Reading Wednesday
Sep. 9th, 2020 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Just finished: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Fuuuuuuuuck I loved this one. I was spoiled for the ending (as in I read something about it back when it first came out—I think maybe Tor published the last chapter as a short story or something? Also it's right there in the title) but it still managed to be heartwrenching in a way that felt authentic. The whole plot was a well-engineered steel trap that is no less deadly for its inevitability.
If I have one critique, it's the bits where he breaks the tight third-person POV to give an omniscient view of the larger battles. It's the only place where the writing falters a bit, and I wonder if it might have been useful to have one or two other POV characters.
Anyway, I put a hold on the sequel.
Currently reading: Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. I gather this is one of those books you're supposed to read to be a serious person? A co-worker loaned it to me. It starts out as bog-standard misery porn—a kid growing up in the South in poverty, and of course she's also being sexually abused because that seems to be the theme of books that people recommend to me lately—but it is really beautifully written. And about halfway through it gets a lot more interesting, mainly because the angry but gospel-obsessed pre-teen version of Bone, the protagonist, is a much more lively character than the child version, who just suffers.
If I have one critique, it's the bits where he breaks the tight third-person POV to give an omniscient view of the larger battles. It's the only place where the writing falters a bit, and I wonder if it might have been useful to have one or two other POV characters.
Anyway, I put a hold on the sequel.
Currently reading: Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. I gather this is one of those books you're supposed to read to be a serious person? A co-worker loaned it to me. It starts out as bog-standard misery porn—a kid growing up in the South in poverty, and of course she's also being sexually abused because that seems to be the theme of books that people recommend to me lately—but it is really beautifully written. And about halfway through it gets a lot more interesting, mainly because the angry but gospel-obsessed pre-teen version of Bone, the protagonist, is a much more lively character than the child version, who just suffers.
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Date: 2020-09-10 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-10 12:08 am (UTC)I am really hoping that this ends with the kid killing the abusive step-dad. It's first-person so fingers crossed.
Oh also I was amused today because I went on Tumblr looking for fanart of Baru Cormorant (as I thought the cover of at least the edition I read was terrible and figured some teenage girl had done a better one) and the first post I saw was "Books That Will Ruin Your Life" and guess what the first book was???
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Date: 2020-09-10 03:06 am (UTC)I was giving a ride to a classmate.
It was not until about an hour into this road trip that it dawned on me that THIS CLASSMATE HAD BORNE A CHILD OUT OF WEDLOCK IN THE CAROLINAS AND THAT WAS WHY EVERYTHING WAS SUPER AWKWARD IN MY CAR.
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Date: 2020-09-10 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-10-23 12:38 pm (UTC)I found the main character very difficult to relate to. It felt for a bit like the author had met someone like her and was trying to portray this person. For a moment I thought, "he uses the word savant... is he going for autistic?" And then I realized that Baru has reactive attachment disorder - no surprise, given her childhood.
It would definitely have been useful to have multiple viewpoint characters, particularly the secretary and the wild duchess.
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Date: 2020-10-23 08:53 pm (UTC)I think he was going for a very archaic meaning of savant; the Masquerade are eugenicists, so they're surprised to find a maths genius amongst a "primitive" culture. She didn't strike me as autistic, either in terms of an authentic portrayal of autistic people, or the cliché portrayal of autistic people in media.
One thing that did occur to me is that I've seen a fair number of male antiheroes with a similar kind of affect. It's rare to see a manipulative female character who's not primarily using sex to manipulate.
I'd have made one of the other dukes and duchesses interesting and used them for the POV for events that Baru doesn't see. Of course, the sequel overcorrects in that respect.