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Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
Jun. 18th, 2021 08:39 pmReading through this novella, it at first came across to me as boring but unobjectionable, but the more I thought about it the more frustrated I got, and by the end I was quite out of patience with it.
The basic premise: in a dystopian future that for some reason strongly resembles the historic American Wild West, a young woman named Esther runs away from home to join the Librarians, ostensibly upholders of the dystopic status quo, but secretly they're working for the rebellion.
Esther decides to join the Librarians because she wants to make herself Be Good according to her dystopian society's ideas of what is good, and the Librarians are supposed to be kind of the ideals of that. But when she finds some Librarians and tells them what she wants, it becomes extremely clear that they do not match that society's ideals of Good. Very not.
Esther seems to me to turn far too easily from Desperately Trying To Be Good, to willingly helping out the rebellion. She also goes too fast into being into a new love interest, just days after her father murdered her previous long-term partner! It's kind of alarming, honestly. It feels too much like she's there just to be a blank outside pov for the reader to follow along with, introducing the reader to the idea of who the Librarians really are, instead of being a real person in herself. (Tbh though none of the characters feel like people to me, I never felt like I had much of a sense of who any of them were)
The Librarians are also awfully fast to trust this outsider with the knowledge of what they really do. And how is the entire Librarian force secretly on the side of the resistance, when they are hired and supported as tools of the state--that needs explaining on how that could happen! Sure, maybe a strong minority of resisting Librarians would make sense, but it seems like all of them are???
Like the Gailey novelette I read for the hugos last year, this book seems to involve things happening/being the case because it'll make the story say the things the author wants to say, whether it makes internal sense to the narrative or not. Which is a way of telling a story that really frustrates me. You can say things with a story, obviously, but it needs to work in the context of the story being told, imo!
Also I don't love the Wild West-adjacent setting. Why is that the vibe Gailey decided to go for? The wild west has been traditionally used as a narrative setting to be actively or passively racist against Indigenous people, and this story does not say anything at all about Indigenous presence (or lack of presence) at all, and it just ignores the thematic implications entirely. So it seems to me that the Wild West is just being used because it's a ~fun setting~ instead of interrogating the inherent issues with the genre. That's sure uncomfortable.
The basic premise: in a dystopian future that for some reason strongly resembles the historic American Wild West, a young woman named Esther runs away from home to join the Librarians, ostensibly upholders of the dystopic status quo, but secretly they're working for the rebellion.
Esther decides to join the Librarians because she wants to make herself Be Good according to her dystopian society's ideas of what is good, and the Librarians are supposed to be kind of the ideals of that. But when she finds some Librarians and tells them what she wants, it becomes extremely clear that they do not match that society's ideals of Good. Very not.
Esther seems to me to turn far too easily from Desperately Trying To Be Good, to willingly helping out the rebellion. She also goes too fast into being into a new love interest, just days after her father murdered her previous long-term partner! It's kind of alarming, honestly. It feels too much like she's there just to be a blank outside pov for the reader to follow along with, introducing the reader to the idea of who the Librarians really are, instead of being a real person in herself. (Tbh though none of the characters feel like people to me, I never felt like I had much of a sense of who any of them were)
The Librarians are also awfully fast to trust this outsider with the knowledge of what they really do. And how is the entire Librarian force secretly on the side of the resistance, when they are hired and supported as tools of the state--that needs explaining on how that could happen! Sure, maybe a strong minority of resisting Librarians would make sense, but it seems like all of them are???
Like the Gailey novelette I read for the hugos last year, this book seems to involve things happening/being the case because it'll make the story say the things the author wants to say, whether it makes internal sense to the narrative or not. Which is a way of telling a story that really frustrates me. You can say things with a story, obviously, but it needs to work in the context of the story being told, imo!
Also I don't love the Wild West-adjacent setting. Why is that the vibe Gailey decided to go for? The wild west has been traditionally used as a narrative setting to be actively or passively racist against Indigenous people, and this story does not say anything at all about Indigenous presence (or lack of presence) at all, and it just ignores the thematic implications entirely. So it seems to me that the Wild West is just being used because it's a ~fun setting~ instead of interrogating the inherent issues with the genre. That's sure uncomfortable.
