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sophia_sol) wrote2018-04-19 09:04 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-04-19 09:04 pm
The Game of Silence, and The Porcupine Year, by Louise Erdrich
A continuation of the series begun in The Birchbark House and it continues to be incredible and I love it a lot and had a lot of feelings. The author is great at making me care super lots about everyone involved.
I CRIED SO MUCH WHEN OLD TALLOW DIED :( Old Tallow is one of my favourite characters in this series and I'm so sad about her death, although it's also the kind of thing where like... Old Tallow made her choice and would absolutely have been satisfied knowing that her actions, though they led to her death, meant that everyone else in the family survived that hard winter. It's a death where she had agency and it felt right and stuff. But it was still super sad.
I also love the sibling relationship Omakayas has with Pinch. The two of them get on each other's nerves SO MUCH but also in certain ways understand each other better than other people can, and even manage to have moments of real feeling and tenderness between them....and then go right back to annoying the heck out of each other.
And Two Strike is a fascinating character, a girl who decides that she is going to take the male social role even though she's female, and everyone's fine with that, and although Two Strike acts as something of an antagonist for a while, the issue the narrative has with her is her arrogance, not her breaking of assumed gender roles. And Two Strike is really good at the gendered role she has chosen for herself.
There were also a whole lot of other things I loved, but I didn't take the time to start writing my thoughts down until a week after I read these two books, so a lot had already departed my memory. Oh well. (Usually I write down the first draft of my book thoughts within a day or two of reading a book so I don't forget the details I want to discuss, then let things percolate for a good long while as I reshape what I've written down to better reflect what I want to convey.)
Next up in the series: two more books, but there's a time jump in which Omakayas grows up, and the next two books follow her twin sons as children instead. I'll miss hanging out with young Omakayas but I'm excited to see her life as an adult and I'm sure I will care about her sons once I'm introduced!
I CRIED SO MUCH WHEN OLD TALLOW DIED :( Old Tallow is one of my favourite characters in this series and I'm so sad about her death, although it's also the kind of thing where like... Old Tallow made her choice and would absolutely have been satisfied knowing that her actions, though they led to her death, meant that everyone else in the family survived that hard winter. It's a death where she had agency and it felt right and stuff. But it was still super sad.
I also love the sibling relationship Omakayas has with Pinch. The two of them get on each other's nerves SO MUCH but also in certain ways understand each other better than other people can, and even manage to have moments of real feeling and tenderness between them....and then go right back to annoying the heck out of each other.
And Two Strike is a fascinating character, a girl who decides that she is going to take the male social role even though she's female, and everyone's fine with that, and although Two Strike acts as something of an antagonist for a while, the issue the narrative has with her is her arrogance, not her breaking of assumed gender roles. And Two Strike is really good at the gendered role she has chosen for herself.
There were also a whole lot of other things I loved, but I didn't take the time to start writing my thoughts down until a week after I read these two books, so a lot had already departed my memory. Oh well. (Usually I write down the first draft of my book thoughts within a day or two of reading a book so I don't forget the details I want to discuss, then let things percolate for a good long while as I reshape what I've written down to better reflect what I want to convey.)
Next up in the series: two more books, but there's a time jump in which Omakayas grows up, and the next two books follow her twin sons as children instead. I'll miss hanging out with young Omakayas but I'm excited to see her life as an adult and I'm sure I will care about her sons once I'm introduced!