Archive for October 2010
Day 44: The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
This is a mundane story about a couple who decide to stay at their summer home after labor day and undergo a series of inconveniences: the kerosene man didn’t order enough kerosene to supply them with any for the next month, the grocery store stops delivering after labor day, their milk and eggs guy has gone out of town, their car breaks down…. And throughout, the locals all express shock that the couple would want to stay.
You might be thinking that this is barely worth being a story at all from my summary. What makes it stand out is that Jackson has made this rather pedestrian narrative into something that is very, very creepy. There is an underlying dread that is so skilfully done that it’s hard to even say if it’s actually there until she makes it explicit that the couple feels it too. But even then she never picks a side; you never know if there’s any real cause, if the unlucky couple will go home after a cold and hungry night or if something more sinister is waiting for them because they dared to stay beyond their welcome.
Day 43: Libyrinth by Pearl North
When I was a kid we used to go to a bookstore called Buck a Book. (It went through lot of names but to us it was always Buck a Book to us.) Down in the basement was the used book section where I used to pick up stacks and stacks books (paperbacks, mostly f& sf) and honestly, it barely mattered what the content was. Most of them were pretty bad, and nearly all of them were basically forgettable.
This book reminds me of those days. I doubt I’ll remember what happens in this book tomorrow.
You’ve probably noticed the super twee title, so that’s strike one (though it is a book with a POC protagonist and a POC on the cover). Anyway, it’s a fallen world SF novel (that might as well be fantasy) that references our literature throughout the novel (strike two)
There is a super massive library where Haly can hear all the books talking to her. She turns out to be the chosen one of a cult whose mission is to eradicate all the books on the planet. Because of her powers, she uncovers a plot for the head librarian to betray the rest of them to the eradicators.
Day 42: Delcroix Academy: The Candidates by Inara Scott
This came in the WFC big bag o’ books and I think I would have enjoyed it had been the first third of a book that I think the plot warranted. At 300 pages it simply could not support the content, and much of it was predictable, if generally pleasant.
What I enjoyed the most was that the main character didn’t want to use her super power and made herself completely part of the woodwork in her high school to prevent herself from wanting to use it.
Dancia has a super power where she can make stuff happen and she’s suddenly been invited to attend an elite boarding school. Here’s all the things you need to know:
Is there something creepy and wrong going on at the school? Yes.
Do the two cute boys both like her? Yes.
Does she have the most superest of super powers ever? OF COURSE!
Day 41: Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless by Gail Carriger
One lesson I really need to learn is that just because some is good, it doesn’t mean that more is better. There are times when there’s that nagging little voice that tells me that (at least for me) the concept is going to be played out after one book. (see also: Temeraire and Sorcery and Cecelia)
Soulless is the love child of urban fantasy, steam punk and comedy of manners. (hey it’s a book, it can have three parents). I was intrigued when I heard about the story open where Alexia is attacked by a vampire when they weren’t properly introduced, and worse, he didn’t even know that she didn’t have a soul so he couldn’t bite her anyway. I thought it sounded like a heck of a lot of fun.
And it was. Oh, there were the warning signs that I should have quit while I was ahead like the very predictable plotting and the use of overly silly names for characters and the repeated references to how Alexia was half-Italian and that society looked down on her for that (when no one actually does). Because it was fun and funny and not afraid to take the piss put of the genres it was playing with.
But like I said, I should have quit with one. All the things that bugged me in the first book bugged me times a million in the other two. Oh well, maybe next time I will learn.
Day 40: Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson
It’s a bit of a weird thing to read a fragment of an unfinished novel that you know will never be finished, never know where the author intended to go. You never. Know if you will be letting yourself in for unending curiosity about where it might have gone and how it might have resolved. Still, sometimes it’s worth that risk of diving in.
Come Along With Me is the novel Shirley Jackson was working on when she died. There’s only around 30 pages, so it never gets much beyond introducing us to the main character who has recently lost her husband and has sold her home and all her belongings and moved to the city. She has abandoned her old life so completely. That she’s even given up her name:
I though of Jean and Helen and Margaret, but I know people called by all those names, and perhaps I would not enjoy answering to them; I though of Gertrude and Goneril and I thought of Diana, which was dead wrong and Minerva, which was closer but silly. I knew I had to think of something right away, and I got a little chill at the back of my neck; what is really more frightening than being without a name, nothing to call yourself, nothing to say when they ask you who you are? Then it fell on me; I heard it: Angela. It was right, Angela was the name I had come all this way to find.y the end of the fragment
The rest of it was easy. I had said it already. Angela Motorman. Mrs. Angela Motorman.
Angela Motorman is a really good name, and I bet it would have been a wonderful book. Angela can see and hear things no One else can and by the end of the fragment she’d already held one dubious seance.
Day 39: Melanie by Aliette de Bodard
The world Sf blog is kicking off two months of free fiction and it starts with good friend Aliette de Bodard.
How can I possibly resist a story about studying to become an engineer, especially one where math is something mystical, casting an aura to those who have the second sight:
He’s staring at the other students–all shining, all gorged with light: the light of numbers and curves, the endless dance of the formulas that rule the world. And, as it always does, his gaze fastens on Mélanie.
[…]
She’ll be here next year, Erwan thinks, his heart sinking. There’s not an engineering school that will open its doors to her, not an entry exam that she’ll pass–not with so few numbers, so few equations trapped within her. It’s as if the maths had washed right over her, forgotten as soon as she’s read them.
And if you like this story, you should know that she has a book out today.
Day 38: Bitterdark by Eljay Daly
I’m always a bit fascinated by what editors choose as the pull quote for stories. The pull quote for Bitterdark is:
Mizein had become a summer queen, clad in brilliant color: a gown of iris petals, deep blue veined in purple; ropes of lapis, amethysts, amber; hair as brown as wild earth.
Which for me on the do-I-want-to-read-it scale is a pretty decided “meh.”
I’d be more compelled by the story open:
The faerie sleep only a little, a few sluggish heartbeats in bowers of pine and slate—but once-kings not at all.
Aelyn lay awake in his mortal wife’s bed while she snored. He counted the tiny countries bordered by eggshell cracks in the ceiling—six hundred and three, never more, never less.
But if I were picking I think I’d go for:
These mortals had their own magic: loud voices and fists and bluster. Mizein didn’t like them at all. They were worse than the Bitterdark, these brutish old women.
In the actual pull quote we mostly learn that this is going to be a story about fairies. There are a lot of stories about fairies, and lots of stories about summer queens. The descriptions aren’t particularly memorable and there isn’t really a reason for me to click on the story.
In the story open, I think there’s more to draw you in. That fairies don’t sleep is new to me, and I like the juxtaposition with the mundane activities Aelyn occupies himself with during the night.
Why do I like my chosen pull-quote? I like the sense of a human magic made up of utterly mundane things I like the idea of a not-mortal creature being a bit cowed by them. It nicely turns on its head the usual relationship of fairies and mortals, and I like the slightly petulant tone of it. (ok, if it were really a pull quote I wouldn’t know they were fairies, but I would soon.)
I enjoyed the first half of this story because of the interaction of Aelyn and his mortal spouse. But there’s a twist and it’s one that doesn’t go for me, so the ending fell flat.
Day 37: The Rememberer by Aimee Bender
On his last human day, he put his head in his hands and sighed and I stood up and kissed the entire back of his neck, covered that flesh, made wishes there because I knew no woman had ever been so thorough, had ever kissed his every inch of skin. I coated him. What did I wish for? I wished for good. That’s all. Just good.
I am rather mentally drained right now so thoughts of proper posts have been getting thinner and thinner, but I think this story sells itself. (I do hope to get some energy back very shortly and post things more interesting soon.)
Day 36: Beloved of the Sun by Ann Leckie
Each year a girl is chosen to be burned alive as a sacrifice to the sungod. She believes she will be reborn as a goddess. Itet was the latest of these girls to be chosen, but someone has attempted to drown her and now she does not speak.
But another god, the ant, speaks to her every night and tells her the way of gods:
There are many gods, but all share this one characteristic—their words must be truth. If a god says what is already true, it spends no power. If a god says what is currently untrue, its speaking must make those words truth. If making that truth takes more power than a god has, that god will be drained, injured, even possibly killed.
She is not the girl she once was-in addition to losing her voice, she has lost her memory. All she knows of the world are things she is told and skills known so well that they are instinctual.
She is the vessel the ant has chosen to overthrow the sungod and bring back the nameless one and to free the other gods.
I enjoyed this story – it has very solid worldbuilding – the world feels larger and longer than this small part we inhabit in this story. Animals as gods is a familiar mythology, but here it feels fresh.
Day 35: Migrating Bears by Helena Leigh Bell
I fell in love with this story a bit when I read the lines:
Joseph Godfrey believes himself to be the son of Bluebeard. How else can he explain the parade of women’s bodies in his bedroom closet, hanging there like limp socks
He has found her sitting on his bed every afternoon since the funeral, dressed in her long nutria fur coat and white kid gloves with the pinky of her left hand pinned down. At night he stands among his mothers in the closet, swishing them back and forth; he closes his eyes to languish in the brush of fur against his cheek.
And then a little bit more:
One evening his father catches him and the next day Godfrey returns from school to find the closet emptied of her and the coats. Godfrey pulls down all his old baby clothes and dumps them on the floor. He takes a stolen pair of scissors and begins disassembling all his old things. This, he thinks, will bring back his mother.
It doesn’t.
It’s weird and beautiful and more than a bit uncomfortable. I liked it quite a bit. (I’d say more, but it’s been a really hard day at work, so I’ll just recommend that you go go read.)
365 Days of Women Writers 