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What a week. What a fortnight, actually. I have encountered many metaphorical fires and even successfully extinguished some of them. And so, my past two weeks' worth of reading in this week's post.
Folks, times are unsettled and I am breaking all the rules.
What I Just Finished Reading Last Week
The Good Hawk – Joseph Elliott
There’s a lot of potential for a historical fantasy set in 11th-ish century Scotland featuring a protagonist with Downs Syndrome to go awry in execution, but Elliott never missteps. The Good Hawk is everything I want from the genre: epic battles and epic journeys, language geekery, ancient lore, action and drama and quests against long odds, and characters confronting familiar problems in a very different time and place from the modern day. The novel is home to a variety of cultures and worldviews, which Elliott mostly depicts as differing from each other, not starkly divided into Good and Evil based on 21st century Western progressive ideals, as do many recent genre offerings. The characters are delights—fully formed people with believable motivations, strengths, and failings. And they face real stakes: not everyone is going to survive. I’m speaking in broad terms here because I think it’s worth going into this book without knowing much about it beyond these elements and discovering the details as you read—and I do recommend reading The Good Hawk if you’re in any way intrigued by what I’ve written here.
What I Just Finished Reading This Week
Solutions and Other Problems – Allie Brosh
I think this book will disappoint anyone who comes to it hoping for nonstop belly laughs. It is not that kind of book. This isn’t to say that there are no belly laughs; there are, and they are some of the funniest things I have read in recent memory. But Brosh is far more focused on coming to terms with uncomfortable facts about life rather than just telling more irreverent stories a la Hyperbole and a Half.
I learned about the darkest episodes in Brosh’s life before reading Solutions, which may have blunted the impact somewhat as I read. (I also have no experience with the death of a sibling or a divorce and can only imagine, rather than viscerally understand, what Brosh is living through.)
Solutions is 519 pages long and I blew through it in under 24 hours. There is very, very little filler here (the two Pile Dog chapters being the obvious exception). My favorites include:
Richard: Uproariously funny.
Neighbor Kid: I have had to fend off this kid as well.
The Kangaroo Pig Gets Drunk: I often wonder about this too, particularly when watching dogs’ endless, endlessly forgiving patience as their human owners prepare and eat all manner of delicious-smelling treats while they—with their vastly superior senses of smell—are stuck eating kibble from the same 60 lb. bag of Cosco dog food. Every. Day.
Daydreams: I think Jon Mulaney said the difference between heaven and hell is that heaven is the Wikipedia article about you that you can edit before others read it and hell is the encyclopedia entry that you can’t. At any rate, Brosh's take on that theme here is very, very accurate.
Bananas and Losing: Heartbreaking.
World’s Greatest Cup: My reaction not only to car audio components but pretty much all technology that comes bundled with lifestyle-“enhancing” bloatware and spyware.
Fairness: I TOO ENGAGE IN THESE BEHAVIORS. Perhaps the funniest chapter in the book, next to Richard.
Fish Video and Sister: Again, heartbreaking and beautiful.
A Nonspecific Story about an Animal, Friendship Spell, and Friendship: Holy shit. These hit like a ton of bricks to the head. Really, really powerful stuff; Friendship is easily my favorite thing she has written.
The Owl Service – Alan Garner
I only recently heard about Alan Garner, which intrigued me because I read a lot of British fantasy and if he’s good, why hadn’t I encountered him before? Stylistically, he is very different from most of the genre’s authors, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the plot and even depict the setting. It takes some getting used to and at the outset I wasn’t sure it would work for me, as I find lush descriptive language one of the genre’s major draws.
The novel opens as Allison, her stepbrother Roger, and their respective (step)parents go on holiday to a remote Welsh country house and interact with the Welsh staff: mad Huw Halfbacon, Nancy, and her son, Gwyn. The kids find a dinner service in the attic and then strange things begin to happen.
The plot incorporates elements from the 4th branch of the Mabinogi, and I would not recommend reading The Owl Service if you’re unfamiliar with the former, because you may not understand what’s going on, let alone how revolutionary Garner’s story is. (More on this behind the cut.) Once my brain adjusted to imagining description from dialogue, the novel improved considerably. It’s still something of a product of its time: men act decisively and women are illogical, bitchy, anxious, uneducated, conniving, and literally have science explained to them by the menfolk.
But.
As the supernatural mystery heightens, it becomes clear that the main characters’ lives are influenced—not in any good way—by the history of the Mabinogi’s Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gronw Pebyr, and Blodeuwedd; indeed, it’s a history that’s troubled the area’s inhabitants for centuries. Garner’s worldbuilding and the mechanics of his magical system are spare but utterly convincing. And for such bare (bare, bare, bare-bones) language, there’s a lot going on well before readers are likely to become aware of it. Garner hooks you with a country manor Gothic and then starts slipping in observations on economic, ethnic, and gender prejudice so sharp some readers may never realize how cutting they are.
And he doles it out so slyly. In what is, to me, the novel’s pivotal conversation, a character casually mentions that it sucks to be Lleu, but what about poor Gronw, who really can’t be faulted for falling for a woman’s wicked charms, when she’s so alluring.
Yeah, poor Gronw, I thought. Not surprising, given how Garner writes female characters. I gritted my teeth and turned the page.
And the ending: ”You’re not birds. You’re flowers. You’ve never been anything else. Not owls. Flowers. That’s it. Don’t fret.”
Oh my god. Plot, character development, social commentary, supernatural mystery and zero authorial hand-holding: this novel is fabulous and Garner has earned my unending love.
Red, White, & Royal Blue – Casey McQuiston
Ten days ago, I looked at my life and said, What I need most right now is intelligent but unapologetic fluff. Red, White, & Royal Blue had a lot to recommend it for the role, given its premise: youngest male offspring of the first female president of the United States falls in love with the youngest grandson of Great Britain’s queen. And for the novel’s first 130-odd pages, boy did it deliver, as McQuiston spun an escapist fantasy confection that hit all the right notes for me. I had a hard time keeping the characters apart because aside from their names they all speak and think exactly the same, but that “same” is the sort of irreverent, snappy banter and observation I enjoy, so all was forgiven. Better yet, McQuiston had the good sense to move quickly to the “lovers” phase of “enemies to lovers” once the bloom had worn off the first stage.
But then, it went downhill when Alex, our first son, made a stink about the cost to taxpayers of housing the Thanksgiving turkeys in the Willard hotel. In fairness, McQuiston did this to set up an extended snappy dialogue flirtation between Alex and the prince. But.
But. Alex spends the next 300 pages of the novel flying around the US, Britain, and continental Europe under pretext of doing philanthropic work so he can fuck the prince. Realizing that this is not a good look for Alex after the Turkey Incident, McQuiston makes a point to have Alex reassure his mother/the US president that he’s paying for it out-of-pocket.
And, sure. Even if uni student Alex is somehow able to pay for his One Percenter lifestyle out of pocket (How, when McQuiston gives him regulation Humble BeginningsTM in a Texas suburb?), taxpayers are absolutely paying for his Secret Service detail while he does, and that. Costs. A. Ton. Our Hero is spending hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars for booty calls. (At this point, Alex is in Regulation DenialTM and telling himself that's all they are.) In attempting to prove that her hero is better than the opposition, McQuiston turns him into a bog standard political hypocrite who lives his best life at citizens’ expense.
Plus, his security team absolutely are putting themselves in danger so he can binge drink vodka in a club or bang Prince Henry in a tack room at Wimbledon (yes, this actually happens). And how on earth can members of the presidential and royal families just waltz into a random karaoke dive bar in LA, on the spur of the moment, and get shitfaced while all the patrons are still there, snapping photos? (As someone who watched entire city blocks get locked down in 2010 while Joe Biden stopped in at a Brooks Brothers, I have a very hard time envisioning a world where this is possible.) How is this not a security risk? How is this not even a massive tabloid scandal? In an election year? When mom’s regulation Conservative Evangelical NemesisTM could make utter political hay out of this behavior?
Similarly: what do the other residents of the building in which the vice president’s daughter rents her “airy one-bedroom apartment in Columbia Heights” (PS: Ahahaha) think of the daily inconveniences this imposes on them because she doesn’t want to live in the Naval Observatory? And isn’t the Naval Observatory much more conveniently located to her university to begin with?
Alex, Henry, and all their US first family and UK royal relatives are able to slip their protective details whenever they want to fuck, or binge drink, or engage in typical YA romance genre behaviors. Which is just sloppy writing, and far less interesting than the realistic alternative, in which a widening circle of personnel know about their relationship, and how do Our Heroes prevent their secret from getting out under those circumstances?
A big reveal is set up from miles away in which the first gay Latin man (with bonus undocumented family in the US) to be elected to the Senate mysteriously defects to become the vice presidential running mate to the socially conservative troglodyte who’s running against Alex’s mother. But…wouldn’t an openly gay Latin man with undocumented family in the US alienate the very “values” voters who compose said candidate’s base? How does this make sense? McQuiston tries to hand-wave this away but it's not convincing.
And finally, there's the conclusion, in which Alex and the prince find the courage to stop lying about their relationship, the world rallies behind them, Alex's mother wins a second term in office, and the prince buys an NYC brownstone to be closer to Alex. But he doesn't renounce his position in the royal family. Alex, meanwhile, decides to go to law school to be near him; something for which he has done precious little planning but: “Mom knows someone at NYU, right?”
Because at the end of the day, for all her lionizing of immigrants and outsiders and the working class and Humble BeginningsTM, McQuiston still very much idolizes inherited privilege and wealth and Ivy League educations and all the trappings that come with them. It makes the novel's very genuine representation and progressive ideals start to look like pandering, and struck a pretty sour note for me.
TL;DR This is a lot of demands to hang on an escapist fantasy confection, but McQuiston invites it by repeatedly insisting on “realism” and a "three cheers to the underdog" ethic and inconsistently maintaining either. It works far less well than if she’d just chosen to jettison such concerns completely.
little scratch – Rebecca Watson
This powerful novel is told in streams of consciousness. The plural is intentional here; Watson does a stellar job of representing, through both language and formatting, the default internal state in which several modes of consciousness and rumination occur simultaneously. She also accurately depicts the power of intrusive thoughts and the lengths to which people go to banish them.
At the start of the novel, we learn that the unnamed narrator has woken up with a hangover, that she has a boyfriend to whom she’s deeply attached, and an office job that she despises. The rest is revealed gradually, and Watson’s skillful introduction of “the rest” in a way that lets readers guess exactly what it is before the protagonist makes it explicit is what transforms this novel into 200 pages of continuous gut-punch. This was heavy reading in the same week that I tackled Brosh’s Solutions, but man, is it a tour de force.
Rat Queens vol. 4 – Kurtis Wiebe, Owen Gieni, & Ferrier
The stories in this volume are as fun as ever, but very much disconnected from everything that happened in volume 3; a cursory search online indicates that Drama is responsible. I ignore this and focus on enjoying the ride.
What I Am Currently Reading
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Oh, postal service. You are indeed slower than you used to be.
The Reign of Wolf 21 – Rick McIntyre
I’m jumping straight into this, the second volume. So far so good.
The Golden Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
Having finished the chapters on Halloween and Scotland's slate of November festivals, I will set this one aside until December.
The Sisters Grimm – Menna van Praag
I needed a dose of well-written girl power after this week’s heavy reading.
Rat Queens vol. 5 – Kurtis Wiebe, Owen Gieni, & Ferrier
So far, so good.
What I'm Reading Next
Aside from the McIntyre, I picked up Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Charlie Holmberg’s Spellsinger, Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, Megan Whalen Turner’s The Return of the Thief, and David Wondrich’s Imbibe.
これで以上です。
Folks, times are unsettled and I am breaking all the rules.
What I Just Finished Reading Last Week
The Good Hawk – Joseph Elliott
There’s a lot of potential for a historical fantasy set in 11th-ish century Scotland featuring a protagonist with Downs Syndrome to go awry in execution, but Elliott never missteps. The Good Hawk is everything I want from the genre: epic battles and epic journeys, language geekery, ancient lore, action and drama and quests against long odds, and characters confronting familiar problems in a very different time and place from the modern day. The novel is home to a variety of cultures and worldviews, which Elliott mostly depicts as differing from each other, not starkly divided into Good and Evil based on 21st century Western progressive ideals, as do many recent genre offerings. The characters are delights—fully formed people with believable motivations, strengths, and failings. And they face real stakes: not everyone is going to survive. I’m speaking in broad terms here because I think it’s worth going into this book without knowing much about it beyond these elements and discovering the details as you read—and I do recommend reading The Good Hawk if you’re in any way intrigued by what I’ve written here.
What I Just Finished Reading This Week
Solutions and Other Problems – Allie Brosh
I think this book will disappoint anyone who comes to it hoping for nonstop belly laughs. It is not that kind of book. This isn’t to say that there are no belly laughs; there are, and they are some of the funniest things I have read in recent memory. But Brosh is far more focused on coming to terms with uncomfortable facts about life rather than just telling more irreverent stories a la Hyperbole and a Half.
I learned about the darkest episodes in Brosh’s life before reading Solutions, which may have blunted the impact somewhat as I read. (I also have no experience with the death of a sibling or a divorce and can only imagine, rather than viscerally understand, what Brosh is living through.)
Solutions is 519 pages long and I blew through it in under 24 hours. There is very, very little filler here (the two Pile Dog chapters being the obvious exception). My favorites include:
Richard: Uproariously funny.
Neighbor Kid: I have had to fend off this kid as well.
The Kangaroo Pig Gets Drunk: I often wonder about this too, particularly when watching dogs’ endless, endlessly forgiving patience as their human owners prepare and eat all manner of delicious-smelling treats while they—with their vastly superior senses of smell—are stuck eating kibble from the same 60 lb. bag of Cosco dog food. Every. Day.
Daydreams: I think Jon Mulaney said the difference between heaven and hell is that heaven is the Wikipedia article about you that you can edit before others read it and hell is the encyclopedia entry that you can’t. At any rate, Brosh's take on that theme here is very, very accurate.
Bananas and Losing: Heartbreaking.
World’s Greatest Cup: My reaction not only to car audio components but pretty much all technology that comes bundled with lifestyle-“enhancing” bloatware and spyware.
Fairness: I TOO ENGAGE IN THESE BEHAVIORS. Perhaps the funniest chapter in the book, next to Richard.
Fish Video and Sister: Again, heartbreaking and beautiful.
A Nonspecific Story about an Animal, Friendship Spell, and Friendship: Holy shit. These hit like a ton of bricks to the head. Really, really powerful stuff; Friendship is easily my favorite thing she has written.
The Owl Service – Alan Garner
I only recently heard about Alan Garner, which intrigued me because I read a lot of British fantasy and if he’s good, why hadn’t I encountered him before? Stylistically, he is very different from most of the genre’s authors, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the plot and even depict the setting. It takes some getting used to and at the outset I wasn’t sure it would work for me, as I find lush descriptive language one of the genre’s major draws.
The novel opens as Allison, her stepbrother Roger, and their respective (step)parents go on holiday to a remote Welsh country house and interact with the Welsh staff: mad Huw Halfbacon, Nancy, and her son, Gwyn. The kids find a dinner service in the attic and then strange things begin to happen.
The plot incorporates elements from the 4th branch of the Mabinogi, and I would not recommend reading The Owl Service if you’re unfamiliar with the former, because you may not understand what’s going on, let alone how revolutionary Garner’s story is. (More on this behind the cut.) Once my brain adjusted to imagining description from dialogue, the novel improved considerably. It’s still something of a product of its time: men act decisively and women are illogical, bitchy, anxious, uneducated, conniving, and literally have science explained to them by the menfolk.
But.
As the supernatural mystery heightens, it becomes clear that the main characters’ lives are influenced—not in any good way—by the history of the Mabinogi’s Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gronw Pebyr, and Blodeuwedd; indeed, it’s a history that’s troubled the area’s inhabitants for centuries. Garner’s worldbuilding and the mechanics of his magical system are spare but utterly convincing. And for such bare (bare, bare, bare-bones) language, there’s a lot going on well before readers are likely to become aware of it. Garner hooks you with a country manor Gothic and then starts slipping in observations on economic, ethnic, and gender prejudice so sharp some readers may never realize how cutting they are.
And he doles it out so slyly. In what is, to me, the novel’s pivotal conversation, a character casually mentions that it sucks to be Lleu, but what about poor Gronw, who really can’t be faulted for falling for a woman’s wicked charms, when she’s so alluring.
Yeah, poor Gronw, I thought. Not surprising, given how Garner writes female characters. I gritted my teeth and turned the page.
”But none of them is all to blame,” said Huw. “It is only together they are destroying each other.”And just, YES. THIS. THIS. ALL THE WAY THIS. Suddenly Garner’s illogical, bitchy, anxious, conniving, uneducated women start to look very, very different indeed.
“That Blod-woman was pretty poor,” said Roger, “however you look at it.”
“No,” said Huw. “She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she is often longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns.”
And the ending: ”You’re not birds. You’re flowers. You’ve never been anything else. Not owls. Flowers. That’s it. Don’t fret.”
Oh my god. Plot, character development, social commentary, supernatural mystery and zero authorial hand-holding: this novel is fabulous and Garner has earned my unending love.
Red, White, & Royal Blue – Casey McQuiston
Ten days ago, I looked at my life and said, What I need most right now is intelligent but unapologetic fluff. Red, White, & Royal Blue had a lot to recommend it for the role, given its premise: youngest male offspring of the first female president of the United States falls in love with the youngest grandson of Great Britain’s queen. And for the novel’s first 130-odd pages, boy did it deliver, as McQuiston spun an escapist fantasy confection that hit all the right notes for me. I had a hard time keeping the characters apart because aside from their names they all speak and think exactly the same, but that “same” is the sort of irreverent, snappy banter and observation I enjoy, so all was forgiven. Better yet, McQuiston had the good sense to move quickly to the “lovers” phase of “enemies to lovers” once the bloom had worn off the first stage.
But then, it went downhill when Alex, our first son, made a stink about the cost to taxpayers of housing the Thanksgiving turkeys in the Willard hotel. In fairness, McQuiston did this to set up an extended snappy dialogue flirtation between Alex and the prince. But.
But. Alex spends the next 300 pages of the novel flying around the US, Britain, and continental Europe under pretext of doing philanthropic work so he can fuck the prince. Realizing that this is not a good look for Alex after the Turkey Incident, McQuiston makes a point to have Alex reassure his mother/the US president that he’s paying for it out-of-pocket.
And, sure. Even if uni student Alex is somehow able to pay for his One Percenter lifestyle out of pocket (How, when McQuiston gives him regulation Humble BeginningsTM in a Texas suburb?), taxpayers are absolutely paying for his Secret Service detail while he does, and that. Costs. A. Ton. Our Hero is spending hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars for booty calls. (At this point, Alex is in Regulation DenialTM and telling himself that's all they are.) In attempting to prove that her hero is better than the opposition, McQuiston turns him into a bog standard political hypocrite who lives his best life at citizens’ expense.
Plus, his security team absolutely are putting themselves in danger so he can binge drink vodka in a club or bang Prince Henry in a tack room at Wimbledon (yes, this actually happens). And how on earth can members of the presidential and royal families just waltz into a random karaoke dive bar in LA, on the spur of the moment, and get shitfaced while all the patrons are still there, snapping photos? (As someone who watched entire city blocks get locked down in 2010 while Joe Biden stopped in at a Brooks Brothers, I have a very hard time envisioning a world where this is possible.) How is this not a security risk? How is this not even a massive tabloid scandal? In an election year? When mom’s regulation Conservative Evangelical NemesisTM could make utter political hay out of this behavior?
Similarly: what do the other residents of the building in which the vice president’s daughter rents her “airy one-bedroom apartment in Columbia Heights” (PS: Ahahaha) think of the daily inconveniences this imposes on them because she doesn’t want to live in the Naval Observatory? And isn’t the Naval Observatory much more conveniently located to her university to begin with?
Alex, Henry, and all their US first family and UK royal relatives are able to slip their protective details whenever they want to fuck, or binge drink, or engage in typical YA romance genre behaviors. Which is just sloppy writing, and far less interesting than the realistic alternative, in which a widening circle of personnel know about their relationship, and how do Our Heroes prevent their secret from getting out under those circumstances?
A big reveal is set up from miles away in which the first gay Latin man (with bonus undocumented family in the US) to be elected to the Senate mysteriously defects to become the vice presidential running mate to the socially conservative troglodyte who’s running against Alex’s mother. But…wouldn’t an openly gay Latin man with undocumented family in the US alienate the very “values” voters who compose said candidate’s base? How does this make sense? McQuiston tries to hand-wave this away but it's not convincing.
And finally, there's the conclusion, in which Alex and the prince find the courage to stop lying about their relationship, the world rallies behind them, Alex's mother wins a second term in office, and the prince buys an NYC brownstone to be closer to Alex. But he doesn't renounce his position in the royal family. Alex, meanwhile, decides to go to law school to be near him; something for which he has done precious little planning but: “Mom knows someone at NYU, right?”
Because at the end of the day, for all her lionizing of immigrants and outsiders and the working class and Humble BeginningsTM, McQuiston still very much idolizes inherited privilege and wealth and Ivy League educations and all the trappings that come with them. It makes the novel's very genuine representation and progressive ideals start to look like pandering, and struck a pretty sour note for me.
TL;DR This is a lot of demands to hang on an escapist fantasy confection, but McQuiston invites it by repeatedly insisting on “realism” and a "three cheers to the underdog" ethic and inconsistently maintaining either. It works far less well than if she’d just chosen to jettison such concerns completely.
little scratch – Rebecca Watson
This powerful novel is told in streams of consciousness. The plural is intentional here; Watson does a stellar job of representing, through both language and formatting, the default internal state in which several modes of consciousness and rumination occur simultaneously. She also accurately depicts the power of intrusive thoughts and the lengths to which people go to banish them.
At the start of the novel, we learn that the unnamed narrator has woken up with a hangover, that she has a boyfriend to whom she’s deeply attached, and an office job that she despises. The rest is revealed gradually, and Watson’s skillful introduction of “the rest” in a way that lets readers guess exactly what it is before the protagonist makes it explicit is what transforms this novel into 200 pages of continuous gut-punch. This was heavy reading in the same week that I tackled Brosh’s Solutions, but man, is it a tour de force.
Rat Queens vol. 4 – Kurtis Wiebe, Owen Gieni, & Ferrier
The stories in this volume are as fun as ever, but very much disconnected from everything that happened in volume 3; a cursory search online indicates that Drama is responsible. I ignore this and focus on enjoying the ride.
What I Am Currently Reading
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Oh, postal service. You are indeed slower than you used to be.
The Reign of Wolf 21 – Rick McIntyre
I’m jumping straight into this, the second volume. So far so good.
The Golden Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
Having finished the chapters on Halloween and Scotland's slate of November festivals, I will set this one aside until December.
The Sisters Grimm – Menna van Praag
I needed a dose of well-written girl power after this week’s heavy reading.
Rat Queens vol. 5 – Kurtis Wiebe, Owen Gieni, & Ferrier
So far, so good.
What I'm Reading Next
Aside from the McIntyre, I picked up Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Charlie Holmberg’s Spellsinger, Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, Megan Whalen Turner’s The Return of the Thief, and David Wondrich’s Imbibe.
これで以上です。
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Garner is still iffy in my books once past the early fantasy stuff- Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath. Roger, and the guy in Red Shift, are pretty unlikable by me.
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Yeah, that was...not the best. That said, I rationalize it away by convincing myself that Roger has seen the error of his prejudices regarding Gwyn and Wales the same way he's seen them regarding Blodeuwedd, and since the novel conveniently avoids any denouement, who's to say otherwise?
Roger was bad, absolutely, but Clive was the one who truly stuck in my craw.
Thanks for the heads up about Garner's other books. I was looking at the trilogy next and not sure whether to try out any of the others in the meantime.
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I've never read book 3 of the trilogy just because I loved 1&2 so much, and also because from what I've read here and there it's John M Ford levels of deliberately obscure. I r naive reader and unable to guess what an author is trying to convey by not saying things.
Elidor isn't bad either BTW.
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Given what Garner shows us through others' observations, she and Clive definitely deserve one another.
And on that third book--oh boy. Still, I'm slightly more inclined to try it in the Age of Wikipedia than I would be otherwise. At any rate, I've got holds on the first and third books and am trying to track down a library with the second, so hopefully I'll be able to dig in within the next few weeks.
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I have known for a long time that Red, White, and Royal Blue are Not for Me, but this definitely confirms that.
This is a lot of demands to hang on an escapist fantasy confection, but McQuiston invites it by repeatedly insisting on “realism” and a "three cheers to the underdog" ethic and inconsistently maintaining either. It works far less well than if she’d just chosen to jettison such concerns completely.
Exactly! If you want to write escapism where we just revel in the fantasy of having all the money, then write escapism!
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Exactly! If you want to write escapism where we just revel in the fantasy of having all the money, then write escapism!
Yes, I would have liked this so much better, because I wouldn't have been jarred out of the story every time it whipsawed between different levels of realism. And she explicitly says that she wrote the book as an antidote to the current political situation, which, sure. But my problem with the current political situation isn't which party's engaging in these self-enriching behaviors, it's that politicians engage at them at all. It just does not fit together well in a single book.
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Because at the end of the day, for all her lionizing of immigrants and outsiders and the working class and Humble BeginningsTM, McQuiston still very much idolizes inherited privilege and wealth and Ivy League educations and all the trappings that come with them.
Yeah. I read RWaRB with a sort of vague dislike while being entertained by the fluff -- I compared it in my write-up to drinking this horribly sweet, artificial strawberry soft drink: I don't actually like it, and I know it's terrible, but it's also weirdly compelling enough to take that next sip -- but it was the "Mom knows someone at NYU" bit at the end that made me really annoyed with the book.
(You are of course spot on about all the RL implication of... everything, which were not taken into account and the whole thing basically worked on a kind of fairy tale logic despite the supposedly real world setting. I'd kind of accepted that for the duration, but this bit still stuck out.)
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Yes, exactly! That's a brilliant metaphor for what it's like to read this book. It's just, I was, for once, actually in the mood for that horribly sweet artificiality and I would have liked the experience much more if McQuiston had just stuck to that. But her handwaving was the narrative equivalent of slapping "Natural Flavors!" or "Gluten Free!" on what I already know is an unhealthy drink, which just called attention to how bad-for-you the thing really is. It would have been so much better to stick to pure fairy tale logic.
And yeah, the NYU ending was just the !??? icing on that particular cake.