Sleeping Giants Review

This week's novel is Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel.  It was recommended to me about a million times by a friend of mine, who read a lot more into it than I did.  Do not believe Nick's lies!  This is not a story about how world religion and politics changed when faced with proof of aliens!  I don't know where he got that.

Eleven-year-old Rose falls into a glowing hole in the woods by her house, landing in the palm of a giant robotic hand, that is made of material that makes no sense, and is far older than makes any sense.  As an adult and an accomplished physicist, Rose takes over the project to locate the rest of the pieces of the robot, solve the mystery of where it came from (aliens) and how it works, and hopefully use it to benefit mankind rather than start the next world war.

The story is told through a series of transcribed interviews with the major players in the project: Rose (whose last name is Franklin, and I don't know how I feel about that), the pilots, the linguist, and some others.  It's difficult to maintain tension and momentum in epistolatory stories.  We hear about the action after it's happened and we only get pieces of the story.  But here it works exceptionally well.  All the interviewees are excited about their findings, and their excitement is infectious, even when they're giving info dumps about what the robot is made of and why that's weird.  The interviewees have big and distinct personalities that come through in the interviews, making the reader care about them and their struggles.  The interviewer also tends to catch them right after important events, when their emotions are still high and their recollections are believably vivid.  

The nameless interviewer acts as a non-entity, just there to record, and stays that way through a handful of interviews.  But then the interviewees get used to him.  They anticipate and comment on aspects of his personality, and his character starts to grow for the reader.  Eventually, we're given glimpses into his back story and we start to understand how many strings he's pulling in the background, how many steps ahead he's working.  He becomes the main character.

As for the second part of what makes epistolatory stories awkward--that we only get snip-its of the full story--Sleeping Giants works around that by taking on qualities of a con or a heist, where the full plan doesn't come out until the end, and in that light it works well.

There is some really bananas science (there's a part about legs that made me laugh out loud at an inappropriate moment because it's SO SILLY) and some super questionable decision making (yeah!  Keep the giant murder robot under a major airport!  I'm sure nothing will go wrong!)  It's kind of groan worthy.

But despite its silly story, it's told well.

***

Next week: Six of Crows, YA fantasy heist by Leigh Bardugo.

Those Emotions are Wrong

My biffle has been reading through Modern Monsters, and I'm enough of an anxious busybody that I keep checking in on the google document she's reading to read her comments.

In one of the stories, someone attacks the main character. It's supposed to be a shocking moment of violence, but my biffle's response was along the lines of “Yeah! Get her!”

I was horrified. “If you want the main character to be beaten, I've done something wrong.  This is bad.”

“No,” she said, “You elicited an emotional response. That's a good thing.”

“But it's not the response I want, and it's going to make is so the ending doesn't work.” And, indeed, the ending didn't work for her.

My initial gut instinct was to reject everything she said because she was just wrong, and then to rationalize that decision with the fact that the two of us consistently treat violence in fiction differently. But visceral rejections like this are the ones to which I really need to pay attention, because they mean that deep down I knew something was wrong. Also, it was completely unfair to my awesome biffle, who was taking the time to read my draft and tell me what she thought. I spent the day coming up with a frantic list of ways to make the main character more sympathetic and to make what's happening more clear, which I think are going to turn out to be really important edits that give it some of the polish it was lacking.

But this got me thinking about a lot of things.

1. Can I control my reader's emotions? On the one hand, of course not! How presumptive of me! There's always going to be someone who feels differently than I expect, and I see it all the time as a reader where I can tell the author wants me to feel one way and I burst out laughing instead. Was that a misfire on their part, or does that work on most people and I'm just the weird one out? Is it just a numbers game: most people will feel pathos for this lost puppy? On the other hand, there are definitely ways emotions can be manipulated. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the unearned tears I shed at the end of a movie when the music swells and there's one really good line, but the character didn't earn those tears. It's probably somewhere in the middle and going too far in either direction is a lazy way out.

2. My friend noted that the ending didn't work. For her, the middle wasn't a problem, but she noted what she was feeling. One thing I've learned from this short story exercise is that the problem isn't really the ending, and isn't even really the middle. The problem is the beginning, where that character is not set up correctly. That's were I need to do most of the work.

The Lie Tree Review

This week's novel is The Lie Tree, dark YA fantasy by Frances Hardinge.  Again, this was recommended by NPR's best books of 2016, and that list is on a roll.

To escape the scandal of Faith's natural scientist father having faked his fossil discoveries, the family moves to the tiny island of Vane for her father to help with an excavation there.  When her father is murdered, Faith finds that he had discovered a Lie Tree, which grows on lies and produces fruit that reveals the truth when eaten.  Faith's lies spread through Vane so she can learn the truth of her father's death from the tree.

Faith's character is beautifully done.  Her parents forbid her to go to school, even though she's fascinated with natural science and an avid student.  They keep things from her and never confide in her because she's a girl.  So she eavesdrops and snoops to exert some control over her life and get the information she needs to navigate her life.  This character flaw, or character trait, flows naturally from her situation, and it's presented with equal parts guilt, excitement, and compulsion.  And through all her sneaking and spying, all the lies she tells her parents and her parents' friends about being stupider than she actually is to keep up appearances, it's natural that she takes to the lie tree.  The tree grows bigger and faster for her than it ever did for her father.

There's an ease to her lies that make them elegant.  People more easily believe a lie that they want to believe, so Faith plants half lies and gets other people to create and spread the lies for her, so they never point back to her.  One lie feeds on another, so if the townsfolk believe one, they'll believe the next.

Then after a book full of Faith resenting her mother's vapidness and the other society women's coldness or denseness, she comes to the realization that other women are acting the part of demure, vain, ignorant women.  She never noticed that she wasn't alone because they all did such a good job.  They all hide in plain sight just as she does.

"Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies.  But neither, it seemed, were other ladies."

Oh heck yes!  This is so important, and I love it so much.  The concept of "not like other girls" drives me up a wall, because it starts with the assumptions that 1. girls are a homogeneous group and 2. being a girl is a bad thing.  And what is especially great about this revelation in The Lie Tree is that the novel doesn't start by saying, "Faith wasn't like other girls."  It starts by showing how downtrodden she feels and how hard she works to act a "proper lady," which are completely relatable problems that demonize the patriarchy (and those that propagate it) rather than demonizing women. 

***

Next week: Sleeping Giants, epistolary sci-fi by Sylvain Neuvel.

Not Yet

When I take my toddler to the doctor, I have to fill out pages of questionnaires about his development.  Can he stack four blocks?  Does he point at things?  Can he walk backward?  The cool thing about this is that I can say, "Heck yes!  He walks backward like a champ!"  But the other cool part is that the options for answers are "Yes," "Sometimes," and "Not yet."

"Not yet" is nice.

Is he using a spoon?  Well, not exactly.  We're working on it.  He'll get it.

I got Modern Monsters edited last week to the point where I was ready to send it to readers.  This was a big accomplishment for me, but rather than basking in my greatness, I sat down to send a few of them off to a critique group.  So I went through them and thought, "Which are the five worst ones?" and then made a list of all the stories and all the things I didn't like about them so I could compare their problems and make a decision about which ones to send.  I discovered that they were all terrible and I was a terrible writer and a terrible person.

This discovery rained on my celebratory parade.

I need to change the way I think about it--for my writing and for my life in general.  It's not "Which are the worst?" but it's "Which ones need attention?"  It's not "No" or "Bad" or "Oh God, everything's awful."  It's "Not yet."  It's "I'm working on it."  It's "It'll get there."  Not just the way I talk about it, but the way I think about it needs adjustment.

The Invisible Library Review

This week's novel is The Invisible Library, dimension hopping spy librarians by  Genevieve Cogman.

Irene is a librarian for the Invisible Library, which collects books from different dimensions.  In order to collect these books, she has to be part thief, part spy, infiltrating different worlds and tracking down rare books.  Her latest mission is to find a copy of the Brother's Grimm from a quarantined world infested with chaos, meaning that fairy magic, steampunk technology, and supernatural creatures all exist together in pandemonium.  Added to this, she has a new trainee to bring along and keep safe, her former, manipulative supervisor is trying to take her mission, the librarian stationed there gives them way less information than they need, and the book she needs has been stolen and every factions is looking for it.

Irene's character is a lot of fun.  She's resourceful and clever, she comes up with plans lickity split, and she can blend in and act the part.  What's funny is that no one around her can read her mind enough to pick up on her plans.  These are especially cute with her trainee, Kai, who never picks up on anything.

Some way down the corridor on the far side, once out of earshot, she said, "I apologize for that."
"Oh, don't worry," Kai replied.  He twitched a shoulder in casual dismissal, seemingly fascinated by the beech paneling and decorated plaster ceiling.  His voice was arctic in tone.  "You're quite right; I shouldn't have made a noise and disturbed other students at work.  I apologize for offending against the Library rules--"
"Look," Irene said before he could get any more sarcastic, "don't get me wrong.  I'm not apologizing for being rule oriented."
"Oh?"
"No.  I'm apologizing for snapping at you to shut you up, because I couldn't discuss classified information with someone else in the room."
Kai took a few more paces.  "Oh," he said.  "Right."

Her mentor/mentee relationship with Kai is fun and sweet.  And that makes the vagueness of all her other relationships all the more confusing.  Several times I felt like I missed something or like I was seeing things that weren't there.  For example, people seemed to think she was attracted to the detective who is following them around and helping out, but I never felt any chemistry or romantic interest on her part.  In fact, it felt more like Kai had a crush on him.  And then it felt like Irene and her former supervisor, Bradamant, had a thing or almost had a thing or had a thing that went sour...I don't know.  Maybe Irene doesn't know either, because she's too rational to focus on her emotions and so they slip past her, but it could also be that the author's trying to make relationships out of nowhere, and it could be that I'm crazy.  No one can say.

And then there is the world where they spend the majority of the book.  That dimension has been infected with chaos, so a lot of it doesn't make sense.  I wish there was some jumping around between worlds so we could see the differences, or at least see a world that had some order to it (the glimpses of the Library are intriguing).

There was a lot of action and intrigue and mystery that was all well done, I hope there's even more to chew on with the sequel.

***

Next week: The Lie Tree, YA about lies, lies, and more lies by Frances Hardinge.

Every Anxious Wave Review

This week's novel is Every Anxious Wave, time travel and rock concerts by Mo Daviau.  This was recommended again by NPR's best books of 2016.

Karl used to be in a mildly famous band and used to have a hippy, squatter girlfriend, but now he owns a bar and wallows in nostalgia.  When he finds a wormhole in his closet, he turns that nostalgia into a business, sending people back in time to see their favorite bands.  When he accidentally sends his only friend, Wayne, back to 980 instead of 1980, he has to get the help of grumpy astrophysicist, Lena, who would rather use the wormhole to change the past than see a concert.

I was so psyched about the premise of this one.  Going back in time to see any concert you want would be so cool.  I could see LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden or Cheep Trick at Budokan.  I could see the Beatles in Hamburg.  If the premise expanded a bit, I could see ballets, operas, movie premieres in classic theaters.  I could see Macbeth at the Globe.

But I know Karl would judge me for these choices, and that makes it both really hard to relate to him and his "I have better taste than everyone and no one is cool enough to understand the true beauty of bands they've never heard of."  His attitude added a level of embarrassment, especially since I was so enthusiastic about the premise.  I'm enthusiastic about the wrong things and that makes me vapid or a sell out or a tool or something.  This is not what I want out of a reading experience.

Karl's life being stuck in the past, his stumbling upon a time machine that he only uses to go backwards, where he has strict rules of non-interference, and uses to relive his glory days, tie together thematically with incredible ease and creativity.  The problem is that I just can't sympathize.  I don't pine after the glory days because my glory days are ahead of me.  I don't get why he's pining after his ex-girlfriend when every way he describes her makes her sound awful.  Although I'm sure his struggles would resonate with some people, they just didn't for me and that made him come off whiny and unlikable.

The novel was also a fan of the more loosey-goosey school of time travel that I mentioned last week. You just have to suspend belief and let it wash over you without questioning too much.

"Wait, why can some people interact with the past and others can't?...Hold up, how does Karl remember timelines that were erased?  How are they holding conversations across time, wouldn't that take excessive precision?  If this future is a different timeline, was the jump between timelines part of their past?  Are they jumping across timelines when they travel through time?  How does...you know what?  Never mind.  Don't think about it too hard."

***

Next week: The Invisible Library, librarians that travel across dimensions to find books, by Genevieve Cogman.