Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 337

Recent Reading: UPROOTED by Naomi Novik

So, UPROOTED.

What this book is: really, really good. Outstanding. Is it being presented as YA? It could be read as YA or adult. Nieshka’s arc is a YA character arc, but this is a complex story with plenty of depth. It’s definitely going to appeal to readers of all ages.

What this book is not: a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Oh, it has echoes of Beauty and the Beast, especially at first. Also, there is a rose. But UPROOTED departs significantly from the fairy tale. It really cannot be called a retelling. Let’s say it’s in the same family as Beauty and the Beast.

What this book is: by Naomi Novik.

What this book is not: even faintly reminiscent of the Temeraire series. You know, when I read TEMERAIRE, I said to myself, “Just look at all these semicolons! Novik’s overdone it. She’s really captured Jane Austen-style language generally, but Austen definitely did not use a zillion semicolons per paragraph like this.” Then I went and opened up some book or other by Austen and you know what? Yes, she did.

What I mean to say is, Naomi Novik honestly did capture Austen-style language in the Temeraire series. And since before UPROOTED, she’d written nothing but that series, it was impossible to tell what her natural writing style might be like. Well, I guess she might switch and switch again, who knows, but UPROOTED is written in a style that reminds me a lot of Robin McKinley. If it had McKinley’s name on the cover, I’d have believed it was hers. It’s a smooth, straightforward writing style that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s the kind of writing that gets out of the way and lets you fall right into the story. It starts like this:

Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.

What this book is: a dark fairy tale.

What this book is not: a pastoral fantasy, in the sense that Sherwood Smith used the term in her recent post at Book View Café. Oh, there is an enchanted wood. There sure is. And it is certainly very powerful. But it is the most malevolent enchanted wood you can possibly imagine. It is so malignant that anybody who sets foot in its shade and takes a breath of its air is likely to be inextricably corrupted and try to kill everyone. That scene where the village cows get corrupted and turn evil? Yeah, sounds funny, but actually no, it is seriously horrific. I definitely see why some reviewers are setting UPROOTED in the horror category. I wouldn’t go that far, quite, but as far as I’m concerned, despite the otherwise bucolic village setting and the ordinary forest through which it’s safe to ramble, this story is shoved firmly out of the Pastoral Fantasy category by its horror aspects.

What this book is: compulsively readable, with wonderful characterization and wonderful writing.

What this book is not: flawless. I truly appreciate a story with a theme of redemption. There’s almost no other theme that appeals to me more. But the Wood was SO malevolent in this story that I had trouble believing in the ending. I’m curious: if you’ve read this book, what did you think of the ending? In very general terms, please: no actual spoilers.

What I liked best about this book: practically everything. Specifically: the relationship between Nieshka and Kasia. The relationship between Nieshka and The Dragon. The way the relationship between Nieshka and her mother was handled, and the way the relationship between Kasia and her mother was handled. How Kasia grew and, uh, changed through the story. That bit where Nieshka first called down lightning, that was totally awesome.

What I did not think quuuiiite worked: this setting was supposed to be Eastern European-ish, but in fact it was a thoroughly generic fantasy setting (*extremely* well done, but generic). I guess the names were sort of Eastern European-ish, but they did not really strike me that way. Every time Nieshka cooked buckwheat or ate a blini or whatever, I was just a little bit startled. Maybe this was just me, but one writer who I think manages to pull off this kind of setting just a little better is Merrie Haskell. To me, her settings feel just a little more grounded in historical settings.

Also, the Dragon can clearly read minds. Why did nobody ever seem to notice this? Maybe they all just took it for granted that naturally the Dragon could read minds and so nobody ever saw any need to comment?

Rating: Five out of five. Nine and a half out of ten.

Probability that I’ll re-read this: 100%, probably as soon as next year.

Chance that I’ll send a copy to someone just cause I must share the love: I already have. I did that before I had quite finished the book myself.

Chance that I’ll nominate this for awards next year: Very, very likely, and it’s got enough buzz that I think it has a good chance of picking up a lot of nominations.

Chance that I’ll keep an eye out for Naomi Novik’s next book: Are you kidding? Absolutely.

What I want Novik to write next: something SF. I think it would be fun to see what she’d do with a space opera type of story. Or something with a hard-boiled noir tone. It’s fascinating to me to see her write in such madly disparate styles, so it would be neat if she’d try that again.

Mist in the banner

Well, I like that a lot better. A LOT BETTER. I looked at lots of mist, I must say. Like this:

I really liked this, but it turns out that it’s hard to read print against this kind of dramatic background. Too bad!

And this:

More landscape-y. I like the open gate type of image, but I really wanted a more abstract kind of mist.

So, I hope you like the one up there at the top of the post. I do. Maybe eventually I’ll find one (or buy one) with rainbow-colored mist and a dragon, like so:

Except a prettier dragon, and sort of transparent. With feathers . . . wait, am I getting too picky?

Recent Reading: Stories of the Raksura II by (obviously) Martha Wells

So, I had a chance to read the second set of stories and novellas this past weekend, yay! There are two novellas in this collection, “The Dead City” and “The Dark Earth Below.” There are also several short stories.

Here, in brief, is what you get in this collection:

The first novella is set shortly after Moon’s first encounter with the Fell – you remember, when the Fell destroyed the city of Saraseil, Moon went to a Fell ruler because he thought he might be Fell himself? And then lots of the plot of the actual trilogy arises because of that meeting. Well, in “The Dead City,” Moon has not yet even begun to recover from meeting the Fell ruler or from the destruction of Saraseil. He’s angry, bitter, and on the edge of despair.

All that emotional distress is what drives this novella. It’s a good one. Of all the secondary characters in this one, I liked Ghatli – everyone’s going to like Ghatli, I expect. She’s one of the few non-Raksura who’s heard of Fell but is still able to accept a Raksura. As for scenery, you know it’s going to be ornate and large-scale because after all this is Martha Wells we’re talking about. So we have a huge buried city; buried for a rather unexpected reason and now being excavated for a thoroughly peculiar and pretty appalling reason. Anyway, Moon helps solve the problem mostly because he is just so tired of watching vicious predatory species slaughter people who don’t really have the ability to fight back. Then he goes on his way. Structurally, this story is totally a western: a small community faces an enemy beyond their strength, the lone hero rides in (or flies, in this case), rallies the townspeople, defeats the bad guys, and rides off again, still alone. It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah, basically a western. I liked it a lot. It takes up about 30% of the book.

Then we get “Mimesis,” which is my favorite of the three short stories included in this collection. I don’t find its biology particularly persuasive, but on the other hand Raksura have magic biology too and I don’t have a problem with that, so hey. This story is from Jade’s pov and Moon is not featured.

Then we get “Trading Lesson,” which I’d read before somewhere, maybe on Martha Wells’ website, I don’t know. It’s a minor story, nothing wrong with it, but minor.

The final short story is “The Almost Last Voyage of the Wind-Ship Escarpment.” It doesn’t include any of the familiar Raksura characters, or in fact any of the characters we’ve ever met. I liked it, though. It could be expanded, if Wells’ ever wanted to play with it some more. Everybody’s backstory is complicated enough to be fun to play with, especially Flaren. You know, the Three Words are a pretty dangerous place. But – spoiler – the Wind-Ship Escarpment does in fact survive.

The three short stories together take up not quite 20% of the book, so that leaves half of the total length for the second novella, “The Dark Earth Below.” I loved this novella. All these stories are arranged in chronological order, so this one is set last, later than the trilogy. For the first time, I feel that Wells has reached an acceptable stopping place for the Raksura series. Which doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t happily snap up another trilogy or as many other stories as she wanted to write in this world. But this story involves the birth of Moon and Jade’s first clutch. This brings us to a natural stopping point.

Of course, that’s not all it involves, or it would hardly be half the length of a novel. We get more ornate magical biology and a peculiar mystery that poses a pretty serious threat to the Raksura colony. While all that is being sorted out, Jade is still very pregnant and is not at all happy. Stone has always been one of my favorite secondary characters and I’m glad to say he’s around; Pearl has never been extremely sympathetic but she shows to advantage in this novella. We get glimpses of Frost, Thorn, and Bitter – you remember the three youngsters from Sky Copper – among others. Basically we are shown enough to be sure that the colony is in much better shape now than it has been in the recent past. That, too, is important for letting the reader get a sense of closure.

Naturally the mystery is solved . . . I am not sure I would have figured everything out, but magical biology is just, well, hard to figure out sometimes, I guess. I also like how the Kek are presented here. Any Raksura colony that doesn’t have a Kek village living beneath its tree probably is at a disadvantage. I will add that I do feel bad for the Onde, both the whole population and particularly the individual featured in this novella.

But – another spoiler, I know – the clutch of babies is fine. Three females and two males. I’ll go ahead and give you their names: Solace, Sapphire, Fern, Cloud, and Rain. A thoroughly satisfying clutch, and I’m sure the first of many. Can’t you just see Moon as a line-grandfather someday, with great-great-great-grandchildren living in a flourishing colony? I definitely can. I’m pretty sure that we’re supposed to be left with a happily-ever-after future scrolling out ahead of us. And we are. So, as I say, a satisfying ending point for the series.

Now I kind of want to go re-read the trilogy, though. Again.

Great characters you might not want to actually hang out with

So, this post by Maddie Rodriguez at BookRiot set me to thinking.

It’s a post about “Seven characters you would try not to meet at parties,” which I thought was a fun topic, but they’re not fantasy characters AND they’re also not the KIND of character that leaped to mind when I saw that heading.

What *I* thought was: scary protagonists. What Maddie Rodriguez was thinking of was: killjoy protagonists. A guy who’s always talking about his ex. The Pedantic Dude. (I can actually enjoy hanging out with Pedantic Dudes. It’s pretty easy for me to slide into Pedant Mode myself.)

I also thought: Nope, I’d probably like hanging out with Darcy from P & P. None-too-subtle sarcastic comments about the other guests? Go for it!

So here is the list I thought I was going to get:

Five Scary Protagonists You LOVE In Books But Might Not Want At Your Party

1. Kaoren Ruuol from the Touchstone trilogy by Andrea K Höst. (Did I spell that right? I didn’t look it up.) I’m talking here about the Kaoren before Cassandra softened his hard edges. The Kaoren who would stand around at a party, his arms crossed over his chest, watching expressionlessly as everyone wasted time they ought to spend training or fighting monsters. The Kaoren who would make you feel guilty for every minute you spent just hanging out. That guy.

2. Nick from The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan. I know he’s super-loyal to Alan and that’s great, but he would be seriously scary at a party. You know, I really want to re-read that whole trilogy now that I’ve thought of it.

3. Janus bet Vhalnich from The Thousand Names by Django Wexler. He would see absolutely everything about everyone, including you, and you would never, ever know what he was thinking. I mean, he’s one of the good guys . . . probably . . . but honestly, he’s a good guy in the scariest possible way. You’re glad he’s on your side, but you aren’t going to be *friends* with this guy and you could not possibly relax with him in the room.

4. Sarkon, The Dragon, from Uprooted by Naomi Novik. I just finished this book, which is amazing and wonderful and I loved it, but you know, The Dragon didn’t say a nice thing to anybody until about a third of the way through? Even at the end, he is hardly the life of the party. Nieshka can see through his little mannerisms by then, but he is going to come across as supercilious, sarcastic, arrogant, and possibly even cruel to almost everybody else.

5. Ezekiel Korte. I’m just saying.

The Martian is heading for the big screen —

I’m sure you all knew already that Weir’s THE MARTIAN was going to be a movie. I always seem to hear about these things a year after everyone else already knows. But!

Via BookRiot, here is the official trailer for the movie.

Looks awesome. I’m totally going to go see it. I won’t even wait two years after everyone else already saw it. Probably.

What do you think?

Does this redesign strike you all as elegantly simple or boring? Comment, please. I may add a more artistic banner later. At the moment I’m thinking a swirl of mist. But we’ll see!

YA/Adult pairs of books

From BookRiot, this post by Anmanda Nelson, about YA and adult fantasy titles that go well together, in the sense that if you liked this, you should perhaps try that.

As it happens, though, I haven’t read any of the titles Amanda picked. Well, okay, yes I have: I’ve read Sabriel, but I had to look twice to notice because that’s the only one; it was a long time ago and I must admit I don’t remember anything about it. Yes, I know, lots of people love Sabriel. Someday I will probably re-read it. Let’s see, okay, her choices were:

The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

The Agency series by Y.S. Lee and The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman

Sabriel by Garth Nix and The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi and The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Most of them, I don’t think I’d want to read, based on Amanda’s descriptions and the fact that I really disliked A Handmaid’s Tale. (I read it a long time ago, I admit, maybe I would like it better now.)

I found the second set in particular an interesting contrast:

Lee’s Agency series follows Mary, a young thief in Victorian England rescued from the gallows and trained to be a female private investigator and spy. Her job places her in a number of situations a lady wouldn’t normally find herself in- a similar theme in The Fair Fight, a brilliant novel about female bare-knuckle boxing during the same time frame. Ruth and Mary are both poor, outcasts, and take to untraditional livelihoods to stay afloat. The adult-ness of the Freeman book means it’s dirtier and grittier (and has much fouler language), so it’s easy to pick which one you want to read based on how much dirt you want under your nails.

The first sounds like a story I would like. The second, not so much. I can see why Amanda paired them off, but I’m not sure the pairing works terribly well for me.

But it’s an interesting idea! Even though I don’t really believe in the actual YA category as such, here are five YA titles I particularly love:

Beauty by Robin McKinley

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whelan Turner

The Tiffany series by Terry Pratchett

And what the heck, also:

The Floating Islands

Now, what adult titles would you pair with those? Here are my suggestions, and I am trying here to pick books that really and truly might not appeal to younger readers but might to older readers:

Beauty . . . . Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. Why I picked it: it’s a fairy tale, but a good deal longer, slower, and more complicated than McKinley’s story. It’s one of the later books by OSC that suggests to me that he can still really tell a story (I was not too keen on some of his later books, but this one is very well put together.)

The Scorpio Races . . . Rider at the Gate by CJ Cherryh. Why I picked it: This is a far cry from the wish-fulfillment magical horse of fantasy. Rider is by no means my favorite CJC title, but wow, the predatory horse thing is even more intense than in Stiefvater’s book. I may never read the sequel again . . . unless she writes a third book . . . but I will certainly read the first one again; it stands alone fairly well.

The Dark is Rising . . . The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. Why I picked it: I was thinking about books with a time travel element, but with a more immersive feel than Connie Willis’ Blackout/All Clear had for me. And Powers is a spectacularly gifted writer, even if he’s not one of my personal favorites.

The Queen’s Thief . . . The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Why I picked it: thieves, thieves, let’s see. I mean, there’s no shortage of thieves in fantasy. Lynch’s series is well written, gritty but not TOO dark, definitely not something I would hand a kid but definitely something I would recommend to adults.

The Tiffany series . . . the Sam Vimes series. Is it cheating to pick another series by the same author? And I grant you, this series, at least once you get past the first one, probably appeals to practically everyone.

The Floating Islands . . . The Raksura novels (and stories) by Martha Wells. Flying! People! I am pretty sure I would have LOVED the Raksura novels whether I’d first read them at fourteen or forty, but they jumped out at me for this comparison even though I think many younger readers would love them.

Okay! What is your favorite YA, or even MG, title? And what adult title would you suggest might go with it?

A dozen books I’m trying to loan out

So, a friend of mine stayed at my house this past weekend, taking care of my dogs while I zipped off to Arkansas for a family reunion + my parents’ golden wedding anniversary. We had nice weather in Arkansas, thank heaven, and everything went beautifully, though I’m happy to be home and my dogs were as ecstatic to see me as though I’d been gone a month instead of just overnight!

But! My petsitting friend also likes SFF, but she is 25 years younger than me, so OF COURSE she has not read a ton of the older authors. I mean the people who were getting more buzz in the 80’s, even if they’re still active today, a lot of younger readers haven’t ever happened to try them because there are just so many new authors all the time and the buzz has moved on.

So I put out a dozen books I thought she might love that she might not have heard of.

My choices — and she is more into fantasy than SF at the moment, but I didn’t let that stop me — in no particular order:

1. The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip, because it’s perfect in every way and who wouldn’t love it?

2. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, because it’s also practically perfect, despite the slight flaw in Master Li’s character.

3. Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly, because it’s a great book for almost anybody who likes current-day vampire UF.

4. The Paladin by CJ Cherryh, because I know it’s not for everyone, it’s got rather a slow pace, but for someone who prefers fantasy to SF, well, what CJC novel would you recommend? This is a standalone and I really love it.

5. Cuckoo’s Egg by CJC because there’s no sense letting people think they dislike SF when they just haven’t tried the right books. This is a really good one.

6. Night Watch because it’s possibly my very favorite of Pratchett’s books and imo a good entry point into his series. It turned out that my friend had at least heard of Pratchett, but hadn’t read any of his.

7. Jhereg by Steven Brust, because no one does first person smartass better and it’s just so much fun.

8. Island of Ghosts by Gillian Bradshaw. Yes, yes, it’s historical rather than fantasy, but as far as I’m concerned, good historicals read just like good fantasy. Except without the magic, of course. But still, the reading experience is basically the same and I simply love Bradshaw.

9. The Curse of Chalion, because everybody ought to try Lois McMaster Bujold.

10. Shards of Honor, because ditto and there’s hardly a better entry into SF than this.

11. Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn, because it’s one of my favorite by Shinn, so comfortable and warm, I push it on everyone.

12. And the one she actually borrowed: Beauty by Robin McKinley. I’m sure she’ll love it! And I get the warm feeling of having introduced someone to McKinley.

If she loves Beauty, I’m going to feel a burning desire to press Sunshine on her next.

I know it’s hard to distinguish titles I love from titles I’m sure everyone else will love, but say you’re loaning books to someone who’s a couple of decades younger than you but has at least somewhat similar tastes in books. What’s a handful of books you would most want to loan that person? The authors and titles they might have missed that no one, or at least no one who loves SFF, should go through life without trying?

Cover reveal!

Okay, this surprised me, because the release date is still 9 months in the future, but I checked and it is okay for me to post this. So, HERE

Okay! Isn’t that beautiful? I think it is not only beautiful, but different and eye-catching. I think the artist was clever to avoid any human figure; I think this cover will stand out wonderfully from the crowd. I also think this pale, pale cover will catch the eye, and the colored mist will look good on the shelf and entice readers to pick it up. Then I think the items in the background will be interesting and make potential readers open the book and read a few pages.

The band of colored mist goes across the spine, too, which I hope will make it stand out to the casual browser.

In the story, the mist is, you know, mist-colored. But this is a brilliant interpretation by the artist, imo.

I put the picture in full-sized to be sure you’d be able to see the three objects in the background — the pen, the watch, and the key. Those are all important items in the story, totally appropriate for the cover.

I just could not be more pleased with this. I’m not sure it beats THE FLOATING ISLANDS for my favorite cover ever, but . . . it might.

MIST is the first book I ever wrote with just one point-of-view protagonist, btw. That was interesting to me personally; I mean, that I never felt the impulse to switch to another pov. Oddly, my other RH title, THE WHITE ROAD OF THE MOON, is apparently going to be the second book I write with just one pov protagonist. I didn’t expect that, but I’m nearly 200 pp into it and, yeah, just one protagonist so far, so that is pretty conclusive.

Artists nominated for the 2015 Hugo

I don’t want to forget to check out the artists who were nominated for the Hugo this year. Partly for my benefit and partly in case any of you with voting memberships also want to check out the artists and don’t necessarily want to take the time to look everyone up, here are the artists, with links.

The last one, Carter Reid, I couldn’t quickly find anything of his but the Zombie Nation webcomic I linked. I poked around for five minutes, but if he has a gallery somewhere, I didn’t happen across it. If anybody cares to share a link, great; if not, well, his work doesn’t really seem comparable to the other nominated artists.

Best Professional Artist

Julie Dillon

Kirk DouPonce

Nick Greenwood

Alan Pollack

Carter Reid

My first impression: I like Julie Dillon, I’ve always liked Julie Dillon, I like her use of color and organic curvy shapes, and I am probably going to put her first.