holmes writes, she calls him Watson. And throughout the book, Watson calls her Holmes, because he loves so much that he gets to hang out with Charlotte Holmes The Famous Kid Detective Who He Followed In The Tabloids And Wanted To Be Friends With And Now He Is, that she's not Charlotte to him. Oh, plus, you know, it's Holmes/Watson modern day, so of course they're Holmes and Watson to each other. They're both trying to live and invoke the famous stories, while also playing to its conventions.
And a future book in the series, which I do not plan to read, is titled The Case For Jamie. So is this character Jamie Watson or James Watson? I would appreciate this more if I thought it was a deliberate "lol so what is Dr. Watson's first name, John or James" reference. I do not think it is.
Also: The in-universe version of Mycroft owns the in-universe version of Blackwater. I do not think Mycroft is meant to be older than 25.
Choices were made.
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Entertainment is a different kettle of fish.
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- I mean, how much are these books really about education as opposed to entertainment? I've sat with my three year old niece and a book about birds and she doesn't want to talk to me about bird ecology and avian anatomy, she wants to quack and hoot and tweet. I don't think we should get too precious here. She'll learn about the ecology when she's older. At best these books are edutainment, the intention is not for someone to learn how to be an astronaut by reading that book, the intention is for them to dream about being an astronaut.
-Good science books for children are rare and they shouldn't stop being good science books when the scientific ideas they teach become obsoleted by new discoveries. I recently read The Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton which says that basically everything I read about in the dinosaur books I read as a kid is wrong, not because the authors weren't careful or thoughtful but because new fossil discoveries and new techniques for measuring and analyzing existing fossil discoveries have totally changed the basic paradigm of how we think about dinosaurs. I don't think that makes the books I read worthless, because they were based on real facts and a real scientific process in progress.
- Science education is full of lying to children, it's not a bad thing. First they taught me Newtonian mechanics, then oops, it turns out General Relativity is a thing. First they taught me that heat rises and cold falls, then they teach me that Heat Transfers is a complicated classical physics paradigm. It just wasn't worth it to teach me General Relativity or classical heat transfers before I had the mathematical toolkit to deal with them. I don't think it's bad to simplify with the intention that if they come back later with curiosity they learn that their elementary school science books didn't give them all the facts.
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My feeling on Educational Books For Kids is that if the kids use it as a reference book for their homework, it should not get them a bad grade.
Once the word "relativity" even come into play, we're at a different level of kids book than I'm buying for.
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For little kids, I expect and receive no sourcing. For an older kid, I do want something. Footnotes, endnotes, bibliography...
Could the kid still go and read it? Sure. Am I gonna recommend someone buy it for them as a gift? No.
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There is certainly an audience, but it's not me!
I honestly truly do not understand why this is set in Connecticut. It's not like the author puts a ton of effort into setting and place, there's no wonderful Details Of Connecticut peppered in there. The setting is so conspicuous and so unexplained.
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(I will admit, Pluto will forever be the ninth planet in my mind! But that's just nostalgia talking. I'd never tell a kid that :) and in fact my kids are used to me saying things like "Pluto, which is not a planet but which I learned was a planet," and rolling their eyes at me :) )
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I haven't done a full survey but I've definitely come across some very badly handling of the Pluto issue, such as treating it like Pluto's feelings were hurt.