The Raven King Review

This week's novel is The Raven King, the last book in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater.  Since I haven't talked about the first three books on here, I'm going to talk about the series as a whole, but focus on the last book.

Blue Sargent is the only non-psychic at 300 Fox Way, a house full of her mom's psychic friends and relatives.  Everyone sees the same thing in Blue's future: that if she kisses her true love, he will die.  She doesn't pay it much mind until she gets involved with a group at the prestigious boarding school for rich and connected boys just outside of town.  Gansey, Adam, Ronan, and Noah are on a search for the Welsh king Glendower, who's rumored to be in a magical sleep on the lay lie somewhere in the area.  Forces on the lay line tell that Gansey is going to die within a year.  Together they search for Glendower, while each of the boys deal with their own traumatic pasts and come into their own magical powers.

I have to say that the second book in this series, The Dream Thieves, is far and away my favorite.  It focuses on Ronan, who is a great, complex character.  He could have so easily slipped into a half dozen stereotypes of "the bad boy" or "actually a big softy once you get to know him" or other boring things that would be a complete disservice.  Instead he rides the edge of these and presents himself as a solid, nuanced, consistent character.  His power set of bringing things out of his dreams is also really cool.  Plus, that book had the tightest self-contained plot while still moving along the wider narrative of the series.

The thing I loved most about this series was the relationships between the characters.  I loved the women of 300 Fox Way.  Blue and her mother are close, and her mother is involved in her life and listens as Blue confides her troubles, yet her mother still gives her space to lead her own life and have her adventures.  They trust one another, but still get frustrated with each other.  All the women at 300 Fox Way are like that.  They're all up in each other's business and pecking at one another, but they form a solid front and band together.  There's a great scene where Blue comes home to find all the ladies sitting together fully dressed in a full bathtub where they were trying to scry.  It didn't go well, so they just stayed in the bathtub and had some wine.

I also loved the boy's friendship, their flavor of brotherhood.  Again, even though they got frustrated with one another, their every action was shaded with love.  Even though they were living through horrors and traumas and grief, they still managed to joke around and act like teenage boys.

None of the relationships were just one thing.  That is to say, they didn't react to each other the exact same way every time.  Their feelings changed, while the relationship, the sum of all those feelings, stayed consistent and strong.

The other thing that stood out in this series was the prose.  Stiefvater has beautiful, lyrical descriptions paired seamlessly with completely accurate dialogue.  The setting is wondrous, but still set in modern Virginia.  The kids are magical, but they're still kids.

"Because Adam practiced many things, Adam was good at many things, but this--what was it even called?  Scrying, sensing, magic, magic, magic.  He was not only good at it, but he longed for it, wanted it, loved it in a way that nearly overwhelmed him with gratitude.  He had not known that he could love, not really.  Gansey and he had fought about it, once--Gansey had said, with disgust, Stop saying privilege.  Love isn't privilege.  But Gansey had always had love, had always been capable of love.  Now that Adam had discovered this feeling in himself, he was more certain than ever he was right.  Need was Adam's baseline, his resting pulse.  Love was a privilege.  Adam was privileged; he did not want to give it up.  He wanted to remember again and again how it felt."

And elsewhere,

"For a strange second, none of them spoke.

Finally, Ronan said, 'Jesus God, Sargent.  Do you have stitches on your face?  Bad.  Ass.  Put it here, you asshole.'"

 Four stars.  Would recommend!

***

Next Week: Huntress, YA high fantasy by Malinda Lo

Station Eleven Review

This week's novel is Station Eleven, post-apocalyptic literary fiction by Emily St. John Mandel.

Civilization collapses when 99.99% of the world's population dies of the Georgia Flu.  Twenty years after the collapse, The Traveling Symphony, an orchestra and Shakespearian theater troop, travels between the small settlements around the Great Lakes, keeping the arts alive.  This narrative is inter-cut with scenes from before the collapse, centering around the famous actor, Arthur Leander, who died of a heart attack on stage during a performance of King Lear the day before the collapse.  His life and that of his best friend, ex-wives, and son intersect with Kirsten's, an actress with the Traveling Symphony who was a child actress in King Lear and witnessed Leander's death.

A friend of mine told me that this felt like genre fiction written by someone who didn't like genre fiction, and that he'd be interested to hear what I thought about it, as someone more familiar with genre fiction than he is.  I kind of wish he hadn't said that, because it put me off the book for quite a while.  I don't want to read something coming from the premise that genre fiction is worthless but here's how you do it.  After reading it though, I don't get the impression that Mandel doesn't like genre fiction, just that that's not what she usually does and isn't going to start with this book even though it's set after society collapses.

As to what I think about it, as someone more familiar with genre fiction: I liked the post-apocalyptic parts better than the pre-apocalyptic parts.  The stakes were so much higher, and the situations so much more intriguing after the collapse.  The parts before the collapse had drama about a privileged actor wanting and then not wanting and then wanting attention, and drama about his ex-wife burying herself in her art. 

I also have strong opinions about some of the difficult questions brought up about how society should function after the collapse.  For example, the adults have a hard time explaining the world before the collapse to their children who never experienced it.  There's a debate that they shouldn't bother to teach their kids how life used to be because that won't help them live their lives post-collapse, is hard to explain, and makes the kids sad.  This is presented as a thought provoking conundrum, to which I say NO.  Nonononono! If they don't teach the next generation how electricity and vaccinations work, or--heck--general math and science and literature and history, that knowledge will disappear within a generation and the human race would have to start from scratch.  While I'm sure some people would ask so what, I believe very strongly that this is a bad thing, especially when it's possible to rebuild while the infrastructure is still in place.

This novel made me want to write a post-apocalyptic story about the folks that get the power plant working again (where I grew up in Texas, all our power was hydro-electric).  Or a story about the scientists who gather at the remains of a technical institute and start a school.

So, while the prose was beautiful throughout and the connections across time and circumstances were delicate and intriguing, I was drawn almost exclusively to the post-collapse world.

***

Next Week: The Raven King, the final installment in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater.  So I'll be talking about the series as a whole.

Channeling Creativity

A friend of mine has stopped writing, which bums me out because she wrote beautiful stories, and she has several that are unfinished and I want to know what happens.  Her point is that her life has been awesome lately, and she no longer needs to use writing as a form of escapism.  But then she also feels guilty about not doing any work and asks things like "how do you channel creativity?"

I think that if you don't want to write, that's fine.  Don't write.  If writing is something you do for fun, and it's not fun for you, then don't spend the time you have for fun things doing something you think is a drag.  There is seriously no need to feel guilty about that.

Then I think it's interesting that she wrote for escapism.  I write because I have trouble being heard, trouble expressing myself, and if I take the time to craft a story and I get to polish and mold and iron, I can get across what I want to say.  I guess if I get way better at expressing myself vocally, I might lose my desire to write.

Then I think it's interesting that she asked about channeling creativity rather than fueling motivation.  That's like the creativity is inside her, formless and festering, and has no channel to get out.  I can't really picture a formless creativity, like just a mess of creative energy stewing in her gut like a big scribble.  That's not how I experience creativity.  Instead, I'll have an idea sparked by something around me, and that seed of an idea will get stuck in my gut, hardening and rotting unless I can regurgitate it like an owl coughing up a pellet.

I have advice for getting that out: cough up that owl pellet!  Write it down, even if it's an outline or snippets of dialogue or God awful prose.  Draw a picture.  Tell someone about it.  Just get the idea out there so you don't have to cling to it anymore and you can sleep at night without the idea spinning spinning spinning and keeping you up.  Sometimes just talking about your idea is enough for it to run its course and for you to be done with it, so you have to be careful if you want to do anything more than release that creativity into the world.  If you want to form it into some finished product, plowing through writing it down in full, flowing sentences, and editing it and editing it and editing it, that's much less about channeling creativity.  That's about dedication and motivation.

So what strikes me about talking with my friend about this (other than how sad I am that I'll never get to know how three of her stories end) is how differently we approach and even think about writing.  A lot of writing advice and writing quotes make no sense to me, and I guess that's because the people giving that advice also think about things in a different light.  But I've never felt it as clearly before, and it makes me think about how personal an experience it is, from how seriously you take it, to why you do it, to how you envision the creative and crafting process.

Annihilation Review

This week's novel is Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.  It was a quick, creepy read with mystery and atmosphere.

This is the story of the twelfth expedition into Area X, an idyllic wilderness where previous expeditions either died violently when they turned on each other or returned changed with reports of hallucinations and paranoia.  There's an unearthly cry at dusk; an abandoned, dilapidated village; a barricaded lighthouse riddled with signs of violence; and a tower that descends into the earth with strange writing on the wall.  To piece together the secrets of Area X, they have to find the truth about what happened to the other expeditions and what lies they were told during training.

The story is told through the journal of the biologist, who approaches the trip with scientific curiosity, jumping head first into the mysteries instead of letting them simmer in the background.  This means the whole story lasts only a few days, and it means the action clips along.  Through her journal, she tells us that she wants to be unbiased, however, she then later admits to keeping secrets to appear more unbiased so the reader would believe her, which throws her whole story and her motivations into question.

Area X is creepy.  Not in an "ewww! A centipede!" way, but in an eerie way that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.  As a wuss when it comes to horror, I prefer this to being honestly terrified while reading.  The moments of surprise are more emotionally stunning than frightening.  This is accomplished in part by how the biologist's emotions are conveyed, and how she feels more unsettled than frightened.  Then part of it is because the horror is ambiguous.  It's hard to tell if the expedition is hallucinating or if the weirdness is supernatural.  It's hard to tell because we know both are happening, so pinning down any one moment as real or not is impossible.

In the end, not all the mysteries of Area X are explained, but the biologist's journey feels satisfying.  Even more interesting is that VanderMeer shows the monster without the monster losing all its creepy charisma.  I think these two points are related.  If everything was explained, if every monster was shown, the story would suddenly be too neat, too sensical.  But VanderMeer only shows the monster that the biologist was most interested in, while large portions of Area X and it's history remain a mystery.  It's just enough.  It gets to the heart of the biologist's story without dismantling the eerie environment.

***

Next week: Station Eleven, literary post-apocalypse by Emily St. John Mandel

Knots research

I've done a bunch of research about knots over the past few weeks for use in the the firebird story.  It's way too much research considering I'm doing it for at most four paragraphs in a chapter that I've been considering cutting.  It's probably a sign that I've been procrastinating on other things.

Oh well!  I learned some cool things and I'm here today to share them with you.

Turk's Head Knots

A Turk's Head Knot is a decorative knot tied around a stake or flattened out into a mat.  It gets its name from how it looks like a turban if you don't understand how turbans work.  The boy scouts use it as a woggle, a knot that holds their bandanna-neckerchiefs in place, and people will often put it on either end of their larger decorative knot pieces to hide the loose ends.

mat 3 lead-7 bight doubled

The neat thing about Turk's Head Knots is that they can be expanded to suit your needs.  By changing the number of bights (the number of arcs in the top or around the outside in mat form) you can change the circumference.  By increasing the number of leads (the number of strands around the circumference) you can make the knot thicker or taller depending on how you want to think about it.

5 lead-4 bight doubled

4 lead-5 bight doubled

The real kicker for me (math incoming) is that you can't just have any combination of leads and bights.  If you're working with one rope, the knot will only work if the number of leads and the number of bights are co-prime, meaning that their greatest common factor is 1.  So you can make a 3 lead-5 bight or a 7 lead-4 bight or a 9 lead-16 bight, but you can't make a 4 lead-6 bight (with a greatest common factor of 2) or a 3 lead-9 bight (with a greatest common factor of 3).  If you want to make those knots you need to work with multiple strands of rope (2 strands for the 4 lead-6 bight where the greatest common factor is 2, or 3 strands for the 3 lead-9 bight where the greatest common factor is 3.)

Braids and Sennits

Braids and sennits are basically interchangeable words.  A sennit is a series of knots repeated to make a pattern, which is what a braid is.  I set out in my survey of sennits to find something in particular.  I wanted a braid that used 3 strands, isn't the same old standard braid I've seen eighty million times, and uses all three strands equally, or in other words doesn't have a knot-bearing cord.  Turns out that this is a difficult set of criteria.

Basic three strand braid, Chain Sennit, four strand French Sennit, four strand Square Sennit

The fancier the braid, the more strands it uses, so a bunch of cool looking ones have four strands or five strands or eight strands.  I was looking for something with three strands because a three-strand rope--you guessed it--has three strands, and this kind of rope can easily be unlayed into three separate strands then layed back into one.

Diamond Braid, Crown Sennit, four strand sennit

Here are more that use four strands.  These stitches are often used when making lanyards at summer camp, so this was pretty fun, even if my knots look pretty crummy made out of yarn.

braid with knot-bearing cord, Solomon Bar, Half-hitch Sennit

These use a knot-bearing cords, witch is a strand that stays straight as you tie your knot around it.  They are the red strings in the picture.  Since the knot-bearing cord doesn't get knotted, you end up using a lot less length than you do for the knotting cords.  My issue with this is that if you send a bolt of magic down all three strands at once, it's going to move a lot faster down the knot-bearing cord while it lags behind running through all the twists of the knotting cords.

However, I do research not just to get specific vocabulary, but also to find out if what I have in mind will work.  With the lack of three strand braids, I think I need to change what I had in mind and use a Solomon Bar.  These are pretty cool.  They're also called Cobra Knots or a Square Knot Sennit.

The River King Review

This week's novel is The River King by Alice Hoffman.

Chalk House, one of the boys' dorms at the Haddan School, a pretentious boarding school, has a hazing ritual of bullying, intimidation, blackmail, and violence.  August Pierce, one of the new freshmen at Chalk House turns up dead in the river, either driven to suicide by the hazing or murdered as part of it.  A local detective looks into the death despite the small town of Haddan's scorn of the school and general agreement to leave them to their own devices.  Meanwhile, Gus' ghost keeps showing up in photographs and leaving presents of river rocks and minnows.

The prose here is beautiful if a bit opressive in large quantities.  It's something to be sipped rather than gulped.

Hoffman's storytelling creates a long series of tableaux of different characters.  She circles around the town and the school, into memories and town history, flowing between characters and returning to events later from a different point of view.  This way the characters and the events get filled in one detail at a time, occasionally large pieces slotting into place.  It's kind of like watching a painter work one color over here and over there, adding details one place, then adding swaths of color another.

It reminded me of the News from Lake Woebegone.  She shifts through topics in a single paragraph, giving an overview of town, mentioning minor characters who are interconnected and become more faceted each time we see them.  Then the story always circles back to the environment--the overcast sky or the willows by the river or the warblers flying over the school.  It makes the characters feel like part of the environment, the setting, the tapestry of the town.

"This boy on the riverbank was only a few years younger than Abe's brother was in that horrible year, the one Abe and Joey still didn't discuss.  People in the village remembered it as the time there were no trout; a man could fish for hours, all day, if he liked, and not catch sight of a single one.  Several environmentalists came out from Boston to investigate, but no one ever determined the cause.  That wonderful species of silver trout seemed destined to become extinct, and people in town were simply going to have to accept the loss, but the following spring, the trout reappeared, just like that.  Pete Byers from over at the pharmacy was the first to notice.  Although he himself was too gentle a soul to go fishing, and was known to faint at the sight of a bloodworm cut in two, Pete loved the river and walked its banks every morning, two miles out of town and two miles back.  One fine day, as he headed home, the river looked silver, and sure enough, when he knelt down, there were so many trout he would have been able to catch one in his bare hands, had he been so inclined."

There was some weird gender stuff going on when she spoke in broad strokes about the town ladies or the girls' dorm that made it seem like this was set in the fifties.  And I wish at the end that there had been more justice served.  I wanted Gus' ghost to make a dramatic appearance and get vengeance, or I wanted the detective or the photography teacher or Gus' friend Carlin to have a moment of brilliant, cathartic cunning to get solid evidence or a confession before a shocked crowd.  Instead the story ends bittersweet.  And I don't think that's a spoiler.  I think it's fitting, because a climax would be too much plot and not in keeping with the spirit of the book.  But my wanting justice even if I knew it wouldn't happen just speaks to how involved I got with the characters.


***
Next week's novel: Annihilation, eerie sci-fi by Jeff VanderMeer

Seven-Year-Old Carolyn was a Terrible Writer

When I was about seven-years-old, I read Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt.  This is a story about a group of siblings whose mother abandons them in a mall parking lot and they have to make their way to their grandmother's in hopes of sticking together.  After this I read the sequel, Dicey's Song, then the spin off, A Solitary Blue.

There's a moment in A Solitary Blue where Jeff is staying at his mother's house for the first time.  She shows him his room, says good night, shuts the door, and goes to bed.  He wakes up in the night needing to use the bathroom, but he doesn't know where it is because his mom didn't tell him.  He's consumed by anxiety that he'll open the wrong door.  Maybe it'll be his mom's bedroom and that would be awkward.  It's traumatic and I related to it on a fundamental level, which is super sad now that I think about it.

So I was inspired to write my own story.  As far as I can recall, this is the first story I'd ever written.  It was a self insert and stupidly derivative in that my baby sitter up and disappeared, leaving me and my two close family friends to fend for our selves. 

"Carolyn," my mom said, "Dicey didn't go to the police because they would have put her in foster care.  If the baby sitter disappeared, the police would just call me."

I thought on this.  "Well, what if you disappeared?"

Instead of being offended at the ease with which I would kill her off, she rolled her eyes and said, "They'd call your dad."

Well, shit.  No fixing it then.  Not only was my story derivative, but the central conflict made no sense and I had no concept of how child custody worked.

The big nail in the coffin though was that I spelled "hungry" as "hogray," an error my mom makes fun of to this day.

Shadowshaper Review

This week's novel is Shadowshaper, urban fantasy by Daniel José Older.

Sierra discovers that she comes from a family of shadowshapers, people who can imbue their artistic endeavors (usually murals and street art) with the spirits of the dead.  But the murals are fading and someone is killing off the shadowshapers.  Since everyone refuses to talk about it, it's up to Sierra to put things right.

The plot of this one follows the same narrative of most urban fantasies, and it's full of convenient happenings to keep the plot zipping along.  But here the predictability is a kind of scaffold from which Older can drape this book's differences.  The familiarity of the set up throws the unique elements into sharper contrast.


The real showpiece here is the diversity, and I find it remarkably sad that diversity in fantasy is so rare that this is the big topic for discussion in this book.  But more than its existence in this book, what I found most interesting was the way it was presented.  So many of the non-white, non-straight characters I see either feel like the character got race-bent in the last edit so the main character could have a black friend, or their minority status is the point of the story.  But here, it was part of their characterization.  Their race and sexual orientation felt as though it was with them from the ground up, from their conception.  Their race affected their lives, their back stories, and their values, and this added to the dimensionality of their characters without their race being their character.  It felt organic.  The effects of oppression came up, of course, but they were acknowledged like it was commonplace.

(That's part of why it's so sad that this is the thing that stood out.)

A more direct example of this is how the book handles the gentrification happening in the background. The girls talk about how they like that they can go get expensive coffees and how the expensive coffees are really good, but they acknowledge that they feel unwelcome.  And that's about it.  It doesn't turn into an after school special.  It's enough to feel real to someone who's experienced gentrification and enough to make someone who hasn't experienced think.


My favorite thing about this book was that it's the anti white-guy-goes-native-and-becomes-the-best-native narrative.  In the book, there's an anthropologist named Wick, who studies the shadowshapers, gets initiated into their society, and then wants to fill the vacancy of their missing leader.  Everyone else in the story (instead of being in awe of his skills or what-have-you) roll their eyes at him and tell him no.  When he presses the issue, Sierra tells him "hell no" and leaves him a broken shell of a man.

***
Next week: more magical realism with The River King by Alice Hoffman