A Fan's Playground

This book is a sequel to another book (Deep Secret) which I didn't really love, but this one is about pretty different things so I thought I would give it a try.

In a multiverse situation, a teen girl (Roddy) in one world is one of only two people to know of a magic plot to take down her country and wants to do something about this. And a teen boy (Nick) in another world is bored and wishes he could go traveling the multiverse. They both get into shenanigans until eventually their stories overlap.

So for two thirds of the book it felt to me like I was following two entirely different stories that kept getting interrupted by the other one, rather than interwoven narratives, which was rather a jolting experience. And really even after the stories converge they still feel so separate from each other, like Roddy barely cares about Nick's existence and has other things to worry about, while Nick is interested in her romantically but doesn't seem to actually like her as a person, and they just don't....There's no connecting between them, is the thing, they're both protagonists of their own stories and they just happen to have an overlapping climax. And this disconnect throws the whole rhythm of the book off, to me.

And like, there's plenty of interesting things going on, but the whole gaping lack of anything linking the two stories together emotionally means that it's all just kind of left flapping in the wind. Like the relationship between Roddy and Grundo, for instance! This is clearly a central part of both of their lives, and then everything crumbles to pieces after a dramatic revelation, and it's hugely affecting for both of them, but do we get any resolution on that front, on how they might be able to move forward from this? We do not.

And Nick's entire half of the narrative is mostly just him stumbling about to no great purpose, interacting with various characters and set-up pieces because they're there, he's got no goal or purpose, which is fine in a teenage boy but a bit harder to take in a protagonist of a fantasy adventure novel. Why is he one of the viewpoint characters, honestly? It feels to me like he's just there so we can have a viewpoint on various exciting bits of the multiverse DWJ wants to show us rather than because he's important to the story the book is trying to tell.

So all in all, this is certainly a very interesting and moreish sort of book (and there's so much else in it that could be talked about too!), but I don't think I actually really like it.

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 )

Wow, have I really not posted any book thoughts in nearly a month? I have posts written up already and everything! Ugh self. Here, book thoughts:

This is a memoir of Queen Noor of Jordan, covering the time from when she first met King Hussein in the early 70's, through their relationship, to his death of cancer in 1999. And it is SO INTERESTING. The impression I get of Noor from this book is that she is a very capable and also very caring person, and deeply invested in the politics of the Middle East and trying to work for peace. I really respect her. Of course since she's a very public figure her memoir is not exactly a tell-all but it seems to me that she was as open as she felt she could be about a lot of things. She doesn't brush over some of the ways in which her relationship and her position were challenging, but she always speaks about the harder things in a way that makes me as the reader respect her integrity. I like her a lot!

Although the book of course talks about her relationship with Hussein and her children and all that, I was surprised how much of the book was about politics, although in retrospect I shouldn't be. Given Jordan's location, of course a lot of this was about Israel/Palestine stuff. The book covers from the 70's through the 90's, which is an era that I've never actually heard a lot about wrt that area - usually the layperson hears about the founding of Israel, and the current conflict, but the details of the intervening time is glossed over. Well, there's a lot of it! And it's all just so sad and hard to read about, because here's Noor and Hussein working as hard as they can towards peace in the region but I know the spoilers already, I know they don't succeed, I know the conflict is still ongoing today. And that means that there's just been more time for resentment and mistrust to build on all sides, and less likelihood as far as I can tell of a reasonable and viable peaceful agreement ever being reached.

The Goose Girl is a novel retelling of the Grimm fairy tale by the same name, expanding on the story and doing some world-building to make it hang together coherently (I love fairy tales and their "right so this one dead horse can talk, whatevs, no need for explanations" perspective on worldbuilding but it doesn't work as well in a novel-length work).

It's been years since I last read this book and I'd forgotten how good it is. Gosh I love it. Well -- I'm always happy for a well-done fairy tale retelling, so I'm an easy sell on a book like this. But really it's more than that that I love about it. ( Spoilers! )