Reading Wednesday
Mar. 24th, 2021 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi. I don't have much to add about this one, as I'd mostly finished it last week. It continued to be great and Very Much My Thing in terms of interweaving politics, literature, and character. You'll get it done in a night or two so if you're interested in Algerian history, existentialism, or weird little bookstores (and if you're not, do I even know you???) check it out.
Little Bird Vol. 1: The Fight for Elder's Hope by Darcy Van Poelgeest, Ian Bertram, and Matt Hollingsworth. A comic! This is a weird comic. A young Indigenous girl who can't die navigates a post-apocalyptic wasteland to liberate Canada from American Christofascists.
Obviously, this is definitely Very Much My Thing as well—to the point where I was like, eek, is this going to be too much like my novel (it's not at all). It is a very flawed work and I have complicated feelings about it.
It is gorgeous. The art style, the character design, the composition, even right down to the logo, is absolutely stunning. It's cinematic and expressive and I just can't express enough how beautiful it is. I liked what we saw of the worldbuilding, I liked that they didn't pull any punches in terms of the violence, and it was just a really fascinating story.
But. But. There were definitely some problems with the storytelling and the worldbuilding and the general sense that maybe they didn't do much research into Indigenous nations to the extent that I wasn't sure which culture Little Bird and her family were supposed to represent?? And this gets to be a problem when she is sent to liberate a prisoner named The Axe, who is a giant mutant of some sort, who is white, and wears a giant Canadian flag shirt, and they are talking about liberating the North. From whom? For whom? It's never really made clear, and it seemed to fold indigeneity into this sort of pan-Canadian melting pot that is Problematic.
There were also some blocking problems, which the beauty of the art tended to disguise. Particularly in the fight scenes, I wasn't sure where different characters were in relation to each other, who was winning in any given battle, who was dead, etc. The art was almost too good in the establishing shots, in that it was so detailed that the action itself got lost.
This was a particular issue in terms of Gabriel and Little Bird switching places at the end. I'm not sure how this was done, whether Gabriel willingly went to his death pretending to be Little Bird, or whether she murdered him. Or even what was wrong with him in the first place.
But overall I thought it was really well done and I'll probably read the next one when it comes out.
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire, a.k.a., the one with the horse girl. This is the 6th Wayward Children book, about a boarding school for kids who fall into magical portals and then get spat back out into our reality, with all the trauma you'd expect. And given my disappointment with the last one, who would have thought that the one with the horse girl would be the most emotionally affecting instalment in years.
But. Holy shit. This is probably the least brutal of the books except where there's some of the most brutal writing I've seen from McGuire in a long time. The novella takes its time in establishing Regan's childhood in our world—she is, we are told, an ordinary girl who loves horses, and she's inseparable from her two best friends, until one fails at performative femininity and the other forces our heroine into excluding her from their games. It's a note-perfect depiction of the monstrousness of little girls and might have been ripped from the pages of my own depressing childhood. Things get worse as puberty hits, and Regan discovers that her parents have been keeping a secret from her: She's actually intersex, and her growth and development are going to be different from her peers. She makes the mistake of telling her mean girl friend, who reacts pretty much the way you'd predict, and so Regan runs away and finds a magical portal that leads her to a world of centaurs, unicorns, and other hoofed creatures.
The rest of the story is comparatively gentle, and plays the portal fantasy tropes straight to the point where we don't find out if Regan ever ended up at Eleanor West's school, and it doesn't at all seem that she's traumatized by her experiences in the way that the other children in previous books are. Which is fine, given how much I was actively rooting for her to be okay. It's okay to write a happy story, Seanan! I will allow it.
Anyway this is probably my second favourite after Down Among the Sticks and Bones.
Currently reading: Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson. Lesbians in WWII, somehow I don't think this will end well. It's really excellent so far—it's about two young women, one a depressed Jewish poet, the other an artist, who fall in love in France before WWI, get entangled with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, fuck with gender, and generally be awesome and tragic at each other. I'm about halfway through right now and it's really good—the characters are compelling, though I want to shake them both, and it's a period of art and literature that I love and enjoy reading about. Hopefully the lesbians don't die at the end but I'm avoiding spoilers.
Little Bird Vol. 1: The Fight for Elder's Hope by Darcy Van Poelgeest, Ian Bertram, and Matt Hollingsworth. A comic! This is a weird comic. A young Indigenous girl who can't die navigates a post-apocalyptic wasteland to liberate Canada from American Christofascists.
Obviously, this is definitely Very Much My Thing as well—to the point where I was like, eek, is this going to be too much like my novel (it's not at all). It is a very flawed work and I have complicated feelings about it.
It is gorgeous. The art style, the character design, the composition, even right down to the logo, is absolutely stunning. It's cinematic and expressive and I just can't express enough how beautiful it is. I liked what we saw of the worldbuilding, I liked that they didn't pull any punches in terms of the violence, and it was just a really fascinating story.
But. But. There were definitely some problems with the storytelling and the worldbuilding and the general sense that maybe they didn't do much research into Indigenous nations to the extent that I wasn't sure which culture Little Bird and her family were supposed to represent?? And this gets to be a problem when she is sent to liberate a prisoner named The Axe, who is a giant mutant of some sort, who is white, and wears a giant Canadian flag shirt, and they are talking about liberating the North. From whom? For whom? It's never really made clear, and it seemed to fold indigeneity into this sort of pan-Canadian melting pot that is Problematic.
There were also some blocking problems, which the beauty of the art tended to disguise. Particularly in the fight scenes, I wasn't sure where different characters were in relation to each other, who was winning in any given battle, who was dead, etc. The art was almost too good in the establishing shots, in that it was so detailed that the action itself got lost.
This was a particular issue in terms of Gabriel and Little Bird switching places at the end. I'm not sure how this was done, whether Gabriel willingly went to his death pretending to be Little Bird, or whether she murdered him. Or even what was wrong with him in the first place.
But overall I thought it was really well done and I'll probably read the next one when it comes out.
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire, a.k.a., the one with the horse girl. This is the 6th Wayward Children book, about a boarding school for kids who fall into magical portals and then get spat back out into our reality, with all the trauma you'd expect. And given my disappointment with the last one, who would have thought that the one with the horse girl would be the most emotionally affecting instalment in years.
But. Holy shit. This is probably the least brutal of the books except where there's some of the most brutal writing I've seen from McGuire in a long time. The novella takes its time in establishing Regan's childhood in our world—she is, we are told, an ordinary girl who loves horses, and she's inseparable from her two best friends, until one fails at performative femininity and the other forces our heroine into excluding her from their games. It's a note-perfect depiction of the monstrousness of little girls and might have been ripped from the pages of my own depressing childhood. Things get worse as puberty hits, and Regan discovers that her parents have been keeping a secret from her: She's actually intersex, and her growth and development are going to be different from her peers. She makes the mistake of telling her mean girl friend, who reacts pretty much the way you'd predict, and so Regan runs away and finds a magical portal that leads her to a world of centaurs, unicorns, and other hoofed creatures.
The rest of the story is comparatively gentle, and plays the portal fantasy tropes straight to the point where we don't find out if Regan ever ended up at Eleanor West's school, and it doesn't at all seem that she's traumatized by her experiences in the way that the other children in previous books are. Which is fine, given how much I was actively rooting for her to be okay. It's okay to write a happy story, Seanan! I will allow it.
Anyway this is probably my second favourite after Down Among the Sticks and Bones.
Currently reading: Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson. Lesbians in WWII, somehow I don't think this will end well. It's really excellent so far—it's about two young women, one a depressed Jewish poet, the other an artist, who fall in love in France before WWI, get entangled with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, fuck with gender, and generally be awesome and tragic at each other. I'm about halfway through right now and it's really good—the characters are compelling, though I want to shake them both, and it's a period of art and literature that I love and enjoy reading about. Hopefully the lesbians don't die at the end but I'm avoiding spoilers.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-24 09:41 pm (UTC)Exhibition: https://oaggao.ca/facing-claude-cahun-marcel-moore
Play: https://artsfile.ca/undercurrents-festival-story-of-two-queer-artists-tugs-at-the-heart/
I would readily pay money to see either again. With any luck one or both will get within lunging distance of you at an opportune time.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-24 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 12:18 am (UTC)Spoiler below—-
Photo of Cahun after the liberation of the Island of Jersey, 1945: https://www.npg.org.uk/blog/claude-cahun-freedom-fighter
no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 12:22 am (UTC)Well, they do I guess but not from Nazis.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 02:07 am (UTC)But yeah.
Also, the play had Margo MacDonald playing Claude. You should definitely go see it if you get the chance.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 12:07 pm (UTC)I was reading your post thinking "that story sounds familiar, I wonder if it was inspired by --".
They were incredibly real and incredibly badass and holy shit Cahun's autoportraits are DECADES ahead of what their contemporaries were doing; Google them it's AMAZING.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 11:10 am (UTC)Oh, I guess Modelland by Tyra Banks? I haven't read it, but my friend did a two-hour long takedown podcast and I listened to that. But that's not bad-with-pretentions (which is what I find appealing), it's just bad.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 09:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-25 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-26 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-26 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-28 11:18 pm (UTC)