Reading Wednesday
Jun. 16th, 2021 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. I know I come off as very anti-freezed peach at times but I don't actually want any books banned. After the Revolution what we'll do is whenever new copies of any Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman books get printed, they will have to contain an additional copy of this book. I realize this will make Atlas Shrugged very heavy, but also that will discourage teenagers from picking it up. Anyway it's very good and you should read it.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger. Now, this is a conundrum, this book. The things that it does well, it does exceptionally well, and I loved it. It also needed one more editorial pass than it got. The highs more than outweigh the flaws, though.
Ellie has a magical gift, inherited from her Six Great Grandmother—the ability to raise the ghosts of dead animals. Which she's done with her dog, Kirby (and their opening scene together is just so fantastic that I don't want to ruin it for you). Her best friend, Jay, is a descendent of Oberon and can create light and travel through fairy rings. Ellie's idyllic life is torn apart when her older cousin, Trevor, is killed in a car crash; he visits her in a dream and tells her that he was murdered by a wealthy and powerful doctor who lives in a town in Texas.
The good: Little Badger writes beautifully. The prose is spare but evocative, and some of the passages—in particular, where Ellie summons the spirit of a trilobite fossil and ends up in a prehistoric underworld—are incredibly rich and memorable. I loved the characters and their world. I was particularly into the stories about Ellie's Six Great Grandmother and the conflicts between the Lipan Apache and the early colonizers. Little Badger corrects a lot of the flaws I see in YA in general. I was surprised and delighted that, for example, when Ellie tells her parents what she's seen and experienced, they believe her and support her. Because why wouldn't they? But it's a rare enough thing in YA fantasy that it was kind of mind-blowing.
Where I think it needed another pass: I checked Goodreads and everyone who had criticisms of it had the same one—Ellie and Jay just didn't feel like teenagers. It threw me for a loop every time Ellie got behind the wheel of a car because in my head she was 12 and too young to be driving. I also felt that the narrative didn't know what to do with the very functional parents; they trust Ellie, but in order for her to be the heroine, they need to be set back from the story a bit, and it felt artificial. It results in one particularly strange chapter that breaks the book's tight third-person POV to hop to Ellie's mom's viewpoint for no good reason. There was also some weirdness around bits of information we should have had earlier, from the minor (Jay has pointy ears, which he keeps hidden under his hair, and which don't affect the plot in any way so it's an odd bit of character information to drop in the last 20 pages of the book), to the incredibly significant (magic is actually destructive, possibly more so than fossil fuels, but this doesn't decrease the amount that our very wholesome protagonists use it).
These things might bother me a lot in the hands of a lesser writer, but this was a book where the whole more than overcame the sum of its parts. I can't help but feel I shouldn't have loved it as much as I did but I loved it.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger. Now, this is a conundrum, this book. The things that it does well, it does exceptionally well, and I loved it. It also needed one more editorial pass than it got. The highs more than outweigh the flaws, though.
Ellie has a magical gift, inherited from her Six Great Grandmother—the ability to raise the ghosts of dead animals. Which she's done with her dog, Kirby (and their opening scene together is just so fantastic that I don't want to ruin it for you). Her best friend, Jay, is a descendent of Oberon and can create light and travel through fairy rings. Ellie's idyllic life is torn apart when her older cousin, Trevor, is killed in a car crash; he visits her in a dream and tells her that he was murdered by a wealthy and powerful doctor who lives in a town in Texas.
The good: Little Badger writes beautifully. The prose is spare but evocative, and some of the passages—in particular, where Ellie summons the spirit of a trilobite fossil and ends up in a prehistoric underworld—are incredibly rich and memorable. I loved the characters and their world. I was particularly into the stories about Ellie's Six Great Grandmother and the conflicts between the Lipan Apache and the early colonizers. Little Badger corrects a lot of the flaws I see in YA in general. I was surprised and delighted that, for example, when Ellie tells her parents what she's seen and experienced, they believe her and support her. Because why wouldn't they? But it's a rare enough thing in YA fantasy that it was kind of mind-blowing.
Where I think it needed another pass: I checked Goodreads and everyone who had criticisms of it had the same one—Ellie and Jay just didn't feel like teenagers. It threw me for a loop every time Ellie got behind the wheel of a car because in my head she was 12 and too young to be driving. I also felt that the narrative didn't know what to do with the very functional parents; they trust Ellie, but in order for her to be the heroine, they need to be set back from the story a bit, and it felt artificial. It results in one particularly strange chapter that breaks the book's tight third-person POV to hop to Ellie's mom's viewpoint for no good reason. There was also some weirdness around bits of information we should have had earlier, from the minor (Jay has pointy ears, which he keeps hidden under his hair, and which don't affect the plot in any way so it's an odd bit of character information to drop in the last 20 pages of the book), to the incredibly significant (magic is actually destructive, possibly more so than fossil fuels, but this doesn't decrease the amount that our very wholesome protagonists use it).
These things might bother me a lot in the hands of a lesser writer, but this was a book where the whole more than overcame the sum of its parts. I can't help but feel I shouldn't have loved it as much as I did but I loved it.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 06:35 pm (UTC)no one who knows you could think you wanted books banned, you're just Deeply Unimpressed with the assholes who want the Freeze Peach to shout racial slurs at little kids but would never defend a GSA from being shut down
Atlas Shrugged is also heavy, what's 200 more pages?
no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 07:50 pm (UTC)Atlas Shrugged is also heavy, what's 200 more pages?
Exactly!
no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 11:43 pm (UTC)Also, moderation exists for a reason! People can choose the tone of their platform. That means if I want everything to be funny, everything unfunny will die in moderation. Unfunny people can go do that elsewhere.
Nothing to do with verisimilitude, but ...
Date: 2021-06-17 10:13 pm (UTC)I don't know the book or the author, but, for whatever it's worth, the first time I drove on the 401, I was 12 years old (and I still remember the terror I felt when I eased my way past my first transport truck on that very same trip). No, I didn't steal a car; my father was at least as strange then than he is now. (If my parents are to be believed, the first time I steered a car, I was under 3.)
Probably a good thing that as a father, I am a little more cautious than my parents were.
Re: Nothing to do with verisimilitude, but ...
Date: 2021-06-17 10:41 pm (UTC)But this is a kid with a driver's license.
Re: Nothing to do with verisimilitude, but ...
Date: 2021-06-18 01:47 am (UTC)Okay, that just sounds like bad writing on some level, then. But also, bad reading on my part. I see now you meant that they seemed much younger than their stated ages. In my defence, I'm more used to coming across teenage characters who sound like they've been through grad school already.
Re: Nothing to do with verisimilitude, but ...
Date: 2021-06-18 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-19 03:50 am (UTC)This is something that happens far too often in books and tv. Particualrly if characters are meant to be younger than 16-17.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-19 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 01:30 am (UTC)most readers are stupidwe have ideas about how characterization works. There's also the difference between how teens act with peers, with parents, and with trusted vs. untrusted adults.no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 12:17 pm (UTC)