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Time and circumstance conspired to keep me from reviewing the second book in the Cemeteries of Amalo book, The Grief of Stones, but today I finished the third book, Tomb of the Dragons and I do have time to review this third and final book in the trilogy.

This is NOT a spoiler-free review.

Tomb of the Dragons retains much of what I loved about the first two books, including Thara’s character and his investigations into the underbelly of Amalo, with a healthy helping of Ethuveraz politics.

Thara is having to adjust to the events at the end of the last book, and here, I feel, is where we truly see how important his calling is to him—how he handles losing it. It gives some good perspective to why he is so dogged in pursuing his work goals—his calling really is his sense of purpose, his life. Watching Thara grapple with this change and its indefinite consequences was fascinating.

However, it also retains in greater measure some of the things that I didn’t love about the earlier books, including Addison’s obsession with minutiae. I can only read about the characters traveling on this or that tram line so many times before my eyes start skipping lines to the things that really matter. This would bother me less if it didn’t feel like it came at the expense of more important things.

For one, at the close of the trilogy, we still know virtually nothing about Evru, arguably the most important person in Thara’s past. We know nothing about their relationship except how it ended, about why Thara was drawn to Evru or what he got out of the relationship. We know very little about Thara’s own past, and only here do we finally get even crumbs of detail about his training as a prelate, one of the other most important events of his life. Yet we get the full name of every paper boy Thara encounters.

Furthermore, Addison makes plot decisions which are frankly baffling in their logic. To any reader with eyes, Iana was set up as Thara’s love interest, the most likely future candidate for his “moving on from Evru’s tragedy” romance. Three and a half books lead us to believe this.Then we get a bait-and-switch where Iana abruptly declares himself heterosexual and aromantic, and some rando we only get introduced to properly in the final third of the book is shoehorned in as Thara’s new crush.

To be clear, I’m not mad that Iana and Thara didn’t end as a couple—I was never deeply invested in their romance and would have been just as happy for there to be no romance at all in this story—I’m just a loss to understand this switch. It makes Thara and Olgarezh feel painfully lacking in chemistry, as we’ve had a fraction of the time to get to know them together as we have with Iana. We know almost nothing about Olgarezh as we have only a third of a book to get to know him, and the nature of his role and his character keeps him buttoned up for most of it, so I found it hard to care about him.

It would have been far less annoying and unsatisfying to just have Thara end the book single, but looking forward to a future romance. Instead, what we get feels rushed and narratively nonsensical. It also makes the ending of the book feel inorganic and unnecessary, a tool to force bonding between Thara and Olgarezh, rather than a rewarding conclusion to Thara’s adventures in Amalo.

The second thing that surprised me in an unsatisfying way was Thara ending the series essentially exiled from Amalo. A huge thread of this series has been Thara learning to accept love from others and find a way to set down roots again, and he was doing that in Amalo! He had friends, he had peers, he had connections, he had a home! And yet at the end of the book, that’s all taken away, and he’s kicked onto a life on the road with Olgarezh, who he barely knows, and all of his Amalo connections are relegated to pen pals. It was shocking and very disappointing. Again—if Addison had never planned for Thara to stay in Amalo, why wasn’t there more groundwork laid for his being unsatisfied having to stay in one place, why so much time spent showing him settling in to Amalo? It felt like giving him a home only to once again take it away.

There was a Maia cameo, which I loved, and it was really fun to revisit the Untheliniese court from the perspective of someone other than Maia, and to see Maia from an outside perspective. It was fun to see Csevet from another angle too! Really loved getting to see Maia in action as Edrahasivar too.

On the whole, this was a disappointing end to the trilogy. I still love the first two books, and there is still much I like about this one, but Addison makes too many jarring narrative shifts that make no sense and don’t add up in the face of the earlier parts of the story for it to be satisfying.  

Brahma's Dream by Shree Ghatage was a book I snatched out of a pile of stuff my sister was giving away last year, but she'd never gotten around to reading it herself, so she couldn't give me a preview. Brahma's Dream is set in India just before it gains self-rule, and concerns the family of Mohini, a child whose serious illness dominates her life.

This is one of those middle-of-the-road books that was neither amazingly good nor offensively bad, and therefore I struggle to come up with much to say about it. That makes it sound bad, but it isn't--I enjoyed my time with it. I thought Ghatage did a good job with exploring life on the precipice of great political change, although the history and politics of 1940s India is more backdrop to the family drama than central to the story. I liked Mohini and her family; because the nature of her illness necessitates a lot of rest and down time, Mohini is naturally a thoughtful child, as her thoughts are sometimes all she has to amuse herself. However, she never crosses the line into being precocious, which was a relief.

Neither did I feel like the book leaned too hard on Mohini's illness to elicit sentimentality from the reader. Obviously, an illness like hers is the biggest influence on her life, and on the lives of her immediate family, and there are many moments you sympathize with her because she can't just be a child the way she wants to be, but I didn't feel like Ghatage was plucking heartstrings just for the sake of it.

Reading the relationships between Mohini and her family was heartwarming, especially with her grandfather, who takes great joy in Mohini's intellect and is often there to discuss the import of various societal events with her. 

Ghatage's descriptive writing really brings to life the India of the time, with the colors, smells, sounds, and sights that are a part of Mohini's every day.

It reminded me of another book I read about a significant event in Indian history (the separation of India and Pakistan) told through the perspective of a young ill girl, Cracking India. 

On the whole, this was a sweet, heartfelt book. It's not heavy on plot, but if you enjoy watching the story of a family unfold and the little dramas that play out, it's enjoyable.

Last night I finished The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because I felt like it was time I made a real foray into the Arthurian legends. The actual first Arthurian book I read was The Mists of Avalon, but that was years ago and before I had heard the full story about Marion Zimmer Bradley. This book takes a decidedly different tone. I’m sticking to the most common name spellings for all of the characters here, because spellings do vary across all versions of these legends.

The first thing that surprised me about The Once and Future King is that it’s funny, and frequently in an absurd, dorky kind of way. Knights failing tilts because their visors fell over their eyes wrong, Merlin accidentally zapping himself away in the middle of a lesson because he was in a temper, the Questing Beast “falling in love” with two men dressed in a beast costume, that sort of thing. This silliness is largely concentrated in the first quarter of the book, which is about Arthur’s childhood, but it’s never fully lost.

The second surprise was how long the book focuses on Arthur’s childhood, but then again, it is setting the scene for Arthur’s worldview and the lessons he internalized as a child which shape his approach to being king.

( Read more... )

I picked this out of the free book box and October seemed like a good time to buckle down with a gruesome murder mystery, so I started into Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (if you recognize her name, it's probably because she also wrote Gone Girl). This book is about a newspaper reporter, Camille, who returns to her tiny, rural Midwest hometown of Wind Gap to investigate a missing girl.

What to say about this one? I'm struggling. It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible. I was engaged enough to finish it, but I also dropped it back in the free book box right after finishing it. I don't feel like I wasted my time, but I also don't feel inspired to read more of Flynn's work.

The book definitely goes hard on portraying women with capital I Issues, as well as the effects of generational trauma, be it from bad parenting, mental health problems, or misogyny. The toxicity of life in a small town is also a strong element, and the claustrophobia the protagonist Camille feels being back there, seeing all these teenage girls who seem doomed to follow the same dour, unhappy paths their predecessors did. The misery that these unhappy girls and women inflict on each other, perhaps in absence of a healthier outlet, also features prominently and heartbreakingly.

Camille herself I didn't care for. She's aggravatingly passive for most of the book and her own emotional distance (as well as perhaps the writing) keep the reader at arms' length from everything that's happening. Hated her love interest too; exactly the kind of arrogant, presumptuous type I can't stand. I kept hoping she'd tell him to fuck off, but regrettably she found him charming.

Flynn's writing style was fine, although I didn't always love her choppy sentences.

The crimes in the book are quite dark, but held up against the smaller instances of violence, physical and emotional, being perpetrated in this small town day after day, the reader is left to wonder how much difference there really is between them. 

Flynn shows well how the toxicity of Wind Gap impacted Camille, but I felt that not enough attention was paid to Amma, and why she alone among the family turned to such glee over violence and cruelty as an outlet for her trauma. This is one colossally fucked-up 13-year-old and I think the narrative would have benefited from more time in her head. 

On the whole: idk. It was fine? Flynn obviously had things to say about life as a girl in a small town, and I think she said a lot of that effectively, but as for the enjoyability of the book? Eh.

In case I haven't worn you all out nattering about Earthsea yet, here's some more. On Friday when I finished the Cycle I went online, as one does, and discovered that last year there was published a graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series. So naturally this weekend I had to run out and buy it and read it all at once. The art was done by Fred Fordham and the project was overseen by Le Guin's son, Theo (she having passed away in 2018). 

Theo, like Le Guin herself, was trepidatious about any visual representation of Earthsea, after decades of white character designs; white, middle-aged actors; and general tom-fuckery when it comes to representing Le Guin's work. It wasn't until Theo saw Fordham's work in To Kill a Mockingbird that he first considered it might be worthwhile to consider a graphic novel adaptation of his mother's work, and so here we are.

Fordham appears to have been the right man for the job--this graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea captures the characters as Le Guin may have envisioned them when she wrote. Theo in his forward acknowledges that one of the beautiful things about how the characters are described in Le Guin's work--enough to give an idea of their appearance, but also vague enough that readers can all use their own imaginations to some degree--becomes limited when creating an "official" visual representation of those characters. So he considers Fordham's designs just one of many possible looks for these characters, but one that cleaves to his mother's original descriptions. 

His expressions neatly capture the shift in Ged's attitude over his schooling at Roke, from the proud, angry boy who first arrives to the sobered, haunted young man who departs.

Nearly all of the wording in the book is lifted directly from the original novel, which means Le Guin's original hard-hitting dialogue and beautiful descriptions of Earthsea survive to accompany Fordham's gorgeous scenic illustrations. He really captures the moody atmosphere of some of the book's darker moments, while also creating some truly stunning vistas of the ocean, which of course is a considerable part of the world for the characters of Earthsea (who live in an archipelago). I particularly enjoyed some of the rainy scenes--felt just like home here in the PNW!

He also does a great job making Ged and the Lookfar feel small on some of Ged's journeys. Looking at it some of these full-page spreads, you really feel that Ged is just one young wizard on his own in a vast and unknowable world. 

If I had any issues, it's only that some of the palettes run quite dark, so that a few panels can be almost impossible to distinguish unless you're looking at the book directly under a light source, and that there is some occasional visual awkwardness (not sure how to describe this--maybe Fordham used a 3D rendering tool and it shows?)

Overall, I was delighted with this, and I really hope Fordham and Theo press on to do Tombs of Atuan as well--I would love to see Tenar and Atuan rendered as well!

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. This isn't a complaint from me, but if what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

This is an issue when the first nearly half the book is just a bunch of the most mundane conversations between them imaginable, on the level of "Are we out of toothpaste?" and the back-and-forth on that. Many of these conversations reveal absolutely nothing about the characters, although they do give a chance for infodumping on alien species and history. I felt like I knew these characters and their dynamics quite well within the first few chapters, but we're dragged along for another hundred pages of this kind of quotidian and repetitive banter. 

Closeness among a crew of this sort makes sense, but their relationships are all also functionally the same, and every scene among a group of them is begging you to find them so cute and familial and heartwarming; there's never even a hint of tension or conflict among any of them (except with the Jerk), partly because none of them is allowed to have any character flaws. They are all also quite juvenile, but this is never shown or suggested to be a flaw.

There are interesting things about Chambers' aliens here. The parallels between the Grum and the Humans--both warlike species, one of whom drove itself to destruction and the other who barely pulled back from the brink--are some of the most interesting parts of the book, but they get very limited page time. Dr. Chef and Ohan are both vastly more interesting characters than the rest of the crew, but they don't get any more attention than Ashby, who's more like a cardboard cutout of a captain than a person, and does virtually nothing the entire story, outside his dull interspecies romance with Pei.

The book concerns a supposedly long and difficult journey to an area of space hitherto closed off to the GC because the aliens who live there, the Toremi, are violently xenophobic and attack anyone who approaches their space (they have recently changed their tune about this, ergo the mission). But it never feels that way. The sense of journey is severely hampered by the fact that we never have even a vague point of reference for how long a "standard" is, the second most common length of time the characters use to measure its passage (after "tenday," which is self-explanatory). It makes sense why no one on the ship relates a "standard" to Earth's time measurements (none of the humans on the ship have ever even been to Earth), but we as readers really should know how long that's supposed to be. 

Furthermore, their supposedly long and difficult journey feels a lot more like a jaunt across town given how frequently they run into places and people they know. There's never a point in the book when you feel the vastness or the emptiness or the unknowns of space; at all times, The Long Way feels like we're circling around a familiar neighborhood. 

Neither do the characters ever really act like they're on a particularly lengthy or dangerous job. Captain Ashby apologizes a few times for dragging them on this trip (they all agreed to come), but it never feels long. There's never any of the crew getting bored because they've been in empty space for weeks on end (or not--I still have no idea how long this trip actually took); there's never any fretting over supplies or starting to run low on things; there's never any tension among the crew after being shut up with each other for who-knows-how-long. The whole journey comes off like just another average job for them.

Any problems that come up, no matter how hard they're suggested to be, are solved almost immediately. This book, for the most part, cannot stand to make its characters uncomfortable for more than a minute or two at a time, so struggle after struggle is solved with a contrivance and there's no aftermath. Even Rosemary's biggest fear, the secret that drove her away from home, is revealed and resolved in a page or two after a single conversation. The rest of the crew's reaction happens off-page and is mentioned all of once. Could this be seen as just Rosemary fixating on something that was never really going to be an issue? Sure--except that every other problem in the book is solved with similar ease, as if talking things out is all anyone ever needs.

I understand what Chambers wanted to express with her diverse crew and the extensive lengths they go through to avoid offending each other (Except the Humans--any and all potshots at them are apparently fair game, while other species cannot be reproached or ribbed without it being a serious breach of etiquette. There's a lot of whining about Humans, particularly from Sissix, who can't go a single POV chapter without moaning about some other thing she can't stand about them.), but parts of the book come off like a lecture on how to manage a diverse workplace. Rosemary, the Human newcomer, frequently berates herself for even noticing differences between herself and literal space aliens. 

Furthermore, the commitment to accepting each other's differences, no matter how strange or even unpleasant they seem to us (such as the fact that Sissix's people do not consider children people until they come of age, and the death of a child isn't even mourned by them) goes out the window with the Toremi. The conclusion reached about them is that they are simply too violent and strange to form any real relationship with. This wouldn't be so odd if the rest of the book hadn't harped on so hard about heartily accepting absolutely every difference between species without an ounce of judgement. There is an interesting question to be asked in sci-fi if there may be species out there who are simply too different for us to get along, but here it feels out of place and clumsily handled. No one on the Wayfarer ever really tries to understand things from the Toremi's perspective, despite the grace they give to their fellow GC species.

It also feels out of place in regards to Ohan, the crew's navigator. Ohan's storyline asks a fascinating question I saw posed with much more skill in a short story called Ej-Es by Nancy Kress. What is the ethical move when an individual is suffering from a parasitic illness which may impact their mind, and certainly cripples their quality of life, when they emphatically do not wish to be cured? Is it really Ohan's choice, or is the illness forcing them to accept it? Unfortunately, actually digging into these questions would be far more uncomfortable than this book is willing to get (and this issue too, is solved easily and without any lasting consequences).

This is most certainly a me issue, but given the state of "AI" (LLMs) today and the impact they're having on society, I struggled to feel anything but antipathy towards the ship's AI, "Lovey," who is as much a character as the others. I found her intrusive, irritating, and illogical (WHO in their right mind wants a ship's central computer that has emotions?), and therefore her plotlines were entirely uninteresting to me, as was her relationship with Jenks. Lovey is a walking privacy violation and it somehow never comes up that she must have been manufactured by someone and what that means for the crew, that some corporation has potentially endless access to their personal lives. 

The book is also weirdly opposed to using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, which was distracting and annoying, because it replaces it with an invented term even in common sayings (eg. "to each their own") and never explains why humanity apparently moved away from "they" as a singular pronoun to using it exclusively as a plural pronoun.

On the whole, incredibly disappointing given how much I liked the previous book I read from Chambers, but this was her first novel. It shows. But she's also capable of growth, because at least one of her later works is much better, and I'll stick with that. I have no interest in revisiting the Wayfarer.