A Fan's Playground

(Trilogy consists of: The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, The Winter of the Witch)

I read the first book in this trilogy for the first time four years ago, and liked it a lot at the time, but wrote a VERY incomplete review of it. So I reread it before reading the sequels, so I would remember what actually happened in it! And then I read the sequels.

And now that I've read the whole trilogy I'm....hm. Evaluating the three books all together, I like it a lot less than I thought I was going to. And the thing is, I don't know WHY!!! It's doing so many different things that I generally find extremely compelling, and yet when all put together, I am left feeling cold.

It's a book set in medieval Russia, fairy tale inspired, about the tension between Christianity and the traditional beliefs, featuring a young woman with interesting complicated relationships with her family and also with the god of death. And it's well written, and the main character has a complicated morality but is dedicated to doing what she thinks is the right thing to do, and the winter vibes are powerful and delicious. You would think that this is my jam! And yet.

I mean, yes, there were some aspects of how the story was put together that did not agree with me. Like, Vasya spends most of the second book crossdressing as a boy, and she is very clearly experiencing The Genders about it, but the author is completely and utterly unaware of this fact in a very "I'm cis and have never considered what it means to be a gender" kind of way that feels like it belongs to a bygone era of crossdressing novels. And there were some aspects of how this played out that were really uncomfortable.

(and the books are also extraordinarily heterosexual........except for one brief moment where the god of chaos and the evil priest kiss. Because obviously gayness is something that only belongs to antagonists. SIGH. I would honestly be happier if I just thought the author somehow didn't know gay people exist.)

Also, although I am all about those delicious human/personification-of-death ships, this particular god of death felt so very human that it didn't really feel like that's what it was doing! And yes, there were watsonian reasons why he was more human than he ought to have been, but that doesn't actually make it satisfying to me.

But honestly these are things that would, in other books, not actually stop me from enjoying other parts of a book, if the other parts were good. So idk. *enormous shrugs* If you have read these books and have any thoughts about why it might not have spoken to me, then please talk to me about it!

Other thoughts:

I did, throughout the whole read, keep finding myself thinking "This is like spinning silver except spinning silver did it so much better. Why am I not just rereading spinning silver instead."

I kept being thrown by Konstantin not being the character type I expected him to be, because....okay. When I was a teen, I began reading the Alvin Maker books by Orson Scott Card. They are, um, extremely baffling and horrible, and although they began with some compelling worldbuilding, they went very off the rails remarkably quickly and I think I gave up like halfway through the series. But they contain a character who plays a similar role to Konstantin: a priest/minister type person who thinks he is hearing god talking to him but is actually hearing the devil, and doing what the devil wants. And that dude from the Alvin Maker books is a very different person from Konstantin! But I kept expecting Konstantin to be him! Anyway Konstantin's terrible but in a different way, and I could never quite hold it in my head what kind of way that was, lol.

When I was a kid I read a lot of horse books, as one does, so when I heard about this book -- a fantasy novel kind of built around the structure of one of the classic varieties of horse books -- I was THERE. (I was also there for The Scorpio Races, back when that came out, which is the same kind of idea!)

The creatures being raced in this book, kehoks, are dangerous monsters whom the rider must control through sheer power of will over that of the kehok. Raia is a young woman who's run away from her abusive parents and needs resources to get them off her back; Tamra is a retired rider who now trains riders, and needs money to be able to keep her daughter with her. Together, they need to work to catapult Raia to winning kehok races, despite the enormous danger of the savage kehok Raia must ride!

This is all very classic horse book and I love it. However, it's not the only thing this book is doing. There's a second plot intertwined with this one, about the politics behind the recently dead emperor and what needs to be done to get the emperor-to-be on the throne, and the long and the short of it is that Raia racing with her kehok is in fact vital to the survival of the very empire. And like, okay, fair, those kinds of high stakes are classic for fantasy novels. But I think I just wanted this book to be horse-girl-book-but-fantasy, rather than horse-girl-book-subsumed-into-fantasy-tropes. I was there FOR the horse girl tropes, you know?

At any rate, I did appreciate that one of the main characters in this book is a middle-aged single mother, not a character type that often gets to be heroic in fantasy. And I loved Lady Evera, which is not something I would have thought from the beginning of the book, but she develops depths! And Raia did a great job in her role as ingenue, and I did find the whole plot to do with augurs mildly interesting. So overall a very good book, it's just too bad that it's not QUITE the kind of book I was most wanting it to be.

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

( expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )

The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater

I would have been a million percent into this book as a kid when I eagerly read every single horse book I could, and I will not lie, I am super into it now as well. It is basically Misty of Chincoteague with MAN-EATING WATER HORSES awww yeah. SUPER INTO IT.

( Read more... )

Over the course of yesterday and today, I listened to the audiobook of King Of The Wind, by Marguerite Henry.* I acquired it ages ago, in the flush of my Man From UNCLE fannishness, because it is read by David McCallum. That was -- gosh, more than a year and a half ago, I think. But I never got around to listening to it until now.

I JUST finished it. And.

Reader, I cried. TWICE. Once when the queen was presenting the Plate and Agba remembered his promise to Sham and knew he had fulfilled it, and once when the explanation for the blank gravemarker is given. OH AGBA AND SHAM. THEIRLOVEISSOTRUE. ♥♥♥

I haven't read that book in probably close to 8 years, and it was fascinating to see the ways in which my perspective has changed. I still think it an unutterably fantastic book, and adore it deeply. But now I notice things like the fact that there's a character who stutters, and is portrayed rather as if the stutter is an aspect of his less than pleasant personality. Um. Problem.

But overall, it was every bit as heartwarming as I remember, though also a lot SHORTER than I remember. What's fascinating, though, is to see which bits my memory dwelt on but the book didn't, and which bits the book dwelt on but my memory didn't. There's this one bit that's dismissed with in only one line in the book, but is one of the bits that I can picture SO CLEARLY in my head that I was sure it must have been at least a page. I've never really had that experience before, because usually the books I really like I reread often enough that I never get the chance to develop these erroneous beliefs.

(Also, oh dear, I am obviously out of practice at reading books about the wildly passionately close love between a child and an animal. There were one or two moments when I couldn't help sporfling a bit over stuff fandom has trained me to see....)

ETA: I forgot to mention. David McCallum? An EXCELLENT audiobook reader. His voice is just so great. *happy sigh*



*I'm pretty sure I read every single book Marguerite Henry ever wrote, most of them at least 3 times, and the ones I OWNED? A truly astounding number of times. To have called me "horse-mad" would have been an understatement.