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lizbeeSo I bought a supporting membership for Chicon this year, for reasons that I'm sure seemed good at the time -- OH, RIGHT! I decided that I felt very strongly about "Remedial Chaos Therapy" deserving a first preference over "The Doctor's Wife" purely because people were being OUTRAGED that a MERE SITCOM was getting MAINSTREAM COOTIES all over their precious nerd awards. And also I wanted the option of nominating Legend of Korra Book 1 for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) next year. Because I really want to see my show getting crushed by The Avengers and Game of Thrones, I guess.
Anyway, with membership comes the voting pack, electronic copies of all nominated novels, novelettes, novellas and short stories. And this was pretty great, because I was really keen to read Jo Walton's Among Others, which has been universally praised by fannish reviewers, and now I can do so for free!
The problem is that I ... kind of hated it. A lot.
The plot is this: Mori (Morwenna, or Mor) is 15, Welsh and it's 1979. Following an accident that left her with a crippling injury and a dead twin, she runs away from her mother, who an evil witch, spends two months in a Children's Home, and winds up being sent to live in England with her father, who abandoned his family when she was a baby.
The novel is written in the form of Mori's diary, and much of it deals with the science fiction she's reading. I've read about 80% of the books mentioned, and I have to say, other than giving fellow fans a warm glow, I don't really see what the book talk adds to the novel. Mori could have been obsessed with romance, or thrillers, or 18th century gothic literature, or Sherlock Holmes, and very little would be different.
Mori also sees fairies. Which is nice for her, I guess. She's sent off to boarding school, where she discovers the class system, and eventually becomes part of a local SF book club, while getting a boyfriend and fending off her mother's magical attacks.
The good bits: the depiction of chronic pain is AMAZING, and I had to take Panadol because I was having sympathetic pain. The boarding school bits are okay. The scenes with Mori's paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew, are interesting, and could have formed the backbone of an entire (better) book.
The bad bits: the narrative voice. Maybe I was just spoiled by Michelle Cooper's Montmaray books, a YA trilogy which is also narrated through the diary of a teenage girl, but this reads more like a 40-something's LJ than a teenage girl's diary. There are flashes of the "real" voice, but they're few and far between. She doesn't sound like a teenager, even a very precocious teenager.
(Said my friendyiduiqie when I asked her to have a read and tell me if I'm being unfair, "I thought you were joking about the LJ thing, but then it opens with a quote from a LiveJournal comment!")
Worse, there are also moments where Walton seems to stop writing and let LJ take over. For example: "I shall try to be more sex positive from here on." And a really embarrassing-to-read bit where a stranger accuses Mori of faking her disability, and this shy, rather awkward 15 year old responds with a riposte that makes the stranger Properly Ashamed. It's not the only bit that reads like "This is what I SHOULD have said!" but it's the most glaring, at least for me.
I might be more convinced by the magic plot if I believed in the character, but as it is, Mori's belief in magic seems childish verging on pathological, and the depiction of her mother starts to look like a REALLY ugly portrayal of mental illness. (For example, the mother chooses her outfits by selecting every third article of clothing in her wardrobe. Magic, or compulsive behaviour?)
It's difficult to know where the authorial voice ends and the unreliable narrator takes over. There's a scene where Mori's paternal aunts tell her she should have her ears pierced, and she "realises" that will take away her magic, and that they are witches, and panics. I guess it's meant to be shocking and tense, but I was so far outside of the character it just looked childish and silly. (Asweaverandom pointed out, it's also inconsistent: if ear piercing will take away her magic, what about her injuries? What if she needs a pin in her hip?)
ALSO, this isn't really a comment on the quality of the book, but there's a scene where Mori's father tries to kiss her and get into bed with her, and she muses that she's learned from Heinlein that there's nothing immoral about incest but she doesn't want to get pregnant, and I wish I'd known about that scene in advance and prepared myself. (I presume that it's meant to indicate that Heinlein is a bad guide to sexual morality, but then we hit the problem of the authorial voice again.)
It all ends ... well, it ends. With Mori's mother (she has dark skin and hair and a hooked nose and a mole, by the way!) defeated and Mori returning to the arms of her father and grandfather and boyfriend, so I guess the patriarchy wins.
I did likeweaverandom's comment: "I CANNOT CONNECT WITH THE PROTAGONIST BECAUSE THE AUTHOR'S VOICE IS TOO LOUD!" That ... pretty much sums it up.
Especially disappointing is that I loved every one of Jo Walton's novels, so I know she can do better. And worse, not counting A Dance With Dragons, this is one of only two Hugo-nominated novels with female protagonists.
From there I went on and read Fields of Gold by Rachel Swirsky, one of the nominated novelettes, in which an Average Joe dies and finds out that (a) the afterlife is just ... the dead, still hanging out; and (b) his wife killed him.
What was most notable for me, after Among Others, was how vivid the characters' voices were, and how quickly they came to life. So even though I didn't really like them, I totally believed in them, and that was enough to carry me through the 40 pages.
(Fields of Gold also contained incest. I can only assume this year's Hugos are sponsored by the Game of Thrones kinkmeme.)
Anyway, with membership comes the voting pack, electronic copies of all nominated novels, novelettes, novellas and short stories. And this was pretty great, because I was really keen to read Jo Walton's Among Others, which has been universally praised by fannish reviewers, and now I can do so for free!
The problem is that I ... kind of hated it. A lot.
The plot is this: Mori (Morwenna, or Mor) is 15, Welsh and it's 1979. Following an accident that left her with a crippling injury and a dead twin, she runs away from her mother, who an evil witch, spends two months in a Children's Home, and winds up being sent to live in England with her father, who abandoned his family when she was a baby.
The novel is written in the form of Mori's diary, and much of it deals with the science fiction she's reading. I've read about 80% of the books mentioned, and I have to say, other than giving fellow fans a warm glow, I don't really see what the book talk adds to the novel. Mori could have been obsessed with romance, or thrillers, or 18th century gothic literature, or Sherlock Holmes, and very little would be different.
Mori also sees fairies. Which is nice for her, I guess. She's sent off to boarding school, where she discovers the class system, and eventually becomes part of a local SF book club, while getting a boyfriend and fending off her mother's magical attacks.
The good bits: the depiction of chronic pain is AMAZING, and I had to take Panadol because I was having sympathetic pain. The boarding school bits are okay. The scenes with Mori's paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew, are interesting, and could have formed the backbone of an entire (better) book.
The bad bits: the narrative voice. Maybe I was just spoiled by Michelle Cooper's Montmaray books, a YA trilogy which is also narrated through the diary of a teenage girl, but this reads more like a 40-something's LJ than a teenage girl's diary. There are flashes of the "real" voice, but they're few and far between. She doesn't sound like a teenager, even a very precocious teenager.
(Said my friend
yiduiqie when I asked her to have a read and tell me if I'm being unfair, "I thought you were joking about the LJ thing, but then it opens with a quote from a LiveJournal comment!")Worse, there are also moments where Walton seems to stop writing and let LJ take over. For example: "I shall try to be more sex positive from here on." And a really embarrassing-to-read bit where a stranger accuses Mori of faking her disability, and this shy, rather awkward 15 year old responds with a riposte that makes the stranger Properly Ashamed. It's not the only bit that reads like "This is what I SHOULD have said!" but it's the most glaring, at least for me.
I might be more convinced by the magic plot if I believed in the character, but as it is, Mori's belief in magic seems childish verging on pathological, and the depiction of her mother starts to look like a REALLY ugly portrayal of mental illness. (For example, the mother chooses her outfits by selecting every third article of clothing in her wardrobe. Magic, or compulsive behaviour?)
It's difficult to know where the authorial voice ends and the unreliable narrator takes over. There's a scene where Mori's paternal aunts tell her she should have her ears pierced, and she "realises" that will take away her magic, and that they are witches, and panics. I guess it's meant to be shocking and tense, but I was so far outside of the character it just looked childish and silly. (As
weaverandom pointed out, it's also inconsistent: if ear piercing will take away her magic, what about her injuries? What if she needs a pin in her hip?)ALSO, this isn't really a comment on the quality of the book, but there's a scene where Mori's father tries to kiss her and get into bed with her, and she muses that she's learned from Heinlein that there's nothing immoral about incest but she doesn't want to get pregnant, and I wish I'd known about that scene in advance and prepared myself. (I presume that it's meant to indicate that Heinlein is a bad guide to sexual morality, but then we hit the problem of the authorial voice again.)
It all ends ... well, it ends. With Mori's mother (she has dark skin and hair and a hooked nose and a mole, by the way!) defeated and Mori returning to the arms of her father and grandfather and boyfriend, so I guess the patriarchy wins.
I did like
weaverandom's comment: "I CANNOT CONNECT WITH THE PROTAGONIST BECAUSE THE AUTHOR'S VOICE IS TOO LOUD!" That ... pretty much sums it up.Especially disappointing is that I loved every one of Jo Walton's novels, so I know she can do better. And worse, not counting A Dance With Dragons, this is one of only two Hugo-nominated novels with female protagonists.
From there I went on and read Fields of Gold by Rachel Swirsky, one of the nominated novelettes, in which an Average Joe dies and finds out that (a) the afterlife is just ... the dead, still hanging out; and (b) his wife killed him.
What was most notable for me, after Among Others, was how vivid the characters' voices were, and how quickly they came to life. So even though I didn't really like them, I totally believed in them, and that was enough to carry me through the 40 pages.
(Fields of Gold also contained incest. I can only assume this year's Hugos are sponsored by the Game of Thrones kinkmeme.)
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 09:26 pm (UTC)Mori returning to the arms of her father and grandfather and boyfriend
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Date: 2012-05-23 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 09:13 am (UTC)Weaves's text of outrage had too many emoticons to count.
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Date: 2012-05-24 01:16 am (UTC)You know, I *was* the awkward loner tween who read a LOT of Heinlein starting in about sixth grade, and bits of it (happy polyamory, casual group sex, casual bisexuality) did blow my mind in a positive way... but even then I was enough of a critical reader to take a step back and be like, "Ok, your kink is not my kink" when we got to the part in "Time Enough for Love" where he goes back in time and bangs his mom. Does the book actually characterize her as someone who forms *all* her opinions about morality based on SF books?
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Date: 2012-05-24 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 10:46 pm (UTC)Also, following your links, Wow, my opinion of Walton as a person just dropped a lot.