Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

I'm seriously distracted by certain other events in my life, and doubly resentful because I was so excited to post about two of these books that I almost did a Reading Monday. Anyway. Here it is.

Just finished: Blood Marble by Shirley Meier. Pretty much what I said last week—great story and characters, editing that was sloppy enough that it was distracting.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. Jaw. Dropped. This was one of those books that was chock-full of things I've been dying for—an unreliable and unlikable narrator, specificity of character, unconventional structure, poetic prose. I absolutely loved it. It's the story of Cass, a photographer who had her 15 minutes during the punk era and then crashed and burned. Now a depressed, middle-aged addict, she gets roped into a shooting assignment on a remote island to interview the reclusive artist who inspired her career. Cass winds up in the middle of a mystery involving a failed commune, the problem of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and—depending on your interpretation—a touch of cosmic horror.

Everything about it is stunning. I loved Cass' character—she's damaged and brittle, she makes terrible choices, and the author makes no attempt to soften her edges. The prose is so beautiful I had shivers reading it. Hand knows her stuff with photography, and again, makes no effort to dumb it down—you're thrown into the world of highly technical artists and meant to keep up. The first body doesn't even drop until halfway through the book, in a complete disregard for conventional thriller writing. I loved it and I'd be binging the entire series if I hadn't also just downloaded a bunch of free books that I want to get through.

(Trigger warning for violent sexual assault early on in the book.)

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo. This was one of those free books, and I expected it to be the usual high-concept mess that Tor free books often are. Nope! It was amazing and I loved absolutely everything about it. Apparently it's a sequel, but it's a standalone so while I will now read the first book, there was no problem with reading them out of order.

Anyway this is set in a universe with weretigers and mammoths and the recurring character is a nonbinary cleric named Chih who travels around collecting people's stories, so already I'm primed to enjoy it. Chih is crossing a northern mountain pass with a mammoth-riding guide when they are waylaid by three hungry tigers, who trap them in a lookout post but are brought to a standstill by the presence of the mammoth. To stay alive, Chih tells a story, Scheherazade-style, in the hopes of distracting the tigers long enough for a rescue party to arrive.

The story is of a human scholar who marries a tiger. The tigers also know the story, but from a very different point of view. So the story is told back and forth, with Chih beginning from the humans' point of view, and the tigers interrupting to correct them with the version that they learned. There's a dreamy, fairy tale quality to both the story itself and the telling. I also loved every single character. It was a gorgeous meditation on cultural differences and exchange, all while managing to be unexpectedly funny as hell.

Currently reading: The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen. I almost noped out of this because the beginning was horribly written and it's quite lengthy for YA, but I'm glad I stuck with my commitment not to nope out of books. I still don't think it's great, but it's an unexpectedly fun read with the odd insightful moment.

I take it that this is part of a podcast series that I've never heard of? The concept is "what if instead of forming a team, superheroes went to therapy," which honestly, is pretty fun. This one is about Caleb, a teenaged football player, who develops an inconvenient superpower—the ability to sense other people's emotions as if they were his own. This draws him to Adam, a severely depressed nerd, and they form a friendship, and later romance, while managing their own secrets and mental health issues.

So...it suffers from a laundry list of everything I can't stand about YA. The characters sound less like actual teenagers and more like they were ripped from 90s after school specials where the jocks pick on nerds and the nerds have no friends. Protip for anyone writing YA: No living teenager says "jeez." Ever. (And this is a book with swearing, so there's no excuse.) Very few go to schools where Latin is offered as an option, and very few have a favourite Shakespeare play, no matter how nerdy they are. It also suffers from flat prose, without metaphor or any sort of literary flair. Earnestness. Everyone talks about their feelings. Transcribed texting. Cultural references that already feel cringe.

And yet I'm enjoying it? I think it's because the sections about Adam's depression ring extremely true. Also it's cute and fast-paced. There was a time not so long ago when there were few queer YA books at all, let alone ones that weren't primarily about how hard it was to be gay, so this is progress, I guess.

Comments

[omnia_mutantur]

The first Nghi Vo in that series also amazing (or at least I thought so). Their loosely-a-retelling of Gatsby but with queerness and race and magic/demons was fascinating, but also slow and dreamy and incorporated a lot of "a couple months later" passage of time in ways that made it hard for me to remain engaged. so, what I'm saying is if you read it, I am deeply interested in what you think/thought, but also I'm not sure if I'd recommend it.

[sabotabby]

Oooh. I heard about the Gatsby one, and keep meaning to pick it up.

[naomikritzer]

The problem of YA where everything the author knows about teens they learned from watching after-school specials of the 80s and 90s DRIVES ME UP THE WALL.

I am also a little worried about slipping into this once my second actual teen grows up and moves out (she's in 12th grade this year). Some of how I manage authentic teen voices is that I have some actual teens in my life to listen to.

But yeah, the jock/geek divide is just ... not entirely how it worked even in the 1980s, when I was a teen. One of the things I loved about Spider-Man: Homecoming was that Peter's nerdy high school's super-competitive activity is Academic Quiz Bowl or something similarly nerdy, and the lines form around THOSE rivalries. My younger kid goes to an extremely nerdy high school where the super-competitive activity is Mock Trial. They totally have sports but the sports enthusiasm tends to be a lot more going through the motions compared to the excitement when the Mock Trial team goes to Nationals. (My older kid did Mock Trial -- their team took 2nd at Nationals. My younger kid got recruited and was like "ABSOLUTELY NOT, that is [sibling]'s thing," and is aggressively a theater nerd instead. Do not even get me started on the lines of competition, rivalry, and resentment just within a theater crowd at a small high school, we will be here all night.)

[naomikritzer]

I've read two YA books recently where "who gets to be Homecoming/Prom King/Queen" is a central piece of the story. In "Pumpkin" (companion book to Dumplin' and Puddin'), the author kind of pulls this off partly by setting it in a tiny Texas town where I can believe that kids still care about this stuff, and partly by making the kids KIND of invest in it ironically. The other one, it's set at a big suburban high school in California, and ABSOLUTELY NOT, I do not believe for a millisecond that anyone at a big suburban high school in California unironically cares the tiniest bit about Homecoming Court.

Pumpkin is pretty good and does some stuff that's honestly pretty unusual in YA. (I kept comparing it as I read to Simon and the Homosapiens Agenda, which I also loved. But Simon is set in a suburb of Atlanta, and the kids are overwhelmingly wealthy suburbanites who are going on trips to pick out out-of-state colleges (Leah, you find out in the sequel, is kind of the exception, and -- not surprisingly -- she is ACUTELY aware of the class stuff to which Simon is entirely oblivious) while in Pumpkin, many of the kids are not going to college, and the main character's post-high school plan is like "...maybe community college? idk." The upper-middle-class suburban setting is incredibly ubiquitous in YA, so it was nice to see an authentic-feeling working-class small town.

[sabotabby]

Oh, definitely. Class, geography, and the size of the school play so much of a role in these dynamics. At my high school (mid-90s), there were 2-3000 kids. There may have been jock dramatics and bullying, but if that was the case, I never knew about it because I was off with my various groups of arts kids, political kids, and nerds. The main conflicts that I was aware of were between the recent immigrants and the second-generation immigrants, and again, I had nothing to do with that. I don't think we had homecoming or anything like that, and I wouldn't know about prom because I skipped that to take mushrooms instead.

But I'd think in a modern suburban high school, you could come up with other interesting sources of conflicts pretty easily. Like the dance rivalries over International Night got pretty vicious in my previous school.

[minoanmiss]

I love how you write about books.

[sabotabby]

Thanks. I realize my public-facing entries are 90% book stuff, so I try to be entertaining about it.

[frenzy]

>There was a time not so long ago when there were few queer YA books at all, let alone ones that weren't primarily about how hard it was to be gay, so this is progress, I guess.

This is incredibly true. Sometimes, I find myself being hard on gay YA lit, but wow we have come so so far in the last 5 years. I'm excited what the next decade will bring!

[sabotabby]

It's true. I'm hard on YA lit in general, because as a child I did not enjoy being condescended to, and as an adult I don't think it's healthy for adults to condescend to teenagers. But I can think of a grand total of one YA author who wrote queer literature that didn't suck (Francesca La Block) and the fact that we have anything that's not "being gay is sad, will anyone at my high school understand if I come out?" is progress that I've seen in my lifetime.

[sabotabby]

This said, as a teenager I'd have vastly preferred to read something like Generation Loss or When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, even though neither of them are YA. Queer protagonists in both cases, but they're both about something else.

[kore]

Isn't Elizabeth Hand AWESOME? Generation Loss is my favourite book of hers. She gets so much right - addiction, the punk scene, trying to move past that, the atmosphere, the photo details -- and it comes together so beautifully. (I first discovered her via a beat-up paperback of Waking the Moon, years ago. Not really my thing but well-written enough she went on my list of Authors To Watch For pretty early.)

[sabotabby]

I'd never even heard of her and this blew me away. Now I want to read everything she writes.

[smilingslightly]

I think _Glimmering_ is worth a read. The comments on that page are my thoughts on the revised author's edition when I read it in 2014. I imagine that upon a 2021 reread they wouldn't be quite the same, but in what ways, not sure.

Though I've actively sought out Hand's writing — I just really enjoy both her skilled "literary" SFF style and her relatably mind/fucked worlds — and thus have read a fair amount of it, I've never gotten around to _Generation Loss_, or any of the more recent thriller-mystery novels that feature Cass.

[zombie_cupcake]

Yay for a non binary protagonist!!!!!

[sabotabby]

There aren't many of them, especially as leads. I think the singular they trips a lot of writers up, tbh.

[zombie_cupcake]

Well... people have to adjust to us. 😀

[sabotabby]

Absolutely!

[zombie_cupcake]

🤗😃