19: Red Heart of Jade by Marjorie Liu

[alias_sqbr]

Supernatural romance set in Taiwan. This was flawed but a lot of fun. I wrote a longer review at my lj (since we've had a bunch of reviews of her stuff here recently).

Yay for this comm introducing me to a new awesome author :)

# 35 - Kevin Gilbert, Child's Dreaming

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

# 35 - Kevin Gilbert, Child's Dreaming (1992), photography by Eleanor Williams

Kevin Gilbert was self-educated in prison. He was involved in the Aboriginal rights movement from the 1970s and he initiated the idea of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.

He was the author of the first written Aboriginal play, wrote Living Black (which I've reviewed previously) and was awarded - and refused - the Human Rights Award for Literature.

This is a collection of poems for children. Mostly they are about animals and insects, written in a very straightforward way. The collection is illustrated with clear photos by Eleanor Williams. I think it would be a nice collection to read aloud to a child of say three to seven.

13. Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

[sumofparts.livejournal.com]

Description
The plot of the novel is a little tricky to describe because it involves different groups of people whose lives and stories intersect. There's a group of four Indians who stay at an American asylum most of the time but escape periodically throughout the last hundred years or so to fix the world, to wreak havoc in the form of natural disasters and to tell various stories (or the same story) of how the world began along with Coyote and an unnamed first-person character and occasional narrator. Interspersed are the stories of members of a Native American family from Alberta and the ways they are "searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world" (back cover).

My Impressions
What struck me first was the initial first person narrative style and how it evokes oral storytelling and then the juxtaposition of the more familiar (to me) third person omniscient narration. From this, I felt I was missing subtext in getting used to the different rhythm. There were also references to characters and swaths of history and culture, eg how Indians/Native Americans are perceived in western Canada, that I was only getting the gist of. I think the way I read it also affected how I perceived the novel because in reading it while I was sitting in waiting rooms, on the subway train, etc. and over the course of a couple of weeks, I was losing track of some of the happenings. I definitely have to reread to fully absorb. This was a book full of ideas and I need to get my head around them. This book was often confusing because I wasn't sure if we were meant to treat it as a "realistic" scenario or as a surreal experience especially when it felt like the "real world" and the myth/legend were combining. The characters were interesting to read about but certain ones felt like ciphers and I wanted to know more about their motivations. I think the four old Indians and Coyote were supposed to be inscrutable but I wanted to know about that narrator. I really liked the female characters in this story. They were strong and seemed more level-headed than their male counterparts. I'd recommend the book but it's hard to decide if I liked it.