Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 127

Trust, by Steven Dietz (FF Friday)

A lovely play about loneliness, missed and found connections, fame, love, fidelity and infidelity, and of course trust. Six characters are connected by a web of complex relationships, some romantic, some not, some unrequited, some committed, some casual, some hard to define, all changing.

Cody is a singer who just became famous; Becca is his fiancee; Leah is a singer who’s been well-known for a long time but is no longer a rising star; Gretchen is a dressmaker who’s making Becca’s wedding dress; Holly is a young groupie; Roy is a lonely DJ. The heart of the story is an unexpected slow-build romance between two of the women, which was not where I expected the story to go when I first read it and was a very pleasant surprise.

I’ve never seen it performed but it reads well, though Roy, who steals compulsively when he gets nervous, probably comes across better in performance. In reading, he’s the one character who felt more like a concept than a real person. Otherwise, though highly structured in that everyone is connected to each other in no more than one degree of separation, it has a very realistic feeling. It makes me think of looking out a window and seeing people passing by on the street, and wondering what relationship you might have with each one if you actually got to meet.

This is my favorite play by Dietz. He’s best-known for Lonely Planet, which I also like a lot, a two-person play about two gay men. Jody owns a map shop, and his friend Carl keeps coming in with a chair, which he leaves behind when he goes until the shop and stage are filled with them. Each chair belonged to someone who died of AIDS, and the cluttered stage becomes both a visualization of the space that mourning and fear takes up in our minds, and an AIDS quilt-like memorial for those who have died.

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Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, and Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies, by Katharine Briggs

Exactly what it says on the can: an encyclopedia of British fairy descriptions and stories by a British folklorist. Her books are all out of print, but I have also obtained her fairy tale novel Kate Crackernuts and a book on cat folklore. I haven't read those yet.

There are cultural notes in this book but it's not academic, but very easy to read and meant to be enjoyed. Old-school and excellent. The stories are vivid, the atmosphere is eerie, and the illustrations are beautiful and scary by turns—often both. I owned this as a child and was absolutely terrified by the story and full-color plate illustration of the Nuckelavee, a horrible centaur without skin.

I lost the book in one of my many moves, then eventually ordered it online to see if it was still good and the Nuckelavee was still scary or if it was just one of those childhood things that loses its impact with age. Nope. Still good. Still scary.

If you like this sort of thing, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Or give it to a child you know, and with any luck it will haunt them like it haunted me.

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Werewolves, Rainbow Fudge, and Lesbian Chicken Farmers

I am enjoying the influx of new people and sudden activity of old. If you're looking for people to read and add, here are some fun and representative posts you might have missed:

The Beast of Gévaudan, aka that time France had werewolves.

Baffling lines in fiction, like "Cops go through girlfriends like veal cutlets."

A recipe for rainbow fudge. Can personally vouch for the beauty and deliciousness of this, in which each layer is individually flavored with raspberry, blueberry, orange pandan, and ginger.

Cozy mysteries about a lesbian chicken farmer in rural Yorkshire? Sign me up, please!

My favorite werewolf book and also some links to free online werewolf stories.

Tiny whirlpools. A morning glory, a hole in water, a speck of sun like a brilliant bee.

Poppies, umbrellas, history.

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Children of the Dragon; Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, by Rose Estes

Children of the Dragon is a small-scale but otherwise standard story about three siblings and their dragon eggs; ends just as it starts to get interesting, that is, with the hatching. I wonder if a sequel was intended but never written? It certainly read that way.

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons is an adorable, lighthearted entry in the Endless Quest (same principle as Choose Your Own Adventure), with rainbow dragons, a castle in the clouds, and a bratty princess.

My favorite Rose Estes book, and also my favorite Endless Quest (D&D-based, which I preferred to Choose Your Own Adventure), is still Circus of Fear, which has three totally different and super-fun tracks in which you run away to a fantasy circus and apprentice with 1) fantasy animal trainers, 2) freaks, 3) acrobats. Obviously 1 is best because blink dogs, pegasi, etc., but the other two, with very sympathetic “freaks” and an arrogant acrobat, are fun as well.

Any of you read Endless Quest and/or Choose Your Own Adventure? Which was your favorite, or most memorably bonkers? Anyone else stick slips of paper at choice points to help you backtrack when you ran out of fingers?

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons (An Endless Quest Book, 6) (Pick A Path to Adventure)[image error]

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Circus of Fear (An Endless Quest Book, 10)[image error]

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Kit’s Wilderness, by David Almond

A beautifully written and intricate English children’s book. Kit’s family returns to their ancestral coal mining town to take care of his grandfather after his grandmother died. At home, his grandfather tells him stories of mining and spirits of the mines; at school, he falls in with Allie, a flamboyant girl who wants to be an actress, and Askew, a strange boy who plays the game of Death, in which the children enact being dead. When Kit plays, he puts one foot in the actual world of spirits, and thereafter is haunted by the spirits of children who died in the mines.

For a relatively short book and fast read, this has dizzying layers of complexity. A journey to some sort of underworld is enacted, in separate but related plotlines, by 1) Kit’s grandfather, into both memory and forgetting, 2) the miners, to the past in terms of the layers of fossils they tunnel through and also into the literal underground, 3) a school play based on the Snow Queen, 4) a story about a caveman that Kit is writing, 5) the schoolchildren, in the game called Death which involves going into a pit, 6) Askew, running away from life and literally going underground, 7) Askew’s father, into alcoholism, 8) Kit, into the spirit world, 9) Kit, Askew, and Allie, into the cave where Askew is hiding.

There’s also an incredible amount of character mirroring, doubling, and opposition; to take just two examples, Kit and Askew both bear the same names and ages of boys who died in the mines, and the story Kit is writing is simultaneously a version of Askew’s life, a version of Kit’s life, a magic spell to bring Askew back, Kit’s way of connecting with the past, and Kit’s ticket to his future: a life that will be different from the one his ancestors led.

This book won a whole lot of well-deserved awards. It’s a technical feat that’s also very enjoyable to read, rewarding without being difficult, numinous and moving.

Anyone read this or anything else by Almond? I have only read Skellig, which I recall shared a balance of grittiness and magic, good characterization of even minor characters, and a lot packed into a short length.

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Please vote on books for me to read in the cabin in the woods.

I am more-than-usually likely to actually review what I read, though reviews may be delayed as I need to lug my laptop to my parents' house to actually post them. However, the recent influx of reviews are mostly books I read while in the cabin last time, wrote up while there, and have been doling out ever since, so...

If you've read or heard of any of them, please tell me what you think (without spoilers).

View Poll: #20872

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rachelmanija @ 2018-12-09T11:41:00

View Poll: #20871

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Heir to the Blade; The Air War (Shadows of the Apt books 7 & 8), by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Oh, my brave and heartbreaking bug people!

Book 7 was fantastic and had me biting my nails every other chapter; Book 8 was probably my single favorite of the series so far, despite zero appearances from two of my three favorite characters (but my third had a huge role). It was even more of a nailbiter and heavily featured one of my favorite things, the culture of fighter pilots in a time period when you can actually see the faces of your opponents.

All else is spoilers. ( Read more... )

Heirs of the Blade (Shadows of the Apt Book 7)[image error]

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Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith (FF Friday)

If you enjoy F/F, please consider joining fffriday , where we review or rec fiction, fanfic, or other F/F things every Friday. This review is linked from there.

A re-read. This vivid and satisfying science fiction novel, Griffith’s first, has no male characters in the entire book.

Anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives on Jeep, a planet owned by the sinister Company that seems to control everything, willing to give up everything for the chance to study its people and cultures. The Company’s first expedition found that Jeep was entirely populated by women, and only belatedly discovered why when all its men and 20% of its women died of a plague. The remaining women were quarantined there until a vaccine could be found, and have spent the last five years avoiding meaningful contact with the locals and trying to preserve their existing culture untouched by change.

Marghe has taken an experimental vaccine which may or may not work, and only lasts for six months even if does. She sets out to discover what became of her missing predecessor, and finds that when you look into other cultures, they may also look into you.

Though aspects of the plot are a bit wobbly and there’s enough loose ends that I wonder if a sequel was intended but never materialized, this is a very enjoyable book if you like detailed cultural worldbuilding. (I sure do.) Though character is somewhat secondary to worldbuilding, Marghe’s outer and inner journey is satisfying and her eventual romance with a local woman is believable. She also has an interesting relationship which is neither sexual nor romantic, but otherwise similar enough to a ton of heterosexual genre romances popular at the time that I have to wonder if Griffith was doing a deliberate take on the problematic nature of captive-to-lover romances.

And, of course, if you want to read a book where all the characters are women, there still aren’t many and this is a good one. There’s multiple societies involved, all female and all different and not one partaking of any stereotypes of how women are or how all-female societies would be better or worse than the ones we have. They’re societies. They’re people. No more, no less.

This concept is still neither dated nor much imitated; gee, I wonder why...

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The Sea Watch (Shadows of the Apt 6), by Adrian Tchaikovsky

All is spoilery. Except that I fucking LOVED the worldbuilding in this particular book.

Only in this series, unlike most, the worldbuilding itself becomes a spoiler after a certain point, at least to me, because I so enjoyed finding for myself which kinden we'd be introduced to next. So even saying "This is the one with the [some kind of bug] people" is spoilery. And so I will put that behind a spoiler cut.

( Read more... )

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