Assorted YA, SpecFic, and More

[sanguinity]

...and the last of my 2010 backlog!

Specfic

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death.

Lovely fantastic quest novel set in an alternative universe Africa. (I would be more specific than "Africa", except that there is little that I can key on that is more specific, beyond "sub-Saharan, but within geographic reach of Arab imperialism".) So much of the advance press I read about this novel characterized it as a novel about rape (specifically rape in the war-crime context), but while war-time is undeniably a key plot point, it is not what the novel is about. Despite my fears, this was no grimmer than in the neighborhood of the second Ginen novel (The Shadow Speaker). If you liked Shadow Speaker, you could find this one worth your time, too. ETA: as pointed out in comments, Who Fears Death requires a trigger warning (graphic, prolonged on-screen rape scene); The Shadow Speaker doesn't. ETA2 ....and I am apparently atypical in thinking the two novels are similarly dark; see the comments.

N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

This hit all my buttons in exactly the way my buttons like to be hit. Among other things, one of the few fantasy-novel portrayals I’ve seen that accurately portrays the society tensions of having a colonizer and colonized mixed heritage. I’ve been deliberately holding off on the sequel, because I’m enjoying the anticipation of having a sequel just. that. much.

Karin Lowachee

Cagebird

Space Pirates! Nasty, dangerous, knife-between-your-ribs space pirates! With decidedly un-retro cyberpunk overtones. Third in a series, and while you can tell that it's the third (and would probably read richer if you read the other two first), it works fine as a stand-alone. I'm still looking for copies of the first two in the series.

Gaslight Dogs

Fantasy world based on a just-being-colonized Alaska or Siberia, wherein the colonizing army is trying to steal Native spiritual powers for use against the Native population. I had grave doubts about this: I'm jumpy about non-Native people writing about Native cultures, and the dedication had that classic "their beautiful, beautiful culture" authorial exoticization going on. Additionally, during its first third, the book threatened to replay a number of my most-hated fiction tropes about Native people (the culturally white guy with the drop of Native blood who is thus somehow “really” Indian, and who instantly becomes a better Indian than the best Indian among them, among other tropes). In actuality, Lowachee mostly used the scenarios of those tropes to bring forward some ugly, often-ignored truths about colonization. Unfortunately, the trope of the savage bloodthirsty brave was played not only straight-up, but dialed up to eleven. I presume there’s a sequel in the works; I’m cautiously curious to see if Lowachee lets that last trope stand. Also curious to see if the sequel is as slashy as the original.

Young Adult / Middle Grades

Grace Lin, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

Fantasy quest novel, with stories-within-stories structure. Beautifully done.

Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963.

Historical fiction about a Chicago family visiting relatives in Alabama -- relatives who just happen to attend the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Does a beautiful job of communicating the place and time through the little family details, and not given to the heavy-handedness you sometimes see in historical novels for the juvenile market.

LitFic

Heidi Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.

Semi-autobiographical fiction of a mixed African-American and Danish girl growing up in Portland. I loved it, but I'm at a loss to say anything about it.

...plus also the entirety of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and a few more volumes of Ai Yazawa's Nana, but both of those are popular enough that I feel fine with not writing anything up about either.

Comments

[skygiants]

I really admired Who Fears Death, but I feel the need to respectfully disagree about its level of grimness, especially as compared with The Shadow Speaker - I thought Who Fears Death was a much more emotionally difficult book to read (and not just because of the rape) and I would definitely not recommend it to someone coming off Okorafor's YA without a trigger warning.

- editing to rephrase, since I realize that could be misunderstood: I would recommend it, but I would want to make sure someone knew what they were getting into first.

[sanguinity]

You're correct: I'll edit.


Re grimness, I was specifically thinking about all the deaths in Shadow Speaker. But you can get through Shadow Speaker without needing a rape trigger warning; you can't with Who Fears Death.

[skygiants]

Heh, yeah, pretty emphatically not. Thanks for adding the warning.

Like I said, it's not just the rape (or the genocide, or any of the other explicitly triggery things that happen) that sets it apart from Okorafor's other work for me - it's also that I always think of Shadow Speaker as a coming-of-age novel at heart, with a greater sense of wonder and hopefulness to temper the violence. Who Fears Death is a book much more explicitly concerned with anger and violence and involves a certain level of fatality from the beginning. But it's also been a while since I've read The Shadow Speaker, and I'd forgotten some of the deaths, so I could be misremembering the feel of it as well.

[sanguinity]

Coming off of Zarah the Windseeker, I was not expecting what I got in Shadow Speaker -- it was something of a shock. And while the end of Shadow Speaker was fairly positive, it didn't really cancel my horror at some of the things that had gone before.

But I suspect that there's very much a YMMV factor at play here when trying to evaluate which book is darker, how much, and why. And thank you for pointing that out.

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

Same here - I thought Shadow Speaker was pretty lighthearted in spirit and fun to read, really, despite the often grim subject matter, whereas I found Who Fears Death... difficult. And very grim, even if hopeful. An excellent book, but wow, I had trouble with it.

[g33kgrrl]

Thanks for these reviews! My amazon wishlist/library list just got larger. :)

[vass]

Gaslight Dogs

Is that the one where she used the term 'Abos' for the indigenous people? And when she found out later that it's an extremely offensive racial slur in Australia, she was just like oh well?

[sanguinity]

:: Is that the one where she used the term 'Abos' for the indigenous people? ::

Yes. Within the book, it's the casual language of extremely virulent racists, wholly consistent with "extremely offensive racial slur".


:: And when she found out later that it's an extremely offensive racial slur in Australia, she was just like oh well? ::

It sounds like you should be telling me; it's not something that I've heard about.

[vass]

I can't remember where I heard it, but if she used it as a slur, I'm less bothered, because that's exactly how it's used here. I'd just be bothered if someone got the idea that that's an appropriate thing to call an Indigenous person.

[sanguinity]

Yeah, if someone picks the term up for use from this book, they'll be doing it because they think (presumed-to-be-fictional) racist slurs are cute. These are not the kind of character that most would see fit to emulate.