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Now on April 8th, because I'm doing April Fool's Day a week behind schedule.
What I Finished Reading This Week
Gideon The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
This one was an odd duck for me. My reaction, I think, is mainly due to the fact that marketing hype and reviews led me to expect one book, and it was something else.”Lesbian necromancers in space!” trumpets the front cover. Necromancers? Yes. Lesbians? Yes, although to my delight this is just an unremarked aspect of who the characters are. Space?
Well, in as much as it starts on one planet and ends on another that the protagonists travel to via spaceship, yes. But really, you could replace "spaceship" with "horse-drawn carriage" and “planets” with “continents” or “Panem districts” and it wouldn’t change an effing thing about the book. Gideon The Ninth isn’t so much scifi as fantasy in outer space window dressing, which was a bit of a disappointment because I'd been led to expect scifi-scifi.
Indeed, Gideon is actually several books done up new window dressings: call it "Lesbian necromancer Aslan in the Gormenghast Castle And Then There Were None Hunger Games: The Series!" For what it's worth, I found Gideon to be at its most entertaining during the chapters that focused on the murder mystery.
But not all of the chapters do, and there are some major tonal shifts that don’t quite work for me. Chief among these are the opening chapters, in which a character’s very real grief over the impending death of her child is seemingly played up for laughs, and the conclusion, which falls into the action movie “endless fight scene with big! Bigger! Massive! Giant! Explosions!” trap, and grows monotonous about 100 pages before the battle ends.
Gideon’s enemies-to-lovers arc with Harrow is telegraphed but undeveloped, a situation not helped by the very real chemistry between Gideon and another character. I suspect Muir started with the idea of an epic emotional showdown between Gideon and Harrow and built the book out from there; a pitfall of this approach is that the author can be so convinced of the scene that she fails to adequately build up to it when writing the rest, which seems to have happened here. Without that buildup, two childhood nemeses splashing around and shouting at each other in a swimming pool while Dia de los Muertos makeup runs down their faces is more comical than cathartic.
Indeed, readers are told about the antagonism between these two, but never really see it. Rather, one gets the sense that they mildly dislike each other and tolerate one another’s presence with nothing more than mild irritation. There was no evidence of pathos or seething hatred, and so for me, no payoff when we’re told they’ve overcome it.
Publisher copy and multiple reviews led me to expect a pulpy raunchfest, with Gideon as a sort of lesbian Jayne Cobb from Firefly. But the book’s sensibility—in which Gideon’s gaze is arrested by a delicate woman in a lacy nightgown—is more quaint Jane Austen than Girls Gone Wild.
Yes there are setting-improbable wisecracks. Yes there are references to the Bible, Shakespeare, and online memes. I’d thought the latter would bother me, but Gideon’s voice turned out to be one of my favorite things in the book. The former, alongside the characters’ names, pretty much telegraphed narrative arcs and functions even before I realized an appendix existed to explain their significance. The book would have been better on the whole had Muir’s writing been subtler and tighter.
I can’t quite say I liked this novel as a book. But I did form vivid mental images of the settings and characters. I did like Gideon and Harrow as characters, despite their complete lack of chemistry. Indeed, I liked all the characters. I don’t feel like this was an excellently executed book and I didn’t feel particularly satisfied once I’d finished it. But it’s weirdly grown on me since in a way I can’t really explain.
Binti: The Night Masquerade – Nnedi Okorafor
This was a swing and a miss. Instead of exploring themes of identity, belonging, and tradition versus modernity (as she seemed poised to do at the previous novella’s conclusion), Okorafor focused on giving her protagonist a series of increasingly improbable and poorly fleshed-out superpowers. By the series’ conclusion , Binti has uncovered a Secret of Her BirthTM and has corresponding membership in two ancient human cultures. She is genetically modified with DNA fromone two three alien species, lending her two different types of magical telepathic abilities and a bond with the living ship Moya New Fish. She has two mates—one human and one alien, and the latter is destined to gestate their child.
And because Binti is so clearly becoming an OP protagonist, there’s no narrative tension. When her entire family tragically dies in an act of horrific violence, it’s obvious they’re not actually dead...and they aren’t. When Binti tragically dies for the sins of others in a separate act of horrific violence, it’s obvious she’ll rise, Christ-like, from the grave...and she does. (But not before the POV switches—for the first and only time in the series—to other characters, the better to facilitate some wallowing in remorse, guilt, and admiration of her sacrifice.)
It's self-indulgent and iddy. And there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. But neither are they what the marketing promised, and because I came to the book looking for the latter but ended up with the former, I'm a bit disappointed. Combined with the fact that the series reads somewhat like a draft where all the ideas are on the page, but the language needs to be polished, these novellas ultimately went wide of the mark for me, despite their latent potential.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Curses – Laure Eve
Laure Eve’s The Graces was one of my surprise favorites from last year’s reading, and it’s a delight to return to its characters here.
Women Of The Golden Dawn – Mary Greer
This week’s chapters covered the founding, growth, and implosion of the Golden Dawn, and W.B. Yeats’ archly matter-of-fact description of Aleister Crowley’s antics is priceless.
A Thousand Ships – Natalie Hayes
I’ve read the first chapter, and so far this looks set to be the novel Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was marketed as but wasn’t.
Spellbreaker – Charlie Holmberg
Thirty percent of the way in we’ve had our meet cute moment and the first intimation that some of the main character's assumptions about her mysterious anti-mage employers may not be as accurate as we’d first assumed.
The House On Vesper Sands – Paraic O’Donnell
As deeply enjoyable this time through as it was during my first read.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week I read the chapter on Easter, completely blanking on the fact that I'd already finished it several weeks earlier.
The Mirador – Sarah Monette
I'm trying to knock this one off my longstanding "reads in progress" list.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired a new hardbound notebook, and that, amazingly, was it.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Gideon The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
This one was an odd duck for me. My reaction, I think, is mainly due to the fact that marketing hype and reviews led me to expect one book, and it was something else.”Lesbian necromancers in space!” trumpets the front cover. Necromancers? Yes. Lesbians? Yes, although to my delight this is just an unremarked aspect of who the characters are. Space?
Well, in as much as it starts on one planet and ends on another that the protagonists travel to via spaceship, yes. But really, you could replace "spaceship" with "horse-drawn carriage" and “planets” with “continents” or “Panem districts” and it wouldn’t change an effing thing about the book. Gideon The Ninth isn’t so much scifi as fantasy in outer space window dressing, which was a bit of a disappointment because I'd been led to expect scifi-scifi.
Indeed, Gideon is actually several books done up new window dressings: call it "Lesbian necromancer Aslan in the Gormenghast Castle And Then There Were None Hunger Games: The Series!" For what it's worth, I found Gideon to be at its most entertaining during the chapters that focused on the murder mystery.
But not all of the chapters do, and there are some major tonal shifts that don’t quite work for me. Chief among these are the opening chapters, in which a character’s very real grief over the impending death of her child is seemingly played up for laughs, and the conclusion, which falls into the action movie “endless fight scene with big! Bigger! Massive! Giant! Explosions!” trap, and grows monotonous about 100 pages before the battle ends.
Gideon’s enemies-to-lovers arc with Harrow is telegraphed but undeveloped, a situation not helped by the very real chemistry between Gideon and another character. I suspect Muir started with the idea of an epic emotional showdown between Gideon and Harrow and built the book out from there; a pitfall of this approach is that the author can be so convinced of the scene that she fails to adequately build up to it when writing the rest, which seems to have happened here. Without that buildup, two childhood nemeses splashing around and shouting at each other in a swimming pool while Dia de los Muertos makeup runs down their faces is more comical than cathartic.
Indeed, readers are told about the antagonism between these two, but never really see it. Rather, one gets the sense that they mildly dislike each other and tolerate one another’s presence with nothing more than mild irritation. There was no evidence of pathos or seething hatred, and so for me, no payoff when we’re told they’ve overcome it.
Publisher copy and multiple reviews led me to expect a pulpy raunchfest, with Gideon as a sort of lesbian Jayne Cobb from Firefly. But the book’s sensibility—in which Gideon’s gaze is arrested by a delicate woman in a lacy nightgown—is more quaint Jane Austen than Girls Gone Wild.
Yes there are setting-improbable wisecracks. Yes there are references to the Bible, Shakespeare, and online memes. I’d thought the latter would bother me, but Gideon’s voice turned out to be one of my favorite things in the book. The former, alongside the characters’ names, pretty much telegraphed narrative arcs and functions even before I realized an appendix existed to explain their significance. The book would have been better on the whole had Muir’s writing been subtler and tighter.
I can’t quite say I liked this novel as a book. But I did form vivid mental images of the settings and characters. I did like Gideon and Harrow as characters, despite their complete lack of chemistry. Indeed, I liked all the characters. I don’t feel like this was an excellently executed book and I didn’t feel particularly satisfied once I’d finished it. But it’s weirdly grown on me since in a way I can’t really explain.
Binti: The Night Masquerade – Nnedi Okorafor
This was a swing and a miss. Instead of exploring themes of identity, belonging, and tradition versus modernity (as she seemed poised to do at the previous novella’s conclusion), Okorafor focused on giving her protagonist a series of increasingly improbable and poorly fleshed-out superpowers. By the series’ conclusion , Binti has uncovered a Secret of Her BirthTM and has corresponding membership in two ancient human cultures. She is genetically modified with DNA from
And because Binti is so clearly becoming an OP protagonist, there’s no narrative tension. When her entire family tragically dies in an act of horrific violence, it’s obvious they’re not actually dead...and they aren’t. When Binti tragically dies for the sins of others in a separate act of horrific violence, it’s obvious she’ll rise, Christ-like, from the grave...and she does. (But not before the POV switches—for the first and only time in the series—to other characters, the better to facilitate some wallowing in remorse, guilt, and admiration of her sacrifice.)
It's self-indulgent and iddy. And there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. But neither are they what the marketing promised, and because I came to the book looking for the latter but ended up with the former, I'm a bit disappointed. Combined with the fact that the series reads somewhat like a draft where all the ideas are on the page, but the language needs to be polished, these novellas ultimately went wide of the mark for me, despite their latent potential.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Curses – Laure Eve
Laure Eve’s The Graces was one of my surprise favorites from last year’s reading, and it’s a delight to return to its characters here.
Women Of The Golden Dawn – Mary Greer
This week’s chapters covered the founding, growth, and implosion of the Golden Dawn, and W.B. Yeats’ archly matter-of-fact description of Aleister Crowley’s antics is priceless.
A Thousand Ships – Natalie Hayes
I’ve read the first chapter, and so far this looks set to be the novel Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was marketed as but wasn’t.
Spellbreaker – Charlie Holmberg
Thirty percent of the way in we’ve had our meet cute moment and the first intimation that some of the main character's assumptions about her mysterious anti-mage employers may not be as accurate as we’d first assumed.
The House On Vesper Sands – Paraic O’Donnell
As deeply enjoyable this time through as it was during my first read.
The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week I read the chapter on Easter, completely blanking on the fact that I'd already finished it several weeks earlier.
The Mirador – Sarah Monette
I'm trying to knock this one off my longstanding "reads in progress" list.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired a new hardbound notebook, and that, amazingly, was it.
これで以上です。
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