The Twelve Kingdoms, Book Two: Sea of Wind, by Fuyumi Ono. 39.

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Though set in the same world as the first Twelve Kingdoms novel and possessing a few of the same characters, this is not a continuation of Yoko’s story, but about events a number of years before that story begins. You don’t have to read the first book first, but if you did, note that the hero of this one is much easier to take than Yoko is for much of her story.

A young boy is swept away from Japan into another world, where he is named Taiki and informed that he is a kirin: a magical shapeshifter who enacts the totally literal Mandate of Heaven via his choice of a new king. (The king can be either male or female, incidentally.) But unlike a normal kirin, Taiki can’t shapeshift into his animal form or bind demons into his service. If he can’t even be authentically himself, how can he correctly choose the rightful king?

Like the first novel, this book has a slowly builds up to a powerful climax. Most of the book involves Taiki slowly learning the ways of the kirin and the world. This is rather leisurely paced, though the world itself, which is based on Chinese mythology and elaborated with an unusual level of invention and detail, is fascinating. But by the time Taiki makes his choice, I was completely invested in his emotional conflicts.

The take on the “rightful king” theme is unusual and intriguing, but I wish there had been more exploration and critique of how and why it works, and whether it’s really better than other methods of obtaining a monarch. Also, though the translation is less clunky than that of the first book, I question the choice of the translators to refer to Chinese mythical beings as “boggarts,” “faeries,” and “lamia.” Those are very culturally specific and non-Chinese creatures, and keeping the original terms intact would have been much less jarring. (If those were the original terms, I question Ono’s choice to use them!)

Quibbles aside, this is definitely worth reading if you’re more in the mood for worldbuilding and character development than wall-to-wall action. Akihiro Yamada did the gorgeous interior illustrations.

View on Amazon: Twelve Kingdoms - Paperback Edition Volume 2: Sea of Wind (v. 2)

Never Let Me Go, The End of Racism

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

17) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Everything I want to say about this book requires me to discuss spoilers. It's phenomenal, but it's premised on a twist I don't want to ruin.

( The Entire Review is A Spoiler! )

18)The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza

It's a 500 page book that proposes to reexamine the entire history of racism and show how misconceptions about racism have led to the current... fragile... state of American race relations. Needless to say, it would have felt crammed and rushed in a book five times as long. The back is filled with footnotes leading in a zillion different directions, but the connections between the footnotes and the text are often fairly hazy.

( Review Continues Behind the Cut )

18. Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat

[whereweather.livejournal.com]

18. Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
Vintage, 1994

Another writer who's long been on my to-read list.  Breath, Eyes, Memory is Danticat's first novel; it chronicles part of a girlhood in Haiti, the experience of moving to New York to rejoin her mother, and, later, as an adult and young mother, returning to Haiti to see her aunt and grandmother again.

As a novel, the book is very loosely plotted; it has a number of characteristic first-novel traits, including a certain uncertainty about its direction and themes, and some clumsiness in construction.  But Danticat is a good writer -- not yet skilled, here, but good -- and the kind of writer I like: the uncertainty usually doesn't lead to contrivedness, but lends an honest ear to mystery; it is seeking rather than trying to make things clean.

I found the book's heavy use of (snippets of) Haitian Creole very interesting -- I know French well, so parsing the meaning and looking up words and phrases was very cool -- and was moved and troubled by the book's exploration of the "virgnity cult" with which the generations of Haitian women in the book are so obsessed, trying to preserve their daughters' 'purity' in ways that seem shocking and violent to a reader like me.  Also -- and I don't know whether or not this was deliberate -- I find the evocations of daily life in Haiti extraordinarily illuminating, not so much for the descriptions of weather, customs, flora and food (although those are there) but for the differences between its material culture and my own.  Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere (a fact I looked up, not a point underlined in the book), and the ordinary people in this book do not have things surrounding them in the way that Americans do.  They live in houses with one room and one bed, they have outhouses and outdoor firepits, they cook their food in banana leaves, they sleep on the same mat they use to pile their beans to sell at market.  They walk miles in the dark to save fare on the collective taxis.  I don't think they have electricity; they light lanterns after dark.  All these things are normal to the narrator, and, I guess, to the people as well, but they are amazing, collectively, to a reader like me, at least when paying attention.

Summary: I like Danticat, and her lyricism; I like the odd, bold, lyrical, very unusual title of this book.  Any recommendations for other, later works of hers?