A Fan's Playground

Time to return to another childhood read! This book came out when I was approximately middle-school-aged, and was much talked about at that time. It was the sort of book that was aimed at children but which adults really approved of you reading, but also it was a fairy tale retelling so I actually read it. It won the Silver Birch Award, and I was encouraged to read a lot of Silver Birch and Red Maple nominees in school. (I didn't actually read many of them though, I mostly was unimpressed with the selection.)

After Hamelin is a retelling of the story of the Pied Piper, from the perspective of the one child who was left behind, and how she goes on a quest to save all the other children of Hamelin. And rereading it as an adult, with a finer tuned understanding of genre conventions, this book is 100% in the Literary Fiction genre.

I'm conflicted, a bit, in how I feel about it. I love the elderly Penelope's perspective (elderly Penelope's a delight!) and I love all the skipping rhymes. This might be one of the few books aimed at children that includes rhymes where the rhymes add to the experience of reading rather than detracting. And I really like that two of the big things that save the day are harp-making and jumping rope, neither of which are traditionally heroic skills.

But the ~literature~ aspects of the book are not really my thing, and I don't find the ending satisfying -- which, honestly, it's a very ~literature~ ending so maybe that's not surprising. And all the dreamworld stuff doesn't really do it for me, which is a problem in a book that is largely set in the dreamworld. None of her companions while she's there feel particularly real to me. Which perhaps makes sense for a dreamworld! But it means that for the majority of the book it's only Penelope carrying the whole thing for me, and young Penelope doesn't have the same force of personality as old Penelope.

Also, from a disability-representation perspective: I'm glad that Penelope doesn't get cured of her deafness and stays deaf her entire teenaged and adult life. BUT. She spends the whole time she's in the dreamworld (i.e. much of the length of the book) not being deaf, which I feel is a cop-out in terms of actively portraying a disabled character.....

So I don't know. I have a lot of nostalgic fondness for this book, and there's some stuff it does that I really do like, but I'm not sure how the balance comes out in the end between the stuff I like and the stuff I don't!

On another note, I googled the author when I was partway into this reread, and found myself fascinated. All I knew about him from when I read this book as a kid was that he was a famous radio person. Well, he is that, and also he once was a children's librarian, and also he's written a bunch of other books which all seem to be wildly different from each other, and also he is apparently currently working on a musical called "do you want what I have got? a Craigslist Cantata". A man of many interests!

I decided to reread the whole series so I could then do a reread of the newest book! ( cut for spoilers, mostly for King of Attolia and Thick as Thieves )

Valor's Choice (Confederation #1), by Tanya Huff

A fun space opera/mil-sf book about people being competent and about cross-species interactions! It was great. Not deep literature but an enjoyable time, and I look forward to reading the rest of the books in this series.


The Better Part of Valor (Confederation #2), by Tanya Huff

These books are really in a lot of ways about a variety of competence porn, watching Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr be hypercompetent at everything she does, which is pretty great. I particularly enjoy watching her competence at managing up (manipulating her superior officers to make sure things work out correctly despite the superior's incompetence) which is something I have some familiarity with in my work history so it's particularly fun to watch.

The books are also highly dedicated to getting the largest ratio of snark-to-dialogue possible, which is largely fun but gets a bit much occasionally.

Relatedly, the constant offhand references to how sexual the di'Taykan are is mostly fine but also I'm just SO CURIOUS whether there are any di-Taykans who don't fit in with this monolithic understanding of the species, whether being less sexually inclined, less sexually adventurous, interested in only their own gender or their own species, or uninterested in sex entirely. Somehow I doubt this is ever going to come up BUT ONE CAN HOPE.

( oh am I actually getting around to plot spoilers? apparently I am! )

Occasionally one just needs to reread the Queen's Thief series. I didn't bother with Conspiracy of Kings since I wanted to end on the high note of my favourite book in the series. Of course because I'm me, at one point in King of Attolia, DESPITE me having read it multiple times before and knowing exactly what happens, one bit got too stressful for me and I had to put the book aside for like three weeks before I could continue. *facepalm*

Anyways, I don't really have a lot else to say about these books that I haven't said before. I like them a lot!

my goodness it's been like five million years since I've posted a book review. I've read books in the meantime! But somehow not posted about them. Let me start working through the backlog. I'll start with some very brief reviews of a few old favourites.

The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery

As always a total delight to read. However, I had a new thought this time about an aspect that has always vaguely frustrated me but have never been able to articulate before. ( spoilers for the end )

First Test, by Tamora Pierce

Yeah okay I've got nothing to say about this one. I LOVE IT the end.

Page, by Tamora Pierce

I've come to realize that structurally this book actually isn't super well put together. It's pretty episodic, covering a lot of time without a lot of important events going on. HOWEVER, the important overarching emotional through-line is ( spoilers I guess )

As evidence of the way my brain's been taken over by the Queen's Thief series over the last few days: last night I dreamed that the next book in the series (book #5) had been released in August and somehow the entirety of the fandom had managed to miss this fact. The book was called "King" and I was super excited that I would actually get to read it. (Too bad the internet is giving NO HINTS as to when we might expect the next one. And Megan Whalen Turner has a tumblr, but it's all photos of her daily coffee, inspirational photos of Greece, and reblogs of fanart. Super cute but less than actually helpful on this point.)

At any rate. In the last few days I reread all four extant Queen's Thief books. FOLLOWING ARE MY (SPOILERY) THOUGHTS. I will note first though for people who have not read this series and are possibly interested: this is a series that the vast majority of people seem to agree is best enjoyed unspoiled. So if you tend to be on the fence about whether to spoiler yourself for things or not, that might be a useful data point to keep in mind.

I will just begin by saying I SUPER LOVE THESE BOOKS. As I told twitter the other night: books about fantasyworld politics plus a sneaky trickster of a main character = THE TRUE WAY TO MY HEART. What a great series. Despite the bits below where I'm complaining about various aspects, I really love these books.


( The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( A Conspiracy of Kings, by Megan Whalen Turner )

Apparently James Alan Gardner had intended this book to be entitled "Haunted" and it was all a big mix-up that it's called "Hunted" instead. I've thought of it as Haunted ever since I found this out, because the name "Hunted" makes actual zero sense for this book, whereas Haunted is a good name for it.

( cut for lots of spoilers for Hunted, and also some spoilers for Ascending but not much more than Oar gives you herself on the first page )

So here's the problem with not writing up my thoughts immediately after finishing a book: I FORGET WHAT THEY ARE. So here, have some extremely abbreviated book thoughts. Sigh.

( Captive Prince book 1 )

( As Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired, by Benson Bobrick )

( Mike & Psmith, and Psmith in the City, by P.G. Wodehouse )

( First Test, and Page, by Tamora Pierce )

( The Annotated Secret Garden (The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the annotations by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina) )

HMM LET'S HAVE SOMETHING MORE CHEERFUL HERE NOW. Time for more book reactions! Of books I read months ago because I keep forgetting to actually POST them!

Today it is the first couple Attolia books, because I've been told for years that they're amazing and I should read them, and I'm finally getting around to it.

( The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )


And now all that's left is for me to read A Conspiracy of Kings! Which is sitting on my shelf right now, actually, waiting to be read, but I have a book I borrowed from a coworker and two books I borrowed from a friend and a book I have out from the library and another library book I intend to borrow from my mom, all of which are higher priority right now because they have restricted time-frames. So. I'll get to it at some point, I assume!