slashmarks

I am again going to try to go fast and limit myself to a couple paragraphs/book. We'll see how it goes.

Wild Seed – Octavia Butler. Doro and Anyanwu are two immortal beings, not quite human; Doro is a sort of spirit that hops from body to body, and Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who never ages and can heal from almost any wound. Neither has never met another like them until they find each other; neither has either feared anyone or anything seriously until they met each other. Doro attempts to control Anyanwu, and Anyanwu seeks, eventually, to escape him, but as the only two who will never die, they are drawn together.

I am... not sure how I feel about this book. There are ways in which it's very interesting, particularly as a Butler fan in general – I can see her exploring issues of power and consent and attachment that show up in the other work I've read by her, though I feel somewhat less successfully in this book, earlier than my favorites. I love Anyanwu, it's compellingly written, the worldbuilding is incredibly original and the history is well-used. But I can't help but feel that this was an incredibly depressing book to read, and that I wasn't sold hard enough on why Anyanwu should be attached to Doro when he is so awful. (How awful? Content warnings: rape, breeding humans like livestock, human sacrifice/murder, slavery both fantasy-esque and historical, eugenics, incest.)

Circle of Magic: Daja's Book – Tamora Pierce. I continue to feel about the same about Pierce as usual, which is that her world building is just interesting and complex enough in glimpses to make her work maddeningly frustrating instead of merely bad. (Yes, I have read bits of her later work, too.) Weirdly moralistic treatment of children with random intrusion of twenty-first century culture in a medieval setting that is just accurate enough to make it jarring instead of inevitable; shallow and implausible characterization; adults jerking children around on a chain because they can; terrible and inaccurate treatment of disability; also minor technical mistakes with fiber arts that bother me as much as anything else in that list because I am a nutcase.

Also how old are these kids supposed to be? They're treated like children – I mean, younger than I would expect twelve year olds to be treated, and that's in modern America and this is a high medieval setting, but supposedly Sandry is sufficiently skilled at weaving to work on her own and Daja is a blacksmith apprentice capable of complex work, which suggests they should be like, sixteen to twenty. I also was really frustrated by the fact that Pierce appears to have mixed up her action plot line with her main emotional plot line and resolved what was set up as the main damn conflict of the book off screen with a decision that the character implied had never been in question anyway.

Some things I did like: finding out more about the Traders even if a lot of it was cringe worthy; saffron; the way that the kids' magic worked; Frostpine being freaked out about the other teachers encouraging the children to just give up their magic and just him and Daja in general; Sandry in general and her willingness to tell off adults for being jerks and responsibility; random bits of technological and worldbuilding description; the fact that the disability issues are more “THESE ISSUES DID NOT EXIST IN THIS TYPE OF SOCIETY” than “DISABLED PEOPLE AREN'T HUMAN;” the description of Trader rituals. So, er, that one escaped the two paragraph limit.

Nine Goblins – T Kingfisher (novella). There is a war between goblins and humans, with inevitable involvement of elves and orcs. The war, however, is largely in the background, as the work focuses on a particular squad of goblins, led by Sergeant Nessilka, despite the fact that she maintains they need a babysitter, not a sergeant. After a charge on a wizard goes badly, they are magically transported forty miles past the front, to a forest near the other main character, an elf veterinarian named Sings to Trees. Another magical disturbance nearby proves to make things even more complicated – particularly as it concerns the nearby (enemy!) human village.

This is the first work of Kingfisher's that I can't recommend without reservation. There are a lot of things I really loved – Nessilka is exactly the kind of resignedly practical, responsibility narrator I love and expect from Kingfisher, and I also loved Sings To Trees' introduction (in the midst of delivering a breached unicorn foal, arm up the mother's uterus trying frantically to turn it, covered in unpleasant substances and badly bruised.) But ultimately the handling of disability here was... It made me very uncomfortable, even if I'm not sure I can point to anything specific as an error. Let me explain: in this world, magic is a sort of psychotic break, where the psychosis is able to interact with reality. Wizards have varying levels of stability as a result of this, and the portrayal is sympathetic but very much outside-and-above. The villain's lack of moral judgment is explicitly attributed to being a child, not her psychosis, but I felt that the subtext was more than a little difficult to read. All that said, this is comparatively old work and I did enjoy it.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo – Zen Cho (novella). This is supposedly a historical romance about a Chinese writer living in twenties London, but it is a very unusual romance in which the main character spends most of the book having an affair with someone other than the romantic lead. Some parts of the plot felt a little stretched, but the book's selling point isn't the plot anyway, or the real romance – it's about the voice of the narrator, which is hilarious. Rachelmanija posted an excerpt a while back in her review, and I recommend you go check that out, or see if amazon has a read inside feature on it, because if you like the voice, you will like the book. Also in a weird mirror of the previous review, extra points for a wholly sympathetic side character with psychosis.