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Well. A calmer day at work was somewhat undone by the horror of an hour trying to recover a lost exchange draft with two-odd days and no more free evenings before the deadline. Luckily, the draft was recovered. To celebrate, here are the things I read over the last week:
What I Finished Reading This Week
Our Crooked Hearts – Melissa Albert
This is, hands down, my favorite book I've read this year. Albert opens with a jaw-dropper of a first chapter and doesn't take her foot off the gas until the final page. Everything about Our Crooked Hearts is just so well done. To start, this is an author who understands real fairytales--the disjointed continuity, the sense of subdued menace, the arbitrary turns of events, the dreamlike imagery that means something beyond the power of words to convey--and uses it to stellar effect throughout the novel.
To this add an excellently developed protagonist and supporting cast of allies, antagonists, and things in between. Albert's ability to write sympathetic, relatable, flawed, and unreliable narrators (and characters) continues to impress. Her prose gives such a sense of who these people are--really, and what they think and say they are--by showing readers and letting them draw their own conclusions. She gets family dynamics. She gets friendship dynamics. She gets intergenerational dynamics. She gets the interior an interpersonal realities of adolescence down pat.
Her settings are evocative and beautifully described. Our Crooked Hearts could take place anywhere, even as it's set in a very specific place, which Albert never explicitly spells out.* Ditto her descriptions of magic. And everything else.
Guys, I could not put this book down, not to eat, not to sleep, not to get physical movement. And I have intentionally not said anything specific about what it's about, because this book really should be gone into blind. Suffice it to say that it shares a lot in common with Laure Eve's The Graces and The Curses, and you really should read it.
* And oh, my joy as it slowly became clear that the place I'd chosen to set the story in my head was actually where it is set. And then to have a favorite bookstore casually referenced, in a way that it could be absolutely fictional, if you didn't know it existed. Just, 😍.
White Mare Red Stallion – Dianna L. Paxson
This book was fascinating in that while reading it, I could see all the things I love about Paxson’s writing starting to come together, but without being fully formed. Paxson’s depictions of natural settings are gorgeous: this is an author who writes descriptions of nature like someone who has actually spent time outdoors, which is not something I can say about many recent authors.
Those descriptions, as well as the depictions of everyday life and folkloric practice in 2nd century CE Scotland were my favorite parts of the novel. There are some great scenes of cattle reeving, battles, and religious festivals, as well as some more liminal realities. The plot was decent, but not as good as the scenes of everyday life. It's the story of star-crossed lovers, here the daughter and son of the chieftains of the Novantae and Selgovae, respectively, two tribes that inhabited modern Dumfriesshire. They are drawn to one another by the other's physical attractiveness and a limited set of interactions in social settings. Paxson handles this pretty well: you can tell these are two adolescents attracted to one another in an age-typical fashion, vice the common YA treatment.
The same goes for the obligatory Terrible Event that drives them apart: again, this is done in a way that makes sense for the culture, time period, and maturity of the characters in question. It's just, I would have happily read 230-odd pages of Paxson depicting daily life in said time period; I didn't need an ur-plot to keep me interested. I can also sense where Paxson's editors intervened, in the form of several bog standard plot elements that occur in pretty much all of the fantasy and historical fantasy published in the same time period. I could see them coming from a mile away and could have done without their presence, although Paxson manages to subvert them in some pretty clever ways. Of much greater interest to me than the love story was the protagonist's relationship with her mother, which I wish could have been the primary focus because what Paxson does with it is great and would have been even better had she fleshed it out more.
TL;DR - Paxson had not quite hit her stride with this novel but you can definitely see her accelerating up to it, and while not all of the novel's elements were as fully developed as in her later works, they were definitely all in place and I enjoyed the read.
What I Am Currently Reading
River Kings – Cat Jarman
I'm very glad to be picking this back up after a long hiatus.
No Shortcuts – Max Smeets
I should finish this one by the end of the week.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
I wish Stoker would spend less time on the (to my modern eye) cartoonish depictions of evil and more on the beautiful descriptions of nature that opened the novel.
What I’m Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Our Crooked Hearts – Melissa Albert
This is, hands down, my favorite book I've read this year. Albert opens with a jaw-dropper of a first chapter and doesn't take her foot off the gas until the final page. Everything about Our Crooked Hearts is just so well done. To start, this is an author who understands real fairytales--the disjointed continuity, the sense of subdued menace, the arbitrary turns of events, the dreamlike imagery that means something beyond the power of words to convey--and uses it to stellar effect throughout the novel.
To this add an excellently developed protagonist and supporting cast of allies, antagonists, and things in between. Albert's ability to write sympathetic, relatable, flawed, and unreliable narrators (and characters) continues to impress. Her prose gives such a sense of who these people are--really, and what they think and say they are--by showing readers and letting them draw their own conclusions. She gets family dynamics. She gets friendship dynamics. She gets intergenerational dynamics. She gets the interior an interpersonal realities of adolescence down pat.
Her settings are evocative and beautifully described. Our Crooked Hearts could take place anywhere, even as it's set in a very specific place, which Albert never explicitly spells out.* Ditto her descriptions of magic. And everything else.
Guys, I could not put this book down, not to eat, not to sleep, not to get physical movement. And I have intentionally not said anything specific about what it's about, because this book really should be gone into blind. Suffice it to say that it shares a lot in common with Laure Eve's The Graces and The Curses, and you really should read it.
* And oh, my joy as it slowly became clear that the place I'd chosen to set the story in my head was actually where it is set. And then to have a favorite bookstore casually referenced, in a way that it could be absolutely fictional, if you didn't know it existed. Just, 😍.
White Mare Red Stallion – Dianna L. Paxson
This book was fascinating in that while reading it, I could see all the things I love about Paxson’s writing starting to come together, but without being fully formed. Paxson’s depictions of natural settings are gorgeous: this is an author who writes descriptions of nature like someone who has actually spent time outdoors, which is not something I can say about many recent authors.
Those descriptions, as well as the depictions of everyday life and folkloric practice in 2nd century CE Scotland were my favorite parts of the novel. There are some great scenes of cattle reeving, battles, and religious festivals, as well as some more liminal realities. The plot was decent, but not as good as the scenes of everyday life. It's the story of star-crossed lovers, here the daughter and son of the chieftains of the Novantae and Selgovae, respectively, two tribes that inhabited modern Dumfriesshire. They are drawn to one another by the other's physical attractiveness and a limited set of interactions in social settings. Paxson handles this pretty well: you can tell these are two adolescents attracted to one another in an age-typical fashion, vice the common YA treatment.
The same goes for the obligatory Terrible Event that drives them apart: again, this is done in a way that makes sense for the culture, time period, and maturity of the characters in question. It's just, I would have happily read 230-odd pages of Paxson depicting daily life in said time period; I didn't need an ur-plot to keep me interested. I can also sense where Paxson's editors intervened, in the form of several bog standard plot elements that occur in pretty much all of the fantasy and historical fantasy published in the same time period. I could see them coming from a mile away and could have done without their presence, although Paxson manages to subvert them in some pretty clever ways. Of much greater interest to me than the love story was the protagonist's relationship with her mother, which I wish could have been the primary focus because what Paxson does with it is great and would have been even better had she fleshed it out more.
TL;DR - Paxson had not quite hit her stride with this novel but you can definitely see her accelerating up to it, and while not all of the novel's elements were as fully developed as in her later works, they were definitely all in place and I enjoyed the read.
What I Am Currently Reading
River Kings – Cat Jarman
I'm very glad to be picking this back up after a long hiatus.
No Shortcuts – Max Smeets
I should finish this one by the end of the week.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
I wish Stoker would spend less time on the (to my modern eye) cartoonish depictions of evil and more on the beautiful descriptions of nature that opened the novel.
What I’m Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
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I agree with everything you said above about fairy tales. They really are the original stories, and where most if not all of everything that came after originates.