laceblade

The Land of Stories was written by Chris Colfer, the actor who portrays Kurt Hummel on Glee.

Had the book not been written by Colfer, I probably wouldn't have read it. This kind of fantasy isn't really my thing, although I do read a lot of sf/f and a lot of YA.

( Discussion of the basic plot. )
The lesson that the kids end up learning is that every human being is complicated, and a product of their background. It's kind of a powerful and empathetic message from an author who grew up being bullied in school.

For fans of Glee/Colfer, my choice of revealing lines were:
Cinderella telling the kids, "Living a public life is a difficult thing to do, and even now I find it a bit overwhelming. No matter what you do, you can never please everyone."

The Evil Queen saying, "Every driven person comes from a mountain of pain they wish to keep hidden."

The dialogue was the strongest writing in the book, although I think a lot of it would have benefited from comedic timing & being spoken out loud. For that reason I'm very much looking forward to seeing his movie "Struck by Lightning," which recently debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival (the trailer is here at YouTube).

This book was not my fave, but if more books are published in the series, I would be interested in reading them. I could see this being very much an "intro" book. I'd love to read another book with these established characters and maybe one or two new ones, so that he could really sink his teeth into some characterization.

Between filming Glee and doing the live tours the last two years, I have no idea when Colfer found the time to write a novel and a film script. He is a BAMF. (HE ALSO TWIRLS KNIVES. CHRIS COLFER IS A BAMF.)

I started writing a locked post about usual things, but decided that I don't want to write about illness while on vacation. SO I WON'T.

INSTEAD, I would like to write about George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice. You might remember me writing about Game of Thrones a while ago. I had been stalled out on the beginning of A Clash of Kings for a while, and then suddenly tore through the second 3/4, and am now halfway through A Storm of Swords.

IDK, I feel slightly guilty reading these, sort of like how I feel when reading the Kushiel series. Like, the writing is okay but not stellar, and the plot is heinous, but makes me SO INTRIGUE.

I still like Arya and Caitlin a lot. Am liking Sansa more, and am now actually liking Jaime Lannister! Bwahaha.

I'm assuming that fandom sorts people into houses, just like HP, amirite?
I want to be a Stark because I could have a puppy direwolf.


I don't think this is too spoilery, but I like the women characters (even Cersei) but am disappointed that for most of them, it took me a book and a half to mostly do so.



As an FYI, I probably won't be on the Internets again until Sunday night, so if you leave comments, don't expect replies until then at the earliest.

So eventually, will I be able to go more than 5 pages without women's breasts being described as teats, or without women's breasts being fondled by men who use them as instruments for their own power?

I'm generally bad at book synopses to begin with (which is why I don't often blog what I'm reading), but I'll do an especially poor job in this post because it's really difficult to write about this book without giving things away.

This is the book that nojojojo referred to in a post you might remember from RaceFail, We Worry About It, Too.

After the death of her mother, Yeine Darr heads south from her homeland to the city Sky, where she is sucked into a world filled with paranoia and political scheming. She wants to find out how her mother died, but she soon has enough problems trying to stay alive. Yeine is a competent and bad-ass heroine, and I never tired of her throughout the book.

I tend to prefer science fiction to fantasy; I get really tired of keeping track of the names of people and gods and races and lands and etc. And I struggled a little bit with this book at first due to this tendency of mine, but the fantastic prose hooked me and kept me going, and so did the suspense. It seemed that with every page, Yeine learned more about her own past, that of the people surrounding her, and that about the history of her world and the gods who made it. I highly recommend this book.

The premise of the sequel (book two in a trilogy) sounds interesting to me, but it will be written in the first person from the perspective of another character. I'm a little nervous that it will be difficult for Jemisin to pull off a separate character's voice while maintaining the first-person perspective. However, her writing was so masterful in this first book that I will happily give her the benefit of the doubt.

Also, the cover is gorgeous.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms will be released on February 25, 2010. Look forward to it!

This quartet seems to have mixed reviews....I remember someone telling me that they were bad, and not as good as the Song of the Lioness Quartet. Yet, sasha_feather was adamant that these were her favorite ones, being more realistic. Having acquired them for free at Bookmooch.com, I decided to go for it.

I read Song of the Lioness in fragments spread out over a few months, and I'd have to read it again for style, but I think that Protector of the Small was better written. I definitely liked Kel better as a protagonist.

I like how hard Pierce makes Kel work. I feel like I'm there for every blow, every muscle strain, of her training to become a knight. I remember this being true in the Song of the Lioness Quartet, too. I like that Kel had to deal with bullying/hazing. She didn't tattle, but got stronger and made sure it didn't happen to others. I have so much respect for her strength and personal code of honor. I think these will be comfort books for me in the future!

I like how Kel ages throughout the four books, both physically and emotionally. Everyone around her changes, too, even the way characters view each other and the world. Pierce is really good with her viewpoint characters - while some characters appear in many of her books, they are viewed differently by the people telling the story. I like her consistency, and the obvious thought she gives to viewpoint and the backgrounds people are coming from.

I like that it seems Pierce realized how "easy" Alanna had it in Song of the Lioness - and so Kel has no magic. I found this quartet less annoying than SotL. Kel doesn't have magical powers, a magical pendant, a magic Goddess-voiced cat, a magic horse, or whatever else. The Prince of Tortall is not her best friend. I like that Kel has to do without the Gift, that some things don't come naturally to her. As much as Alanna's life sucked sometimes, I feel like Knighthood/etc. came a bit too easily/naturally for the protagonist, like it was ordained. I found it a lot easier to relate to Keladry.

( Spoilers! )



So, I say all of these good things with a grain of salt. What makes Kel somewhat special in comparison to her peers is that her father was the Tortallan diplomat to the Yamani Islands for 6 years of her childhood. Thus, Kel is not only adept at interacting with people hailing from the Yamani culture, but is also trained in Yamani fighting styles and weapons. After making it through Tortall's training for knighthood, she uses her weapon of choice: a glaive.

It's extremely clear that the Yamani Islands are meant to be Japan. Women wear kimonos secured by obis. Kel refers to her weapon with the "Yamani" (see: actually Japanese) word naginata. In the text, Yamani people bow by placing their palms flat on their thighs and bending forward. Honor is taken very seriously by warriors, and death is viewed as preferaable to surrender or capture.

But in the first two books especially, Pierce makes a narrative choice that I find pretty weird. Whenever Kel hides her emotions, she is described as acting in a Yamani manner. Not just once, but almost ad nauseum. When she smiles but is actually upset, it is a "Yamani smile." When she struggles to keep her countenance free of emotion, she is keeping it "Yamani-blank." When she defers to cultural manners as a way to interact with others, her face becomes "a Yamani mask of politeness."

It might be true that Japanese culture looks less favorably on a selfish outpouring of emotions than, say, U.S. American culture, but it just smacked of painting too broadly with one brush for my tastes.

Also, some of the names were a little improbable, such as "Chisakami" and "Shinkokami," and sort of sounded like an anime fangirl writing some AU fanfiction, making up names.

Of course, some aspects of it were nicely written, and helped bring the Quartet as a whole into focus.. Women in the Yamani Islands are given much more weapons training than women in Tortall (equivalent of France/England) because men are often away when towns/etc. get attacked by pirates. As a child, Kel is 5 years old and with her mother in a temple when pirates attack. And her mother is bad-ass with a glaive, cutting people down and saving some Yamani relics. Thus, it's fairly natural to both Kel and her family that she would want to train to become a knight.



I really want to read Terrier.....I want to see things from a lower-class character. But I've already got Trickster's Choice checked out, and I own the first two of the Immortals Quartet (yeah, I skipped it and went right for Keladry's quartet instead). I'm thinking that I will love Terrier a lot.

What are Melting Stones and Will of the Empress about?

OMG, there are so many crazy people in the public library!

I am trying to get better at dropping books that are difficult to get through, rather than forcing myself to read things. Thus, even though I only had 100 pages left in Holly Black's Tithe, I dropped it. I can't get into Shelley Jackson's Half-Life, so I'm not going to force myself to read that, either (I'll still go to Wiscon Book Club, don't worry!).


I think that part of why I grow tired with fantasy novels is that world-building makes me impatient. Sure, it's dealt with in science fiction too, but supposedly the SF genre is grounded in possibility - something that could happen - and therefore the world, however futuristic, is inextricably linked to our own.

With fantasy, it seems like more time is spent explaining societal structures like governments and schooling than I care to read at once (interpersed information is much better than infodumps, in my opinion).

Anyway.

This is partly why I find it difficult to stay wholly interested in the manga series Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. The main characters are literally world-hopping, and each new world means another set of explanations to get through. Of course, they travel to a new world every time I get comfortable with the one I'm in. New worlds can be neat, but it's hard to care about every character, even though most of them are incarnations from previous CLAMP manga.

Of course, as soon as I am able to make sense of my mild dislike of the narrative structure of the series, I read volume 13.

( Spoilers through the end of Volume 13! )