Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 202

Brain architecture is weird

So, did you know this?

[Birds] also have very different brains than mammals: while mammals have a neocortex arranged in a characteristic pattern of layers, birds have a different unlayered structure called the pallium with neurons “organized into nuclei”.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

The green part is considered to be used primarily for higher cognitive functions, incidentally.

Isn’t that remarkable? I took a class in comparative animal physiology, but I don’t remember ever hearing anything about the striking differences in brain architecture between birds and mammals before. Maybe that was included, but it seems like the kind of thing I would have remembered, so I don’t think it was.

Here is a post about the architecture and function of parts of the avian brain.

Here is another post about avian brains and intelligence.

Birds have another exceptional capacity that helps them to have small but intelligent brains. They can generate new neurons when they need them and shed them when they are no longer necessary. … For example, in those parts of the world where breeding is governed by the seasons, song birds sing only during the breeding season, and they do so using parts of the brain (nuclei) that have grown larger by recruiting new neurons that have recently been generated in other parts of the brain. Once the breeding season is over, the number of cells in these song nuclei declines because some of the cells die when not needed. 

That’s pretty neat.

And of course the octopus brain is very different from both:

Here’s a post about the octopus brain.

This is so freaky:

The octopus brain is split into two halves and then into many lobes with particular functions. These lobes are folded, which increases the surface areas and connections. Some regions have very small neurons where large numbers can be packed into a small compartment. Also, the distance between them is very short, which increases processing speeds.

The Vertical Lobe (VL) is the seat of learning and memory and is organized like the human hippocampus with many sensory inputs at right angles to the small neurons that process the information. …

The brain is divided into three parts, each with a hierarchy. The central brain, surrounded by cartilage, has 50 million neurons and surrounds the gut. The vision brain (with 150 million neurons) and the eight arm brains (with a total of 300 million distributed neurons) are outside of the central nervous system.

Aliens among us!

I was thinking about this because of Scott Alexander’s recent posts about brains and complex thought and human perception of the moral worth of various animals. This series of posts begins here:

NEURONS AND INTELLIGENCE: A BIRDBRAINED PERSPECTIVE

Driven by the need to stay light enough to fly, birds have scaled down their neurons to a level unmatched by any other group. Elephants  have  about 7,000 neurons per mg of brain tissue. Humans have about 25,000. Birds  have  up to 200,000. That means a small crow can have  the same number of neurons  as a pretty big monkey.

Does this mean they are equally smart? There is no generalized animal IQ test, so nobody knows for sure. …

So does that mean that intelligence is just a function of neuron quantity? That the number of neurons in your brain, plugged into some function, can spit out your IQ?

It…comes pretty surprisingly close to meaning that. [Ellipse in the original.]

That is interesting, even though imo, AI people are not remotely near building anything that is at all intelligent, which is what the research Scott references is actually about. Stuff that fakes being intelligent, yes. Computers that are actually intelligent, no.

No, the reason it interests me is that it opens up so many different architectures by which we can get intelligence, and that is just fascinating.

If you would like to design an alien species that is small, but much more intelligent than seems reasonable for its size, no problem! If you care to do so, you can absolutely have a character comment about the very peculiar brain structures your alien species possesses. At the very least, if challenged by a reader, you can whip out your handy understanding of avian and octopus brain architecture.

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YA is not a genre

A very good post at Book Riot: Do Teens get Pushed out of YA When It’s Called a Genre?

Answer: Yes, they do.

I agree with almost everything in this post. That makes it hard to excerpt. But here:

YA, especially over the last decade, has been called a genre over and over. … YA, seen as a genre, is less about who it is intended for and more about the commonalities among books. YA books as a genre are fast-paced, intended for quick consumption, often come as a series, …and most importantly, feature a person who is “a young person” as a main character.

Yes.

YA classified as a genre also means that books which have no business being called YA are called so. To Kill A Mockingbird is one such culprit …

YES.

… teen literature emphasizes the teen aspect of the books and that they’re intended for teen readers. YA, on the other hand, is a genre that reaches any reader itching for a specific reading experience.

YES TO ALL THE ABOVE. Bold in the above is mine.

Also this very important point:

Moreover, teens are fresher to books than adults. This means that those predictable twisty books that are panned for being “too obvious” and those books which feature “overdone” tropes aren’t seen that way for teens, who are discovering these storytelling devices with eager, excited, and non-jaded eyes.  …

And thus more and more YA books are aimed at adults, not teens; because YA is treated as a genre for adults, not as a category for teens.

The problem is, in my opinion, not solvable at this point. I believe the best solution is not to try to reclaim YA for teen readers — which might be nice, but I think that is hopeless. Rather, I think it’s time to stop directing teens toward YA at the expense of “adult fiction.” I would like every single librarian, publisher, bookseller, teacher, and author to stop pretending — or worse, sincerely believing — that teens can’t identify with protagonists of different ages. I would like to just let YA become a genre that deals with young protagonists coming of age and completely quit worrying about the age of the readers, while directing teen readers toward whatever part of YA appeal to them AND ALSO the zillions of non-YA books out there that are just as likely to appeal to them, such as, I don’t know, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, to take one example almost at random.

At the moment, we have a ridiculous situation where, first, all kinds of books are considered YA when they definitely are not — not just To Kill A Mockingbird, but lots and lots of others.One that struck me recently is Thick as Thieves, which I just re-read. It’s considered YA because the “author writes YA,” even though the story itself does not meet ANY of the criteria expected for YA-treated-as-a-genre. Ditto with Elizabeth Wein’s

And second, at exactly the same time that YA is pulled away from teen readers, we direct teens away from near-infinite numbers of “adult” novels that are not only approachable but really ideal for teen readers.

For the foreseeable future, I expect both trends to continue. I expect teens to continue to be directed toward YA as though that’s the only category suitable for teen readers, and I expect YA to continue moving away from the kinds of stories that appeal to teens toward the kinds that appeal to adults.

In the meantime … the whole Book Riot post is worth reading.

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Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series Coming to TV

From tor.com, this:

Deadline has announced that Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee Productions is developing Wild Seed for Amazon Prime Video, with Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu to co-write the series.

Wild Seed is the first book in Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series, about two African immortals whose lives span ages. One is Doro, who kills and uses his abilities to breed people as livestock, the other is Anyanwu, a healer who demands that Doro come to terms with his cruelty.

I am torn. I love Wild Seed. I have read it many times. But I am one of the apparently rare-ish readers who hated Okorafor’s novella “Binti.” Though I did like Who Fears Death, so there’s that.

I would love to see Wild Seed done well. I think the single best thing the writers can possibly do is stay completely true to the original, including keeping as much of the original dialogue as possible. And the characters. And the plot. Just don’t mess with anything! It could be great!

Well, we’ll see. Crossing my fingers.

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The internet and OCD

I initially saw this article on The Passive Voice blog.

What It’s Like Using the Internet When You Have OCD

Morgan was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 20 years ago. While a combination of medication and therapy has kept it mostly under control, she says, it still comes back occasionally in an incredibly frustrating manner.

“There have been flare-ups that have slowed me down because I had to type a sentence, erase it, and type it until it was ‘safe,’” she says.

What Morgan is experiencing is an emerging manifestation of OCD: When symptoms express not in the physical world (for example, when a patient repeatedly, and in a way that interferes with their life, checks their oven to ensure that it’s off), but on the internet instead.

This is interesting to me partly because everything about psychology is interesting, partly because seeing how OCD can manifest in the context of the internet and writing is interesting, and partly because I’m clearly one of the many people who occupies space in the penumbra of OCD.

I went through a brief period decades ago where I did indeed feel compelled to go back to my apartment and make sure the oven was turned off every single time I left the apartment. Soon enough I said to myself, “This is turning into a compulsion,” and I made myself stop. I never went back to check again, ever. Being able to stop is what I mean by “being in the penumbra of OCD.”

More recently, after people leaving gates open and dogs getting out twice in the past couple of years, I often check the gates several times a day to make sure they are closed. This urge to check the gates got much stronger after Honey was lost in St Louis that time. Even though I didn’t lose her personally — even though I got her back after 7 hours and she was fine — I still wound up very strongly sensitized to the whole idea of dogs getting lost. I don’t always give way to the urge to check both gates twice or three times a day, but I feel it. If it gets to be a problem, I’ll eventually padlock both gates and then I bet I will be able to make myself stop checking.

It is not at all unusual to be in the penumbra of a serious condition. Reading Peter Kramer’s books has made it clear to me that a lot of people experience something that is somewhere near the edge of, but not nearly as extreme as, a real disorder. Sometimes I wonder whether that’s more commonly the case than otherwise.

This phenomenon of OCD manifesting as various problems using the internet is interesting. Like this:

Saxena says he has patients who have trouble sending emails at all, concerned that they might write something offensive or use foul language, even though such modes of communication are totally out of character for that person. These “checking behaviors,” he says, “can sometimes take hours and hours and hours out of a day. 

Fascinating. This one is hard for me to wrap my mind around, even though I know that obsessive thoughts about hurting people — especially your own children — is rather a common manifestation of OCD and this fear of writing inappropriate things in emails sounds somewhat similar.

This all makes me think of the only SFF novel I know of where obsessive / compulsive disorder is very important to plots or characters: Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. In that one, as you may all recall, many of the people on the planet Path were deliberately engineered to be intelligent (to make them useful) and also to have OCD (to make them easier to control). This is still the novel that I think does the best job of showing the reader the experience of OCD.

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One Free Trick

Here’s an article by Arkady Martine at tor.com to which one of the commenters here drew my attention: One Free Trick: How to Use the Writing Skills You Have to Learn the Ones You Don’t

When I went to the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop back in the distant dim year of 2013, the inestimable Elizabeth Bear, along with various other people who are cleverer than me, explained to me about the tricks a writer gets for free in their box. The writing-skill cards you drew in your first poker hand.

The magic of this idea is that it is a promise: everyone gets something. Every writer, no matter how green, has at least one thing they’re good at to start off with. It could be character, or prose rhythm, or pacing … Your One Free Trick is the skill you can build on. The skill you can lean on, while you learn the rest of the craft of being a writer. …

Plenty more at the link. Martine says his “one free trick” was setting, from which arose a certain talent for theme.

Theme, really? Hard to imagine. I fairly often don’t notice themes in my own work until a reader points them out to me. (Then they can sometimes be blindingly obvious.)

I would say … I guess I would say that if I have a “free trick,” it’s also setting. Was this important scaffolding for developing novel-writing as a whole? Not sure. Maybe! It’s interesting to me that Arkady Martine considers this an intrinsic skill of his and yet he came into novels out of short stories. He says:

Novels are, for those of you who were not aware, really damn hard to write. Especially if you were, like me, a person who had been merrily writing short stories with some success for a good while before taking the plunge into longform narrative. Novels are hard for a lot of reasons … but for me, the most difficult part of writing one was that there were so many words in it. (Hear me out.)

That’s funny! Not that he’s wrong, except that I think of setting as something more useful for novels than for short stories. You have room to stretch out and show the world in a novel. Not, possibly, as much as you might like. But way more than in a short story.

I wonder if you provided the following survey to authors:

You consider novels:

_____ Really damn hard to write.

_____ Not as hard as short stories.

Whether they would all check the first choice. That is, I don’t really wonder. Obviously Martine would check the first option, but plenty of authors find novels easier than short stories [raises hand.] I have to say, I would check this other choice if given:

______ Shockingly variable in terms of how hard they are to write.

Anyway! Setting, description, worldbuilding, that’s the part I think I got as a “free trick” (if anything). If I got two free cards, then my second one definitely wasn’t theme. Maybe a feel for the rhythm of language.

Here is how Martine says he used setting to build his novel:

I let myself pick things to put in this book that aren’t hard for me, that make good use of my strengths. There’s a ton of lush visual description in this book—buildings and clothing and peculiar food items, everything having enormous symbolic weight … because I love that stuff, and because I’m good at it. And then I turned those lush visuals into weight-bearing parts of the book—plot-bearing parts of the book. I’ve even used my One Free Trick skills to get unstuck on transitions or scenes I’d paused on for a while: I’d describe, in detail and with precision, one of those important symbolic visual setting elements, but I’d do it from my POV character’s impressions and understanding of what she was seeing. Eventually I would see why my protagonist would be looking so closely at that thing—and I’d be in the scene, deep in the character’s voice, and I’d have done some thematic work to keep the story moving along.

Now that is fascinating. Describing stuff from the protagonist’s pov, that’s basic and important. Using that to “discover” why the protagonist is looking closely at a thing and get into the scene — that’s fascinating. I don’t think I do that …

… but, since I am moderately stuck on my WIP, I’m wondering if maybe I might consider taking a stab at some similar process to get it moving …

… although really I expect I just need to outline the rest of the plot …

… and wow do I agree with Martine about this:

The people who got the instructions to the Plot Machine are very lucky …. My Plot Machine instructions were incomplete and mostly made of those guys from the IKEA instruction manuals, gesticulating happily at a pile of incomprehensible parts.

Plotting, yeah, that is definitely not my “one free skill” either.

Arkady Martine’s debut novel is A Memory Called Empire.

The cover, you probably won’t be astonished to learn, is very dark and monochromatic, sigh. The description, let me see:

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn’t an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan’s unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.

Sounds promising!

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My weekend disappeared into a blur of cuteness

This is Conner, who somehow failed to get Winners Dog on Friday, but did on the other two days. (To be fair, the dog that beat him on Friday was probably okay, but I didn’t really look at him, since my attention was on Conner.) The two points from Saturday were useless since he can’t benefit from single points, but on Sunday he also got Best of Winners and thus a major. One more major and he’ll have his championship!

The one in the front is Kimmie, who didn’t do all that well — she got reserve on Saturday, and best bred-by-exhibitor Cavalier once, but that’s it for Kim. A particular ruby girl beat her twice. Since that ruby is now finished, Kimmie won’t be facing her again in future shows.

This delightful puppy is Leda, who to my surprise beat her sister two days out of three! She got Winners Bitch on Friday, beating both Kimmie and the ruby. This means she earned her first major, so depending on how you look at it, Leda is now closer to her championship than Kim. Leda has only four points but three of those came in a major. Kimmie has 9 points but no majors. It is a whole lot easier to whittle down the singles than to find shows with majors.

I guess I will now start showing Leda much more seriously. I wish I had last year because she still looks rather puppyish in some ways and will have a harder time in the adult classes, probably.

Most likely the reason two out of three judges this weekend preferred Leda to her sister is that she is more compact, more solid, with more “bone.” She is shorter-coupled — Kim’s worst failing imo is that she is “longer cast,” which means longer in the body. Kim is unquestionably prettier, though. You can bet I will be adding notes about all three judges to my file where I keep track of these things. Friday and Sunday’s judges prioritize other things over the prettiness of the head and expression; Saturday’s judge the other way around. In the future, I will make decisions about which dog to show to which judge based on that presumption.

I took my laptop to the hotel, but I wound up barely touching it. Mornings vanished into a rush to shampoo each dog’s ears and feet, mist their coats with a conditioner, brush the coat flat and put on drying coats, blow dry the dog and start the next dog. Then zip to the show site and rapidly show each dog, switching out armbands hastily but (amazingly enough) without ever entering the ring while wearing the wrong dog’s armband.

After those intense mornings, the afternoons vanished into naps and reading and taking the three dogs on long walks.

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Recent Reading: The Sword Smith by Eleanor Arnason

It says on Amazon:

The Sword Smith tells the tale of Limper, a master sword smith running from an oppressive boss-king who forced him to make junk, and Nargri, his young dragon companion. Written in the early 1970s, and published in 1978 by Condor, The Sword Smith is an anti-epic fantasy. In a new Afterword written for this edition, Arnason describes the characters as “mostly fairly ordinary people, rather than heroes, wizards, and kings. Their problems are ordinary problems, rather than a gigantic struggle between good and evil. There is no magic. The dragons are intelligent therapod dinosaurs, and the trolls are some kind of hominid, maybe Neanderthals. In many ways, it is a science fiction story disguised as a fantasy.

This is only sort of true. I guarantee that some of the problems are not in the least ordinary. In fact, now that I think through the story, almost none of them.

Nor does this story read like anti-epic fantasy to me. Let me see, what does seem like an anti-epic story, where the problems are mostly ordinary and the people mostly ordinary . . . okay, The Sharing Knife series is anti-epic. (Mostly.)

I would say that The Sword Smith reads more like . . . hmm. Like a series of folk tales, kind of. Like Norse mythology, a bit. It’s very episodic and there is no real plot as such. You know Mark Twain’s famous dictum that “A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.” This one kind of doesn’t.

Limper is more interesting than likable, though I certainly didn’t dislike him (or I would have stopped reading the book). Nargri is a fine character too, but in fact given the description I would never have thought of her people as intelligent descendants of therapod dinosaurs. I get that this book was published back in 1978, and maybe we didn’t know yet that therapods were feathered, but I did not really get the impression that Nargri was fundamentally bipedal, and that really means that Arnason didn’t draw me a very clear visual image of her people. It’s true that her people make stuff and build stuff and use stuff, all of which implies bipedality, but the way everyone’s first reaction to Nargri is “a big lizard” and the descriptions of her running make me want to envision a big Nile monitor or something like that, which is not at all what any theropod ought to look like. Kate Elliot captured them much better in her Spiritwalker trilogy.

Yet for all that, I found the story surprisingly compelling. I blasted right through it. I liked the detailed descriptions about smithcraft, and the completely non-ordinary problems that Limper and Nargri got into were often very tense, and I whooshed right through the whole story nearly in one sitting, not counting breaks to take the puppies for long walks in this beautiful weather.

So, yep, ordered Woman of the Iron People. Looking forward to trying that one, and I expect to like it. I do wonder whether it will have been put together more like a regular novel, though.

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Ranking (a few of) Georgette Heyer’s Heroes

Okay, after the previous post ranking Jane Austen’s heroes, how about giving some thought to those featured in Georgette Heyer’s novels? The only flaw in this plan is that I haven’t read nearly all of them, even if you restrict yourself to the Regencies.

But hey, why let that stop me? Here then, is a temporary and no doubt soon-to-be-outdated ranking of a mere eight of Georgette Heyer’s heroes:

8. Powder and Patch — Philip Jettan

Philip is kind of a loser, if you ask me. Most of Heyer’s male leads start off confident in who they are. Not Philip. Reinterpreting himself as a fop to please a girl? Please.

7. The Grand Sophy — Charles Rivenhall

Charles is kind of a jerk. He may learn better, but it doesn’t speak well for him that Sophy had to sort out everyone’s problems because Charles couldn’t and didn’t.

6. Devil’s Cub — the Marquis of Vidal

Vidal is awfully casual about shooting people. Sure, he was drunk at the time, but still. And abducting women . . . seriously, Vidal? Good thing his dad appeared to sort things out, or who knows what would have happened?

5. Arabella — Mr Beaumaris

Everything’s a light joke to Mr. Beaumaris. He’s bored, he’s cynical, and he plays games. I like him anyway, but no one but Heyer could have pulled him off.

4. Frederica — the Marquis of Alverstoke

Alverstroke isn’t particularly admirable when he meets Frederica, but he sure does allow her and her siblings to impose, in a way that clearly suggests he’s a nicer person than is immediately apparent. I like the relationship that he allows to develop between himself and Frederica’s brother.

3. The Corinthian — Sir Richard Wyndham

Oh for heaven’s sake, Richard. Why on Earth were you planning to marry that woman and let her family leech off you in the first place? Just to bored to be bother saying no? What was WRONG with you?

On the other hand, Richard improved instantly when he met Pen and this turned into one of my favorites of Heyer’s books.

2. False Colours — Kit Fancot

The idiocy of the situation isn’t Kit’s fault. Every step of the way, his decisions seem reasonable. He’s just trying — responsibly and soberly — to sort things out for his spendthrift but charming mother and his possibly slightly impulsive brother.

a) Cotillion — Freddy Standen

Even when I read the rest of Heyer’s books, I doubt anybody is going to take Freddy’s place at the top of the list. I love his calm, easy-going nature and his perfect aplomb in every possible social circumstance. And the way he things of things and never drops a stitch. And that punch he landed on Jack when it counted didn’t hurt either.

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A definitive ranking of Jane Austen’s heroes

From Book Riot: A Totally Scientific and Definitive Ranking of Jane Austen’s Heroes.

I liked the title, I’m reasonable familiar with Austen’s heroes, so sure, go ahead and show me your take on ranking them all …

A few rules before we get to the list. Who counts as a “hero,” or love interest, to use a better term? For my purposes, any male character who begins one of Austen’s novels single and ends up married or engaged, unless they are a fairly minor supporting character like  Emma ’s Mr. Weston. My most important criterion is “this man is someone you would actually want to be with in real life.”

Sounds reasonable.

Oh ho, Mr. Collins is 4th from the bottom! Although I can’t actually argue with this ranking on logical grounds, he is probably my very least favorite male character in all of Austen’s work. Ugh.

Ah, this list puts Captain Wentworth above Mr. Darcy! I can’t actually argue with that either.

Top place on this list goes to Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey. I don’t know. I rather recently watched a movie version and was not impressed with the movie as a whole — the entire relationship between Henry and Catherine is sort of hinted at rather than visible on the screen. Maybe if I re-read the book I might agree. But Mr. Darcy stands out a lot more for me, along with Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon. In contrast I have apparently found Henry Tilney pretty forgettable.

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Recent Reading: Wings of Fire 6-10

Okay, so, finished the second Wings of Fire arc last night. Very enjoyable!

The books included are:

Moon Rising – pov protagonist: Moon

Winter Turning – pov protagonist: Winter

Escaping Peril – pov protagonist: Peril

Talons of Power – pov protagonist: Turtle

Darkness of Dragons – pov protagonist: Qibli

The arc starts off very strong. Because Moon can read
minds, she serves as a wonderful way to introduce Winter and Qibli. The reader
gets a very clear idea of what all three of these important dragons are really
like. This is a real advantage, as Winter is not likeable on the outside – he
goes beyond prickly behavior to overtly hostile. But because Moon has a much
better idea of what he’s really like than he lets others see, the reader also
gets this understanding.

The first book also sets up important overall plot
elements: Darkstalker is introduced right away, plus we know that for some
reason Moon can’t read Turtle’s mind, plus we know that mostly all she can see
in Peril’s mind is an inferno. Plus, Moon is an engaging character in her own
right.

Tui Sutherland either must work from a detailed outline or she is good at smoothing out the overall plot arc, because every book moves the overall story along while also giving the reader a more intimate look at a different protagonist. Winter is so sympathetic from the inside, even though he’s so unlikeable from the outside. The personal resolution he comes to at the end of his book is extremely satisfying. Ditto for Peril, who has a strong burn the world violence and hostility both inside and outside, but longs so much to belong and to be loved. Poor Peril! What a terrible life! Her background makes her personal resolution even more satisfying.

I can see why Sutherland had trouble with Turtle, but
she did a rather good job with him in the end. No, he is not a typical hero.
Yes, he is an understandable and sympathetic character, plus brave when it
counts. The end of his book is the only cliffhanger in the set. I, at least,
had a very good idea of how he would get to a more satisfactory ending in the
last book, which he does. I’m guessing that any astute MG reader will also
immediately see how he is going to recover from what Darkstalker does to him.

Qibli’s novel provides an fine ending to the arc. I will say, I saw the ultimate solution to Darkstalker coming way, way in advance. Somewhere in Turtle’s book it occurred to me that I could definitely think of one solution, so the big question left was, would Sutherland come up with a different way to solve the problem? Answer: no. I’m curious: for those of you who’ve read these, did you also predict the ultimate solution? Did you see a different solution than the one that was actually used?

Now, I don’t read books for the excitement of solving the puzzle, but for character and setting and style, so figuring out a good solution to the Big Bad Guy early did not detract from the reading experience. Qibli does a great job carrying the final book. From time to time, Sutherland reserves information that Qibli was thinking about so as to pull off a plot twist; this involved mild cheating since, as the reader is in his pov, really the information should by rights have been right there on the page. But she does it smoothly enough that it works pretty well. Just for a bit, the reader is left thinking, Can Qibli, who’s so smart, really be missing these obvious clues? The answer is no, he saw them and put them together, as becomes clear at the opportune moment.

Minor quibble: The love triangle plot element is SUCH a deeply cliched component of YA that it’s a pity to see it used unnecessarily in a MG series. Worse, it almost sets Moon up as a Mary Sue character in the most cliched fashion possible, as she winds up at the center of attention for so many male characters. Granted, this is a relatively minor element — this is a MG story, after all — but I wish Sutherland hadn’t included it.

Major pluses: Practically everything else. Such wonderful writing. Great characters, each one of whom grows and learns over the course of the story, but not in a heavy-handed way. Snappy, fun plots that are dark enough not to seem shallow or saccharine to adult readers, but not so horrifying that they should be an obstacle to most MG readers.

Has anybody read the early books of the third Wings of Fire arc? How are those? I’m not sure I like the idea of having to get acquainted with the dragons of a whole different continent, but say something positive and I’ll probably overcome that hesitation.

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