when i first saw this title and cover, i said AWWWWW! and then, over the holiday season, so many people were praising this book in print and in[image]
when i first saw this title and cover, i said AWWWWW! and then, over the holiday season, so many people were praising this book in print and in person, i knew i needed to get a copy for myself. OR, to get a copy for greg because - fox - and read it before gifting it to him. because i am a monster.
for me it's a mixed bag. on the one hand, the artwork is gorgeous
[image]
on the other hand, this
[image]
which just, no. like capital-letter NO with all of my being.
again, i am a monster. this is known.
show me a cute animal, and i melt like an ice cap, but human children inspire nothing outta me but low-level panic, gracelessly suppressed. i'm just...not interested, which makes me feel guilty as a human person and plays its part in my nightly insomniac personal reckoning/shame spiral. also keeping me from sleep is my cynical inability to be charmed by the well-intentioned but facile insights this book offers up to readers. because people are getting genuine comfort from this book and i feel like a dick for rolling my eyes and imagining these words carved on a block of wood and sold for like twenty dollars.
does this book have messages this girl needs to hear? hell yes.
[image]
[image]
but then this happens
[image]
and it's like that olde aesop's fable about the signal and the noise.
i am a monster. my dreams aren't coming true, my ship's not coming in, 'at least i have my health' doesn't apply, i'm growing old and bitter, and platitudes really only work for people with vanilla froyo problems.
[image]
if i treat it like a book written in a foreign language, it's great - i can enjoy the pictures, and i can recognize the individual words even though the messages mean nothing to me.
[image]
i am a monster. like the mole, i will eat all your cake.
fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.
although i know, with my logic-brain and my experiences and my readers’ advisory training, that not every book is going to “work” for every reader, i always feel a little bit guilty, a little bit broken, when a wildly popular book i had every expectation of loving falls short for me.
and in this case, i’m not even sure why we didn’t click.
its hooks hooked me: it’s a fairytaleish book with a spooky forest and a mysterious castle and an enigmatic wizard and a village with a long-standing and creepy tradition of gifting a young woman to the enigmatic wizard in the mysterious castle every ten years.
it’s got a magical freaking library.
and that cover. o, that delicious cover.
[image]
everyone raved, everyone who knew my tastes said i would love it, and on paper, i should have loved it. but i struggled.
for starters, i never really connected with the characters. it doesn’t bother me that agnieszka is a food-covered klutz in torn dresses. i know some people are so over the clumsy heroine trope, but us sloppy girls gotta stick together, and agnieszka was so borderline slapstick with her pratfalls and porridge-hair it didn’t read as helpless hapless girl so much as pathological, like she was magnetized towards mud. but her transition from “who, me?” to ‘NOW I KNOW ALL THE MAGICS!’ was muted, making her triumphs seem sudden and unearned while so many other parts of the book were draggy. i did like kasia, and i appreciated how her friendship with agnieszka was written, but all this other stuff kept getting in the way of novik developing that friendship, ultimately reducing kasia from who she was to what she could do; making her a tool, not a character. sarkan? i got nothing. he barely registered for me.
which brings us to the romance element. that this didn’t interest me is no surprise. literary relationshipping surprises me when i do give a hoot about it—my expectation is that i will blah blah through the smooching parts until the book gets back to the good stuff. but this time, i didn’t even understand it; how it happened, where and when the attraction blossomed. it’s like when two people you’ve known for a long time suddenly hook up and there’s this whole new dynamic to process and the ‘wait, you kiss each other now?’ thing is very confusing.
i liked some of the battle parts, but for every sequence i enjoyed, there were pages of “i throw the magic at YOU!” “no, but i throw the magic back at YOU!! PYEW! PYEW!” and i’m like “wake me when you get some battle rhinos.”
all of that and there’s nothing overt that i can point to and say “that’s where it lost me. that’s what i didn’t like.” it wasn’t that it was unenjoyable or a chore to read, it just never made my readerheart sparkle.
it is a truth universally acknowledged that i give all authors three chances to woo me. and whether that’s optimistic or foolish, i don’t know - this it is a truth universally acknowledged that i give all authors three chances to woo me. and whether that’s optimistic or foolish, i don’t know - this practice has redeemed some authors and nailed the coffin lid on others. but i am hereby making an ALL-NEW AMENDMENT to this policy: Iain Reid will get his third chance with me, but i will NOT be buying that third chance in hardcover. EVEN if that hardcover has a pretty face. someone hold me to this, because i am notoriously weak-willed when covers are pretty. remind me that i have read both of his books in a single day and seen their big fat twists coming from a mile away, and i haven’t been able to love him the way people seem to love him, and although this makes me feel sad and left out, i don’t need to be shelling out 28 bucks to feel sad and left out when i am fortunate enough to have access to one of the most robust library systems there is.
don’t get me wrong, i LOVE that someone is trying to be the novelist-version of m night shyamalan because when that rug-ripped-out-from-under-you thing works, there’s nothing more exhilarating. i love the sensation of mental flailing and the "but wait OHHHHHHHHH" that ripples across the brainparts. but when the rug is all
[image]
at me, it is somewhat less rewarding. i don’t like figuring things out before the author wants me to know them. and this book is pretty bad at keeping its secrets. it’s like a little kid playing hide-and-seek, unable to suppress their giggles behind the living room curtains.
maybe in some pop cultural deadzone unexposed to either (view spoiler)[
Westworld(hide spoiler)] or (view spoiler)[that Black Mirror episode Be Right Back(hide spoiler)]*, this would be more OMG-making, but i watch ALL THE TEEVEE and the first thing i thought when the ____ (noun) was ____ (verb - past tense) was “oh, so ███████████████. probably”
and here we are.
i don’t dislike Iain Reid - in fact, he has a terrific facility for writing tension and awkwardness and “offness,” which really came through here, and that farmhouse scene in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, even though i didn’t much love the rest of it, was very effective and so so creepy.
so, yeah, i will take him home again, but i’m not going to pay for the pleasure. unless, i mean how pretty a cover are we talking???
* this second touchpoint-reference is not reveal-spoilering, it is more What the Book is About, but the publisher-supplied synopsis is pretty detail-light, so i figured better safe than spoilery.
fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.
sometimes a book will surprise you. usually, that statement is a one-way street: i didn’t think i would like_____(title) because i don’t usually like_____(genre/theme) or _____(noun), but BOY was i surprised!
but this time it’s the inverse—the cover, synopsis, and all the reviews i've read during the howevermany years i've had this book on my shelf have all been waving neon banners and chanting my name, promising me it was gonna be a verykaren book.
and then i read it and i was like ‘huh.’ not "huh?," which would have been preferable, but 'huh.'
i guess this is why no one ever asks me to be a judge on the booker panel.
actually, upon 43 seconds of reflection, maybe this is a "huh?" after all. because i do not understand the glowing praise and accolades.
it deserves praise for the prose—her writing is quite lovely, especially in the nature descriptions; it paints a strong atmosphere of isolation and loneliness and beauty against which our narrator linda comes of age.
but as far as character and story, it was moosh to me.
i don't mind a little ambiguity in my fiction—i'm happy to do some of the work myself, as long as i'm given enough context clues to do so. but i struggled with linda as a character. whether or not i "like" a character is irrelevant, but i do need to understand them, and linda is so slippery and inconsistent, it's hard to interpret her motivations.
she's had an unusual upbringing; raised in a commune in the isolated backwoods of northern minnesota that turned sour and disbanded, leaving her behind in the care of a couple who may or may not be her birth parents. for the meat of this story, she's fourteen years old, poorly supervised and lonely, and her low social intelligence, coupled with the unkindness of teenagers and their bullying, makes it difficult for her to make friends. she fumbles throughout the book to establish connections; prone to grand gestures and inappropriate sexual advances, always retreating to the safety of solitude.
when a young mother named patra and her four-year-old son paul move in to the house across the lake, linda ingratiates herself into the family, a babysitter to paul, a friend to patra to help keep her loneliness at bay while she awaits the arrival of her professor husband. linda's relationship with patra becomes obsessive/possessive; nearly predatory, but she (mostly) seems to enjoy paul's company. patra is a bit flighty and fragile, and when her husband eventually arrives on the scene, things start to go downhill quickly, culminating in paul's death, which readers have known about since the second page, waiting only to hear the 'how' of it, and what linda's role was in the situation.
even with the benefit of first-person narration, linda's personality remains opaque and walled-off, and her actions are frequently inconsistent. she's hard to pin down or predict, which is really frustrating for a reader.
as for the story, there are several prominent events and conflicts, but many of them are treated shallowly, and despite there being a number of narrative threads that loop and recur, they don't necessarily cohere, and they just end up...dangling. there's child abuse and neglect, teen pregnancy, pedophilia, christian scientists, the commune, the events of the trial—puzzle pieces that seem like they should at some point interlock, but never quite come together.
linda's memories from her early childhood in the commune are only briefly surfaced, and much more could have been done with that to explain linda as a character. she's such a blank hole, psychologically, and since this is primarily a character study, in first freaking person, that's maddening.
the story is told from adult-linda's perspective at thirty-seven, and the decisions she makes in her adult life are just as perplexing as those during her formative years. i suppose we're meant to infer that she's still paralyzed; emotionally stunted from the psychological trauma of paul's death, or that it's some kind of guilty self-punishment to avoid personal attachments, but linda was an odd little duck even before she met patra and paul; demonstrating creepy stalkery behaviors towards one of her classmates and trusting her teacher more after he was arrested for child pornography and inappropriate sexual conduct with the object of linda's creepy stalking.
the main takeaway is a haunting and pretty bleak emotional mosaic of events in the life of someone who was only ever on the fringes of the human experience; who can't seem to decide whether she wants to belong or not. she states, I remembered children from the playground where I’d watched them when I was growing up. Plus, I’d read some books with children in them., which is inexpressibly pitiable, but, when selected to give a presentation for a history odyssey tournament, she chooses wolves as her topic and, when asked by one of the judges, "What do wolves have to do with human history?" replies "Wolves have nothing at all to do with humans, actually. If they can help it, they avoid them." it's hard to tell what linda wants—she makes timid advances into human connection and when she isn't rebuffed, she self-sabotages and is alone again. there's no sense of character growth and too many empty spaces to fill in.
to me, the novel as a whole was messy and underdeveloped, despite some beautiful writing. i didn't hate it, but i can't say i enjoyed it much, either, although i loved the surprise lurking under the dust jacket:
[image]
i give it three, but it is a low three, and i am sad i didn't love it.
For one moment, I felt like a river running down to his ocean.
i feel like i need to drop a few lines here about what, precisely, i felt was lacking inFor one moment, I felt like a river running down to his ocean.
i feel like i need to drop a few lines here about what, precisely, i felt was lacking in this story. i so rarely throw down a fewer-than-three-stars rating on here, i figure an explanation may be helpful. i'm not going to go into too much plot-detail, since there are a bazillion reviews of this book already on here - i just want to have a record of my own reaction, for the day when some stranger asks me WHYYYYYYYYYYYY i didn't like this.
there are a few reasons.
1) i am confused
[image]
on paper, the concept of fusing multiple fairytales with classical mythology is exciting and should make for a pleasantly dense story that is at once comfortably familiar but also studded with surprising AHA moments as the overlaps and contrasts begin to manifest. however - there wasn't a true marriage between the elements here. their presence was more decorative than functional, and while it occasionally meshed well, overall it was just too cluttered. it's like when you have a really delicious cupcake and it's already got a tasty frosting on top but then someone thinks "add gummy worms!" and it throws off the texture and the taste and you have to chew SO MUCH you forget about how tasty the cupcake was because you're so focused on not choking to death.
2) nyx, the heroine of this book and NOT the greek goddess of night (whose name is a bit problematic in a book that incorporates so many other aspects of greek mythology and in which darkness/shadows but not specifically nighttime are a preoccupation) anyway, her. she's meant to be the sacrifice and savior of her people, trained since she was a little girl in both fighting and magical arts and yet she is not at all a badass heroine. once she gets to the castle, she's completely directionless, which makes the book directionless. she's inconsistent, unstable, easily distracted, prone to violent and short-lived outbursts that simmer down into grumbling recriminations directed at multiple targets. it's emotional whiplash - with her sister, she is loving and resentful, protective and hurtful, with ignifex, she goes from attraction to attempted homicide and back again in the blink of an eye. the inconsistency makes it confusing and difficult to root for her to succeed, because it's hard to know what "success" would even look like, with all the cross-purposes and competing goals and obstacles.
this book is best categorized as a fantasy romance, but i was completely unmoved by the romance itself. which - yes, is a familiar feeling for me, since i'm not a fan of romances, so i'm an easy target for your accusations of not being the right audience. howevs, even when i read a romance that doesn't make me swoon or whatever, i can usually understand why it would work for other readers - i can see that the bones (heh) of the relationship are solid and why the two would fall for each other and why readers would cheer. but this one - this is such a perfunctory romance that exists only because we are told it exists. technically it's a love triangle, and it's at least an interesting version of a love triangle, but it's also the worst kind of instalove because it's unfounded, unearned, and circumstantially selfish.
those are the big three complaints, and all i can muster as a "review" right now. i still really want to read the second book in this standalone series. i think there's a great story underneath all this clutter and i am really rooting for it to manifest in the second installment. at the very least, i am excited because it's a love story between a monsterfighting girl and a boy with no hands. which is pretty hot.
************************************************************ my guess is that some joker broke into my digital copy of this and gleefully altered its contents; transforming it from the amazing, life-changing book everyone is raving about into some half-baked romance featuring a sloppy and confusing mythos-mashup and completely lacking in either emotional tension or a cohesive narrative.
this is either some sort of magic eye puzzle i'm just not equipped to "see" or i have forgotten how to read books.
maybe i'll review this further tomorrow, or maybe i'll take a nap.
looks like i am the only one who didn't fall head-over-heels in love with this book. i did fall pretty hard for the cover, but it takes more than a prlooks like i am the only one who didn't fall head-over-heels in love with this book. i did fall pretty hard for the cover, but it takes more than a pretty face to win me over…
it has many good qualities: story set in a wholly original fantasy world, families who are supportive and loving that seem realistic rather than idealized, strong imagery and situations that aren't just warmed-over versions of other YA books, romance where the two participants are apart for most of the book, so we don't have to read about all the gazing and fumbling and stammering, debilitating illness written sympathetically and vividly...
i just didn't think the actual story was developed as well as the characters. i never felt the tension i was meant to feel during the actiony events, and beyond the two main characters: aza and jason, none of the other characters were more than foils or obstacles, and overall the fantasy elements were not as well-realized as the realistic ones.
aza has been severely sick her whole life with a respiratory condition so rare that it has actually been named after her, and whose cause and treatment has baffled every last specialist. she is nearly sixteen, much older than she was ever expected to live, when she begins seeing visions of ships in the clouds and hearing something whistling and calling her name. assuming these are hallucinations brought on by one of her medications, she freaks out less than she might ordinarily, until the evening she is visited by an assortment of BIRDS (if you know how i feel about birds, you know how alarming this is), after which she collapses and dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
when she wakes up, she is aboard the very ship she has been "hallucinating," high in the air, where she is re-introduced to her people, because - turns out, she's not from "our" world, she is from magonia, and it's the air on the earth that has been killing her. and there's no specialist for that.
so aza learns about her culture and their rituals, and the BIRD that belongs in HER CHEST and that she is a very special girl with a very special destiny. because YA. however, she has left behind her parents and sister, as well as her best friend-with-possibilities, jason, and even though they all think she's dead, and she has finally found a place where she can breathe, she's torn between two worlds.
and jason, for one, doesn't believe she's really dead.
this one got off to a rocky start for me, because from the outset, i was not a fan of aza's voice. i think she was meant to come off as tough in the face of death or something, but her brittle snark was irritating. her illness was horrible, and i'm not downplaying her struggle, but i also don't automatically canonize the afflicted and i think that when people are bitchy and then say things like "Calling the sick girl names? Please. We all know it's not okay" - it's not fair. if you're going to antagonize people and be provocative, you're gonna get some back, sick or not - no special treatment in high school politics.
but after a while, i got into it, and once jason was introduced, it got a bit better. although it's still "what if john green kids were even more precocious," and they don't read like sixteen-year-olds, it's still a really lovely relationship, and i thought headley did a nice job turning that friendship into maybe-more without it getting all goopy. despite sounding older and being more capable than their years (booking flights, tossing off profitable inventions and having factories in their arsenal, having access to seeecret footage of squids, etc..) i thought the bones of their friendship rang true - nerdy social outcasts finding each other and bonding over pi and the OED. it's very sweet and charming.
i also loved the descriptions of some of the creatures in magonia. not the heartbirds (shudder) or bird-people (bigger shudder), but batsails, squallwhales, stormsharks?? yes pretty please! Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks? probably not. but that's the thing - a lot of the magonia stuff was just window dressing without a lot of depth. we don't even get to spend any time with stormsharks, they are just a passing detail.
the strengths of this book are completely terrestrial - aza's family, jason's family, and their unshakeable friendship. the fantasy is blurry, the avatar-level eco-preach unnuanced, and the story a little flimsy. i'll read the second one, in the hopes that book two will have way more stormsharks, but i didn't swoon over this one the way it seems the rest of the world did.
how can you take a fascinating topic: the homeless of new york city; a study in ingenuity and survivaloh, jennifer toth, you annoy the shit out of me.
how can you take a fascinating topic: the homeless of new york city; a study in ingenuity and survival skills and people living in highly-organized communities off the grid underground and somehow make the story all about you?? you!! some sheltered white girl who uses (and defines -DEFINES!)the word "dissed" like a new toy, traipsing underground like some little red riding hood into the big scary tunnels and chirping about these "almost attractive" people and somehow writing (and getting published) a sorority girl's take on what are actual life or death concerns for a whole lot of people?? can we get a real journalist in here? someone who is not going to talk about themselves the whole time when there are real people with real stories that should maybe be more spotlit?
jesus christ, it would be like someone writing a book review and using all the space to talk about what happened to them at thanksg- oh. ohhhhhh wait. nonono i take this all back. what a marvelous writer.what an incisive - oh, i give up.
seriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much?
this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the jokeseriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much?
this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the joke, so he had a good track record until then) who knew how much i liked infinite jest so he thought i would like this one. and if i only liked infinite jest because it was a long book written by a white male, then i suppose i would have liked this book. but i didn't, so it must be something else i'm drawn to in the wallace.
i remember i was reading this at the airport where i was going to meet him, like a dutiful girlfriend, and just having my jaw drop at the first part. not because it was soooo goooood like everyone here seems to think. am i really the only one who felt embarrassed by the whole life magazine thing? i remember looking around after i read that part to see if someone was playing a trick on me. when he got off the plane, i just sat there, shaking my head at him sadly. it was the beginning of the end.
look - i really liked white noise, but this i just felt to be a bloated, wooden, oddly-phrased book whose language didn't charm me, but made me unhappy. and then he goes and publishes the first bit as a separate book? who does that?? sorry, delillo - its not terrible, so it gets no 2 stars, but i barely cared about anything in this book, and it ruined a relationship. if i die alone, it's your fault.
why haven't i read borges before?? no one knows. and he was always pushed upon me - "how can you like marquez if you haven't read borges??" "you like why haven't i read borges before?? no one knows. and he was always pushed upon me - "how can you like marquez if you haven't read borges??" "you like donoso - you should read borges." "machado is good, but you should read borges." so - fine - i did. and i am utterly underwhelmed. so there. i am learning during my "summer of classix" that most of the books i have for some reason or another overlooked were probably overlooked for a reason. i naturally gravitate towards what i like - and i seem to have a filter that prevents me from picking up too many books i don't. when i force it, this happens. and i liked some of the stories. but borges isn't for everyone (although scrolling down my "friends who have read" list, it looks as though all my friends gave it five stars.) and i'm not accusing you bitches of inflating your ratings, but i have the sense with borges that some people are guilted into liking him. or pretending that they like him more than they do because he's borges. but i won't be. because i am not ashamed of my intellectual shortcomings. i embrace them. i am incapable of abstract thought. fact. as hard as i try, that whole achilles/tortoise thing? does not compute. so all of this hexagon spiraling into hexagon on top of hexagon... i feel like i am back in college (where every single person i ever knew had a copy of this book. and was a stoner.)but this is classic stoner thinking-chains. reflections, labyrinths, it's perfect for that kind of mindset. "dooood, imagine we were in a hexagon right now??" and i know this makes sense to some people with philosophical and theological mindbents, but for me its almost pain. there were about 6 stories i liked, but the first few almost made me weep with trying to find the value in them. sorry, borges. we were never meant to be.
mmmmkay - it seems that there are those who think it would be valuable "in a book review" to list the stories i did like. so: the shape of the sword, theme of the traitor and the hero, death and the compass, the secret miracle, three versions of judas, story of the warrior and the captive, emma zunz, the house of asterion, and the waiting. more than i thought i liked, but still - a sad minority.
in september, this book will turn sixty years old! while i do not care for it personally, and the celebration of a couple of self-satisfied pseudo-intin september, this book will turn sixty years old! while i do not care for it personally, and the celebration of a couple of self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual doofuses and their buffet-style spirituality traveling across the country, leaving a number of pregnancies in their wake and exploiting underage mexican prostitutes makes me wonder why this book endures, endure it does. so i have made a road trip booklist with less ickiness and more cannibalism. enjoy!
there once was a girl from the bay state who tried to read finnegan's wake. it made her so ill, she took loads of pills. james joyce has that knack to fruthere once was a girl from the bay state who tried to read finnegan's wake. it made her so ill, she took loads of pills. james joyce has that knack to frustrate.
Loading...
