This week's novel is Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
Scarlett Epstein writes fanfiction for the TV show Lycanthrope High and is devastated when it gets canceled. She's not very popular at school with her reduced price lunch and her C average, so most of her friends are online in the Lycanthrope fandom. Worried she's about to lose her friends, she starts a new story populated with characters from her high school: her best friend, the boy she has a crush on, and the girl that bullies her.
First, story time! My teenage niece came to visit one summer. At the time, she was super into The Hunger Games to the point where she and her best friend skipped school to dive to Dallas to go to that creepy, ironic mall tour that the movie cast did. We were sitting around when my husband made a random joke about Peta. Honestly, it was not that great a joke, but that didn't matter to my niece. She started crying, overwhelmed with emotion about Peta and his tragic life as a boy shaped piece of flat bread. After crying for a few minutes, she called her best friend and repeated the joke, at which point her friend also started crying.
So! When Scarlett starts crying thinking about how her favorite show got canceled, Breslaw nails it.
She also nails internet fandom--the interactions, the people you meet there, the fics that show up. It was nice to see all the terms used correctly and used in the way someone familiar with them would use them, instead of like an anthropologist wading into a strange, backward culture. Scarlett makes groan-worthy rookie mistakes in her fic, that you know are going to come back to bite her even before she realizes she's done anything wrong. "Oh, you naive sunfish," I think, "find/replace those characters' names." "Oh, you sweet summer child," I think, "don't insert yourself into your story." That can never end well.
Scarlett's dad now lives in New York with his new brilliant, beautiful wife and their new brilliant, beautiful daughter. He gets a book deal for a novel that turns out to have characters that are unflattering portrayals of Scarlett and her mom. (The snip-its we get are painfully accurate snip-its of a man-book-with-manly-man-feels book.) This hurts Scarlett tremendously, yet Scarlett never seems to make the connection between what her dad did and what she did. It's a hugely obvious parallel, but it's never made explicit. Maybe it's so obvious that Breslaw doesn't feel it needs to be made explicit? Maybe Scarlett never put it together that directly, but it affected her response just the same? It's strange.
On the other hand, I didn't like how when these problems do inevitably rear their ugly head, Scarlett takes all the blame. Although her actions are hurtful, I don't like that her bully never sees that she was hurtful as well. All the guilt is heaped on Scarlett even though her bully spends the entire book being awful. Yes, Scarlett should (and does) learn from her mistakes, but this rings of victim blaming and it ruins the only productive outlet Scarlett had to vent her frustrations.
So it's strange that I feel so differently about the situation between Scarlett and her bully and Scarlett and her dad. Scarlett's dad says she's unpopular and I don't blame Scarlett for that. Scarlett says her bully is mean and fake and I do blame her bully for that. It's a difference between an adult saying mean things about their child and a kid saying mean things about a peer. It's a difference between being unpopular, which isn't a choice, and being cruel, which is.
So yeah, there's a lot of ground to cover there, but it just ends up being that Scarlett feels bad about everything and blames herself for writing her story AND being unpopular.
***
Next week: A Criminal Magic--mobsters and speakeasy magic shows! by Lee Kelly.
August 30, 2016
August 27, 2016
Rahm's Little Readers
My son and I did the Chicago Public Library's summer reading program this summer. While I was looking into it online, I found a reference to a parent reflection on doing the summer reading program with your child that could win you some tech stuff. That sounded right up my alley, so for the last few months I've been working off and on on a short story reflection on the summer reading program.
It was getting late in the summer and I hadn't heard anything more about it. I wanted to know the rules before I got my story all polished. Was there a word limit? Did it have to be in a certain format? Did I e-mail it somewhere or print it out and hand it in? So I asked. And I was told to ask my librarian for "the form." The form?...Oh no.
The parent reflection is a single page form with two and a half lines to describe an activity I did with my child, two lines to say what we learned from that activity, and two lines to say what our favorite part was. It's also a raffle, not a contest.
I was disappointed, and felt stupid for jumping the gun so much, and also for what was now almost a complete misfire of summer reading activities (as you will see.)
At least I can post it here! Enjoy!
-----
It was getting late in the summer and I hadn't heard anything more about it. I wanted to know the rules before I got my story all polished. Was there a word limit? Did it have to be in a certain format? Did I e-mail it somewhere or print it out and hand it in? So I asked. And I was told to ask my librarian for "the form." The form?...Oh no.
The parent reflection is a single page form with two and a half lines to describe an activity I did with my child, two lines to say what we learned from that activity, and two lines to say what our favorite part was. It's also a raffle, not a contest.
I was disappointed, and felt stupid for jumping the gun so much, and also for what was now almost a complete misfire of summer reading activities (as you will see.)
At least I can post it here! Enjoy!
-----
August 23, 2016
Wink Poppy Midnight Review
This week's novel is Wink Poppy Midnight, a dark YA mystery by April Genevieve Tucholke.
When his mother and brother move away to France, Midnight's father moves them to a farmhouse outside of town. Midnight appreciates this because he's determined to get out of the clutches of Poppy, the horrible, beautiful girl who's been seducing and manipulating him and a bunch of other people. Across the street from the farmhouse is the Bell's farm, where Wink, her fortune telling mother, and her innumerable siblings live. Wink understands her life in terms of the fairy tales she reads to her siblings. When Midnight falls for Wink, Poppy gets extra vindictive. But Poppy disappears after an incident involving a haunted house and revenge gone wrong, and there's a question of if she ran away into the woods and is stalking everyone, or if she died and is haunting them.
The story is told with short, alternating chapters from each of the three characters' points of view. Each character has their own distinct voice, to the point where you can pick out the moments they influence each other. Occasionally, the characters cover an event that another character has already covered, and it becomes clear that at least one of them is an unreliable narrator and someone is full of lies.
The setting is beautiful and haunting, all forest and farmland and neglected buildings. The language is beautiful too, emotive and sad and vicious.
The twists made my eyes light as I read them. I had suspected them, but their unveiling was brilliantly executed. However, after the initial reveal, they stopped making sense. Suddenly, I don't understand the characters' motivations. Why on earth did they do any of this? Aside from that, the characters' reactions don't make sense to me. I would expect them to be angry or hurt, and instead they shrug it off and move on. This is especially irksome because everyone had clear motivations and reactions before the twist, and--like I said--I knew the twist was coming, but I was itching to learn why. That was going to be the surprise. But that didn't happen.
I'm disappointed, but it was a lovely book.
***
Next week: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
When his mother and brother move away to France, Midnight's father moves them to a farmhouse outside of town. Midnight appreciates this because he's determined to get out of the clutches of Poppy, the horrible, beautiful girl who's been seducing and manipulating him and a bunch of other people. Across the street from the farmhouse is the Bell's farm, where Wink, her fortune telling mother, and her innumerable siblings live. Wink understands her life in terms of the fairy tales she reads to her siblings. When Midnight falls for Wink, Poppy gets extra vindictive. But Poppy disappears after an incident involving a haunted house and revenge gone wrong, and there's a question of if she ran away into the woods and is stalking everyone, or if she died and is haunting them.
The story is told with short, alternating chapters from each of the three characters' points of view. Each character has their own distinct voice, to the point where you can pick out the moments they influence each other. Occasionally, the characters cover an event that another character has already covered, and it becomes clear that at least one of them is an unreliable narrator and someone is full of lies.
The setting is beautiful and haunting, all forest and farmland and neglected buildings. The language is beautiful too, emotive and sad and vicious.
The twists made my eyes light as I read them. I had suspected them, but their unveiling was brilliantly executed. However, after the initial reveal, they stopped making sense. Suddenly, I don't understand the characters' motivations. Why on earth did they do any of this? Aside from that, the characters' reactions don't make sense to me. I would expect them to be angry or hurt, and instead they shrug it off and move on. This is especially irksome because everyone had clear motivations and reactions before the twist, and--like I said--I knew the twist was coming, but I was itching to learn why. That was going to be the surprise. But that didn't happen.
I'm disappointed, but it was a lovely book.
***
Next week: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
August 16, 2016
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry Review
This week's novel is My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, by Fredrik Backman. I loved this book. It was whimsical and touching.
Almost-eight-year-old Elsa likes Harry Potter and the X-Men and looking up new words on Wikipedia. Her best friend is her granny who likes arguing with people, breaking into the zoo, shooting the neighbors with paint balls, and telling Elsa fairy tales about the Land-of-Almost-Awake. When her granny dies, she leaves Elsa a treasure hunt delivering letters to each of the tenants in their apartment building, telling them she's sorry for her many wrongs. Elsa learns about her granny's past as she learns the tenants' stories which inspired the Land-of-Almost-Awake.
The voice made this book. Elsa is a believable, precocious almost-eight-year-old, and that's reflected in the prose. I was never annoyed with her, even though sometimes she was a little shit, and that kind of balance takes skill.
Elsa has sweet, mailable relationships with her dad and her step-dad and the other tenants in the apartment as well. I just liked her and her mum best.
The interconnectedness of the tenants is neat. Everyone in the building already knows all these stories that Elsa's learning, but they just don't talk about them because they're painful or obvious, and so Elsa never knew. I've had that experience. I know the dirty laundry for all the groups I'm in (my family and friends and colleagues), but it's always surprising when an outsider comes in and you have to spell it all out for them.
Offhand comments made about Elsa or Elsa's mum resonate with me as well. Elsa's headmaster blames her for getting bullied, saying she needs to learn to play well with others and that boys will be boys. People throughout the book tell Elsa's mum, who's pregnant (with Elsa's future half-brother or half-sister, who Elsa has named "Halfie), that she should think of the baby when she gets upset or that she shouldn't drink coffee and shouldn't spend so much time at work. These microagressions are presented perfectly. Elsa's mum clenches her jaw and breathes deeply, and doesn't snap or correct people. Granny launches into a rage at the headmaster, saying exactly what I'm thinking and embarrassing everyone. And Elsa internalizes it all, only half understanding that they're hurtful.
I didn't know going into this that it was translated from Swedish, so I got confused and had to look it up when Elsa starts talking about her favorite words in English. So, for your reading benefit: This is translated from Swedish.
***
Next week: Wink Poppy Midnight, YA American Gothic by April Genevieve Tucholke.
Almost-eight-year-old Elsa likes Harry Potter and the X-Men and looking up new words on Wikipedia. Her best friend is her granny who likes arguing with people, breaking into the zoo, shooting the neighbors with paint balls, and telling Elsa fairy tales about the Land-of-Almost-Awake. When her granny dies, she leaves Elsa a treasure hunt delivering letters to each of the tenants in their apartment building, telling them she's sorry for her many wrongs. Elsa learns about her granny's past as she learns the tenants' stories which inspired the Land-of-Almost-Awake.
The voice made this book. Elsa is a believable, precocious almost-eight-year-old, and that's reflected in the prose. I was never annoyed with her, even though sometimes she was a little shit, and that kind of balance takes skill.
She was born on Boxing Day seven years ago (almost eight). The same day some German scientists recorded the strongest-ever emission of gamma radiation from a magnetar over the earth. Admittedly Elsa doesn't know what a magnetar is, but it's some kind of neutron star. And it sounds a little like "Megatron," which is the name of the evil one in Transformers, which is what simpletons who don't read enough quality literature call "a children's program." In actual fact the Transformers are robots, but if you look at it academically they could also be counted as super heroes. Elsa is very keen on both Transformers and neutron stars, and she imagines that "emission of gamma radiation" would look a bit like that time Granny spilled Fanta on Elsa's iPhone and tried to dry it out in the toaster.The book also shows a quality, dynamic relationship between Elsa and her mum. They bicker like mothers and daughters do, especially considering they are both mourning. But they still hug and snuggle and have important conversations, without having to have a conversation about forgiving each other, because of course they forgive each other. The affection and the anger flow in and out because these kinds of changes in mood happen all the time. It's impressive that Backman struck that balance too: between having characters show different sides of themselves while still having them identifiable and not out of character.
Elsa has sweet, mailable relationships with her dad and her step-dad and the other tenants in the apartment as well. I just liked her and her mum best.
The interconnectedness of the tenants is neat. Everyone in the building already knows all these stories that Elsa's learning, but they just don't talk about them because they're painful or obvious, and so Elsa never knew. I've had that experience. I know the dirty laundry for all the groups I'm in (my family and friends and colleagues), but it's always surprising when an outsider comes in and you have to spell it all out for them.
Offhand comments made about Elsa or Elsa's mum resonate with me as well. Elsa's headmaster blames her for getting bullied, saying she needs to learn to play well with others and that boys will be boys. People throughout the book tell Elsa's mum, who's pregnant (with Elsa's future half-brother or half-sister, who Elsa has named "Halfie), that she should think of the baby when she gets upset or that she shouldn't drink coffee and shouldn't spend so much time at work. These microagressions are presented perfectly. Elsa's mum clenches her jaw and breathes deeply, and doesn't snap or correct people. Granny launches into a rage at the headmaster, saying exactly what I'm thinking and embarrassing everyone. And Elsa internalizes it all, only half understanding that they're hurtful.
I didn't know going into this that it was translated from Swedish, so I got confused and had to look it up when Elsa starts talking about her favorite words in English. So, for your reading benefit: This is translated from Swedish.
***
Next week: Wink Poppy Midnight, YA American Gothic by April Genevieve Tucholke.
August 9, 2016
Among Others Review
This week's book is Among Others by Jo Walton.
This is a story about Mori, a Welsh girl who sees fairies, does magic, and saved the world from her evil witch mother, but now has to make do in a magicless English boarding school. Alternatively, it's the story of a girl dealing with trauma after a car accident crippled her leg and killed her twin sister by burying herself in magical explanations and science fiction/fantasy novels from the 70s.
Intrinsic in this is the question of if the magic is real or not. I fall on the side that her belief is a coping mechanism. It's something she used to do with her sister, and they were on a magic quest when her sister died. There are points when people other than her can see the fairies, but by those points in the novel I don't trust her to be a reliable narrator whose delusions are starting to affect her daily life. Instead of being frustrating, this feels like a second layer over the story. Reading between the lines, we can tell that this is an image she's created of herself, and we can extrapolate the reasons she needs to see herself and her world like that, and through that we can tell what happened.
The magic Mori describes is unusual and fits well with the themes of the book. Magic is "deniable" and "isn't like in books." This means that if Mori does a spell to make the bus come right when she wants it, the magic will go into the past and change a dozen people's daily schedules so they catch the bus at different times to make it so the bus comes right when she needs it. The observable effects of this is that she would do a spell and the bus would come around the corner. So it's impossible to tell if the magic worked, or if the magic did nothing and coincidentally the bus came.
This deniability gets interesting when Mori is so lonely that she does a spell to get herself a karass (a group of people linked in a cosmically significant way, or in other words a friend group.) The next day the librarian tells her she should come to the science fiction/fantasy book club. Then she starts to question the ethics of magic. Would the book club people still like her if she hadn't done the spell? Is anything about the relationships she forges real? Did the spell even work or is this coincidence? She lets it eat her up inside. I, of course, see this as her delusions getting in the way of her life, and holding her back from making friends.
The novel is written as a diary, and boy howdy is it ever a fifteen-year-old girl diary. Walton does a great job capturing the narcissism, overreaction, and catastrophizing of being a teenager. At one point I thought, "Mori's going to read this passage later and be embarrassed."
The other thing that needs a mention are the books. Mori reads like nobody's business and spends a lot of time talking about books. She frames her life around books, to the point where she assumes that when people agree with her it's because they've read the same book she used to base her opinion. If they disagree with her, they obviously haven't read that book. It's kind of a treat when she mentions something I've read, but her opinions about them are so painfully fifteen-year-old girl opinions. I've seen this book described as "a love letter to science fiction/fantasy," but I think a more accurate description is "a love letter to discovering science fiction/fantasy as a teenager."
But then, it could get confusing if you haven't read what she's talking about. She references concepts from books without explanation or context and uses them to make points. For example: did you know what a karass is? If not, you should ignore this whole review and go read Cat's Cradle, but also you'd probably be wondering what Mori's on about, becasue she doesn't explain it until towards the end of the book. I see this again as part of the teen girl thing and being wrong about how universal your experience is (or about the diary aspect). But at the same time, I can see how both the teen girl part and the unfamiliar allusions she drops could get frustrating.
There are also moments of Not Okay that Mori doesn't give the emotional weight they deserve. She doesn't let these moments alter her relationships with Not Okay People. Maybe that's part of her mindset while she's not thinking about painful things, but it was really unsettling for me as a reader.
This book took a lot of leaps and managed a lot of technical aspects that made all the themes hang together beautifully. But I don't think I liked it.
***
Next week: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman.
This is a story about Mori, a Welsh girl who sees fairies, does magic, and saved the world from her evil witch mother, but now has to make do in a magicless English boarding school. Alternatively, it's the story of a girl dealing with trauma after a car accident crippled her leg and killed her twin sister by burying herself in magical explanations and science fiction/fantasy novels from the 70s.
Intrinsic in this is the question of if the magic is real or not. I fall on the side that her belief is a coping mechanism. It's something she used to do with her sister, and they were on a magic quest when her sister died. There are points when people other than her can see the fairies, but by those points in the novel I don't trust her to be a reliable narrator whose delusions are starting to affect her daily life. Instead of being frustrating, this feels like a second layer over the story. Reading between the lines, we can tell that this is an image she's created of herself, and we can extrapolate the reasons she needs to see herself and her world like that, and through that we can tell what happened.
The magic Mori describes is unusual and fits well with the themes of the book. Magic is "deniable" and "isn't like in books." This means that if Mori does a spell to make the bus come right when she wants it, the magic will go into the past and change a dozen people's daily schedules so they catch the bus at different times to make it so the bus comes right when she needs it. The observable effects of this is that she would do a spell and the bus would come around the corner. So it's impossible to tell if the magic worked, or if the magic did nothing and coincidentally the bus came.
This deniability gets interesting when Mori is so lonely that she does a spell to get herself a karass (a group of people linked in a cosmically significant way, or in other words a friend group.) The next day the librarian tells her she should come to the science fiction/fantasy book club. Then she starts to question the ethics of magic. Would the book club people still like her if she hadn't done the spell? Is anything about the relationships she forges real? Did the spell even work or is this coincidence? She lets it eat her up inside. I, of course, see this as her delusions getting in the way of her life, and holding her back from making friends.
The novel is written as a diary, and boy howdy is it ever a fifteen-year-old girl diary. Walton does a great job capturing the narcissism, overreaction, and catastrophizing of being a teenager. At one point I thought, "Mori's going to read this passage later and be embarrassed."
The other thing that needs a mention are the books. Mori reads like nobody's business and spends a lot of time talking about books. She frames her life around books, to the point where she assumes that when people agree with her it's because they've read the same book she used to base her opinion. If they disagree with her, they obviously haven't read that book. It's kind of a treat when she mentions something I've read, but her opinions about them are so painfully fifteen-year-old girl opinions. I've seen this book described as "a love letter to science fiction/fantasy," but I think a more accurate description is "a love letter to discovering science fiction/fantasy as a teenager."
But then, it could get confusing if you haven't read what she's talking about. She references concepts from books without explanation or context and uses them to make points. For example: did you know what a karass is? If not, you should ignore this whole review and go read Cat's Cradle, but also you'd probably be wondering what Mori's on about, becasue she doesn't explain it until towards the end of the book. I see this again as part of the teen girl thing and being wrong about how universal your experience is (or about the diary aspect). But at the same time, I can see how both the teen girl part and the unfamiliar allusions she drops could get frustrating.
There are also moments of Not Okay that Mori doesn't give the emotional weight they deserve. She doesn't let these moments alter her relationships with Not Okay People. Maybe that's part of her mindset while she's not thinking about painful things, but it was really unsettling for me as a reader.
This book took a lot of leaps and managed a lot of technical aspects that made all the themes hang together beautifully. But I don't think I liked it.
***
Next week: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman.
August 2, 2016
The Scorpion Rules Review
This week's novel is The Scorpion Rules, YA sci-fi with an emotional heart by Erin Bow. It is right up my alley.
The Children of Peace are the children of world leaders, given up as hostages to live at the Precepture school as a war deterrent. Countries are free to go to war, but if they do, their hostage child dies. "Make it personal," Talis, the AI that designed the Precepture, says. Thus relative peace has been kept for 400 years. At the school, the children receive a world class education, grow their own food and tend to the herd of goats, and learn to have dignity when it's their time to die. Greta knows her death is coming as her country slips closer and closer to war and must deal with her fear and her role in the greater good.
Although this book is high-concept, its focus is on the emotional reactions to that concept. The set up is used as a way to explore bravery, fear, and dignity, which--in the best tradition of science fiction--can all be translated (with much lower stakes) into the real world. Greta's challenges felt real, her responses human. She tried to stay strong for others, to keep it together to keep her sanity, and at times she broke despite how much she tried.
There's an intense scene midway through about anticipation leading up to torture. It uses the repetitive beat of a machine to give it a rhythm, and it's really wonderfully done. Greta panics, then surrenders, then panics again, all the while trying to slow her breathing and trying to stay strong like she was taught.
The antagonists are complex, and who counts as an antagonist changes throughout the book depending on who is the most immediate threat. People who do horrible things in the first half of the book, protect Greta and her friends in the later half. And I cheered for them. Everyone wants to kill Greta eventually, it's all just a matter of when and how. So that makes everyone a bad guy, and when everyone's a bad guy, sometimes you have to side with them. When you're surrounded by bad guys, you have to trust and mourn and build meaningful relationships with bad guys. When you think about it, even Greta's mother is in the wrong.
There's also a bunch of little things that I appreciated to the point where I want to mention them in my gushing. The goats are disgusting and amused me. The war that acts as the central conflict of the story is over Lake Ontario. And the author refers to the color of several technologies as "Cherenkov blue." (Apparently she used to be a physicist before she was a novelist. Awesome.)
***
Next Week: Among Others, fantasy (maybe???) by Jo Walton.
The Children of Peace are the children of world leaders, given up as hostages to live at the Precepture school as a war deterrent. Countries are free to go to war, but if they do, their hostage child dies. "Make it personal," Talis, the AI that designed the Precepture, says. Thus relative peace has been kept for 400 years. At the school, the children receive a world class education, grow their own food and tend to the herd of goats, and learn to have dignity when it's their time to die. Greta knows her death is coming as her country slips closer and closer to war and must deal with her fear and her role in the greater good.
Although this book is high-concept, its focus is on the emotional reactions to that concept. The set up is used as a way to explore bravery, fear, and dignity, which--in the best tradition of science fiction--can all be translated (with much lower stakes) into the real world. Greta's challenges felt real, her responses human. She tried to stay strong for others, to keep it together to keep her sanity, and at times she broke despite how much she tried.
There's an intense scene midway through about anticipation leading up to torture. It uses the repetitive beat of a machine to give it a rhythm, and it's really wonderfully done. Greta panics, then surrenders, then panics again, all the while trying to slow her breathing and trying to stay strong like she was taught.
The antagonists are complex, and who counts as an antagonist changes throughout the book depending on who is the most immediate threat. People who do horrible things in the first half of the book, protect Greta and her friends in the later half. And I cheered for them. Everyone wants to kill Greta eventually, it's all just a matter of when and how. So that makes everyone a bad guy, and when everyone's a bad guy, sometimes you have to side with them. When you're surrounded by bad guys, you have to trust and mourn and build meaningful relationships with bad guys. When you think about it, even Greta's mother is in the wrong.
"I wondered if Elián realized that he'd been chosen--and not just by Talis. Her was here because Wilma Armenteros loved him. But apparently not enough to avoid nominating a hostage. Not enough to turn her position down."There's some weirdness in tone where Talis is an order of magnitude more snarky and flippant than everyone else. He's a 400-year-old AI, so no one understands the constant movie references he makes. It's especially strange because his word is treated like scripture and is frequently quoted.
"What wars occur--perhaps two or three a year--are symbolic, short, and small-scale. Global military casualties per annum are normally in the low thousands, civilian casualties almost nil. This is the treasure and crown of our age: the world is as peaceful as it has ever been. The world is at peace, said the Utterances. And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?"
"Who was he that did not know that resisting Talis and his Swan Riders is futile? (That was in fact exactly how Talis put it, in the Utterances. Resistance is futile.)"The romance is sweet and developed, and I appreciated it. It's especially refreshing in its misdirection. It seems pretty obvious where it's going considering the tropiness of "a new boy, who doesn't play by the rules, comes to school and opens Greta's eyes," but the trope doesn't play out like usual.
There's also a bunch of little things that I appreciated to the point where I want to mention them in my gushing. The goats are disgusting and amused me. The war that acts as the central conflict of the story is over Lake Ontario. And the author refers to the color of several technologies as "Cherenkov blue." (Apparently she used to be a physicist before she was a novelist. Awesome.)
***
Next Week: Among Others, fantasy (maybe???) by Jo Walton.
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