Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 99

Blame Rachel

Check out the Yuletide archive today!

Fandoms (1013)
Works (1920)

View Poll: #23115

comments

Who will join me on a grand Yuletide endeavor?

It is three days to Yuletide, my favorite winter holiday! The main archive currently has 1780 stories in 967 fandoms. Can we get it to a nice round 2000 stories in 1000 fandoms by Christmas?

If you would like to join me in maniacal Yuletide treat writing, I have some handy tools for you. Here is a searchable app to see what fandoms have been requested, by whom, and what their prompts are.

Here are prompts by pinch hitters who didn't sign up and are not guaranteed a story.

All necessary instructions are in this admin post. Including this:

"Madness collection: the above, but ALSO art where requested, works under 1,000 words, gifts given to more than one person, gifts for people who weren't pinch hitters or signed up to Yuletide 2019 (your beta? a past pinch hitter? the YuleSwaps organisers?) a gift in a fandom someone requested last year... Go wild in the service of good surprises - gifts you have reason to believe will please their recipients. As always, avoid DNWs."

And here is a searchable app from last year!

View Poll: #23102

I would be delighted with art or fic for anything I've ever prompted. You can find ALL my prompts by clicking on the "fic exchange letter" tag.

comments

A Question Meme (of sorts)

Ask me a question or suggest a topic for me to write about in comments, and I will answer/discuss it!

At some point. Probably sooner rather than later. I am not doing the "pick a day of next month for specific questions" meme as that is guaranteed to result in me forgetting about the entire thing.

comments

The Bear and the Serpent, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Everything I have to say about this book is spoilery. Also, this is a reaction, not a proper review.

( Read more... )

The Bear and the Serpent (Echoes of the Fall Book 2)[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

The Tiger and the Wolf, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is the first Tchaikovsky book I’ve read that has no bugs in it. However, it makes up for it with VELOCIRAPTORS.

In a land in which everyone is a shapeshifter, Maniye has shapeshifter-related problems. Her father is the asshole leader of the patriarchal Wolf clan that defeated the previously dominant Tiger clan, and her mother was the captive Tiger queen who was executed immediately after Maniye’s birth.

Most people can only shift into one animal form. But Maniye can shift into both wolf and tiger. She’s kept the latter secret, as usually having two shift forms drives you insane, and if she reveals her tiger self, it will be cut from her. This is even worse than it sounds, as the shift form is also your soul, so she’d be losing half her soul.

First level of spoilers here. This covers stuff in the first few chapters which might be more fun to discover by yourself.

Comments will include spoilers through the end of the book, so don’t read the comments if you only want first-level spoilers.

( Read more... )

The worldbuilding in this book, especially when it comes to shapeshifting, is beyond outstanding. Every detail is incredibly cool and often very original, from naming traditions to magic to Gods. To take just one example, a human wearing armor and carrying a sword who becomes a wolf will be a wolf whose hide is almost as tough as iron and whose claws are almost as hard and sharp as the sword.

The cultures roughly correspond to pre-Columbus America, Asia, and Africa, but it’s pretty rough. There’s no “the wolves are Japanese,” and while wolf culture is very different from hyena culture, the wolves and hyenas all also have their own clans with their own customs, and within the clans, people still have different ideas about things. But it’s all distinctly non-European bronze age as it begins to become iron age, which is an unusual setting that I really enjoyed.

Despite some dark elements and the rape in the backstory, the overall feel of this story was just incredibly fun. It has the same gleeful inventiveness of the Apt books, only this time it’s shifters rather than kinden.

I feel confident that bugs will appear at some point, though. There are three fat books, he won’t be able to resist.

Second level of spoilers, through the end of the book!

( Read more... )

Engagement with premise: A+. Delivers both iddy wish-fulfillment of a downtrodden girl coming into her own, and ALL the cultural and magical shapeshifter worldbuilding you could possibly desire.

The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1)[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Flight # 116 is Down, by Caroline B. Cooney

It amazed Patrick that there were so many people in this small town he did not know. Ambulance call after ambulance call was for a family he had never heard of; a house he had somehow never noticed. Houses lurked behind thick stands of maple trees; driveways sneaked out from behind granite outcroppings; new people moved to town without notifying Patrick. In fact, if he went by the last names of ambulance calls this year, the entire town consisted of sick strangers.

Patrick is an eager 17-year-old EMT. Heidi is a directionless rich girl who feels like a disappointment to her parents, who are currently traveling for their glamorous jobs. When a plane crashes behind Heidi’s house and Patrick is the first rescuer on scene, the two teenagers experience six hours that change their lives.

This book both fulfilled everything you want from this premise—the snapshots of the passengers and their families pre-crash, the ensemble of people from completely different lives suddenly forced to interact, the intensity and suspense of the rescue, the fascinating details and difficulties of how the rescue works, people pulling together (or not) under intense pressure—and also had something I wasn’t expecting, which was a really charming narrative voice.

The details of how a rescue like this would work under these circumstances and the psychology of rescuers were absolutely dead-on. I've worked on first responder teams. The way they all leap to show up at a potentially exciting call and delight in it even while feeling slightly guilty that their crowning moment is someone else's worst day ever was absolutely accurate, and not something often shown in fiction.

All the characters were vivid, even in brief sketches, and there were moments of humor, dark or otherwise, whenever possible. Despite the large amount of death, the depiction of the many people working together was uplifting without being saccharine.

I loved Heidi's time-compressed transformation from an under appreciated girl drifting through life to a girl who rises to the occasion and finds her purpose. I especially liked how her many crowning moments of awesome all involved logistics rather than life-risking traditional heroics. She knows her parents' property inside and out, and comes up with clever solutions to problems like "how multiple large rescue vehicles get to a crash site whose access is blocked by a bunch of stone walls, a steep icy slope, and a very narrow driveway?"

If the premise appeals at all, I promise you will enjoy this. It was so much better than I expected, with so many fun little touches and human moments that lifted it above just being what it needed to be—and many books don’t even reach the latter bar! I now want to read more of her books. Her style was just so enjoyable.

Engagement with premise: A+. Delivers everything it promises, and does it better than it really has to.

Contains non-graphic dog and child death.

Caroline Cooney wrote a ton of books in multiple genres, all of which I missed as a kid except the Girl on the Milk Carton. I'd like to read more by her. What do you recommend or dis-recommend?

Flight 116 Is Down (Point)[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Books of Childhood and the Tragic Fates of Dogs

View Poll: #23025

Please reminisce, fondly or not, about any of these, or other books read in childhood, especially if they seem to have, deservedly or undeservedly, vanished from the shelves. I'd love to hear about non-US, non-British books, too.

Also, please reminisce, as unfondly as you please, about the most aggravating outcomes of childhood books. Dog or not.

comments

Misty and Me, by Barbara Girion

More than anything in the world, Kim wants a puppy of her own

I bought this book at a library book sale because the cover rang a bell. I knew I'd read it as a child and was surprised that I recalled nothing about it. As I began to read, more faint bells rang.

Kim desperately wants a puppy, but her family won't allow it. The entire book is about how she wants a dog, her parents won't let her have a dog, she falls in love with a puppy and scrimps and saves and even hires an elderly dog-sitter so she can have her dog in secret. It's cute, if not terribly memorable. And in terms of engagement with premise, up until the last chapter it's 100% - the book promises a girl and her dog story, and that's exactly what it is.

AND THEN.

The dog-sitter has a heart attack and the secret comes out and she has to move cross-country to be cared for by her daughter... and Kim GIVES THE DOG-SITTER HER DOG. The last page has Kim wiping away tears while going off with her old friend with whom she has no interests in common due to aging apart, with the apparent message that she's learned her lesson that people are more important than animals and to forget about dogs and focus on building relationships with humans.

THAT IS NOT WHAT I WANT FROM A DOG BOOK.

Engagement with premise: This isn't so much a failure to engage with the premise as an utter betrayal of the premise. WTF!!!

Misty and Me[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Engaging With Your Premise

The failure to engage with its own premise is one of my most frequent frustrations with stories. If you read this DW, you have encounter innumerable posts in which I complain that the book about about the flying horse only has the horse fly once and off-page, or that the book about tiny people mostly keeps them in a tiny house without forcing them to deal with the larger world or detailing what it's like to live in a tiny house, or that the memoir about a woman who cooks every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook is 20% cooking and 80% her boring, ordinary home life.

I'm not talking so much about failure to worldbuild or failure to fill the book with well-researched details, though depending on what the premise is, that can be a part of it. I mean shying away from the most central and resonant parts of whatever the story is.

For instance, Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax Pursued has Mrs. Pollifax, the unlikely spy, forced to take refuge in a carnival, where she must uncover a murderous mole. It has lots of well-researched carnival details, so that's not a problem. But it still struck me as failing to fully engage with its own premise.

Almost immediately upon arriving at the carnival, its owner, who knows her secret identity, suggests that she pose as a fortune-teller. I was very excited by this idea, as it would force Mrs. Pollifax to be a part of the carnival, raise the stakes, provide a ton of suspense, offer chances for both drama and humor, be emotionally revealing for both her and the people whose fortunes she tells, and make her grapple with ethical issues.

Mrs. Pollifax-- who in earlier books has done things like fly a helicopter by guesswork-- says this will be too difficult. Instead, she poses as a reporter doing a story on the carnival. Of all the ways to engage with the premise of "elderly spy infiltrates carnival," that is the most premise-eliding way to do it. She's an outsider posing as... a different kind of outsider. She's never forced to step into the shoes of the carnival people. As a result, the book has carnival details, but not the carnival soul the premise promised.

Sholio and I have been talking about this for a while, and she put up a post on it.

As an experiment, I looked at the first page of my DW filtered by book review, to see how often engaging or not engaging with a premise came up in my reviews of the books I read. Turns out, a lot:

Dead and Buried, by Barbara Hambly. The book that is ostensibly about Hannibal's past coming back to haunt him has less Hannibal than multiple other books in the series.

Danny Dunn and the Automatic House, by Jay Williams. Not enough automatic house - it's really only in the last quarter or so.

And, by the same method, it's so damn satisfying when books DO lean into their premise:

Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick. Promises dinosaurs and time traveling paleontologists, provides exactly that and also a very emotionally resonant look at the pursuit of knowledge in the face of impermanence, which is central to paleontology.

Money Shot, by Christa Faust. Noir suspense about a porn actress on the run is centrally about the porn industry and the heroine's understanding of the intersections of money, sex, and power.

Witch in the House, by Ruth Chew. It is in fact about having an upside-down witch in the house.

Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Immensely satisfying book that is all about being smallified.

comments

Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

A paleontologist sits in his office, studying ancient dinosaur tracks and extrapolating the scene in the ancient past that created them. And then a man walks in with a job offer and a cooler containing the head of a freshly-dead stegosaurus.

Bones of the Earth is a celebration of dinosaurs and the pursuit of knowledge, wrapped around a lot of twisty time travel and the adventures of time-traveling paleontologists, some of whom get trapped in time and keep getting distracted from their observations by the subjects of their study trying to eat them.

I’ve re-read this book and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter every couple years since they came out, though I’ve never fallen in love with any of Swanwick’s other novels. (I haven’t yet read The Iron Dragon’s Mother.)

But what I really want to talk about is the ending, which I recall was extremely polarizing. In fact I recall that most people hated it. I loved it. For me the ending took the book from being an exceptionally good sf adventure to being something that would stay with me ever since I read it.

( Read more... )

Bones of the Earth[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments