Reviews and Comments

Just finished a very, very tough section to read. I'm interested to see where she's planning to take the story from here. A greek tragedy would have ended it after this.

I've already written a review of another one of Robin McKinley's books, Deerskin. I loved that book, it was psychological, metaphorical, immediate, disgusting, cathartic and very introspective. Logically, I expected something similar from Sunshine. The premise seemed to promise that as well; A vampire and a human are locked together in a room. He hides in the shadows, she moves with the spot of sunlight falling through the window. But as night falls... I expected a tense, intense, slow thriller. Will she die? Will she convince the vampire to let her live? Who locked them in this room together and why? I looked forward to that story.

It wasn't that. It was that for like, the first chapter, and then it became something entirely different. In a sense, it isn't really fair to resent a story for not being what you wanted it to be. Sunshine isn't bad, it just really isn't my jam. Action-adventure urban fantasy isn't really my favorite to begin with, but when it's a monster mash like this... I'm never really a fan of the types of books that mix all the traditional monsters. Vampires and werewolves still works, but when you start adding demons and pixies and sorcerers... I don't know, it works for comedies (though, maybe this was more intended as a comedy?), but if you want your story to be scary, it's too unfocused. The creepiness of each monster doesn't add up and becomes greater than its parts, they each just kind of lose what makes them uniquely frightening, in my opinion. Few people are actually scared of vampires or werewolves, we tend to be scared of what they represent, our primal animalistic side, a toxic love... The underlying themes that suffuse a good monster story. And you can't properly build those themes when you mash your monsters together. I also didn't really like the main character's narration that much. Sunshine is very snarky, but either she, or Robin McKinley isn't quite funny enough to pull it off. Again, in my opinion.

Anyway, I tried to meet it where it's at. Hell, I finished it. But it wasn't what I was looking for, and I am still kind of sad I didn't get the gloomy, introspective, slow-paced vampire thriller I was hoping to read.

Warning: Extremely Vague Spoilers

It’s clear to see why The Fifth Season won a Hugo award and became immensely popular. Jemisin is an amazing world-builder and extremely good at plotting. She knows exactly at what pace to reveal the mysteries of her world to make her readers desperate to find out what happens next. The culture and history of her world are shaped by the titular “fifth seasons” years-long periods of environmental disasters, which is a great concept, and her orogenes are a really cool half-magic, half-science twist on typical elemental magics. She also manages to do something that was once thought impossible: create fantasy-cursing that sounds both thematic and natural.

Jemisin wants to do more than just write an exciting book though, she has a message, a two-fold one at that. She’s clearly both inspired by climate disasters in our world, as well as (racial) oppression. I say racial, because while the orogenes aren’t a one-on-one for an actual real-life group, there’s hints (like the slightly-on-the-nose slur for them being “rogga”) that she was inspired by the oppression of Black people. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, I’m always happy when an SFF author sees the potential in their fictional world to dissect and analyze our real world. I think especially fantasy is deeply underutilized in that respect. However, I am disappointed in how she went about it. While I’m fully aware how white and arrogant this sounds; I think she could’ve done better.
A review on Goodreads, by Nick Imrie, really put it better than I could “…I can't help but feel that the rape, torture, slavery and abuse are all set-dressing, while the real visceral oppression is here in the social snubs, slights and slurs. In the world of The Fifth Season rape is quotidien but being called rogga is unforgivable.” Harsh, but I think she really managed to identify what bothered me so much about her treatment of oppression in this book. It seems like the most visceral feeling moments of cruelty and bigotry are the ones she’s actually likely to have experienced herself, rather than the ones that are actually the worst.

The orogene characters in this book do terrible things, they kill people accidentally and on purpose, allies and enemies, sometimes one, sometimes many. The guilt they experience over this is minimal, and often they halfway justify it by making the argument that the people they killed all contributed to the oppressive system under which orogenes are forced to live (which, admittedly, is truly horrific). Jemisin seems to agree. I get the sense that we’re supposed to see this world as irredeemable because of the bigotry and cruelty of its inhabitants. And I understand that part of the genre conventions of these types of books is that Life is Cheap, but if you’re trying to make a point about oppression, it’s hard for me take it both ways. I can’t both sympathize with a character’s anger over being called a slur, ignore their comparative stoicism over being cast out from their family, and then excuse them semi-accidentally on purpose wiping out an entire village. The actions in this book aren’t afforded their proper emotional weight, in my opinion.

Within the logic of the world she created, orogenes have demi-god levels of power and are fully capable of accidentally killing people, even as infants. They are also undeniably people, despite their danger, but it’s easily understandable why regular folk would hate and fear them. Now, as I said, Jemisin is an amazing plotter. I have no doubt she realized this, and already has an answer in store, (I’ve read the first fifty pages of the second book, and I’m placing my bets on “ancient indigenous knowledge on orogenes that was lost during Sanzed colonialism”) which disappoints me a little. It feels pretty cliché to compare her to Octavia Butler, the only other Black female sci-fi author people are likely to have heard of, but it was one of her greatest strengths as a writer that she always fully engaged with these types of moral dilemmas. She never let her characters take the easy way out and discover some kind of ancient, lost third option. I just don’t trust Jemisin to do the same. (Though I’m prepared for her to embarrass me on this front. I have underestimated her before.)

I feel like Jemisin wants to use this book to pose us a question, except she has already scribbled in the answer. She wants to portray morally gray characters, but we never actually doubt who she considers “the good guys”. And she seems to be unable to go beyond her own experiences to truly confront the horrors of the world she created.

And that’s what could have taken this book from “good” to “great”, in my opinion. And, in all honesty, if this wasn’t a Hugo winner, I wouldn’t have scrutinized it to this extent. For me, it became a victim of its own high expectations.

So, conclusion.

Should you read this book? Honestly, yes. Am I going to read the rest of the series? Yes, I need to know how this ends. Am I bit disappointed? … Yeah, sadly.

Cynthia Voigt is one of those authors whose work more or less became an integral part of my personality. I discovered her series on the Tillermans around thirteen years old, and read and re-read these books throughout my teens, deeply identifying with the protagonists and their coming-of-age struggles.

“The Runner” was never my favourite, but it was still nice to revisit, now that I have some adult perspective.

In other Tillerman-books, Bullet is already a background character. The uncle who died tragically in Vietnam but left a deep impression on the people who knew him in his short life. In this book we actually get to meet him. In the earlier books, Bullet is understandably placed on a bit of a pedestal by the characters, but I don’t know if this story does a good job of taking him off of it. He’s presented as an extremely talented athlete, very intelligent (though he squanders it) and well-liked by the other students, even if he doesn’t like them. Quite unrealistic, considering his personality. He’s a tough character to like for the reader. He’s very angry, and it’s not pleasant to spend a lot of time in his head with his thoughts. His philosophy of hard work and extreme self-reliance seems attractive at first, but reading between the lines, it doesn't seem to make him any happier. It’s easy to empathise with this anger at first. His cold, authoritarian father is straight-up abusive, has already chased off his older brother and sister, and strains his relationship with his mother. Bullet himself would also rather risk his life in Vietnam than staying on his family’s farm, even if this means he could avoid conscription. He seems to love the farm itself but can’t stand staying a second longer than he has to. This anger seeps through his entire personality and life. He’s arrogant, self-isolating and holds contempt for nearly everyone in his life. He holds contempt for the jocks who beat up a black guy in his recently racially integrated high school. He holds contempt for the hippie students, who protest against the war and in favor of racial equality. He holds contempt for the teachers who try to get through to him. He holds contempt for his sister’s boyfriend, who is a shameless cheater, and he holds contempt for his sister for running off with a guy like that in the first place. Oh, and he also holds deep contempt for black people, because he’s racist. The narrative makes it clear that he was raised with racist beliefs, but he has no desire to divest himself of them. He resents any attempts at changing his mind because he seems to view it as yet another external force trying to control him, just like his father. It’s one of the cases in which his strong will becomes a form of stubbornness that doesn’t actually benefit him. What does seem to reach him, however, is that the only two people in the entire book who can meet his incredibly high standards are both black.

In the lack of value he places in achievement, relationships and even his own life, I think I can recognize a particular strain of teenage depression. Something that he might have grown out of, eventually, in the same way that his interactions with black people in this book may have eventually led him to let go of his racism. The real tragedy is of course that he never gets to be that person. We don’t know if he could’ve, would’ve reached his full potential, because he dies off-screen in a senseless war.

High Stakes: The policital biography of Shell

A Dutch book on the history of the multinational oil corporation, that promises to be rather critical of the company. (Who'd guess that a multinational oil corporation wouldn't always act ethically?)

Much denser than I expected, so I'm still only in the first chapter!

I'd already been planning on reading this book for a while (I love a fairytale retelling, if it's done right). Then I watched the movie The Company of Wolves and it was the exact story I needed at that moment. Without going into detail, it really helped go through and get over some stuff. So I wanted to read the book even more. I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm going through it in order, saving the wolf-stories that I adored so much in the film version for last.

Okay, I'm about halfway through this book, and I feel I can already say: that Hugo was deserved. It is very good. I do still hope to find out why Jemisin decided to write Essun's chapters in second person. That's such an uncommon voice, I feel like it has to have a purpose.

Laura H.* is a notorious figure in the Netherlands. After converting to Islam at a young age, she and her husband left the country in order to join IS. In 2017, they escaped the Islamic State with two small children in tow. Her husband died en route. She wanted to return to the Netherlands, said that she's sworn of Islam and no longer held any fundamentalist beliefs, which of course was treated with huge amounts of skepticism by everyone. She was eventually convicted to three years in prison, so by now she's already living on the outside once again. This book, by journalist Thomas Rueb, is mostly concerned with the question of what could possibly convince a "normal, Dutch woman" who wasn't raised in the faith to join a terrorist state. He quickly shows that she wasn't all that normal, but in fact deeply troubled. Are those extenuating circumstances? Of course, her being a woman and a mother also creates a lot of sympathy as well. It's easier to feel for her than for her abusive husband who was born into a family of Palestinian refugees. Even with all the hardship that implies.

*Censoring a last name like that is done in the Netherlands to protect the privacy of anyone suspected of convicted of a crime.

An anthology of interwoven short stories that take place in a fictional ancient civilization - heavily implied to be the first ancient civilization, actually. Two pairs characters feature in all of them, until they finally meet in the last one; Norema, the barbarian woman and her companion Raven, a warrior from a matriarchal society who is constantly accosted by culture shock in this strange country where men do get to make decisions, and Gorgik and Little Sarg, the lovers, who use their old slave collar as a ruse to free other slaves, as well as a powerful symbol within their sexual relationship. (Look, Delany is a man of interesting sexual tastes and little shame, so you're going to find out about them.)

While that makes this book sound pretty lurid (which is why I decided to read it, not gonna lie), it's actually much more concerned with portraying the contrast between "barbarism" and (it also needs quotes) "civilization". The main difference between these two groups is really just a power relationship, and not intelligence, or even very visible in the lives of everyday people. This book takes place in a time where money, writing and even keys have only just been invented, and are not widely adopted yet. The "civilized" discuss how money and the invention of four-legged pots will shape society, and the "barbarians" discuss Freudian ideas on gender relations.

It's a strange little novelty, that probably never really got popular because it manages to alienate both of its possible audiences. The cover alone would turn away any high-brow intellectual, and the discussion on how to do proper theoretical analysis in chapter two would scare off any sword-and-sorcery fan. If you, by any chance, happen to fall into both of those categories, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're just wondering in fascination how Samuel Delany managed to combine those two elements, like I did, you probably will as well.

An especial treat is the last chapter, which is structured like an academic paper written about the ancient clay tablets that relate the plot of the previous chapters. It reads like a pastiche on the type of male historian who looks at any attempt to interpret history in a way that includes women's agency and potential to shape their society with benevolent paternalistic condescension. The idea that this ancient text could be written by a woman (and we, the reader, know by context clues that it was) is completely alien to him.

I have to say, I do appreciate that about Delany. The feminism in this book is very seventies, and you could write a decent Tumblr discourse post on all the ways it fails, but you don't often get a male writer so solidly on the side of feminism, so it's always quite refreshing.

I think I read the third book in this serie over more than a year ago, and they have dense plots, so I'm a bit lost in these first few pages. I might need to dig up a plot summary or something somewhere online.

That said, man, it's hitting the spot. Now that I don't read a lot of them, it's easy to forget how much fun a really epic, slightly cheesy, fantasy doorstopper can be, with magic and knights, elves and dwarves and lots and lots of political intrigue. I'm enjoying myself.

Very excited to finally start this novel after it spent about a decade languishing on my to-read list, featuring a main character with one of the most badass names ever. (It reminds me of Fela Kuti, didn't he give himself a name that meant something like "He who keeps death in his pouch"? Always loved that.)

So, I burned through the whole patternmaster series in a matter of months, which is pretty unusual for me. I like to leave big gaps in between installments, so I don't get burned out on a story.

While the series is overall great, I really regret reading the books in chronological order, starting with Wild Seed, and ending with this one, because in publishing order, this is her first book and her first published novel ever. As is to be expected, as Butler's skills as a writer increase, the quality of these earlier and earlier published novels decreases. Patternmaster isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to Wild Seed, or even Mind of my Mind and Clay's Ark. Not to mention that the stories become gradually less ambitious. So, the overall effect is that a series that starts as an epic world-spanning, century-spanning tale of conflict between two primal forces of nature peters out as a story about a brotherly feud. It's a bit of a let-down.

So, if you read this series (and you should), do yourself a favor and read it in publishing order.

I picked this book up from a Little Free Library, so I didn't know this was the third installment of a five-part series. It was not an issue, honestly, as it's pretty easy to pick up on the events that proceeded the novel. Martha Quest, the main character of this semi-autobiographical novel, has just left her husband and child and is discovering her political self in Rhodesia's small communist scene against the background of the Second World War. The titular storm, of course.

She's part of the secret "group" that consists of - at most - twelve people who intend to topple the colonial regime and make Rhodesia a communist country, in which all classes and all races are equal. Despite this very ambitious goal, most of their meetings consist of lectures on the history of communism and arguing whether or not wearing make up is a sign that a woman is not sufficiently committed to the cause. Meanwhile, the social democrats are actually doing the hard work of making frustratingly incremental improvements in the country's racial politics. Or actually, their own party's racial politics. The country is still far beyond their grasp. The "group" is led by Anton, a preachy, bureaucratic guy whose feeble attempts at tyrannical rule are barely tolerated, and only because his status as a German refugee, who had to flee because of his political beliefs and quarter-Jewish heritage, gives him a certain amount of clout within this small community. Really, if you've ever even been tangentially involved with leftist activism, it's all painfully, embarrassingly, hilariously relatable. (Every single person I've explained "the group" to has groaned with recognition. Things, they do not change.)

Possibly because it's the middle of a series, the ending isn't very strong. But that wasn't much of an issue for me. Lessing's almost vignette-like style shines the most in the relationships between characters. She has a knack for capturing these interpersonal dynamics with an ironic understanding.

This book is a very interesting look into a time and place I'm not very familiar with, and beyond class or gender, she also touches on the race relations in this apartheid state quite well. I really enjoyed it, and I'm going to see if I can find the other four volumes as well. Instead of placing it back in an LFL, I'll be passing this one along to my mom who really wanted to read it. I'm looking forward to talking about it with her!