All the Mini-Reviews

[rowyn]

I have not reviewed anything in forever. Like, other than the reviews that I timed for the book launches on Mating Flight and "The Three Jaguars", I haven't posted a review since APRIL.

I haven't been reading as much, either. My Kindle account is cluttered with unread books and samples. Still, I have read a bunch of stuff that I haven't written reviews for, and I am obviously not ever going to give them the attention they deserve. So: onward to the mini-reviews!

The Suffragette Scandal, by Courtney Milan: a Victorian romance novel. Like all of Milan's work, I enjoyed this book. It is noteworthy mainly for its contra-trope angles. For instance, the male protagonist is a rogue archetype, but instead of starting out by trying to trick the female protagonist into liking him, he generally tries to make her think he's much worse than he really is. There is the inevitable romantic-conflict silliness, some of which is sillier than is at all necessary. I'll give it an 8.

"The Young Lord's Servants", by Anna Waite: action/adventure middle-grade fantasy short story. A short, fun story about two kids facing off against a beast that threatens their village's property. I liked the way the author established the setting and made it feel unusual but still understandable -- hard to manage in a short story -- and the way the responsibilities of the boys are laid out by the adults, so that the absence of adults at the climax makes perfect sense. An 8.5.

Everything's Fine, by Janci Patterson: contemporary YA mystery/drama novel. I think I got this because it was on sale and because Ms. Patterson is sandratayler's sister. It's an interesting read, dealing with such heavy issues as suicide, child abuse, and date rape. I am not an expert on any of these topics, but I found the story hauntingly plausible on the whole. Not sure what number I'd give it, probably an 8.

A Bollywood Affair, by Sonali Dev: contemporary romance. This one is hard to rank. There were some things I loved about it, like the depiction of a wide cross-section of Indian society, ranging from immigrant Indians in America (at various socio-economic levels) to those in India. The clash between old traditions and roots and modern society is deftly handled and fascinating. On the downside, the typical romance-conflict silliness is gratingly absurd at times, and neither protagonist had the level of respect for the other's autonomy that I want to see (they both end up tricking/manipulating the other into doing things that they think the other should do/wants to do, and in both cases the narrative implies that this manipulation was justified). The characters also suffer from feminine and masculine stereotypes, and I do mean "suffer". Like "this is hurting you as a human being, please stop". The female protagonist seems more resilient by the end, but the male one remains stuck. I am not sure what this combination averages out to. Let's say 7.

Hugo-eligible reading:

Novel:
Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon: A charming, entertaining middle-grade illustrated fantasy. I liked Molly, the friendly, cheerful protagonist, and the way she generally took charge of her own story but also occasionally lost control or became overwhelmed, and the supporting cast was full of colorful characters. I didn't love it; it rates about an 8. My suspension of disbelief struggled to swallow the basic premise of the story: that there are castles and mansions of great power, populated by Minions, and these have to be occupied by Evil Sorcerers/Wicked Witches/Mad Scientists/other leaders of dubious morality, or they'll be decommissioned. And the protagonist is a Wicked Witch but not really wicked-wicked and ... this works better if you are just willing to roll with it from the get-go and are not giving the whole concept the side-eye. But I did enjoy it, which speaks well to the author's skill and humor. I might nominate it. We'll see how I feel about the other books I read from 2015. An 8.

Novella:
"Penric's Demon," by Lois McMaster Bujold: action/adventure fantasy novella in Bujold's "World of the Five Gods" setting. Bujold is a splendid storyteller and this novella is a solid, enjoyable read. I particularly liked the final resolution and the relationship that develops between Penric and his demon. The build-up was somewhat slow, and the generic Euro-medieval feel of the setting in this time period doesn't appeal to me much, so it gets an 8 overall. Definitely recommended, and likely one I'll nominate.

Novelette:
"The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn", by Usman T. Malik
http://www.tor.com/2015/04/22/the-pauper-prince-and-the-eucalyptus-jinn-usman-malik/

I bought this novella on Amazon because I find it incredibly annoying to use a webpage to read anything more than a few thousand words long. It was ... okay. Like a 6 or 7. I'm not sorry I bought and read it, but doubt I'll nominate it for an award, either.

Short Stories:
"Cat Pictures Please", by Naomi Kritzer (3400 words.)
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
I love this one. So nominating it. Both sensible and humorous, and full of charm. a 9.

"Milagroso", by Isabel Yap (4300 words)
http://www.tor.com/2015/08/12/milagroso-isabel-yap/
OK. I wouldn't No-Award it. But probably won't nominate either. Vividly described, and I like that the family is family-like (imperfect but not dysfunctional) and that it's not about a physical conflict. Still, it didn't grab me, and the theme of fake vs natural food didn't work for me. A 6 or a 7.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

My kindle is currently stuck about 2/3rds through a ridiculously long fanfiction that isn't quite bad enough to stop reading but isn't good enough to make me focus on reading it enough to finish it quickly. @.@ I hate that.

I'd probably rate it around a 3. I'm guessing it's one of your 6 or 7s. q:3

[rowyn]

When something would be a 3 on my scale, I don't finish reading it, and therefore don't review it. I've not rated anything lower than 5 because that's pretty much as bad as I'll read and still finish. And I don't usually finish 5s.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've got 'so bad I'll stop right away' at a 1 and 'so bad I stop after a while' at a 2 and then 3 and 4 would be 'not quite bad enough to stop but it feels like I'm reading out of a sense of obligation because I want to know how it ends'. Where 3 is 'I've considered stopping but decided against it'.

Although I usually lump them all together into '1' on a 1-3 scale.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I use the full dynamic range 1-5, with the intent that each range is 20% of the books I finish. It's about the same as your range, I guess, except you call them 6-10.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I adored the Cat Pictures Please story. ^_^ Of course. It is purely coincidence that I work at a company that resembles one in the story.

[alltoseek]

generic Euro-medieval feel of the setting in this time period doesn't appeal to me much

You've mentioned this several times in various reviews, and it made me think about your settings, which - in my mind, and maybe that's not your intention - are often pretty vaguely European medievalish.

A Rational Arrangement - basically a Regency (Poly-)Romance, with a different dominant monotheistic religion than Christianity. And also Great Cats instead of horses.

Silver Scales - absolutely set in pre-Industrial Christian England (with magic instead of industry). (Golden Coils takes us to an equivalent China for a while).

The Demon series setting feels pretty medieval Europe to me, with Guilds and everything, demons and angels. Obvsly it's on a different world with floating islands and such, much fun, but how people live and work, trade and mores and travel, and how society is organized and people get along (or don't) feels pretty medieval Europe.

The Etheriums themselves are their own thing (they actaully feel farily modern US but ppl free to act on their imaginations, with a history and/or need for authoritarian center at the top (the Ether holder), but the worlds the Etheriums intersect with seem fairly vaguely Euro-medieval. Maybe one was Chinese?

The Desire books may get the farthest from a Euro-medieval feel, but it still feels grounded in that? But that the impact of magic has split it away farther. So like half Euro-medieval (lords of the manors, boarding schools, loosely interconnected smallish villages and larger cities all speaking the same language), half its own thing.

Maybe we mean different things by what feels Euro-medieval?

Bujold and Novik both have central European heritage that they strongly draw on. Novik is pretty explicit about it, in Uprooted and in Spinning Silver. The Penric series (all the Five Gods) is basically the Mediterranean set upside down, where south is north and vice-versa. The Vorko saga draws strongly on central Europe heritage. The Sharing Knife is US Midwest in pioneer days.

These are the cultures and stories and places they grew up with and know so they write them.

It seems to me that English itself, and our modern US culture, is so strongly imbued with the history of England and Europe, that for someone who reads pretty exclusively fiction written in English and was raised and educated in the US, it would be very hard to set a story in a culture far outside it, I think.

Unless you imbued yourself in another culture - I've defnly read books written in English set in alternate cultures (drawing strongly on Chinese or Arabian cultures, for example, tho set in far-future sci-fi or some alternate world sort of history) but those writers either grew up closely connected to those cultures or studied/researched/immersed themselves in them to get that feel.

[rowyn]

Your definition of "medieval European-ish" is very different from mine!

Here are some of my key "medieval-Europe-ish" qualifiers:

• Feudal: the powerful countries of the setting have a feudal government where most or all political power resides in the hands of ruler and/or nobles.
• Low-tech, pastoral society: no factories, no assembly lines, no big cities, everything is done by hand. If magic exists, it does not change the "low-tech, everything is done by hand" aspect to any significant degree.
• Average person's life is pretty craptastic -- eg, they're all farmers or servants with cramped living quarters/little free time/almost no access to luxuries, not even comparatively simple ones like "easy access to books."

So no, I do not consider Regency England to be "medieval-ish". A Rational Arrangement is a Regency pastiche, yes.

The Silver Scales and Demon settings are both industrial. It's magic-based industry, yes, but they're still societies where ordinary people have access to magic, education, books, and other luxuries. Scales is considerably more advanced than the Demon setting. The Demon setting comes across as more primitive than it is because their travel and communication technologies are terrible, and the books are a travelogue so that's what you mostly hear about. But Sunrise's mother works at a smeltery. The books include that enchantment are manufacture in factories. And enchantments are used for lighting, cleaning, transport (by making goods lighter and therefore easier if not faster to move), excavation, and miscellaneous other useful day-to-day tasks. (Mastiff uses enchanted tools to make carpentry easier, for instance.)

I do not aim to rip off non-Western real-world cultures for my books, no.

[alltoseek]

So you like your magic settings where the magic has filled in for tech? Got it *g*

So in that case I'd put Penric's world in that just pre-industrial era, post-medieval. Or maybe very late medieval. Penric's in the process of inventing the printing press, true. But there's a strong middle class and the peasantry doesn't seem particularly craptastic. Lots of trade, decent levels of prosperity. The feudalness is pretty dispersed. Again, in the Penric world magic is highly highly limited. The occasional god-touched with highly limited abilities and very rare the demon-infested who control their demons. So magic hasn't worked its way into everyday life, true, and only limited tech so far.

So you prefer magic setting where there's lots of magic that permeate all society and fill in for tech. Maybe kinda like Discworld? *g*


One of my major beefs (I have lots of them :-) with Vorko is how far backward Barrayar went during isolation - full on medieval, which is ridic. Presumably most of the 50K firsters would have been highly educated STEM people - first colonists, you'd have to be. So it's really not that hard to re-create a steam engine and electric generation if you already know a) it can be done and b) probably have among the 50K of you people who have detailed knowledge of how it is done.

How would you have retained and passed on the complete works of Shakespeare but not a single technical manual?

My theory is that the Firsters were led by a group who actually wanted to isolate. White male supremacists who wanted to go back to when white people lived in feudal societies and women did what they were told and the peasantry slaved away. They figure so long as they set themselves at the top it would be better than the environmental-social nightmare of too many people wanting too few resources and all demanding equal access to them.

So this set of Firsters brought written text of stuff they wanted to keep - Shakespeare - and let the digital-only tech manuals be destroyed. They brought horses and goats and other animals, even though pre-terraforming it would have been extremely expensive to both transport them (in place of more immediately useful stuff) and to keep them fed at the expense of your human colonists.

Yep. I don't think Isolation was random. I think some group really thought medieval Europe was ideal.

But I think Bujold's notion was that some excess radiation (that either happened with the wormhole collapse or was independent of it, but still had stopped by the end of isolation) disrupted ALL electricity, so you couldn't generate more, even if you had everything you needed to do so? Is that plausible? And we know that the excess radiation did cause mutations in offspring. But that much radiation, on a world that still needs terraforming for humans to live, and no tech to do it or to protect them from the radiation or treat radiation-induced illness - would enough colonists have even survived? And their horses, natch.

And steam engines don't even require electricity. Woulda been an awesome chance to set up a whole steampunk world. But instead they went back to swords and didn't even go for guns. I dunno. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

[rowyn]

So you like your magic settings where the magic has filled in for tech? Got it g

Yesssssssss XD

I like to use magic for "what if" scenarios, like 'what if you had a culture with terrible transportation BUT that had a lot of useful tools that just didn't help them move faster'. Or 'what if magic was plentiful and protected every citizen's autonomy and met their basic needs -- what sort of problems would they still have?'

I can buy that a society could get crushed enough to lose all their ability to generate technology -- where you get caught in this death spiral of "gotta hunt and gather to survive today because if I stop to do anything more intelligent, I will starve", basically. But I agree that if a society got slammed so hard they could not longer figure out steam engines, they'd also lose literature. That the Isolation was deliberate to a greater or lesser degree is much more likely, yeah.