Reading Wednesday
Sep. 1st, 2021 06:47 pmJust finished: The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen. I didn't end up liking this after all. It was just way too earnest YA. I have a limited tolerance for teenagers talking about their feelings if I'm not getting paid to listen to it.
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders. This was also earnest YA, but it had space battles and wittier prose. It wasn't great but it was entertaining enough that I read it in a few days. It's about Tina, a Typical Teenage YA Protagonist who is the clone of a legendary space hero. She's raised with the knowledge that one day the beacon she carries will activate and she'll be whisked off with the aliens to save the universe. But when it does, she ends up dragging her best friend, and then four other kids from Earth with her, into an alien war that is darker and more terrifying than she imagined.
I liked a lot of the worldbuilding here, especially the Big Bad's absolutely horrifying way of murdering people. And the aesthetic, overall, was quite cool. It had Jupiter Ascending teenage girl fantasy vibes. It had some lovely representation, including the love interest being a trans girl from Brazil, and the characters were all quite charming.
I had the same problem with it that I had with A Memory Called Empire, and that's a story weight issue. (Hat tip to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
radiantfracture for introducing me to that term!) It's the idea that some themes and concepts, if you raise them, need to be dealt with seriously and can't just be lightly brushed off in the narrative.
In both of these books, the lead character is raised to know that someone else's personality will eventually be overlaid on hers. In neither case, this is meant to replace her memories or experiences, but it will fundamentally alter the person that she is. (And it's interesting to me that in both cases, these are young queer women who are undergoing this.) I find this idea viscerally horrifying, and it bothers me that neither of the characters ever really questioned this idea that they were supposed to just take on someone else's memory and identity. Compounding this was the idea that Tina's mother raised her for the first 17 years of her life, knowing that the aliens were going to come and take her away and that she'd never see her again, and there was never really any dramatic weight to this. The human characters overall never thought about friends or family back home or worried about them. In some cases that made sense, but I have a hard time believing that of six teenagers, not one missed home, thought about their loved ones, or thought about their loved ones grieving them.
Currently reading: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I downloaded a bunch of Butler's books that I was embarrassed to not have read earlier (I've read a bunch, just not as many as exist), so you can look forward to some reviews of books that everyone else has read and loved. SURPRISE SURPRISE I'm two chapters in and it's excellent so far. It's a post-apocalyptic story about a teenage girl with hyperempathy—weirdly, the same superpower as in one of the books I just finished, but it's Butler so this is much better done. She grows up inside a gated community, with the starving, huddled masses outside of the walls. It was written in 1993 and set in 2024, so basically we're living the future she wrote, which is always fun.
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders. This was also earnest YA, but it had space battles and wittier prose. It wasn't great but it was entertaining enough that I read it in a few days. It's about Tina, a Typical Teenage YA Protagonist who is the clone of a legendary space hero. She's raised with the knowledge that one day the beacon she carries will activate and she'll be whisked off with the aliens to save the universe. But when it does, she ends up dragging her best friend, and then four other kids from Earth with her, into an alien war that is darker and more terrifying than she imagined.
I liked a lot of the worldbuilding here, especially the Big Bad's absolutely horrifying way of murdering people. And the aesthetic, overall, was quite cool. It had Jupiter Ascending teenage girl fantasy vibes. It had some lovely representation, including the love interest being a trans girl from Brazil, and the characters were all quite charming.
I had the same problem with it that I had with A Memory Called Empire, and that's a story weight issue. (Hat tip to
radiantfracture for introducing me to that term!) It's the idea that some themes and concepts, if you raise them, need to be dealt with seriously and can't just be lightly brushed off in the narrative. In both of these books, the lead character is raised to know that someone else's personality will eventually be overlaid on hers. In neither case, this is meant to replace her memories or experiences, but it will fundamentally alter the person that she is. (And it's interesting to me that in both cases, these are young queer women who are undergoing this.) I find this idea viscerally horrifying, and it bothers me that neither of the characters ever really questioned this idea that they were supposed to just take on someone else's memory and identity. Compounding this was the idea that Tina's mother raised her for the first 17 years of her life, knowing that the aliens were going to come and take her away and that she'd never see her again, and there was never really any dramatic weight to this. The human characters overall never thought about friends or family back home or worried about them. In some cases that made sense, but I have a hard time believing that of six teenagers, not one missed home, thought about their loved ones, or thought about their loved ones grieving them.
Currently reading: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I downloaded a bunch of Butler's books that I was embarrassed to not have read earlier (I've read a bunch, just not as many as exist), so you can look forward to some reviews of books that everyone else has read and loved. SURPRISE SURPRISE I'm two chapters in and it's excellent so far. It's a post-apocalyptic story about a teenage girl with hyperempathy—weirdly, the same superpower as in one of the books I just finished, but it's Butler so this is much better done. She grows up inside a gated community, with the starving, huddled masses outside of the walls. It was written in 1993 and set in 2024, so basically we're living the future she wrote, which is always fun.
