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sophia_sol) wrote2014-08-13 07:34 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2014-08-13 07:34 pm
Cinnamon and Gunpowder, by Eli Brown
This was a good book! A good book where all I want to talk about is its flaws, sorry!
First of all, the main character Owen Wedgewood is just...so very very much Privileged Dude. And a lot of the book is about him learning to see past his privilege! But he takes SO LONG about it and is SO FRUSTRATING in the interim that I don't really like him? I spent a lot of the book thinking to the character "JUST DON'T HAVE OPINIONS UNLESS THEY ARE ABOUT FOOD." Also just in general he believes a little too strongly in his own powers of Being Right About Things and just..no, dude. No.
So I had a lot of trouble understanding/believing why Mabbot likes the dude. I mean, yeah, he can cook delicious things and wax eloquent about food, but why's she so willing to give him so much leeway from the very beginning? Why does she keep hanging about him and wanting to talk with him and stuff?
So (needless to say) I was not into the Mabbot/Wedgewood romance.
Also I was not into the Wedgewood-Joshua father-son type relationship because Wedgewood.
Mabbot was the most interesting character in the book and we saw her only from Wedgewood's biased and not particularly insightful perspective. I would have much rather the book been about her with no Wedgewood involved at all. Except I did love all the food and cooking stuff which Wedgewood brought to the story, so maybe just replace Wedgewood with a different cook character all together.
ANYWAYS on to another point. It rather annoyed me that the book was set in a world that is VERY VERY VERY NEARLY ours with only a few changes because it made those changes feel very jarring. Like: steampunky stuff, but ONLY in the context of Laroche. And: the Pendleton Company instead of the East India Company. And that's it. Everything else that we see is functionally identical to our world as far as I could tell. So why the changes, then? It felt like switching out the East India Company for the Pendleton company was just distancing our own very real history of terrible opium trade and putting it safely into an alternate history where we don't have to feel as bad about it. And steampunk Laroche felt like he belonged in a different book altogether from the book that this was.
Also I felt like the book couldn't quite decide whether Laroche was a horrible person or whether he was a basically respectable person aside from his support of the Pendleton Company. (Similarly I felt the book couldn't quite decide what kind of person the Brass Fox was.)
So in conclusion I enjoyed the process of reading this book but I don't think it's one I would ever feel the need to reread.
First of all, the main character Owen Wedgewood is just...so very very much Privileged Dude. And a lot of the book is about him learning to see past his privilege! But he takes SO LONG about it and is SO FRUSTRATING in the interim that I don't really like him? I spent a lot of the book thinking to the character "JUST DON'T HAVE OPINIONS UNLESS THEY ARE ABOUT FOOD." Also just in general he believes a little too strongly in his own powers of Being Right About Things and just..no, dude. No.
So I had a lot of trouble understanding/believing why Mabbot likes the dude. I mean, yeah, he can cook delicious things and wax eloquent about food, but why's she so willing to give him so much leeway from the very beginning? Why does she keep hanging about him and wanting to talk with him and stuff?
So (needless to say) I was not into the Mabbot/Wedgewood romance.
Also I was not into the Wedgewood-Joshua father-son type relationship because Wedgewood.
Mabbot was the most interesting character in the book and we saw her only from Wedgewood's biased and not particularly insightful perspective. I would have much rather the book been about her with no Wedgewood involved at all. Except I did love all the food and cooking stuff which Wedgewood brought to the story, so maybe just replace Wedgewood with a different cook character all together.
ANYWAYS on to another point. It rather annoyed me that the book was set in a world that is VERY VERY VERY NEARLY ours with only a few changes because it made those changes feel very jarring. Like: steampunky stuff, but ONLY in the context of Laroche. And: the Pendleton Company instead of the East India Company. And that's it. Everything else that we see is functionally identical to our world as far as I could tell. So why the changes, then? It felt like switching out the East India Company for the Pendleton company was just distancing our own very real history of terrible opium trade and putting it safely into an alternate history where we don't have to feel as bad about it. And steampunk Laroche felt like he belonged in a different book altogether from the book that this was.
Also I felt like the book couldn't quite decide whether Laroche was a horrible person or whether he was a basically respectable person aside from his support of the Pendleton Company. (Similarly I felt the book couldn't quite decide what kind of person the Brass Fox was.)
So in conclusion I enjoyed the process of reading this book but I don't think it's one I would ever feel the need to reread.