Reading Wednesday
Nov. 25th, 2020 03:42 pmJust finished: His Magical Pet, Rachel Manija Brown, Laurie French, and Layla Lawlor (ed.).
This was fun! I liked the f/f one more, and I'm trying to pin down why. I think it's because the characters in that seemed a bit more fully developed, whereas this was like, "he's hot, he's also hot, whoops now they're in love." The standout to me was Tate Hallaway's story about supervillains adopting a cat, and I'm not just saying that because she's my friend and a rad person. But that was the only one where I really got a sense of personality from the characters. Also it was funny as fuck.
But in general I enjoyed it. Like Her Magical Pet, it's exactly what it says on the package, and I'm here for that.
(Also! Apologies for a lack of clarity on who the editors were on the last few posts: Apparently all three of them edited both books, which was not super clear from the Amazon listing that I googled.)
Currently reading: The Last Girl Scout by Natalie Ironside.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
armiphlage was lovely and sent me a copy, correcting deducing that it was, as the kids say, My Jam.
Whooooo boy I have never wanted to edit a book so badly in my life* but also I'm really into it??? And because I'm really into it, I want it to be more polished than it is.
It's about a post-apocalyptic America overrun by zombies and vampires, and oh yeah there are fascists and communists and anarchists fighting it out. Into the fray are our two heroines, both trans lesbians: Mags, a political commissar from the communist-run region, and Jules, a recent defect from the fascists. They get word of a stash of exciting tech in the Citadel, a.k.a. Washington, DC, and travel across a ravaged America to get to it before the Nazis do.
The author knows her shit. She's apparently a former soldier and a former white supremacist and is now a Wobbly, and both the military stuff and the political stuff ring true, with a level of detail I generally don't expect from genre fiction. No coy The Rebellion(TM) fights for Freedom(TM) here, but actual, nuanced debates about economic and government structures. She even references my favourite meme. Most genre writers—and dystopian writers are among the worst—get politics and the military wrong, and granted I don't know much about the latter, but she definitely gets the former right and makes the latter sound right.
But it's a mess. I think it must have been self-published because I don't think a publisher would have looked at a first novel the size of a cinder block and said, "cool, let's do it." It could be about half as long. For example, we get the story of Mags slitting a fascist's throat twice in two chapters. Yes, it's a cool story, but we don't need it twice. It's things like that, which a half-decent copy editor would fix, that make me grudgingly accept the trad publishing industry, gatekeepers and all, even though no publisher has offered me a book deal goddamn it.
Speaking of my book, her writing has a lot of the problems that I see in my own. I think every anarchist or anarchist-adjacent writer really, really wants to do a Spanish Civil War story without the tragic ending. But. It does not make sense for American Nazis to be speaking German. It doesn't make sense for Appalachian Communists to structure themselves as soviets. I think you can absolutely do an American-based dystopian fascists vs. communists and anarchists story, but I need to see homegrown versions of the ideology. There is some excellent worldbuilding around the role of religion, but with all the historical detail, I'm not sure why future America adopted those specific political forms. I say this with love because I wrote and abandoned a novel that was almost exactly this. She also does the thing that I do where you switch POVs during the chapter, and in commercial fiction you really shouldn't, but I get it.
My other critique is there is an awful lot of "sugars" and "hons." I know that's how people in the South speak and the author is from the South, but it grates in print. I'm also not super into love at first sight (or, at least, sex within 24 hours and love within 48 hours). This may be a me thing, as it was also an issue for me in the last book I read, so clearly lots of people do like that and I'm the giant weirdo who has made my lead couple angst about each other for 180,000 words and counting.
Anyway. All of this is not to say that I'm not enjoying it, because I absolutely am. But like, comrade author, for your next book, drop me an email, okay? We can make it stronger together.
* My life = my life since I read Gideon the Ninth and badly wanted to edit that too.
This was fun! I liked the f/f one more, and I'm trying to pin down why. I think it's because the characters in that seemed a bit more fully developed, whereas this was like, "he's hot, he's also hot, whoops now they're in love." The standout to me was Tate Hallaway's story about supervillains adopting a cat, and I'm not just saying that because she's my friend and a rad person. But that was the only one where I really got a sense of personality from the characters. Also it was funny as fuck.
But in general I enjoyed it. Like Her Magical Pet, it's exactly what it says on the package, and I'm here for that.
(Also! Apologies for a lack of clarity on who the editors were on the last few posts: Apparently all three of them edited both books, which was not super clear from the Amazon listing that I googled.)
Currently reading: The Last Girl Scout by Natalie Ironside.
armiphlage was lovely and sent me a copy, correcting deducing that it was, as the kids say, My Jam.Whooooo boy I have never wanted to edit a book so badly in my life* but also I'm really into it??? And because I'm really into it, I want it to be more polished than it is.
It's about a post-apocalyptic America overrun by zombies and vampires, and oh yeah there are fascists and communists and anarchists fighting it out. Into the fray are our two heroines, both trans lesbians: Mags, a political commissar from the communist-run region, and Jules, a recent defect from the fascists. They get word of a stash of exciting tech in the Citadel, a.k.a. Washington, DC, and travel across a ravaged America to get to it before the Nazis do.
The author knows her shit. She's apparently a former soldier and a former white supremacist and is now a Wobbly, and both the military stuff and the political stuff ring true, with a level of detail I generally don't expect from genre fiction. No coy The Rebellion(TM) fights for Freedom(TM) here, but actual, nuanced debates about economic and government structures. She even references my favourite meme. Most genre writers—and dystopian writers are among the worst—get politics and the military wrong, and granted I don't know much about the latter, but she definitely gets the former right and makes the latter sound right.
But it's a mess. I think it must have been self-published because I don't think a publisher would have looked at a first novel the size of a cinder block and said, "cool, let's do it." It could be about half as long. For example, we get the story of Mags slitting a fascist's throat twice in two chapters. Yes, it's a cool story, but we don't need it twice. It's things like that, which a half-decent copy editor would fix, that make me grudgingly accept the trad publishing industry, gatekeepers and all, even though no publisher has offered me a book deal goddamn it.
Speaking of my book, her writing has a lot of the problems that I see in my own. I think every anarchist or anarchist-adjacent writer really, really wants to do a Spanish Civil War story without the tragic ending. But. It does not make sense for American Nazis to be speaking German. It doesn't make sense for Appalachian Communists to structure themselves as soviets. I think you can absolutely do an American-based dystopian fascists vs. communists and anarchists story, but I need to see homegrown versions of the ideology. There is some excellent worldbuilding around the role of religion, but with all the historical detail, I'm not sure why future America adopted those specific political forms. I say this with love because I wrote and abandoned a novel that was almost exactly this. She also does the thing that I do where you switch POVs during the chapter, and in commercial fiction you really shouldn't, but I get it.
My other critique is there is an awful lot of "sugars" and "hons." I know that's how people in the South speak and the author is from the South, but it grates in print. I'm also not super into love at first sight (or, at least, sex within 24 hours and love within 48 hours). This may be a me thing, as it was also an issue for me in the last book I read, so clearly lots of people do like that and I'm the giant weirdo who has made my lead couple angst about each other for 180,000 words and counting.
Anyway. All of this is not to say that I'm not enjoying it, because I absolutely am. But like, comrade author, for your next book, drop me an email, okay? We can make it stronger together.
* My life = my life since I read Gideon the Ninth and badly wanted to edit that too.
