Reading Wednesday
Sep. 29th, 2021 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyBrief, as I'm on my way to be tortured again.
Just finished: Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand. I love this series so much. As if the first one wasn't everything I wanted out of a book, its sequel is everything I wanted + black metal and bleak, sunless landscapes. Just spectacular, really.
Currently reading: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. I've been hearing great things about this one for a few years so I finally picked it up, and...meh. I'm waiting to see what's groundbreaking about it. It has a cool setting drawn from Yoruba culture and language, but it's otherwise a bog-standard YA fantasy. I would struggle to name one distinctive thing about any of the protagonists. It's a quick enough read and I'm braindead so YA fantasy is about at my intellectual level right now, but it's leaving me cold. Essentially, evil king dude does a genocide against magic practitioners, killing everyone over the age of 13 (which is when magic manifests) and then oppresses the maji for the next 11 years, calling them "maggots" and extracting heavier and heavier taxes on them just for existing. The maji are white-haired and silver-eyed, by the way, because this is a novel about racism. Our heroine, Zélie, is a maji who stumbles on a way to restore magic to the land. Aided on her quest by her brother, the king's daughter, and eventually the king's son who hates maji but secretly is one, she must find three MacGuffins and bring them to the special place at a special time or magic will be gone forever. It's fine, I guess, just that it could also be set in Magical Europeland and it wouldn't have changed the plot one bit so far.
Just finished: Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand. I love this series so much. As if the first one wasn't everything I wanted out of a book, its sequel is everything I wanted + black metal and bleak, sunless landscapes. Just spectacular, really.
Currently reading: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. I've been hearing great things about this one for a few years so I finally picked it up, and...meh. I'm waiting to see what's groundbreaking about it. It has a cool setting drawn from Yoruba culture and language, but it's otherwise a bog-standard YA fantasy. I would struggle to name one distinctive thing about any of the protagonists. It's a quick enough read and I'm braindead so YA fantasy is about at my intellectual level right now, but it's leaving me cold. Essentially, evil king dude does a genocide against magic practitioners, killing everyone over the age of 13 (which is when magic manifests) and then oppresses the maji for the next 11 years, calling them "maggots" and extracting heavier and heavier taxes on them just for existing. The maji are white-haired and silver-eyed, by the way, because this is a novel about racism. Our heroine, Zélie, is a maji who stumbles on a way to restore magic to the land. Aided on her quest by her brother, the king's daughter, and eventually the king's son who hates maji but secretly is one, she must find three MacGuffins and bring them to the special place at a special time or magic will be gone forever. It's fine, I guess, just that it could also be set in Magical Europeland and it wouldn't have changed the plot one bit so far.
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Date: 2021-09-29 03:29 pm (UTC)I wish I knew whom to sacrifice a block of tempeh to on your behalf.
*hugs you a lot*
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Date: 2021-09-29 09:43 pm (UTC)